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All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

Well, let's start at the beginning, Ari.

The universe probably started with the Big Bang.

Very, very beginning.

So, Ari, this story starts with images from the new James Webb Space Telescope of the very, very early universe.

We're talking like 500 million years after the Big Bang, which since the universe is 13.8 billion years old, that's basically less than 5% of the universe's life.

That's Bingjie Wang, an astrophysicist who is part of a team that published a study about one of these red dots in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics last week.

So long story short, Ari, we still don't know.

They're all very different.

They all have like different features.

The lead author of that study, astrophysicist Anna de Groff, says that our existing models really just don't explain what's going on in this specific case.

Yeah.

So I reached out to astrophysicist at Yale, Priya Natarajan, and she says this could be one example of how black holes rapidly grew into supermassive black holes, but that this is only one example of a model that she and her colleague, Tal Alexander, actually proposed a while ago.

They thought that black holes created soon after the Big Bang, with big clouds of dust and gas around them, could rapidly grow to become supermassive black holes.

So she thinks more work needs to be done.

And because of that, scientists can study illusions to try to understand how the brain fills in those gaps.

A new study in nature neuroscience did exactly this in mice.

So this is an example of how the brain fills in the edges of a shape, even when those edges don't exist.

And when researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the Allen Institute in Seattle showed this image to mice, they found a special group of neurons in mice brains specifically involved in that process of filling in the missing edges.

Although one limitation of the study is that it's mice.