Planet Neuroscientists

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Weekend reads: A White House official’s retraction; ‘bosom peril;’ nonsense with a forged authorship

in Retraction watch on 2022-01-15 13:31:02 UTC.

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Part donkey, part wild ass, the kunga is the oldest known hybrid bred by humans

From mules to ligers, the list of human-made hybrid animals is long. And, it turns out, ancient.

Meet the kunga, the earliest known hybrid animal bred by people. The ancient equine from Syro-Mesopotamia existed around 4,500 years ago and was a cross between a donkey and a hemippe, a type of Asiatic wild ass, researchers report January 14 in Science Advances.

Horses didn’t appear in this region of Asia until 4,000 years ago, centuries after their domestication in Russia (SN: 10/20/21). But dozens of equine skeletons were excavated in the early 2000s from a royal burial complex dating back to 2600 B.C. at Umm el-Marra in northern Syria. The animals, whose physical features didn’t match any known equine species, appear to be “kungas” — horselike animals seen in artwork and referenced in clay tablets predating horses by centuries. 

“They were highly valued, very expensive,” says paleogeneticist Eva-Maria Geigl of Institut Jacques Monod in Paris.

Geigl and her colleagues analyzed a kunga’s genome, or genetic instruction book, and compared it with those of horses, donkeys and Asiatic wild asses, including the hemippe (Equus hemionus hemippus), which has been extinct since 1929. The kunga’s mother was a donkey and its father a hemippe, making it the oldest evidence of humans creating hybrid animals. A mule from 1000 B.C. in Anatolia reported by the same research group in 2020 is the next oldest hybrid.

Geigl thinks kungas were created for warfare, as they could pull wagons. Coaxing donkeys into dangerous situations is hard, she says, and no Asiatic wild ass can be tamed. But a hybrid might have had the characteristics people sought.

Coauthor E. Andrew Bennett, a paleogeneticist now at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, likens kungas to “bioengineered war machines.” But with the riddle of how kungas were made being solved a century after the last hemippe perished, “it’s impossible to make these animals again.”

in Science News on 2022-01-14 19:00:00 UTC.

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50 years ago, NASA’s space shuttle program got the green light

The decision on the shuttle is ‘go’ — Science News, January 15, 1972

President Nixon’s announcement last week of the decision to begin development of a space shuttle system may prove to be nearly as crucial to the future of the manned space program as the 1961 Kennedy challenge to land a man on the moon.

Update

The shuttle program was NASA astronauts’ ticket to space for 30 years. Beginning in 1981, five reusable spacecraft carried out many important missions, including helping to build the International Space Station and carrying the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. Despite initial hopes that the shuttles would usher in an era of low-cost spaceflight, the program was deemed too expensive to continue and ended in 2011. Recently, NASA has begun working with private companies to transport astronauts to low Earth orbit. In 2020, SpaceX flew six astronauts to the International Space Station (SN: 12/19/20 & 1/2/21, p. 36). Last April, NASA announced it had tapped SpaceX to ferry astronauts to the surface of the moon as part of the upcoming Artemis program.

in Science News on 2022-01-14 14:00:00 UTC.

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Our mental self-portraits contain clues about our personalities

By Emma Young

If I ask you to picture your face and body in your mind, what do you see? And how do your beliefs and attitudes about your self — including your personality and your self-esteem — influence these mental self-images? Completely fascinating answers to these questions have now been reported in a new paper in Psychological Science. The findings are important not just for understanding how we all see ourselves, but could also be useful for studies into body image disorders.

Artistic self-portraits have long been recognised as reflecting aspects of the artist’s identity and emotions, as well as their physical self. But they’re often drawn from photographs or reflections in a mirror. How any of us really see ourselves in our mind’s eye has been very difficult to explore experimentally. To do this, Lara Maister at Bangor University and colleagues used a technique that required 77 student participants to look at 500 pairs of faces in turn and each time indicate which they felt most looked like their own. All the chosen faces were then averaged to produce a final self-portrait. The students also completed a Big Five personality test and a self-esteem scale, and had a passport-style photo taken, for comparison.

The researchers used a face-recognition algorithm to analyse the self-portrait and the passport photo for each participant. This produced a measure of how different the two were. The team certainly found similarities (confirmed by human raters) — an individual’s self-portrait did resemble his or her photo more than other participants’ photos. However, other factors beyond physical appearance also seemed to be influencing people’s self-portraits.

To see whether one of these factors could be personality characteristics, the team had an independent group of participants act as personality raters. They were shown the pairs of self-portraits and passport-style photos and asked how strongly they perceived each of the Big Five personality traits in both. The results showed that these raters’ judgements were not random. Both self-portraits and photos clearly contained visual information that allowed the raters to make personality ratings that tallied to some extent with the participants’ self-reported personalities. (The paper doesn’t mention exactly what facial information allowed raters to make these judgements, but earlier research has found that genes and also pre- and post-natal hormone exposure can influence both face shape and personality, and extraversion has been linked to facial symmetry, for example.)

The team then ran further analyses on the self-portraits and the personality ratings. And they found that the higher the original participants’ self-ratings on a particular trait, such as extraversion, the more facial features associated with that trait were present in their self-portrait, above the level present in their photo. So for a self-reported extravert, say, their mental image of their own face had exaggerated extraversion-related facial features. This certainly suggests that our perceptions of our personalities influence our mental images of our own faces. And this is interesting for all sorts of reasons, not least this: if explicitly asked, most people surely wouldn’t be able to link particular facial features to personality traits, but we seem to have an implicit understanding of these links.

Maister and her colleagues then switched from faces to bodies. This time, 39 young female students picked from a series of pairs of body silhouettes, rather than faces, producing a body shape self-portrait. They also completed a questionnaire on body self-esteem and they were weighed and measured.

The researchers homed in one just one physical measurement: hip width. They found that, unlike in the first study, there was only a “negligible” relationship between the perceived and actual measure. But they did find that those who had low body self-esteem were more likely to perceive their hip width as being bigger than it actually was. Also, the lower a participant’s body-self-esteem, the slimmer they reported a “typical” female body to be.

This work shows that our perceptions of who we are, in terms of our personality and how we feel about ourselves, affect our mental visual images of ourselves. In fact, the team writes, the work points to a “close, interactive relationship between physical and psychological representations of the self”.

Body-images were less aligned with reality than were face self-portraits, and more influenced by how happy the individual was with their own body. We don’t see our unclothed bodies  as often as we see our faces, and this could be a factor here.

The team suggests that their approach could be used with people with clinical disorders of body image, such as anorexia or body dysmorphia. “Our approach could be used as a unique, direct method of assessing distortions in visual memory in these patients, allowing us to reveal whether they stem from higher level self-beliefs and attitudes or even a disorder in the link between these attitudes and the physical self-representation,” they write. It could also be used to explore how well treatments are working.

In fact, it could be used in all kinds of research — such as whether people who routinely take selfies have mental face images that are more aligned with reality, or whether any potential impacts on self-esteem might warp their images instead.

– The Self in the Mind’s Eye: Revealing How We Truly See Ourselves Through Reverse Correlation

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

in The British Psychological Society - Research Digest on 2022-01-14 13:10:34 UTC.

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An early outburst portends a star’s imminent death

A star’s death usually comes without warning. But an early sign of one star’s imminent demise hints at what happens before some stellar explosions.

In a last hurrah before exploding, a star brightened, suggesting that it blasted some of its outer layers into space. It’s the first time scientists have spotted a pre-explosion outburst from a run-of-the-mill type of exploding star, or supernova, researchers report in the Jan. 1 Astrophysical Journal.

Scientists have previously seen harbingers of unusual types of supernovas. But “what’s nice about this one is it’s a much more normal, vanilla … supernova that’s showing this eruption before explosion,” says astronomer Mansi Kasliwal of Caltech, who was not involved with the research.

On September 16, 2020, scientists discovered the explosion of a star roughly 10 times as massive as the sun, located about 120 million light-years away. Thankfully, telescopes that regularly survey a swath of the sky, as part of an effort called the Young Supernova Experiment, had been observing the star well before it detonated. About 130 days before the explosion, the star brightened, the researchers found, the start of a pre-explosion eruption.

The final explosion was a commonplace type of stellar detonation called a type 2 supernova, which occurs when the core of an aging star collapses. Precursors to such explosions probably hadn’t been seen before because the early eruptions are faint. For this supernova, scientists had observations of the star sensitive enough to pick up the relatively weak eruption.

Previous post-explosion observations of such supernovas have hinted that the stars slough off layers before death. In 2021, astronomers reported signs of a supernova’s shock wave plowing into material that the star had expelled (SN: 11/2/21). A similar sign of cast-off stellar material was also found in the new study.

Scientists aren’t sure exactly what causes such early outbursts. They could be the result of events happening deep within a star, for example, as the star burns different types of fuel as it nears death. If more such events are found, scientists may eventually be able to predict which stars will go boom, and when.

Precursor outbursts are a sign that stars experience inner turmoil before exploding, says study coauthor Raffaella Margutti, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. “The main message that we are getting from the universe is that these stars are really knowing that the end is coming.”

in Science News on 2022-01-14 12:00:00 UTC.

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Introducing the BMC Series SDG Editorial Board Members: Gerald Mboowa

Welcome to our SDG Editorial Board Members blog collection. We are hearing from the Editorial Board Members of the BMC Series journals whose work aligns with achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Here you can find other posts in this collection, grouped with the tag ‘SDG editorial board members‘.

My work relates to the WHO Sustainable Development Goal SDG3 and focuses on ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all. I have experience in microbial genomics and computational approaches. My research looks at the use of genomic methods for pathogen detection, characterisation as well as understanding transmission dynamics and acquisition of antimicrobial resistance at hospitals and community settings. I am proud to collaborate in achieving SDG3 by working with National Public Health Institutes (NPHI) in Africa facilitating access to sustainable DNA sequencing technologies for rapid and timely response to common infectious disease threats, including drug resistance. Recently, my group has developed an automated & highly scalable assembly, annotation, and higher-level analyses microbial computational pipeline for genomic data called rMAP: Rapid microbial analysis, profiling pipeline, and visualisation (https://bit.ly/36g809L).

Some of the challenges I have encountered during my research include limited access to DNA sequencing technologies, competitive funding, or high-performance computing (HPC) bioinformatic environments to support large-scale data analyses. However, I have established research collaborations and networks to increase funding opportunities and access to DNA sequencing technologies and HPC. For example, in 2019, the U.S. National Institutes of Health launched the second African Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics (ACE) at the Infectious Diseases Institute in Makerere University’s College (https://ace.idi.co.ug/). This center serves as a regional bioinformatics HPC resource for training and collaborative research for institutions in Africa.

Tools that read and interpret gene variations to enable customized medical care during HIV testing, treatment & management

HIV infection results from the expansion of a single or limited number of viral variants (genetically different copies of the virus). The differences in HIV virus come into existence after stable changes occur in its genes. This can happen during the exchange of genetic material between different HIV viruses in the body or after certain viral gene combinations become more prevalent than others due to exposure to antiretroviral therapy (ART) regimens. But also, sometimes viruses do not naturally develop smoothly from one stage to the next in a logical way. ART, the drugs used to treat HIV/AIDS, continue to save the lives of tens of millions of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). At the end of 2020, 27.5 million people, out of an estimated 37.7 million PLWHA, were receiving ART globally. This increased use of ART has been accompanied by the emergence of HIV drug resistance (HIVDR) – the levels of which have steadily increased in recent years. HIVDR is caused by changes in HIV genes that affect the ability of drugs to stop the multiplication of the virus. All ART drugs are at risk of becoming partly or fully inactive due to the emergence of drug-resistant virus strains. HIVDR leads to increased numbers of HIV infections and HIV-associated illnesses and deaths. The World Health Organization (WHO) report revealed that in 2020, 64% of countries with a high burden of HIV infections had growing HIVDR and recommended national action plans to prevent, monitor and respond to HIVDR. HIV virological failure (VF) signals treatment effectiveness and occurs when ART fails to suppress and sustain one’s viral load to <200 viral copies per ml and is normally associated with HIVDR. It is estimated that 24% of HIV patients in Sub-Saharan Africa have experienced VF. HIVDR and VF remain barriers to reaching the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) fast-track goal of ending AIDS by 2030.

Sanger sequencing (method of gene sequencing involving electrophoresis and is based on the random incorporation of chain-terminating dideoxynucleotides) is the gold standard for HIVDR testing but is limited by non-detection of resistance-associated variants with prevalence <20% yet these cause VF. Next-generation sequencing or NGS (multiplies millions of copies of all different genes in the virus in a massively paralleled way) detects different HIV variants and has been implemented largely in high-income countries. However, there is very limited application of NGS-based HIVDR platforms in Sub-Saharan Africa which has nearly 70% of global HIV infections.

Why HIV NGS?

