This could be embarrassing for rattlesnakes and other vipers: Their long-standing reputation as the snakes with the fastest strikes on Earth just got bit by the common Texas rat snake.

In lab tests biting a stuffed glove, Western rattlesnakes averaged speeds of 2.95 meters per second and Western cottonmouths averaged 2.98 m/s, says functional morphologist David Penning of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. But Texas rat snakes, familiar farmyard chasers of pest rodents, averaged 2.67 m/s. Statistically that’s a three-way tie, Penning and his colleagues report March 16 in Biology Letters.

Strikes were over quickly but all species subjected their brains to impressive acceleration. Rat snakes accelerated their head more on average (190 meters per second2)
than what a fighter pilot experiences when taking off from an aircraft carrier (27 to 49 m/s 2 ).
Penning’s point is not that vipers are slow, but that other snakes also evolved a lightning strike. “They have to eat too,” he says. Startled mammals have been clocked activating a muscle in as little as 14 to 151 milliseconds. Snakes in Penning’s tests reached their targets in 50 to 90 milliseconds, literally before some creatures could move a muscle. And if you blink — for a human average of 220 milleseconds — you miss it all.

In narrow blood vessels, tumor cells go marching one by one.

By unfolding into a cellular chain, clusters of cancer cells can slide through capillary tubes less than 10 micrometers wide, Sam Au of Harvard Medical School and colleagues report April 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The cells pass through the tubes in single file, each squeezing into an oblong shape and clinging to a neighbor or two. After arriving in roomier quarters, the cells regroup into round clumps, the scientists report.
Clumps of cancer cells that break off tumors and travel through the bloodstream to new sites in the body are known to spread cancer more efficiently than single cells. Many scientists believed, though, that hefty cell clusters were unable to squeeze through the body’s narrowest blood vessels.

Experiments showed that human breast and prostate cancer cells used this single-file strategy to travel through lab-made tubes, human cell‒lined tubes and the blood vessels of live zebrafish. These results could offer insights into ways to foil cancer’s spread.

Fountains of gas from a handful of remote galaxies all seem to be pointing in roughly the same direction, a new study reports. If the result holds up, it puts a new twist on how galaxies and black holes arise from the larger cosmic web, though some researchers worry that the alignment might just be a chance occurrence.

Out of a group of 64 galaxies that are blasting out radio waves, about a dozen are spewing jets of gas that are roughly aligned with one another, astronomers report in the June 11 Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters. The galactic geysers are powered by supermassive black holes whose magnetic fields launch some infalling debris into intergalactic space. If the geysers are aligned, that means the black holes are all spinning in the same direction. And that means these galaxies, which are spread over roughly a hundred million light-years, might all have been influenced by the larger scaffolding from which they formed.
“Naively we expect that shouldn’t happen,” says Ryan Hickox, an astrophysicist at Dartmouth College who was not involved with this study. Black holes, even supermassive ones, are minuscule compared with filaments of galaxies that can span hundreds of millions of light-years. These filaments are the threads along which most matter in the universe congregates, branching through space like a cosmic spider web. Though galaxies live there, they are thought to form and develop independently of what the filaments are doing. A twisting filament should have no influence over what’s happening around one of its resident black holes.

And yet that’s the explanation favored by study lead Russ Taylor, an astrophysicist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. “What we’re seeing is the result of a very large region in the early universe spinning coherently in the same direction,” he says. If that’s true, it adds a “new wrinkle to explain how large-scale structure formed.”

Taylor and colleagues found the apparent alignment while probing a patch of sky in the constellation Draco with the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India. They don’t know the distances to the galaxies, but all seem to sit near a galactic supercluster whose light takes about 7.4 billion years to reach Earth — just over half the age of the universe.

Other researchers using different techniques have previously reported similar alignments among another set of galaxies (SN: 12/27/14, p. 6). Both studies, though, relied on a small number of galaxies, which means the alignment might not be statistically significant.

“If an alignment like this exists, it’s very interesting,” says astrophysicist Michael DiPompeo, also at Dartmouth. “But I’m not super convinced that it’s really there.” While Taylor and colleagues argue that the alignment is not a statistical fluke, DiPompeo did his own calculations that suggest otherwise. He simulated observations of 64 randomly oriented galaxy jets — the computer equivalent of repeatedly dropping a bunch of toothpicks on a table and noting where each was pointed. “I could pretty regularly get patterns that look like this,” he says.
It’s also hard to imagine how such an alignment, if it was present as the galaxies formed, could persist for billion of years, he says. “It’s not like [galaxies] form in the early universe and then just sit there blasting these jets.” Galaxies grow by colliding with other galaxies, which can change how the galaxies and their central black holes rotate.

Both DiPompeo and Hickox say it’s worth probing other galactic gatherings, though, before dismissing these alignments as a coincidence. If similar orientations appear in many galaxy clusters, then the researchers could be on to something. Hickox would also like to see distances to these galaxies. If it turns out the galaxies sit at wildly varying distances from Earth, he says, then the alignment is less likely to be real.

Taylor hopes to do just that. Colleagues are planning observations at other telescopes that will let them determine how far away these galaxies are. And Taylor is gearing up for a more thorough investigation over a much larger patch of sky with a new radio observatory in South Africa called MeerKAT, which should be ready for operation later this year.