For HIV-infected individuals, comprehensive characterization of the different viral variants during initial testing before-ART initiation or during the treatment course improves their chances of survival by ensuring customized treatment while minimizing VF and HIVDR. Significant progress in HIV infection control has been realized in Sub-Saharan Africa over the last two decades largely due to increased access to ART. Advances such as second (Illumina, Roche 454, and Ion Torrent) or third-generation (PacBio and Nanopore) DNA sequencing technologies, that can accurately profile viral variants at any stage of HIV infection, are key for effective disease management, preventing VF, and HIVDR. Urgent identification of viral genetic markers that predict increased risk of VF or HIVDR in different ART-based regimens including newer ones like Dolutegravir and injectable long-acting Cabotegravir/Rilpivirine (CAB/RPV) is critical. This involves analysis of clinical alongside viral load data and viral gene variants using bioinformatics tools. The DNA sequencing technologies and advances in analytical approaches are poised to steer an era of personalized HIV management due to their ability to offer accurate rapid detection and drug resistance profiling close to point-of-care testing (also known as bedside testing).

Virological failure and drug resistance

Non-adherence to ART as well as poor monitoring of viral load during treatment are challenges that continue to affect HIV control programs in Africa leading to the emergence of HIVDR, virological failure, increased HIVDR transmissions, morbidity, and mortality. The WHO recommends global genomic surveillance to monitor dynamics of HIV diversity and emergence of HIVDR. Countries with high infection burden must build robust national HIV genomic surveillance programs to ensure improved management of PLWHA if they are to eradicate HIV/AIDS. ART also referred to as lifetime treatment has transformed HIV infection from a gradual, normally deadly illness to a prolonged disease that endures for many years while subjecting infected individuals to different ART treatments over time. Regular monitoring of viral load is currently used for the assessment of ART response in HIV management. The drugs cause changes in the genes of the virus. These viral gene changes can offer critical insights for understanding mechanisms of drug resistance, effects of therapeutics on the virus, and guide effective vaccine development.

Conclusion

Considering that many African countries have implemented the universal HIV test and treat strategy (which involves providing lifelong ART to PLWHA irrespective of CD4 or WHO HIV clinical staging), national HIV control programs should utilize NGS in routine HIV testing, treatment, and surveillance. However, this also requires appropriate policy changes, substantial investment in installing NGS platforms and bioinformatics capacity building for infectious diseases control programs.

The post Introducing the BMC Series SDG Editorial Board Members: Gerald Mboowa appeared first on BMC Series blog.

in BMC Series blog on 2022-01-14 08:31:54 UTC.

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Schneider Shorts 14.01.2022 – Have a Heart!

in For Better Science on 2022-01-14 06:00:00 UTC.

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Exclusive: How a researcher faked data and gaslit a labmate for years

in Retraction watch on 2022-01-13 20:30:00 UTC.

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Quantum particles can feel the influence of gravitational fields they never touch

If you’re superstitious, a black cat in your path is bad luck, even if you keep your distance. Likewise, in quantum physics, particles can feel the influence of magnetic fields that they never come into direct contact with. Now scientists have shown that this eerie quantum effect holds not just for magnetic fields, but for gravity too — and it’s no superstition.

Usually, to feel the influence of a magnetic field, a particle would have to pass through it. But in 1959, physicists Yakir Aharonov and David Bohm predicted that, in a specific scenario, the conventional wisdom would fail. A magnetic field contained within a cylindrical region can affect particles — electrons, in their example — that never enter the cylinder. In this scenario, the electrons don’t have well-defined locations, but are in “superpositions,” quantum states described by the odds of a particle materializing in two different places. Each fractured particle simultaneously takes two different paths around the magnetic cylinder. Despite never touching the electrons, and hence exerting no force on them, the magnetic field shifts the pattern of where particles are found at the end of this journey, as various experiments have confirmed (SN: 3/1/86).

In the new experiment, the same uncanny physics is at play for gravitational fields, physicists report in the Jan. 14 Science. “Every time I look at this experiment, I’m like, ‘It’s amazing that nature is that way,’” says physicist Mark Kasevich of Stanford University.

Kasevich and colleagues launched rubidium atoms inside a 10-meter-tall vacuum chamber, hit them with lasers to put them in quantum superpositions tracing two different paths, and watched how the atoms fell. Notably, the particles weren’t in a gravitational field–free zone. Instead, the experiment was designed so that the researchers could filter out the effects of gravitational forces, laying bare the eerie Aharonov-Bohm influence.

The study not only reveals a famed physics effect in a new context, but also showcases the potential to study subtle effects in gravitational systems. For example, researchers aim to use this type of technique to better measure Newton’s gravitational constant, G, which reveals the strength of gravity, and is currently known less precisely than other fundamental constants of nature (SN: 8/29/18).

A phenomenon called interference is key to this experiment. In quantum physics, atoms and other particles behave like waves that can add and subtract, just as two swells merging in the ocean make a larger wave. At the end of the atoms’ flight, the scientists recombined the atoms’ two paths so their waves would interfere, then measured where the atoms arrived. The arrival locations are highly sensitive to tweaks that alter where the peaks and troughs of the waves land, known as phase shifts.

At the top of the vacuum chamber, the researchers placed a hunk of tungsten with a mass of 1.25 kilograms. To isolate the Aharonov-Bohm effect, the scientists performed the same experiment with and without this mass, and for two different sets of launched atoms, one which flew close to the mass, and the other lower. Each of those two sets of atoms were split into superpositions, with one path traveling closer to the mass than the other, separated by about 25 centimeters. Other sets of atoms, with superpositions split across smaller distances, rounded out the crew. Comparing how the various sets of atoms interfered, both with and without the tungsten mass, teased out a phase shift that was not due to the gravitational force. Instead, that tweak was from time dilation, a feature of Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity, which causes time to pass more slowly close to a massive object.

The two theories that underlie this experiment, general relativity and quantum mechanics, don’t work well together. Scientists don’t know how to combine them to describe reality. So, for physicists, says Guglielmo Tino of the University of Florence, who was not involved with the new study, “probing gravity with a quantum sensor, I think it’s really one of … the most important challenges at the moment.”

in Science News on 2022-01-13 19:00:00 UTC.

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Organic molecules in an ancient Mars meteorite formed via geology, not alien life

When researchers in 1996 reported they had found organic molecules nestled in an ancient Martian meteorite discovered in Antarctica, it caused quite a buzz. Some insisted the compounds were big-if-true evidence of life having existed on Mars (SN: 3/8/01). Others, though, pointed to contamination by earthly life-forms or some nonbiological origins (SN: 1/10/18).

Now, a geochemical analysis of the meteorite provides the latest buzzkill to the idea that alien life inhabited the 4.09-billion-year-old fragment of the Red Planet. It suggests instead that the organic matter within probably formed from the chemical interplay of water and minerals mingling under Mars’ surface, researchers report in the Jan. 14 Science. Even so, the finding could aid in the search for life, the team says.

Organic molecules are often produced by living organisms, but they can also arise from nonbiological, abiotic processes. Though myriad hypotheses claim to explain what sparked life, many researchers consider abiotic organic molecules to be necessary starting material. Martian geologic processes could have been generating these compounds for billions of years, the new study suggests.

“These organic chemicals could have become the primordial soup that might have helped form life on [Mars],” says Andrew Steele, a biochemist from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. Whether life ever existed there, however, remains unknown.

Steele and his colleagues initially sought to study how ancient Martian water may have morphed minerals in the meteorite, known as ALH84001. The team used microscopic and spectroscopic imaging methods to analyze tiny slivers from parts of the meteorite that appeared to have reacted with water.

In their samples, the researchers discovered by-products of two chemical reactions — serpentinization and carbonation — which occur when underground fluids interact with minerals and transform them. Amid these by-products, the researchers detected complex organic molecules. Based on the identification of these two processes, the team concluded the organics probably formed during the reactions, just as they do on Earth.

Analysis of the relative amounts of different types of hydrogen in the organic matter supported the notion that the organic compounds developed while on Mars; they didn’t emerge later on from Earth’s microbes or materials used in the team’s experiments.

Altogether the findings suggest that at least two geologic processes probably produced organic matter on the Red Planet, says Mukul Sharma, a geochemist at Dartmouth College who was not involved in the study.

The study is not the only to propose that organic material in Martian rocks could form without life. Researchers attributed the formation of complex organics in the 600-million-year-old Tissint meteorite, also from Mars, to chemical interactions of water and rock (SN: 10/11/12).

However, ALH84001 is one of the oldest Martian meteorites ever found. The new findings, when considered alongside other discoveries of Martian organic matter, suggest that abiotic processes may have been generating organic material across the Red Planet for much of its history, Sharma says. “Nature has had a huge amount of time on its hands to produce this stuff.”

Though the work doesn’t bring us any closer to proving or disproving the existence of life on Mars, identifying abiotic sources of organic compounds there is crucial for the search, Steele explains. Once you’ve figured out how Martian organic chemistry acts without meddlesome life, he says, “you can then look to see if it’s been tweaked.”

in Science News on 2022-01-13 19:00:00 UTC.

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COVID-19 spike protein paper earns an expression of concern

in Retraction watch on 2022-01-13 17:44:05 UTC.

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Author Q&A: PLOS Global Public Health

To celebrate the launch of PLOS Global Public Health, we spoke with authors of our first published articles to find out a little bit more about them, their work, and why they chose to publish with the journal.

In this first author Q&A, we spoke with John M. Humphrey, MD, who is the Assistant Professor of Medicine at Indiana University, USA.

Read on to learn more about the published research, which factors were important when selecting PLOS Global Public Health, and the overall experience.

Tell us a little about your research.

I use mixed methods to investigate ways to improve outcomes for pregnant and postpartum women living with HIV and their infants. My research is mainly conducted at the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare program in Kenya. 

What are the important factors that you look for when selecting a journal for your research?

I select a journal based on its reputation and reach among other researchers and stakeholders in my field of research. 

Why did you decide to publish with PLOS Global Public Health?

I selected PLOS Global Public Health having published several papers in PLOS ONE and PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases over the years. I have found the PLOS submission system to be easy to navigate. I also like the way PLOS formats my papers for publication.

What was your experience of the PLOS Global Public Health publishing process?

This experience is on par with my prior experiences working with PLOS. 

What advice would you give to other authors considering publishing with PLOS Global Public Health?

The readership is likely to be broad and the topics very diverse, so having a very well focused title and abstract will help future readers. 

Would you publish with PLOS again? Why?

I have had good experiences with PLOS and have received prompt communications from them whenever questions or issues have arisen. 

Read the latest published article that John co-authored, A qualitative study of the barriers and enhancers to retention in care for pregnant and postpartum women living with HIV.

Find out more about PLOS Global Public Health from the Co-Editors-in-Chief. Thinking about submitting? Discover 6 more reasons why authors choose to publish with PLOS.

The post Author Q&A: PLOS Global Public Health appeared first on The Official PLOS Blog.

in The Official PLOS Blog on 2022-01-13 17:41:27 UTC.

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The largest group of nesting fish ever found lives beneath Antarctic ice

Five hundred meters below the ice covering Antarctica’s Weddell Sea sits the world’s largest known colony of breeding fish, a new study finds.

An estimated 60 million active nests of a type of icefish stretch across at least 240 square kilometers, nearly the size of Orlando, Fla. Many fish create nests, from freshwater cichlids to artistically inclined pufferfish (SN: 10/13/20). But until now, researchers have encountered only a handful of icefish nests at a time, or perhaps several dozen. Even the most gregarious nest-building fish species were previously known to gather only in the hundreds.

The icefish probably have a substantial and previously unknown influence on Antarctic food webs, researchers report January 13 in Current Biology. 

Deep sea biologist Autun Purser of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, and colleagues stumbled across the massive colony in early 2021 while on a research cruise in the Weddell Sea, which is located between the Antarctic Peninsula and the main continent.

The researchers were studying chemical connections between surface waters and the seafloor. Part of the research involved surveying seafloor life by slowly towing a device behind the scientists’ icebreaking research vessel. That device recorded video as it glides just above the bottom of the ocean and used sound to map seafloor features. 

At one location on the Filchner ice shelf in the Weddell Sea, one of Purser’s colleagues was operating the camera tow and noticed that it kept encountering circular Jonah’s icefish (Neopagetopsis ionah) nests down below. Icefish, of the family Channichthyidae, are only found in the Southern Ocean and Antarctic waters and have strange adaptations to the extreme cold such as clear blood full of antifreeze compounds (SN: 9/19/98).

“When I came down half an hour later and just saw nest after nest the whole four hours of the first dive, I thought we were onto something unusual,” Purser recounts.

Purser and colleagues made three more surveys in the area and continued to find nests at a similar density, kilometer after kilometer. Perhaps one of the closest comparisons to icefish among nest-spawning fish are bluegills (Lepomis macrochirus), which form breeding colonies that can have hundreds of individuals, Purser says. But based on measurements showing about one icefish nest per four square meters across hundreds of kilometers of territory, the Weddell Sea colony is several orders of magnitude larger, the researchers say. 

The colony is an “amazing discovery,” says evolutionary biologist Thomas Desvignes of the University of Oregon in Eugene, who was not involved in the research. He was especially struck by the extreme concentration of nests.

“It made me think of bird nests,” Desvignes says. “When we see cormorants and other marine birds that nest like that, one next to the other — it’s almost like that.”

It’s not clear why so many icefish are gathering in one spot to breed. There appears to be good access to plankton in this location, which would be a crucial food source for newly hatched fish. The team also found a zone with slightly warmer water in the area, which could help the icefish locate the breeding ground. 

The icefish could be sustaining Weddell seals, the researchers say. Prior studies have shown the seals spending a lot of time diving in waters above the colony area. 

Purser thinks that there may be smaller Jonah’s icefish colonies closer to shore where there is less ice cover. It is possible, though, that the Jonah’s icefish disproportionately rely on the massive breeding colony, effectively putting all their eggs in one basket. If so, that “would make the species extremely vulnerable” to extinction, Desvignes says. The discovery of the massive colony is one more argument for providing environmental protections for the Weddell Sea as has been done for the nearby Ross Sea, he says. 

For now, Purser currently has two seafloor cameras at the colony site, where they will remain for a couple of years, taking photos four times a day to see if the nests are reused over time.

“I would say [the massive colony] is almost a new seafloor ecosystem type,” Purser says. “It’s really surprising that it has never been seen before.”

in Science News on 2022-01-13 16:00:00 UTC.

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Astronomers identified a second possible exomoon

Some of the same researchers who found the first purported exomoon now say that they’ve found another.

Dubbed Kepler 1708 b i, the satellite has a radius about 2.6 times that of Earth, and circles a Jupiter-sized exoplanet that orbits its parent star about once every two Earth years, the team reports January 13 in Nature Astronomy. That sunlike star lies about 5,700 light-years from Earth.

To find this nugget, the team sorted through a database of more than 4,000 exoplanets detected by NASA’s now-retired Kepler space telescope. Because large planets orbiting far from their parent star are more likely to have moons large enough to be detected, the team focused on a subset of 70 exoplanets.

Each of these planets is between half and twice the size of Jupiter. They all either take more than 400 Earth days to orbit their star or have an estimated average surface temperature less than 300 kelvins (around 27° Celsius), slightly higher than that of Earth.

After further screening, including tossing out exoplanets that don’t have near-circular orbits (which are statistically less likely to host moons), the team identified a strong candidate for an exomoon. It, like its host planet, caused detectable dimming of the parent star’s light when moving across the face of the star.

Discovery of the first possible exomoon, dubbed Kepler 1625 b, has faced a lot of skepticism (SN: 4/30/19). Both proposed exomoons need to be confirmed by further observations by other instruments, such as the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope, the team notes (SN: 10/6/21).

But fresh observations will need to wait: The newfound exomoon candidate and its planet won’t pass in front of the parent star again until March 24, 2023, the researchers calculate.

in Science News on 2022-01-13 16:00:00 UTC.

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We feel more nostalgic as we get older — but it’s not always a positive experience

By Emily Reynolds

A song, a place, a smell… it doesn’t take much to be transported back in time. Just as with Proust and his madeleines, we all have specific memories that not only provoke nostalgia but trigger intense emotions.

And while nostalgia is often framed as a positive thing — a fond wistfulness — this isn’t always the case, as the University of Akron’s Jennifer R. Turner and Jennifer Tehan Stanley explore in a recent paper published in Emotion. They find that nostalgia is more common the older we get — and it can also set off both positive and negative feelings.

Participants were 100 adults ranging in age from 18 to 78. After sharing demographic data, participants downloaded an app to their phones on which they took daily questionnaires for two weeks. Every day after receiving a prompt, they completed a measure related to nostalgia, indicating whether or not they had experienced nostalgia during the day, what they were doing at the time, and who they were with. (They were given three criteria by which to measure nostalgia: an experience that is emotional and autobiographical, during which you relive moments or “takes you back”, and that is not actively sought.) Participants then indicated how positive or negative the experience of nostalgia made them feel; those who did not record nostalgia were asked how they felt in the moment they were taking the questionnaire.

As expected, age was a significant predictor of daily nostalgia — young adults reported nostalgia 60% less often than middle aged adults, while older adults reported nostalgia three times more than middle aged people. Gender was not a significant predictor of nostalgia.

Experiencing nostalgia was related to both positive and negative changes in mood: 72% of participants reported an increase in positive affect in response to nostalgia, while 51% had an increase in negative affect. Younger and middle aged people were more likely to experience positive emotions in response to nostalgia than older people, for whom nostalgia was more related to increases in negative mood.

It makes sense that older people are more nostalgic — they’ve had more life experience to be nostalgic about. As to why our emotional response to nostalgia seems to shift to more negative than positive over time, the team has two suggestions. The first pertains to the way we conceptualise ourselves as we get older, remembering important moments in our lives — not all of which are likely to be positive.

Secondly, though nostalgia was not associated with a significant increase in positive affect among older people, there was some gain. This suggests that the benefits of remembering times past may be more ambiguous in older life, embodying the poignant nature of nostalgia.

Other studies have suggested that purposefully looking back on your past can make you less likely to suffer depression, providing “sense, meaning and ways of thinking to free the individual from feelings of joylessness or despair”. For those finding the pangs of nostalgia more bitter than sweet, this conscious effort to remember may be a way of reframing a complex yet common emotion.

– Holding on to pieces of the past: Daily reports of nostalgia in a life-span sample.

Emily Reynolds is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

in The British Psychological Society - Research Digest on 2022-01-13 10:07:30 UTC.

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Meet the PLOS Water Co-Editors-in-Chief

In this blog post find out about PLOS Water’s Co-Editors-in-Chief, Jenna Davis and Pierre Horwitz. Learn about their specific expertise, what new research is currently exciting them and their vision for PLOS Water.

What does PLOS’ vision for Open Science mean to you?

JD: There is growing support for the idea that knowledge production and dissemination should be more inclusive. How we actually operationalize that ideal is the challenge that PLOS is tackling, and I’m excited by the opportunity to both learn from and support those efforts.

What specific expertise do you bring to PLOS Water?

JD: I’ve been teaching and carrying out research in the water and sanitation field for more than 20 years. Most of my group’s work has been in countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Having the opportunity to examine issues across a variety of contexts has really shaped the way I think about research design and the interpretation of findings

PH: My earliest training was in aquatic zoology; I’ve developed a strong interest in the variety of inland aquatic ecosystems, including water chemistry and water resource management. My research is increasingly focused on social ecology, place-based, and policy dimensions of our interactions with water.

What is the most exciting part of your job as an Editor-in-Chief?

PH: Most of us are aware of the challenges we face in terms of planetary resources and inequality, and the inadequacies of our existing institutions to tackle them meaningfully. Since journals are institutions that structure the delivery of knowledges, we have both responsibilities and opportunities in this regard. The most exciting part of my job as Co-Editor-in-Chief is to be equally attentive to each of these many ways of knowing. Sometimes that will involve challenging our societal and organisational structures.

JD: Working with my Co-EIC Pierre Horwitz to develop a vision for PLOS Water that catalyzes cross talk between the water services and water resources communities, and that supports historically under-represented researchers in publishing their work. I’ve also loved meeting new colleagues and learning about their work–there is an amazing amount of scholarship in the water field!

What will PLOS Water add to the field in the coming decade?

PH: Water permeates, and is nearly universal in a disciplinary sense. The combined forces of industrialisation and population growth have meant a flourishing of types of water knowledge that belong, more often than not, to a set of languages and technologies. While they are essential coverage for the field of water, they have come at the expense of a diverse array of water knowledges that have been marginalised, and are more place-based, culturally defined, and ecologically literate. They include knowledges of Indigenous and local peoples, even formed over thousands of years and hundreds of generations, embedding understandings of water as the world has changed, and how societies have responded.

By addressing this imbalance, and providing a re-acquaintance for an international audience, while maintaining strong coverage of conventional and emerging fields, we may well be in a better position to contribute to a regenerative global agenda over the next ten years.

What’s a common misconception new authors have about the peer review or publication process?

JD: I think some new authors may forget that reviewers, while very knowledgeable and typically more seasoned than they, are also colleagues in their scholarly community. Engaging them in constructive debate can benefit everyone.

What developments are occurring in your field of expertise that excite you at this time?

JD: First, increased data availability and advances in data science are expanding opportunities for measuring and monitoring water resources, services, and access. Ideally this will enable better management and policy choices. I’m also excited to see a broader conception of health being incorporated into the water services arena. Evaluating effects of service deficits on, for example, mental health and the quality of child caregiving helps paint a more complete picture of the costs and benefits of water sector investments.

Want to know more about the journal and how to submit your research? Find out more information at PLOS Water! and follow the journal on Twitter.

Jenna Davis is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the Higgins-Magid Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, both of Stanford University.

Pierre Horwitz is the Professor of Environmental Sciences at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia, and founding Co-Director of the University’s Strategic Research Centre for People, Place & Planet.

Featured image by esudroff on Pixabay.

The post Meet the PLOS Water Co-Editors-in-Chief appeared first on The Official PLOS Blog.

in The Official PLOS Blog on 2022-01-12 17:51:00 UTC.

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Homo sapiens bones in East Africa are at least 36,000 years older than once thought

Fossils from the oldest known Homo sapiens individual in East Africa are more ancient than previously thought.

A partial H. sapiens skull and associated skeletal parts found in 1967 in the Kibish rock formation along Ethiopia’s Omo River date to at least around 233,000 years ago, pushing back the age of the fossils by 36,000 years or more. An age well exceeding 200,000 years for the Ethiopian fossils, known as Omo 1, fits with recent fossil discoveries suggesting that H. sapiens evolved across Africa starting roughly 300,000 years ago (SN: 6/7/17).

A volcanic eruption about 233,000 years ago left a layer of ash atop the sediment that yielded the Omo H. sapiens fossils, say volcanologist Céline Vidal of the University of Cambridge and colleagues. That ash layer displayed a chemical fingerprint matching that of a volcanic crater located 350 kilometers northeast of the fossil site. A massive eruption there spewed volcanic ash that wafted to Omo, the researchers say. Dating of hardened ash at the volcanic crater led to the new age estimate for the human fossils, the scientists report January 12 in Nature.

Another Omo ash layer lying near the fossil-bearing sediment, but with uncertain origins, had already been dated to about 197,000 years ago, providing the previous age estimate (SN: 2/22/05). All sediment ages rely on measures of the decay of a radioactive form of the element argon.

Further work will examine whether ash layers below Omo’s fossil-ceding sediment resulted from earlier volcanic blasts. “If successful, we might be able to bracket Omo 1 with a maximum age,” Vidal says.

in Science News on 2022-01-12 16:00:00 UTC.

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A century of quantum mechanics questions the fundamental nature of reality

Scientists are like prospectors, excavating the natural world seeking gems of knowledge about physical reality. And in the century just past, scientists have dug deep enough to discover that reality’s foundations do not mirror the world of everyday appearances. At its roots, reality is described by the mysterious set of mathematical rules known as quantum mechanics.

Conceived at the turn of the 20th century and then emerging in its full form in the mid-1920s, quantum mechanics is the math that explains matter. It’s the theory for describing the physics of the microworld, where atoms and molecules interact to generate the world of human experience. And it’s at the heart of everything that made the century just past so dramatically unlike the century preceding it. From cell phones to supercomputers, DVDs to pdfs, quantum physics fueled the present-day electronics-based economy, transforming commerce, communication and entertainment.

But quantum theory taught scientists much more than how to make computer chips. It taught that reality isn’t what it seems.

To celebrate our 100th anniversary, we’re highlighting some of the biggest advances in science over the last century. To see more from the series, visit Century of Science.

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“The fundamental nature of reality could be radically different from our familiar world of objects moving around in space and interacting with each other,” physicist Sean Carroll suggested in a recent tweet. “We shouldn’t fool ourselves into mistaking the world as we experience it for the world as it really is.”

In a technical paper backing up his tweet, Carroll notes that quantum theory consists of equations that describe mathematical entities roaming through an abstract realm of possible natural events. It’s plausible, Carroll argues, that this quantum realm of mathematical possibilities represents the true, fundamental nature of reality. If so, all the physical phenomena we perceive are just a “higher-level emergent description” of what’s really going on.

“Emergent” events in ordinary space are real in their own way, just not fundamental, Carroll allows. Belief that the “spatial arena” is fundamental “is more a matter of convenience and convention than one of principle,” he says.

Carroll’s perspective is not the only way of viewing the meaning of quantum math, he acknowledges, and it is not fully shared by most physicists. But everybody does agree that quantum physics has drastically remodeled humankind’s understanding of nature. In fact, a fair reading of history suggests that quantum theory is the most dramatic shift in science’s conception of reality since the ancient Greeks deposed mythological explanations of natural phenomena in favor of logic and reason. After all, quantum physics itself seems to defy logic and reason.

It doesn’t, of course. Quantum theory represents the ultimate outcome of superior logical reasoning, arriving at truths that could never be discovered merely by observing the visible world.

It turns out that in the microworld — beyond the reach of the senses — phenomena play a game with fantastical rules. Matter’s basic particles are not tiny rocks, but more like ghostly waves that maintain multiple possible futures until forced to assume the subatomic equivalent of substance. As a result, quantum math does not describe a relentless cause-and-effect sequence of events as Newtonian science had insisted. Instead science morphs from dictator to oddsmaker; quantum math tells only probabilities for different possible outcomes. Some uncertainty always remains.

The quantum revolution

The discovery of quantum uncertainty was what first impressed the world with the depth of the quantum revolution. German physicist Werner Heisenberg, in 1927, astounded the scientific community with the revelation that deterministic cause-and-effect physics failed when applied to atoms. It was impossible, Heisenberg deduced, to measure both the location and velocity of a subatomic particle at the same time. If you measured one precisely, some uncertainty remained for the other.

“A particle may have an exact place or an exact speed, but it can not have both,” as Science News Letter, the predecessor of Science News, reported in 1929. “Crudely stated, the new theory holds that chance rules the physical world.” Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle “is destined to revolutionize the ideas of the universe held by scientists and laymen to an even greater extent than Einstein’s relativity.”

Heisenberg’s breakthrough was the culmination of a series of quantum surprises. First came German physicist Max Planck’s discovery, in 1900, that light and other forms of radiation could be absorbed or emitted only in discrete packets, which Planck called quanta. A few years later Albert Einstein argued that light also traveled through space as packets, or particles, later called photons. Many physicists dismissed such early quantum clues as inconsequential. But in 1913, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr used quantum theory to explain the structure of the atom. Soon the world realized that reality needed reexamining.

By 1921, awareness of the quantum revolution had begun to expand beyond the confines of physics conferences. In that year, Science News Bulletin, the first iteration of Science News, distributed what was “believed to be the first popular explanation” of the quantum theory of radiation, provided by American physical chemist William D. Harkins. He proclaimed that the quantum theory “is of much more practical importance” than the theory of relativity.

“Since it concerns itself with the relations between matter and radiation,” Harkins wrote, quantum theory “is of fundamental significance in connection with almost all processes which we know.” Electricity, chemical reactions and how matter responds to heat all require quantum-theoretic explanations.

As for atoms, traditional physics asserts that atoms and their parts can move about “in a large number of different ways,” Harkins stated. But quantum theory maintains that “of all the states of motion (or ways of moving) prescribed by the older theory, only a certain number actually do occur.” Therefore, events previously believed “to occur as continuous processes, actually do occur in steps.”

But in 1921 quantum physics remained embryonic. Some of its implications had been discerned, but its full form remained undeveloped in detail. It was Heisenberg, in 1925, who first transformed the puzzling jumble of clues into a coherent mathematical picture. His decisive advance was developing a way to represent the energies of electrons in atoms using matrix algebra. With aid from German physicists Max Born and Pascual Jordan, Heisenberg’s math became known as matrix mechanics. Shortly thereafter, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger developed a competing equation for electron energies, viewing the supposed particles as waves described by a mathematical wave function. Schrödinger’s “wave mechanics” turned out to be mathematically equivalent to Heisenberg’s particle-based approach, and “quantum mechanics” became the general term for the math describing all subatomic systems.

Still, some confusion remained. It wasn’t clear how an approach picturing electrons as particles could be equivalent to one supposing electrons to be waves. Bohr, by then regarded as the foremost of the world’s atomic physicists, pondered the question deeply and by 1927 arrived at a novel viewpoint he called complementarity.

Bohr argued that the particle and wave views were complementary; both were necessary for a full description of subatomic phenomena. Whether a “particle” — say, an electron — exhibited its wave or particle nature depended on the experimental setup observing it. An apparatus designed to find a particle would find a particle; an apparatus geared to detect wave behavior would find a wave.

At about the same time, Heisenberg derived his uncertainty principle. Just as wave and particle could not be observed in the same experiment, position and velocity could not both be precisely measured at the same time. As physicist Wolfgang Pauli commented, “Now it becomes day in quantum theory.”

But the quantum adventure was really just beginning.

A great debate

Many physicists, Einstein among them, deplored the implications of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Its introduction in 1927 eliminated the possibility of precisely predicting the outcomes of atomic observations. As Born had shown, you could merely predict the probabilities for the various possible outcomes, using calculations informed by the wave function that Schrödinger had introduced. Einstein famously retorted that he could not believe that God would play dice with the universe. Even worse, in Einstein’s view, the wave-particle duality described by Bohr implied that a physicist could affect reality by deciding what kind of measurement to make. Surely, Einstein believed, reality existed independently of human observations.

On that point, Bohr engaged Einstein in a series of discussions that came to be known as the Bohr-Einstein debate, a continuing dialog that came to a head in 1935. In that year, Einstein, with collaborators Nathan Rosen and Boris Podolsky, described a thought experiment supposedly showing that quantum mechanics could not be a complete theory of reality.

In a brief summary in Science News Letter in May 1935, Podolsky explained that a complete theory must include a mathematical “counterpart for every element of the physical world.” In other words, there should be a quantum wave function for the properties of every physical system. Yet if two physical systems, each described by a wave function, interact and then fly apart, “quantum mechanics … does not enable us to calculate the wave function of each physical system after the separation.” (In technical terms, the two systems become “entangled,” a term coined by Schrödinger.) So quantum math cannot describe all elements of reality and is therefore incomplete.

Bohr soon responded, as reported in Science News Letter in August 1935. He declared that Einstein and colleagues’ criterion for physical reality was ambiguous in quantum systems. Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen assumed that a system (say an electron) possessed definite values for certain properties (such as its momentum) before those values were measured. Quantum mechanics, Bohr explained, preserved different possible values for a particle’s properties until one of them was measured. You could not assume the existence of an “element of reality” without specifying an experiment to measure it.

Einstein did not relent. He acknowledged that the uncertainty principle was correct with respect to what was observable in nature, but insisted that some invisible aspect of reality nevertheless determined the course of physical events. In the early 1950s physicist David Bohm developed such a theory of “hidden variables” that restored determinism to quantum physics, but made no predictions that differed from the standard quantum mechanics math. Einstein was not impressed with Bohm’s effort. “That way seems too cheap to me,” Einstein wrote to Born, a lifelong friend.

Einstein died in 1955, Bohr in 1962, neither conceding to the other. In any case it seemed like an irresolvable dispute, since experiments would give the same results either way. But in 1964, physicist John Stewart Bell deduced a clever theorem about entangled particles, enabling experiments to probe the possibility of hidden variables. Beginning in the 1970s, and continuing to today, experiment after experiment confirmed the standard quantum mechanical predictions. Einstein’s objection was overruled by the court of nature.

Still, many physicists expressed discomfort with Bohr’s view (commonly referred to as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics). One particularly dramatic challenge came from the physicist Hugh Everett III in 1957. He insisted that an experiment did not create one reality from the many quantum possibilities, but rather identified only one branch of reality. All the other experimental possibilities existed on other branches, all equally real. Humans perceive only their own particular branch, unaware of the others just as they are unaware of the rotation of the Earth. This “many worlds interpretation” was widely ignored at first but became popular decades later, with many adherents today.

Since Everett’s work, numerous other interpretations of quantum theory have been offered. Some emphasize the “reality” of the wave function, the mathematical expression used for predicting the odds of different possibilities. Others emphasize the role of the math as describing the knowledge about reality accessible to experimenters.

Some interpretations attempt to reconcile the many worlds view with the fact that humans perceive only one reality. In the 1980s, physicists including H. Dieter Zeh and Wojciech Zurek identified the importance of a quantum system’s interaction with its external environment, a process called quantum decoherence. Some of a particle’s many possible realities rapidly evaporate as it encounters matter and radiation in its vicinity. Soon only one of the possible realities remains consistent with all the environmental interactions, explaining why on the human scale of time and size only one such reality is perceived.

This insight spawned the “consistent histories” interpretation, pioneered by Robert Griffiths and developed in more elaborate form by Murray Gell-Mann and James Hartle. It is widely known among physicists but has received little wider popularity and has not deterred the pursuit of other interpretations. Scientists continue to grapple with what quantum math means for the very nature of reality.

It from quantum bit

In the 1990s, the quest for quantum clarity took a new turn with the rise of quantum information theory. Physicist John Archibald Wheeler, a disciple of Bohr, had long emphasized that specific realities emerged from the fog of quantum possibilities by irreversible amplifications — such as an electron definitely establishing its location by leaving a mark after hitting a detector. Wheeler suggested that reality as a whole could be built up from such processes, which he compared to yes or no questions — is the electron here? Answers corresponded to bits of information, the 1s and 0s used by computers. Wheeler coined the slogan “it from bit” to describe the link between existence and information.

Taking the analogy further, one of Wheeler’s former students, Benjamin Schumacher, devised the notion of a quantum version of the classical bit of information. He introduced the quantum bit, or qubit, at a conference in Dallas in 1992.

Schumacher’s qubit provided a basis for building computers that could process quantum information. Such “quantum computers” had previously been envisioned, in different ways, by physicists Paul Benioff, Richard Feynman and David Deutsch. In 1994, mathematician Peter Shor showed how a quantum computer manipulating qubits could crack the toughest secret codes, launching a quest to design and build quantum computers capable of that and other clever computing feats. By the early 21st century, rudimentary quantum computers had been built; the latest versions can perform some computing tasks but are not powerful enough yet to make current cryptography methods obsolete. For certain types of problems, though, quantum computing may soon achieve superiority over standard computers.

A new unit of info

Benjamin Schumacher introduced the quantum bit, or qubit, in 1992, which offers a foundation for quantum computing. The qubit can exist as both a 0 and 1. When the qubit is represented on a sphere, the angles formed by the radius to the point on the sphere determine the odds of measuring a 0 or 1.

Quantum computing’s realization has not resolved the debate over quantum interpretations. Deutsch believed that quantum computers would support the many worlds view. Hardly anyone else agrees, though. And decades of quantum experiments have not provided any support for novel interpretations — all the results comply with the traditional quantum mechanics expectations. Quantum systems preserve different values for certain properties until one is measured, just as Bohr insisted. But nobody is completely satisfied, perhaps because the 20th century’s other pillar of fundamental physics, Einstein’s theory of gravity (general relativity), does not fit in quantum theory’s framework.

For decades now, the quest for a quantum theory of gravity has fallen short of success, despite many promising ideas. Most recently a new approach suggests that the geometry of spacetime, the source of gravity in Einstein’s theory, may in some way be built from the entanglement of quantum entities. If so, the mysterious behavior of the quantum world defies understanding in terms of ordinary events in space and time because quantum reality creates spacetime, rather than occupying it. If so, human observers witness an artificial, emergent reality that gives the impression of events happening in space and time while the true, inaccessible reality doesn’t have to play by the spacetime rules.

In a crude way this view echoes that of Parmenides, the ancient Greek philosopher who taught that all change is an illusion. Our senses show us the “way of seeming,” Parmenides declared; only logic and reason can reveal “the way of truth.” Parmenides didn’t reach that insight by doing the math, of course (he said it was explained to him by a goddess). But he was a crucial figure in the history of science, initiating the use of rigorous deductive reasoning and relying on it even when it led to conclusions that defied sensory experience.

Yet as some of the other ancient Greeks realized, the world of the senses does offer clues about the reality we can’t see. “Phenomena are a sight of the unseen,” Anaxagoras said. As Carroll puts it, in modern terms, “the world as we experience it” is certainly related to “the world as it really is.”

“But the relationship is complicated,” he says, “and it’s real work to figure it out.”

In fact, it took two millennia of hard work for the Greek revolution in explaining nature to mature into Newtonian science’s mechanistic understanding of reality. Three centuries later quantum physics revolutionized science’s grasp of reality to a comparable extent. Yet the lack of agreement on what it all means suggests that perhaps science needs to dig a little deeper still.

in Science News on 2022-01-12 15:46:49 UTC.

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People behave more sadistically when they’re bored

By Emma Young

Sadism — harming others for pleasure — is often viewed as a “dark” personality trait, alongside narcissism, say, or psychopathy. Research exploring just what can bring out someone’s sadistic tendencies has found that even viewing images of injuries can do it. But now a new paper reveals a factor that the researchers conclude has a “crucial but overlooked” role in fostering sadistic behaviour: simple boredom.

We already know that bored people will give themselves electric shocks to alleviate their under-stimulation. This new work suggests that a willingness to harm when there’s nothing else to do extends to hurting other people, too — and this was true even for those who’d scored low on a general sadism scale. It’s not exactly an uplifting message about humanity. But, the authors argue, it could lead to new approaches to preventing sadism in schools, the military and other settings.

Stefan Pfattheicher at Aarhus University and colleagues report a total of 9 studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes. In the first, 1,780 people from the US, Germany and Denmark completed personality assessments and scales that measured proneness to boredom in everyday life and sadistic tendencies. They indicated how much they agreed with statements including ‘Many things I have to do are monotonous and repetitive’ and ‘I often find myself at “loose ends”, not knowing what to do’. And they reported on whether they’d been “purposely mean” to people in high school, and enjoyed hurting or humiliating other people, for example. The results revealed that more everyday boredom was associated with more sadism.

The team then explored boredom and sadism in different specific settings. In a study of US military personnel, the team found that sadistic behaviour towards other soldiers was linked to more boredom during military service. Similarly, a study of internet behaviour revealed online trolling was associated with more boredom in everyday life. Finally, in a study on child care, parents living in the US, Canada and the UK were asked whether they sometimes enjoyed making jokes at the expense of their child, or had even enjoyed physically hurting their child. The team found that when sadism did happen during child care, it was more likely to be reported by parents who felt bored while caring for their children. This study “points to a potential cause of child maltreatment that has not so far been considered in empirical research” they write.

However, a weakness of these studies was that they were all correlational and based on self-report. So the team then looked at what impact experimentally-induced boredom might have on sadistic behaviour. These studies of more than 4,000 people produced some fascinating if also disturbing results.

In one, 129 participants came into the lab, handed in their phones and anything else that might be distracting, and were put into a cubicle to watch either a 20-minute film of a waterfall (this was designed to make them feel bored) or a 20-minute documentary about the Alps. In the cubicle with them were three named cups, each holding a maggot, and a modified coffee grinder. The participants were told that while watching the film, they could shred the maggots if they wished. (In fact, if a maggot was put through the grinder, it was not harmed). The vast majority did not grind any. However, of the 13 people that did, 12 were in the boring video group. And the team found a link between worm-grinding and reporting feeling pleasure/satisfaction. “In this way, we document that boredom can motivate actual sadistic behaviour,” they write.

In subsequent experimental online studies, the researchers looked at how levels of underlying, trait sadism might influence sadistic behaviour while bored. These studies again involved participants watching boring vs interesting videos, during which they had the option to deduct money from, or add money to, a payment that they believed was going to be made to another participant. The team found that boredom made participants more likely to make the money-cutting choice — but only if they were already high in trait sadism. However, when there was no positive, prosocial alternative — when participants could only reduce and not increase the payment — bored individuals cut more money whether they were low or high in trait sadism. “Remarkably, this was the case even when looking at the very bottom of the sadism scale,” the team reports.

In a final study, the team explored why bored people behaved in this way, and concluded that it was down to a desire for novelty and excitement.

So what are the implications of all this?

The team accept that their investigations of boredom and sadism in the real world — on the internet, and in military and child care contexts — can’t themselves show that boredom definitely causes sadistic behaviour. But when considered in the light of the results from the experimental studies — especially the finding that when there’s nothing else to do, even people who aren’t normally sadistic become more willing to punish others, apparently just for the minor thrill of it — the results suggest that strategies to reduce boredom in these settings might reduce sadistic behaviour, too.  “We argue,” they write, “that the present research represents ground for giving such interventions a try.”

– On the relation of boredom and sadistic aggression.

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

in The British Psychological Society - Research Digest on 2022-01-12 12:25:25 UTC.

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Bad Choices in Dresden II

in For Better Science on 2022-01-12 06:00:00 UTC.

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Frontiers retracts a dozen papers, many more expected

in Retraction watch on 2022-01-12 01:30:13 UTC.

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Omicron forces us to rethink COVID-19 testing and treatments

New year, new variant. As 2022 gets under way, omicron, a fast-moving version of the virus that causes COVID-19, is well into its march across the world. As of January 11, a record-breaking total of 145,982 people were hospitalized in the United States with confirmed or suspected COVID-19. And hundreds of thousands of people are catching the coronavirus every day.

“There’s a lot of activity right now in the [United States], and we’re seeing that in terms of these astronomical numbers of new cases,” says infectious disease physician Preeti Malani of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “Omicron is keeping us busy.”

Omicron’s unique biology is leading to headaches for both testing and treatments designed to keep people out of hospitals. Researchers are racing to understand omicron and this new phase of the pandemic (SN: 12/21/21). Answers can’t come soon enough.

The variant is more transmissible than previous versions of the coronavirus. Compared with delta, omicron is 160 percent to 200 percent more transmissible, one preliminary study from researchers in Germany and the United Kingdom estimates. That’s mainly because omicron replicates itself in the body and sickens people faster than delta. With delta, it takes about four days after infection for symptoms to appear. Omicron produces symptoms in about three days, researchers have learned from outbreaks in Oslo and Nebraska.

Fortunately, omicron seems less likely than previous versions of the coronavirus to cause deep lung infections that lead to serious complications, such as admissions to intensive care units, intubation and death. But the surge of cases means that vulnerable people, including the unvaccinated, immunocompromised, elderly and those with underlying health conditions, are still landing in hospital beds.

“Health care systems are really under stress,” Malani says.

The key to heading off collapse of health care systems is to prevent people from needing to visit emergency rooms and be admitted to the hospital in the first place. Testing and isolation of infected people has helped to stem the tide of previous waves of infection, but omicron is spreading quickly and tests of all kinds are in short supply. And as quick as rapid tests are, they may not catch someone with omicron before they become infectious. What’s more, some treatments, such as laboratory-made monoclonal antibodies, aren’t as effective against omicron as they were against other variants. Other treatments, including new antiviral pills, are scarce.

“It’s going to be a rough couple weeks for sure, and maybe longer,” Malani says.

Here’s a look at some of the challenges that omicron presents for testing and treatment.

Testing in the time of omicron

Daily PCR testing and rapid antigen tests have helped many employers nip outbreaks in the bud by identifying infected employees and isolating them before they could pass the virus on to others, says Blythe Adamson, an infectious disease epidemiologist and economist. She founded Infectious Economics, a New York City–based company that helps businesses devise strategies to limit disease spread in workplaces.

But omicron has hampered those efforts. In a study conducted in December during the ongoing omicron surge, Adamson and colleagues tested people at five workplaces in New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco with PCR tests that gave answers within eight hours. “This population was 100 percent vaccinated.… And they were highly boosted, so they were doing all the right things,” Adamson says. Yet employees were still getting infected and spreading the virus.

At the workplaces, “omicron outbreaks looked really different than delta outbreaks were looking before,” she says. “While daily PCR testing previous to omicron worked really well to pick up cases before they were infectious, we started noticing [with omicron] that people were slipping through the cracks. Transmissions were happening faster. People were becoming infectious faster and spreading it to other people.”

So rapid antigen tests were added to the mix. Even after finding a positive test, the researchers continued testing the employees daily, adding an unprecedented look at COVID-19 infections in the early stages and allowing the researchers to determine whether rapid antigen tests are still good for pinpointing when people with COVID-19 are infectious to others.

A few weeks ago, rapid antigen tests were considered quite good at saying whether a person is able to infect others, answering the question, “Are you infectious now?” (SN: 12/17/21). But new evidence from Adamson’s group and a study conducted at a walk-up test site in San Francisco calls that past stellar performance into question. “I’m no longer confident that that negative is as meaningful as it was two weeks ago,” says Bob Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

The trouble seems to be at the front end of an infection.

Adamson’s group found that on the first two days of infection, PCR tests, which detect viral RNA, diagnosed infections that the rapid antigen tests didn’t. That’s not unusual. In fact, in previous COVID-19 outbreaks with other variants, Adamson relied on PCR tests to catch infections before they became contagious. But in 28 of 30 omicron infections in the study, people were producing infectious levels of the virus, but the nasal swabs with rapid antigen tests weren’t picking up the contagious cases. In fact, in four verified instances, people who had negative rapid antigen tests spread the virus to others, Adamson and colleagues report January 4 at medRxiv.org. That work has not yet been peer reviewed by other scientists.

It matches other results, however. At a San Francisco walk-up testing site, the BinaxNOW rapid antigen test made by Abbott was able to pick up cases in which people had high levels of virus. But the test didn’t do as well when people were on the threshold of infectiousness, researchers at Unidos en Salud, a community partnership with academic institutions including UCSF, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub and the University of California, Berkeley, report in a January 10 preprint posted at medRxiv.org.

One of the characteristics emerging about omicron specifically is where it lives in the body. Compared with previous variants, omicron seems to be more abundant in some upper respiratory areas, such as the throat, than in the nose, at least in the early days of an infection. That locale means that a nose swab may be missing omicron early on, before viral levels are high.

Adamson’s group found that in the first two days of infection, saliva swabs were better than nasal swabs at picking up infectious cases. By day three, particularly if people had symptoms, there was no difference in the ability of rapid antigen tests to detect the infection, regardless if the swab came from saliva or the nose, Adamson says. That bolsters preliminary evidence in a study from Hong Kong that found that saliva swabs are better for detecting omicron than nasal swabs are. That study appeared December 24 at medRxiv.org. It also has not been vetted by other scientists.

Recently, Wachter’s son had COVID-19 symptoms but tested negative on a standard home nose-swab test. Given the symptom list, Wachter wasn’t convinced. He planned to swab his son’s throat next. “As I think about going down to test my son this morning, I think I am going to stick it in his mouth before I stick it in his nose, which is kind of gross,” Wachter told Science News. He did anyway, and sure enough, that test was positive.

Available home tests haven’t been approved for this use, though, and the throat move isn’t endorsed by test makers or the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In a January 8 tweet, the agency wrote, “Please don’t go sticking that #COVID19 testing swab down your throat.”

Also, says Joshua Gans, an economist at the University of Toronto who has been studying COVID-19 testing, “It’s difficult to swab your own throat because you have to swab where your tonsils are.” Not to mention that many people have a gag reflex when their throats are swabbed. Nevertheless, throat swabbing followed by swabbing the nose with that same cotton swab is recommended in the United Kingdom for rapid testing.

Eating or drinking before doing a throat swab may produce false positives on some rapid antigen tests, but has no effect on nasal swabs, researchers reported in October in Microbiology Spectrum. But, overall, false positives from antigen tests are rare, Gans and colleagues report January 7 in JAMA. Of course, that was with nasal swabs. The researchers didn’t test throat swabbing.

“The antigen tests aren’t perfect,” Malani says. “But they are pretty specific. If it’s positive, you’re positive.”

The problem now comes if you test negative on a rapid antigen test. With omicron, you can no longer be sure you’re not infectious, Adamson says. “You would not want to right now with omicron have a 300-person wedding where you test everyone with a rapid antigen. With the prevalence of omicron in the community, you would absolutely have a superspreading event.”

The latest on treatments

Just as with previous versions of the virus, most people who are sick with omicron will recover on their own at home with standard hunker-down advice: Rest, fluids and fever-reducing medicine. But some people need more medical help, and omicron has changed that process. With omicron cases flooding hospitals and doctors’ offices, treatments are essential to prevent serious disease.

At first glance, help is at hand. In late December, two new oral pills were authorized by the FDA: molnupiravir from Merck and Paxlovid made by Pfizer. Both drugs and the antiviral drug remdesivir were designed to stop coronaviruses from copying themselves in the body. All three seem to hold up against omicron in lab tests, researchers reported in a preprint posted December 28 at bioRxiv.org, but there are no data yet to suggest how the drugs work in the real world, especially against the fast-moving variant.

Molnupiravir drops a person’s risk of hospitalization by about 30 percent (SN: 12/2/21). But because the drug works by introducing genetic mutations in viral RNA, there’s a chance molnupiravir might cause mutations in human genes too. That makes it an especially risky choice for women who are pregnant or might become pregnant, says Katherine Seley-Radtke, a medicinal chemist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Lab animal studies have shown that high doses or prolonged use of the drug may cause genetic mutations or developmental problems in fetuses. There have been no long-term studies of molnupiravir’s effect on people.

Other antivirals have their own issues. Remdesivir is approved for use in hospitalized people, but recent evidence has suggested it can help high-risk people stay out of the hospital too, researchers reported December 22 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Remdesivir blocks viral replication by inserting a dummy RNA building block that stops RNA copying. The problem with that drug is that it must be given intravenously, though its maker, Gilead Sciences, is reportedly working on pill and inhaled forms of remdesivir.

Remdesivir has another drawback in that it has to be converted in the body to its active form. That works better for some people than others, and can affect how well the drug can keep the coronavirus in check, Seley-Radtke says.

For some people, the best choice for treatment may be Pfizer’s new antiviral pill. In clinical trials, Paxlovid, a combination medication which blocks a protein-cutting enzyme that the coronavirus needs to replicate itself, reduced hospitalization and death in high-risk people by 88 percent. It does not have the mutation concerns associated with molnupiravir, but it might introduce problems when given to people taking other drugs.

That’s because Paxlovid also contains a drug called ritonavir. Ritonavir blocks the action of enzymes that break down drugs, keeping levels of the virus inhibitor in the body high so that it can fight the virus. But those enzymes that ritonavir inhibits also process other drugs, so people might accidentally overdose on their other medications. Doctors and pharmacists need to keep a close eye out for such drug interactions when prescribing Paxlovid to patients, Seley-Radtke says.

There is a bigger hurdle for Paxlovid, though. There isn’t enough of it to go around, especially as hospitalizations surge. “It’s a classic situation of scarcity,” Wachter says. At UCSF, “we have a fair amount of the Merck drug. We have very little of Paxlovid,” he says.

“If I have a choice, the Pfizer drug seems like it’s better in every regard, better efficacy and easier to take,” Wachter says. “But for now, we are highly rationing it.” Many of the people who need the treatment the most are unvaccinated – a situation that “raises a whole bunch of moral questions, that they would jump ahead of the line of someone who made a better choice,” Wachter says. This rationing framework is “a hard thing to get your arms around, but not inconsistent with the way we do the rest of medicine,” hehe says. “We don’t treat a lung cancer patient differently depending on whether they smoked.”

Another hurdle for the antiviral drugs is that they work best if given very early in the infection, ideally within three days of symptoms starting. But omicron replicates faster than delta or other previous versions of the virus, perhaps making the window for treatment even shorter, Seley-Radtke says.

It’s unclear what that accelerated timeline means for another class of treatments, monoclonal antibodies. Omicron’s highly mutated spike protein is missing many of the targets that some monoclonal antibodies aim for. Two of the three monoclonal antibody treatments that have been authorized for use in the United States seem to falter with omicron. Of the three, only one, called sotrovimab, seems to incapacitate omicron’s spike protein. Derived from a person who survived a SARS-CoV infection in 2003, sotrovimab still recognizes omicron’s mutated spike protein and disarms it, laboratory tests suggest. That study, posted December 15 at medRxiv.org, has not been reviewed by other scientists.

But sotrivimab is exceedingly hard to get at the moment, Malani and Wachter say. “We basically have none, so that’s not on the list right now,” Wachter says. That scarcity and others “make the promise of these drugs potentially more theoretical than real,” he says.

Over time, COVID-19 tests and treatments will become more plentiful. The U.S. government has pledged to distribute half a billion rapid tests in the coming weeks, for instance. But omicron isn’t waiting.

“We’re stuck with now and the next month being quite horrible,” Wachter says. And as promising as some tests and treatments seem to be, logistics can still foil the plans. “Can I get a test? Can I find a doctor? Can I get a prescription? Does the pharmacy have the medicine?” Wachter says. “And all of those are like ‘No. No. Maybe. Keep calling back. Try a different pharmacy.’ In real life, this is all very hard.”

in Science News on 2022-01-11 20:17:33 UTC.

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Developing a fair and accurate picture of academic contributions

Written by Lindsay Morton

In the sciences, credit counts. As a research scientist, your personal record directly determines your future opportunities in a measured, almost algorithmic way. It’s an elaborate but often ineffective system in which author order and journal impact factor, number of publications and total volume of grant dollars obtained, scholarly association and editorial board memberships each have a coded meaning that can vary by discipline. Though publication record is considered most important, each of these factors contribute to an overall persona; an academic reputation in which job, grant and tenure applications are all based. Within this system, acknowledging a contribution isn’t a simple courtesy: it can help make a career.

How can we allocate credit fairly and accurately?

The challenges inherent in our current systems for assigning credit in scholarly communications fall into three major categories: identifying individual contributors, identifying their specific contributions, and recognizing contributions other than authorship. Open Science tools and practices offer thoughtful and evolving solutions for each of these credit challenges and recognize researchers for all of their scholarly outputs. In this three-post series, we’ll discuss PLOS’ ongoing efforts to enhance trust in published research and improve inclusivity in both the publication and peer review processes, with options designed to allocate academic credit with greater precision and fairness.

What’s in a name: Identifying individual authors

Standard cataloging and meta-tagging procedures were developed for a different era of publishing. Today, there are far more scientific authors than ever before, and they publish with increasing frequency. Authors who share the same name are common—a problem exacerbated by the tradition of publishing under initials and a family name, rather than a full name. 

In the past (and even today, outside the sciences), other identifying characteristics like institution, country, or discipline might be used to distinguish authors who share the same name. But modern scientific researchers are a mobile population. Institutional affiliation, contact details and country may change several times over the course of a career. Research focus may shift or evolve over time. Names, too, may be subject to change, for example in cases of marriage, divorce, or gender transition. 

For these reasons, it is not uncommon for multiple researchers’ digital publication records to be senselessly and inaccurately conflated, or for sections of a publication history to be treated separately after a name change, shift in research focus, or physical move. Those mistakes can cause confusion for institutions and publishers, and increase the administrative burden for researchers.

Solution: Clarifying the record and reducing the administrative burden with ORCID

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor IDentifier) iD is a unique identifier used to distinguish researchers from one another, and to track professional contributions as both author and reviewer—even when name, institution, or country change. Your ORCID is unique to you, no matter how your career evolves. And because it’s widely adopted by publishers, peer review management systems, funders, institutions, and indexing services, tracking and demonstrating your contributions is easy. The system can both push data to partners in order to validate users’ identity, and retrieve data to create a personal profile for each individual. It also functions as a single sign-on tool, enabling researchers to login to all their publishing-related accounts with just one username and password.

Today, there are more than 7.3 million yearly active records, with 5.4 million users taking advantage of automatic profile updates through integrated member organizations like PLOS. PLOS became a member of ORCID shortly after its founding, and we have continued to embrace new functionality as it becomes available. We believe that ORCID is a valuable tool for authors and reviewers to claim credit for their contributions, as well as a time-saving resource for updating and maintaining a CV.

Don’t have an ORCID yet? Sign up today!

Coming up

In the next post in this series, we’ll return to the subject of contributorship to explore how scientific labor is recognized, and how credit is allocated among the different authors on a research article.

The post Developing a fair and accurate picture of academic contributions appeared first on The Official PLOS Blog.

in The Official PLOS Blog on 2022-01-11 15:23:23 UTC.

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Climate change communication should focus less on specific numbers

What’s in a number? The goals of the 2021 United Nations’ climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, called for nations to keep a warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius “within reach.” But when it comes to communicating climate change to the public, some scientists worry that too much emphasis on a specific number is a poor strategy.

Focusing on one number obscures a more important point, they say: Even if nations don’t meet this goal to curb global climate change, any progress is better than none at all. Maybe it’s time to stop talking so much about one number.

On November 13, the United Nations’ 26th annual climate change meeting, or COP26, ended in a new climate deal, the Glasgow Climate Pact. In that pact, the 197 assembled nations reaffirmed a common “ideal” goal: limiting global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees C by 2100, relative to preindustrial times (SN: 12/17/18).

Holding temperature increases to 1.5 degrees C, researchers have found, would be a significant improvement over limiting warming to 2 degrees C, as agreed upon in the 2015 Paris Agreement (SN: 12/12/15). The more stringent limit would mean fewer global hazards, from extreme weather to the speed of sea level rise to habitat loss for species (SN: 12/17/18).

The trouble is that current national pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are nowhere near enough to meet either of those goals. Even accounting for the most recent national pledges to cut emissions, the average global temperature by 2100 is likely to be between 2.2 and 2.7 degrees C warmer than it was roughly 150 years ago (SN: 10/26/21).

And that glaring disparity is leading not just to fury and frustration for many, but also to despair and pervasive feelings of doom, says paleoclimatologist Jessica Tierney of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

“It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, but I think it was definitely made sort of more front and center with COP,” Tierney says. She describes one news story in the wake of the conference that “mentioned 1.5 degrees C, and then said this is the threshold over which scientists have told us that catastrophic climate change will occur.”

The article reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what the agreed-upon limit really represents, Tierney explains. “A lot of my students, for example, are really worried about climate change, and they are really worried about passing some kind of boundary. People have this idea that if you pass that boundary, you sort of tip over a cliff.”

The climate system certainly has tipping points — thresholds past which, for example, an ice sheet begins to collapse and it’s not possible to stop or reverse the process. But, Tierney says, “we really should start communicating more about the continuum of climate change. Obviously, less warming is better.” However, “if we do blow by 1.5, we don’t need to panic. It’s OK if we can stop at 1.6 or 1.7.”

Tierney notes that climate communications expert Susan Hassol, director of the Colorado-based nonprofit Climate Communication, has likened the approach to missing an exit while driving on the highway. “If you miss the 1.5 exit, you just slow down and take the next one, or the next one,” Tierney says. “It’s still better than hitting the gas.”

Target numbers do have some uses, notes climate scientist Joeri Rogelj of Imperial College London. After decades of international climate negotiations and wrangling over targets and strategies, the world has now agreed that 1.5 degrees C of warming is a desirable target for many countries, says Rogelj, who was one of the lead authors on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2018 special report on global warming.

A global temperature limit “is a good proxy for avoiding certain impacts,” he adds. “These numbers are basically how to say this.”

But Rogelj agrees that focusing too much on a particular number may be counterproductive, even misleading. “There is a lot of layered meaning under those numbers,” he says. “The true interests, the true goals of countries are not those numbers, but avoiding the impacts that underlie them.”

And framing goals as where we should be by the end of the century — such as staying below 1.5 degrees C by the year 2100 — can give too much leeway to stall on reducing emissions. For example, such framing implies the planet could blow past the temperature limit by mid-century and rely on still-unproven carbon dioxide removal strategies to bring warming back down in the next few decades, Rogelj and colleagues wrote in 2019 in Nature.

Banking on future technologies that have yet to be developed is worrisome, Rogelj notes. After all, some warming-related extreme events, such as heat waves, are more reversible than others, such as sea level rise (SN: 8/9/21). Heat wave incidence may decrease once carbon is removed from the atmosphere, but the seas will stay high.

Rogelj acknowledges that it’s a challenge to communicate the urgency of taking action to reduce emissions now without spinning off into climate catastrophe or cliff edge narratives. For his part, Rogelj says he’s trying to tackle this challenge by adding a hefty dose of reality in his scientific presentations, particularly those aimed at nonscientists.

He starts with pictures of forest fires and floods in Europe from 2021. “I say, ‘Look, this is today, 1.1 degrees warmer than preindustrial times,’” Rogelj explains. “‘Do you think this is safe? Today is not safe. And so, 1.5 won’t be safer than today; it will be worse than today. But it will be better than 1.6. And 1.6 won’t be the end of the world.’ And that kind of makes people think about it a bit differently.”

in Science News on 2022-01-11 13:00:00 UTC.

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Clovis hunters’ reputation as mammoth killers takes a hit

An amateur archaeologist exploring a dried-out, ancient stream channel called Blackwater Draw near Clovis, New Mexico, made a startling discovery in 1929. He came across chiseled stone points strewn among mammoth fossils. Razor-sharp edges bordering each artifact gracefully curved up to a pointed tip. Thin grooves chipped into the bases of these stone points suggested that they were spearpoints that people had once attached to handles or poles.

Researchers who examined the Blackwater Draw finds saw them as clear evidence of mammoths having been killed by human hunters sometime in the past. Ensuing generations of archaeologists filled out the picture of an intrepid mammoth-killing bunch, dubbed the Clovis people, who spread across North America between around 13,500 and 12,500 years ago. Clovis points or skeletal damage presumably caused by them have been found among mammoth bones at 11 North American sites, including Blackwater Draw. Two other North American sites containing mastodon bones, one featuring remains of extinct elephant-like creatures called gomphotheres, plus a site that yielded camel and horse fossils also include Clovis points or evidence of injuries from sharp, pointed stones (SN: 8/9/14, p. 7).

Archaeologists typically refer to these places as kill sites. It’s long been assumed that Clovis hunters must have left spearpoints lying among the bones of mammoths and other massive creatures after killing and butchering them. If so, Clovis big-game hunters possibly contributed to the extinction of their enormous prey (SN: 11/24/18, p. 22).

But the Clovis people’s status as adept killers of tusked beasts weighing up to about 9 metric tons has come under fire. New experimental and archaeological studies suggest an entirely different scenario, says archaeologist Metin Eren of Kent State University in Ohio. Clovis points had many uses, like a Swiss Army knife, Eren contends. Spear-throwing hunters might have occasionally killed a mammoth, especially one separated from its group or slowed due to injury. More often, these tools served as knives to cut meat off carcasses of already dead mammoths or as dart tips hurled to scare away other scavenging animals drawn to mammoth remains, Eren and his colleagues conclude in the October Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Big protection

A mammoth’s skeleton shows ribs and other bones that sheltered internal organs. A view from the top, right, shows presumed average (red) and maximum (blue) penetration depths of Clovis points hurled at high speeds at a mammoth, based on experimental evidence, assuming the weapons passed through dense hair and a thick hide, and avoided bones.

“It’s not clear that Clovis points attached to spears could even have penetrated a mammoth’s hide,” Eren says. “We need to stop assuming that Clovis people and earlier Stone Age groups [in Asia and Europe] must have been mammoth hunters.”

His argument has been greeted with interested skepticism by some Clovis investigators. “We have an instrument, the Clovis point, that keeps showing up in direct association with dead [mammoth] bodies,” says archaeologist David Kilby of Texas State University in San Marcos. “I remain convinced that Clovis points were designed to serve as reliable hunting weapons.”

Mammoth challenges

Eren made the same argument not too long ago. A spear tipped with a Clovis point and hurled from a spear thrower “could have easily taken down the largest Stone Age beasts,” he said on camera in an episode of the 2015 PBS documentary series First Peoples.

Since then, several lines of evidence have led Eren to retract that claim. Crucial clues came from reconstructions of mammoths’ skeletal and internal anatomy — both from earlier studies by other researchers, as well as new evidence gathered by Eren’s group. The reconstructions show how well-protected these creatures were from spears heaved or thrust at them.

Eren’s team combined measurements from Asian woolly mammoths and Columbian mammoths of North America, the presumed prey of Clovis people. Several frozen carcasses recovered in Asia indicate that woolly mammoth skin was 2 to 3 centimeters thick on average, the group estimates. Beneath the skin lay 8 to 9 centimeters of fat. And above that skin, woolly mammoth hides were covered by 5 to 15 centimeters of dense underfur topped by a layer of outer hairs 10 to 60 centimeters long.

Using measurements of ribs from two Columbian mammoths, whose remains are mounted at a Texas museum, Eren’s team then estimated how far a Clovis spearpoint had to travel to reach vulnerable internal organs.

A Clovis point had to plunge 17 to 30 centimeters deep to kill an Asian woolly mammoth, the team calculated. The distance would be close, but not quite as deep, for Columbian mammoths, which may have lacked underfur.

Even after slicing through hair, hide, fat and tissue on the way into a mammoth’s chest, a Clovis point had to dodge a picket fence of thick ribs to reach the beast’s internal organs. A spearpoint that entered through the stomach and into an opening at the back of the rib cage would have had to travel farther than one aimed at the chest, although it’s unclear how much farther.

With those estimates in mind — and inspired by earlier experiments in which researchers thrust or hurled spears tipped with Clovis points into dead elephants — Eren put the points to the test.

In those earlier elephant experiments, spearpoints often pierced the animals’ hides. But for a variety of reasons that likely included the condition of carcasses and the speeds at which spears were launched, only some points penetrated deep enough to have reached the vital organs of a mammoth or mastodon. Eren used a lab setup that offered a better chance of shooting Clovis points deep into a hunting target than would have been possible in an actual encounter with a mammoth-sized creature. Yet even with this advantage, Eren’s results suggest that Clovis points generally did not penetrate deep enough to have been effective mammoth killers.

In one study published in the July 2020 Lithic Technology, replicas of seven types of Clovis points covering the sizes and shapes that have been found at archaeological sites were fastened to wooden shafts. The sizes ranged from a bullet-shaped point about two-thirds as long as an adult’s thumb to a missile-shaped point nearly as long as a pencil. A bow mounted on a shooting device fired each type of Clovis point 30 times into blocks of moist clay from a distance of about 1.8 meters. Spears traveled at a speed in the upper range of shots that have been propelled by people using spear-throwing tools. The clay blocks, fortified with crystalline silica dust, provided slightly less resistance than the tissue of an elephant or other large animal.

Over 210 shots, Clovis points penetrated clay blocks — which lacked the thick skins of mammoths that would have slowed or blocked spears thrown during actual hunts — to an average depth of 18.6 centimeters, Eren says. Penetration depths of four types of points equaled or fell short of the overall average. Only a couple of shots using the most successful point penetrated as deep as 28.6 centimeters. Smaller points tended to pierce deeper into targets than larger points. But the relatively broad, thick tips on all the Clovis points limited their ability to penetrate clay and enter animal tissue, even assuming one of these weapons managed to breech a mammoth’s tough skin without breaking, Eren says.

Ancient mammoth hunters may have hurled slightly larger Clovis points than the experimental replicas and perhaps launched shots with somewhat greater momentum. Still, sending a spear through an animal’s hide, fat and tissue at an angle that avoided ribs on the way to a fatal rendezvous with internal organs was highly unlikely, Eren says. Unlike the lab setup, presumed mammoth hunters would have taken aim at animals on the move. Spears that lodged in a mammoth’s hide probably felt like a series of stinging pinpricks that could easily have angered the creature and caused it to charge at or stomp on human pursuers.

Try, try again 

Replicas of seven points were tested for their ability to penetrate clay blocks used as stand-ins for tougher animal tissue. The bars on the chart denote the number of times the replicas reached various depths in the clay. Outlines of seven Clovis point forms used in the experiment appear above their average penetration depths. Few of the stone projectiles traveled far enough into the targets to have had a chance to cause lethal injury to an actual mammoth.

Average depth that Clovis point replicas pierced a clay target

Source: M.I. Eren et al/J. Archaeol. Sci. Rep. 2021

Lack of impact

If Clovis people effectively hunted mammoths, their spears would have often hit ribs or other bones, Eren says. Those impacts should have left behind many broken Clovis points at presumed kill sites.

Another experiment supported that expectation. Eren shot 203 replicas of the seven Clovis point types at oak boards, which are not as hard or dense as human or cow ribs. All but three points broke on the first shot. The rest broke on the second shot.

Yet of 93 Clovis points previously found at 15 presumed kill sites, only 12 of 74 discovered among mammoth, mastodon or gomphothere bones had broken, probably after hitting bone, Eren and his colleagues found. In contrast, 10 of 19 Clovis points associated with bison bones — smaller prey with thinner hides likely hunted by Clovis people (SN: 5/13/17, p. 8) — had fragmented due to hard impacts.

Mammoths and their supersized brethren may have fallen prey to Clovis hunters on rare occasions, but the huge beasts would have typically withstood a hail of spears tipped with Clovis points, Eren contends. Even attempts to disable a mammoth by severing tendons in its legs with bladelike Clovis chopping tools attached to handles would probably have failed. In another experiment, Eren swung replicas of such implements at a simulated mammoth foot consisting of a hoof-shaped slab of 5-centimeter-thick clay surrounding beef tendons. Again, in this best-case scenario, chops with Clovis blades sometimes partially cut a tendon but never sliced entirely through one. Often, blades left tendons untouched.

Hunting need not have occurred for Clovis points to have been left among mammoth bones. Microscopic damage that has been observed on Clovis points indicates that they could have served as knives to butcher huge beasts that had already died, Eren says. These knives could have been used to cut all sorts of material, from animal hides to edible plants.

Mixed reviews

Eren’s group raises valid doubts about how well Clovis points worked as mammoth killers, says archaeologist Vance Holliday of the University of Arizona at Tucson. Clovis points discovered at alleged kill sites “could have just as well been used for butchering and then left behind.” Scavenged animals could have died of natural causes, accidental injuries or lethal wounds inflicted by nonhuman predators.

No clear evidence of hunting exists at the few sites containing both Clovis points and bones of mammoth or other large animals, Holliday says. For instance, although more than 10,000 Clovis points have been recovered in North America, mostly at campsites and in storage spots called caches, none have been found embedded in bones of big game.

Spears tipped with Clovis points, as well as long segments of bone and ivory shaped into rods with pointed tips found at a few Clovis sites, might have occasionally been thrust by hand at massive prey in order to wound or kill, Holliday speculates.

Human-beast interactions 

On this partial map of North America, gold dots designate sites regarded by some researchers as displaying clear evidence of human hunting or scavenging of mammoths and other big game, mostly mastodons.

Source: D.K. Grayson and D.J. Meltzer/J. Archaeol. Sci. 2015

Other archaeologists see no reason to recant traditional views of Clovis points as lethal big-game hunting weapons. Precisely because mammoths were so difficult to kill, Clovis hunters would have thrown or thrust spears at torso areas unprotected by ribs, says Texas State’s Kilby. Such wounds wouldn’t kill right away, but hunters could follow massive prey until bleeding or injuries led to death. That tactic would have resulted in few Clovis points striking ribs and then breaking, consistent with what Eren’s group found.

Such a scenario might have led to the death of a mammoth at a 12,900-year-old site in eastern Wyoming called La Prele. Excavations at La Prele since 1986 have uncovered bones from a mammoth and remnants of a temporary settlement where families gathered to feed off the carcass. Finds include a Clovis point that displays damage from a high-speed impact, says Todd Surovell of the University of Wyoming in Laramie, who directs work at La Prele.

“Clovis points were clearly intended to be hunting weapons,” Surovell says. “I don’t believe for a second that they were primarily used as knives.”

Surprising survival

Determining whether Clovis people scavenged mammoths more often than they hunted them will help to clarify a long-standing debate about whether Stone Age groups drove those creatures to extinction, says archaeologist Ashley Smallwood of the University of Louisville in Kentucky.

Advocates of proficient big-game hunting by Clovis people and by even earlier groups in northern Asia suspect that humans killed off mammoths within a few hundred years of first encountering them.

Eren and other researchers think it more likely that those animals died out as ancient shifts to a warmer, wetter climate shrank the grasslands on which the animals lived. Ancient DNA has already supported a similar scenario of extinction by climate change for Siberian woolly rhinos around 14,000 years ago (SN: 9/12/20, p. 9). A recent study, also based on ancient DNA, suggests the same for mammoths.

Evolutionary geneticist Yucheng Wang of the University of Cambridge and his colleagues analyzed plant and animal DNA extracted from 535 sediment samples from the Arctic spanning roughly the last 50,000 years.

Based on that genetic evidence, mammoths survived in Arctic parts of North America until about 8,600 years ago, in northeast Siberia until around 7,300 years ago and in north-central Siberia until as late as about 3,900 years ago, the researchers reported October 20 in Nature. Thus, mammoths coexisted with people for several thousand years or more in those regions. That means in North America, mammoths outlasted the Clovis culture by nearly 5,000 years. An unexpectedly late survival of plants suited to grassland and tundra areas appears to have enabled mammoths to persist longer than previously estimated, the researchers say.

Woolly mammoths died out in various parts of Eurasia over many thousands of years before meeting their final end in the Arctic locales studied by Wang’s group, say ecologist Damien Fordham of the University of Adelaide in Australia and his colleagues. Computer simulations based on ancient DNA, fossil and climate data suggest that rising temperatures and growing human populations led to mammoth die-offs in Europe and Asia starting around 19,000 years ago and in much of Asia starting roughly 15,000 years ago, Fordham’s team reported November 5 in Ecology Letters.

Similar to Wang’s ancient DNA findings, Fordham’s computer simulations suggest that woolly mammoths survived in still-frigid Siberia until roughly 3,000 years ago.

Rapid movements of ancient human groups across Eurasia disrupted woolly mammoths’ ability to move among areas once plentiful with food and water, Fordham’s group suggests. That, more than hunting, hastened the huge beasts’ demise, the researchers suspect.

Perhaps North American mammoth extinction similarly played out in stages. Maybe human hunters played only a minor role in that process. Whatever the case, mammoths, it seems, are as capable of throwing curves at scientists as Clovis people and their stone points.

in Science News on 2022-01-11 11:00:00 UTC.

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Female dolphins have a clitoris much like humans’

Dolphins have active sex lives, with frequent dalliances not just for reproduction. One reason may be that the prominent female dolphin clitoris provides sexual pleasure.

A new up-close look at clitoral tissue from common bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) reveals many similarities to the human clitoris. Abundant sensory nerves and spongy tissues in the genitalia of our female flippered friends suggest the dolphin clitoris may be highly sensitive to physical contact, researchers report January 10 in Current Biology.

The findings suggest that the bottlenose dolphin clitoris likely provides pleasure during sex, which adds up since dolphins have sex all the time, says Patricia Brennan, an evolutionary biologist at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass.

Heterosexual and homosexual sex is common in wild dolphins, including female-female sex. “What that looks like is females stimulating each other’s clitoris,” with snouts, flippers or flukes, Brennan says. Females also masturbate by rubbing their clitoris against objects on the sea bottom.

Like female reproductive anatomy generally, the clitoris — in many species, not just dolphins  — is poorly studied in contrast to male genitalia. The first rigorous study of clitoral anatomy in humans wasn’t published until 1998.

During Brennan’s recent research on dolphin vaginal anatomy, the large size of the common bottlenose dolphin clitoris aroused her curiosity (SN: 12/15/17). The paucity of prior research prompted Brennan and colleagues to examine the organ and look under the hood — including under the wrinkled clitoral hood — an area of enlarged erectile tissue near the vaginal entrance where contact and penile stimulation during copulation is likely.

Excising the clitorises from dolphin specimens that died of natural causes, Brennan’s team found that the dolphin clitoral body is supplied by abundant large nerves at the skin surface. “So just like humans,” she says, “these are areas of high sensitivity.”

CT scans and dissection also revealed many structural features similar to the human clitoris, though differing in shape and with more spongy tissues. Like in humans, the dolphin clitoris has erectile bodies with dense layers of connective tissue, comprised of collagen and elastin fiber that maintains structural integrity under pressure. The team also found genital corpuscles, encapsulated sensory nerve endings called “corpuscles of pleasure” in humans.

Clitoral shape also differs between young and adult dolphins, the researchers report. Juvenile females have a C-shaped clitoris, whereas it is larger and S-shaped in reproductively mature females. These bendy shapes, Brennan predicts, represent a relaxed rather than engorged state. “When that tissue fills up with blood, it’s going to straighten up,” she explains.

These new findings are “striking but not surprising,” notes Teri Orr, a physiological ecologist at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces who was not involved in this study. Orr, a former postdoc of Brennan, studies genitalia across species. Like bonobos and chimps, she says, dolphin group dynamics involve bonding and pleasure-seeking through sex.

However, there are at least two other potential hypotheses for the evolution of an enlarged clitoris in female dolphins, Orr says. The thicket of nerves supplying the clitoris may reflect its shared embryological root with the penis in males. During development both arise from the same types of tissues, and the penis is also well-supplied with nerves, so it’s not too surprising that the clitoris is as well.

Additionally, although modern dolphins do not have ovulation that is induced by an external stimulus, in dolphin ancestors, clitoral stimulation could have played a role in stimulating ovulation, Orr speculates. Across species, theories abound about why female clitoral stimulation can lead to orgasm, and perhaps pleasure and fertility coevolved.

With a historical and persistent gender bias in reproductive biology research, there is much about female sexuality in all species that we still don’t know. Dolphins “might have something to tell us about ourselves,” Brennan says. “We have a lot to learn from nature.”

in Science News on 2022-01-10 21:55:40 UTC.

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Oxygen-rich exoplanets may be geologically active

Humble oxygen is more than just a building block of life. The element could also help scientists sneak a peek into the innards of planets orbiting faraway stars, a new study suggests.

Laboratory experiments show that rocks exposed to higher concentrations of oxygen melt at lower temperatures than rocks exposed to lower amounts. The finding suggests that oxygen-rich rocky exoplanets could have a thick layer of soupy mantle, possibly giving rise to a geologically active world, researchers report in the Nov. 9 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A gooey interior is thought to have profound effects on a rocky planet. Molten rock deep within a planet is the magma that powers geologic activity on the surface, like what happens on Earth (SN: 7/31/13). During volcanic eruptions, volatiles such as water vapor and carbon dioxide can fizzle out of the magmatic ooze, setting up atmospheres that are potentially friendly to life (SN: 9/3/19). But the factors that drive mantle melting on Earth aren’t well-understood, and scientists have tended to focus on the role of metals, such as iron.

The impact of oxygen on rock melting has been overlooked, says Yanhao Lin, a planetary scientist at the Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research in Beijing. Oxygen is one of the most abundant elements on Earth and probably on rocky exoplanets too, he says. As such, other scientists may have previously thought that it is just too common of an element to play such a literally earthshaking role, adds Lin.

In the new study, Lin and colleagues measured the melting temperatures of synthetic, iron-free basalt rock under rock in two environments: under oxygen-starved conditions and exposed to oxygen-rich air. The team used the faux rock to isolate oxygen’s effect on melting and rule out the effects of iron, which can also influence rock melting.

As the molten rocks cooled to less than 1000° Celsius, the minerals in the oxygenated basalt stayed melted longer than the oxygen-depleted samples, the team observed. The oxygenated rocks consistently solidified at temperatures 100° Celsius lower than their counterparts.

Just as salt lowers the melting temperature of ice, oxygen similarly makes it easier for rocks to melt, the researchers conclude. Lin hypothesizes that oxygen can break up long chains of silicon and oxygen atoms in solid rock, coaxing them to form smaller bits. These fragments are more mobile and can flow more easily compared to the longer, tangly groups.

The degree of oxidation could determine how a young exoplanet’s syrupy insides eventually settle into subterranean layers. A more oxidized and more melt-prone gut at lower temperatures may lead to a smaller solid core, a thicker sludgy mantle and a more metal-deprived crusty shell, the researchers say.

A caveat to the work is that the researchers tested the impact of only oxygen on the melting temperature of rocks. The team has yet to consider other factors such as iron concentration and high pressure, which are also probably part of many real-world exoplanet interiors. These additional factors will further induce melting, Lin predicts.

The findings are “a very good effort,” says planetary scientist Tim Lichtenberg of the University of Oxford who was not involved in the study. Other caveats to mantle melting may surpass oxygen’s contribution, but the new results are still useful, he says. Understanding oxygen’s potential impact, for example, could be valuable for explaining the inner workings and history of any exoplanet that scientists come across in their astronomical observations. That understanding could be even more valuable — and opportune — as scientists prepare to use the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope to probe the atmospheres of other worlds (SN: 10/6/21).

Lab experiments, of course, can’t capture all the nuances of real-life planetary interiors. But the work is necessary to guide — and confirm — the formulation of theories about how certain types of exoplanets came to be, Lichtenberg says. Simulations can then extend the reach of experimental results when combined with other techniques, such as modeling.

“Observations, the modeling and the experiments,” Lichtenberg says, “there’s a trifecta.” These three prongs feed off each other to advance exoplanet science as a whole, long before humankind ever sets foot on such distant worlds.

in Science News on 2022-01-10 14:00:00 UTC.

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Readers ask about the moon’s slow escape from Earth and more

Feel the burn

The discovery of a protein receptor in nerve cells that detects heat and capsaicin — the compound that makes chili peppers spicy — was one of the 2021 Nobel Prize winners in physiology or medicine, Tina Hesman Saey and Freda Kreier reported in “This year’s Nobel Prizes awarded” (SN: 11/6/21, p. 14).

Reader Joe Gadway wondered how people can tell the difference between high temperatures and spiciness if the same protein detects both.

“A lot of people ask me this question,” says Nobel laureate David Julius, the molecular physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco who discovered the receptor, called TRPV1. “Sometimes it is difficult to discriminate between [whether] your mouth is on fire because of capsaicin or because something’s hot-hot.”

Other receptors in nerve cells that can sense thermal heat but not capsaicin may help distinguish spiciness from temperature, Julius says. But these receptors’ contributions to heat sensation haven’t been worked out as thoroughly as TRPV1’s role has.

Thermal heat suppresses cold-sensing nerve fibers whereas capsaicin does not, he says. Quieting signals from the cold-sensing nerves may be another clue to help the brain figure out the source of the heat.

Speed could play a role in telling the two sensations apart as well, Julius says. Nerve cells register thermal signals faster than they do chemical signals. While a “hot” signal goes away once you stop touching a hot object, the burn of chili peppers endures. So those temporal clues may also help people tell thermal heat from chemical heat.

Great escape

Moon rock samples retrieved by China’s Chang’e-5 mission reveal that lava oozed on the lunar surface just 2 billion years ago, Freda Kreier reported in “Moon rocks record young lava flows” (SN: 11/6/21, p. 6).

Kreier reported that the moon was a lot closer to Earth 2 billion years ago and has been slowly inching away from the planet. Reader Rick Mott wanted to know how the moon manages to move away from Earth.

“The moon and Earth are caught in a constant gravitational tug-of-war,” Kreier says. Earth’s gravity keeps the moon orbiting Earth while the moon’s gravity tugs on the planet. The force of this tugging allows the moon to steal some rotational energy from Earth, making the natural satellite’s orbit bigger. “This is pushing the moon away at a rate of about 3.78 centimeters per year, roughly the same rate our fingernails grow,” she says.

This tug-of-war is also slowing down Earth’s spin, gradually making our days longer, Kreier says. In 100 years, a day on Earth will be about two milliseconds longer than it is today.

Clarification

In the November 6 issue’s Feedback, a reader asked how scientists contained fusion reactions in a recent experiment (SN: 9/11/21, p. 11). Our response noted that fusion reactions don’t need containment because they fizzle out on their own. This also means that, in the future, generating energy using fusion would have no risk of a runaway reaction, which could cause an explosion. While fission reactions don’t stop on their own as fusion reactions do, we neglected to make clear that modern fission reactors are designed to prevent runaway reactions. Meltdowns in fission reactors are still possible if heat can’t be removed from the reactor.

Correction

“A serious look at psychedelics” (SN: 12/4/21, p. 20) incorrectly identified the drug that Aldous Huxley popularized in his book The Doors of Perception. Rather than LSD, the drug was mescaline, a psychedelic compound made by certain cacti. And the book was published in 1954, not 1953.

in Science News on 2022-01-10 12:15:00 UTC.

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Here’s what goldfish driving ‘cars’ tell us about navigation

It might seem like a fish needs a car like — well, like a fish needs a bicycle. But a new experiment suggests that fish actually make pretty good drivers.

In the experiment, several goldfish learned to drive what is essentially the opposite of a submarine — a tank of water on wheels — to destinations in a room. That these fish could maneuver on land suggests that fishes’ understanding of space and navigation is not limited to their natural environment — and perhaps has something in common with landlubber animals’ internal sense of direction, researchers report in the Feb. 15 Behavioural Brain Research.

Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel taught six goldfish to steer a motorized water tank. The fishmobile was equipped with a camera that continually tracked a fish driver’s position and orientation inside the tank. Whenever the fish swam near one of the tank’s walls, facing outward, the vehicle trundled off in that direction.

Fish were schooled on how to drive during about a dozen 30-minute sessions. The researchers trained each fish to drive from the center of a small room toward a pink board on one wall by giving the fish a treat whenever it reached the wall. During their first sessions, the fish averaged about 2.5 successful trips to the target. During their final sessions, fish averaged about 17.5 successful trips. By the end of driver’s ed, the animals also took faster, more direct routes to their goal.

Some of the fish — all named after Pride and Prejudice characters — were speedier learners than others. “Mr. Darcy was the best,” says study coauthor and neuroscientist Ronen Segev.

In further experiments, the goldfish were still able to reach the pink board when starting from random positions around the room, rather than the center. This finding confirmed that the fish had not merely memorized a choreography of movements to reach their reward, but were planning routes toward their prize each time. When the researchers tried to trick the goldfish by placing decoy boards of different colors on the other walls or moving the pink board to the other side of the room, the fish were not fooled, and navigated to the pink board.

“That was pretty conclusive that the fish actually navigate,” says study coauthor Ohad Ben-Shahar, a computer scientist and neuroscience researcher. Recently, the team let a goldfish take a joyride throughout an entire building, Ben-Shahar says, “and it actually started to explore. It went down one of the corridors and started to sneak away.”

Behavioral neuroscientist Kelly Lambert is “not completely surprised, but still intrigued” by the driving abilities of Mr. Darcy and his fish friends. In her own research at the University of Richmond in Virginia, Lambert has taught rats to drive toy cars. But teaching goldfish to navigate such alien terrain takes animal driving experiments to the next level, Lambert says. “I love the fish-out-of-water idea.”

When it comes to testing the bounds of animal navigation, “it’s important to diversify and expand our tasks and our species,” Lambert says. “I think we need an international race between the rats and the goldfish.”

in Science News on 2022-01-10 12:00:00 UTC.

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Science explores the nature of time and space

We tend to treat time as a quantifiable commodity — something that can be managed, saved and retrieved for future use, like a stick of butter in the freezer. But our perceptions of past and present are often not so solid.

Archaeologists try to reconstruct ancient history from artifacts, and those clues often allow enough leeway to imagine alternative pasts. Take the current controversy over whether the ancient Clovis people, who lived in North America around 13,000 years ago, killed mammoths and other large mammals. Dioramas of these brave hunters felling massive beasts with stone-tipped spears have been a staple of natural history museums for decades. But new research reported by behavioral sciences writer Bruce Bower suggests that those elegant stone points lacked the oomph to inflict a lethal blow. Scientists tested that hypothesis with experiments that included reconstructing a mammoth-foot analog and attempting to inflict “wounds.” These findings could shift the long debate over how much humans are at fault for mammoth extinctions, compared with climate or other environmental changes.

I’m content to marvel at the beauty of those Clovis points, be they mammoth killers or simple butchering tools. But this issue also provides deeper questions to consider, in an essay by contributing correspondent Tom Siegfried.

In the last century, discoveries in quantum physics have challenged our understanding of space and time — and the very nature of reality. It’s as if that stick of butter in my freezer could be simultaneously baked into a croissant in Paris. Or that both butter and croissant could be mere human perceptions and not a fundamental feature of reality. Or what our brains and senses perceive on the human scale of time and space may be just one of multiple realities.

Exploration of the quantum realm promises to bring more challenges to our imaginations in the years to come, as well as dazzling realities like practical applications for quantum computing. For now, I’ll presume that both Clovis points and a fresh-baked croissant deserve to be real.

in Science News on 2022-01-10 12:00:00 UTC.

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To beat procrastination, avoid deadlines — unless they’re short

By Emily Reynolds

Procrastination can get to the best of us. Whether we’re avoiding going to bed, failing to study, or trying to avoid a hated task at work, sometimes it just feels easier to put something off than get it out of the way. For those waiting for chronic procrastinators to deliver, the dilemma is how best to encourage them to do so on time.

A new study, published in Economic Inquiry, provides some suggestions. While shorter deadlines were, perhaps unsurprisingly, more likely to see results than longer deadlines, the most responses were delivered when there was no deadline at all.

Participants were randomly selected New Zealanders who were told they had been invited to take part in a 5-minute-long survey, after the completion of which $10 would be donated to charity. Participants were placed into one of three conditions: in the first, they were given ten days to complete the survey; in the second one month; and in the third, there was no deadline at all.

Short deadlines were preferable to longer ones: 6.6% of those in the one week condition completed the survey compared with 5.5% in in the one month condition. This probably doesn’t come as a surprise to any chronic procrastinators — an impending deadline is often a key driver in work finally getting done.

What might be more surprising, however, is that those with no deadline at all were more likely than those in either condition to respond, with 8.3% returning the survey. So of all the options, having no deadline was the most fruitful in terms of getting results.

In terms of when participants responded, the second day of the experiment was the most productive for all three conditions. In the no deadline condition, there was a spike during the first few days and a long tail of responses, with most replying within one month. Respondents in the one month condition also responded in flurries at the beginning and end of the allotted period, though there were fewer very prompt responses than in the other conditions. The team suggests that specifying a longer rather than shorter deadline or no deadline at all gives an impression that a task is not urgent; this then gives permission to forget about it rather than pushing it up the priority list.

Why would this not hold for the no deadline condition, which also comes without a sense of immediate urgency? The team’s explanation is that charitable donations come with an implicit sense of urgency — we are used to being asked to “act now”. This, they say, could be why the no deadline condition is similar to the one week condition in terms of promptness and response rate.

There are obvious practical ramifications to the results. If charities are looking for donations or organisations are looking for participants in surveys, knowing how to frame the deadline could increase responses. If both short deadlines and no deadlines successfully encourage donations, avoiding that middle ground may be key.

– Procrastination and the non-monotonic effect of deadlines on task completion

Emily Reynolds is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

in The British Psychological Society - Research Digest on 2022-01-10 10:00:00 UTC.

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The curative plant extracts from Allahabad

in For Better Science on 2022-01-10 07:04:00 UTC.

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Authors to correct PNAS ‘nudge’ paper that cites now-retracted article in the same journal

in Retraction watch on 2022-01-09 21:15:24 UTC.

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Weekend reads: A museum of scientific misconduct?; authorship misconduct; uproar over renamed phyla

in Retraction watch on 2022-01-08 00:19:56 UTC.

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Martin Luther King Jr Day: Temporary change to article announcement schedule

Submissions to arXiv are made public on arXiv.org and announced by email on a regular schedule, Sunday through Thursday. On occasion, arXiv defers announcements due to holidays or other reasons, and these changes are announced on the status page.

Monday, January 17th is an American holiday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

The announcement for January 17th will be deferred to the 18th. This change only affects announcement of new submissions, and the arXiv servers will otherwise remain in operation. We will still be accepting submissions and the arXiv site will continue to be available for browsing existing papers.

Articles received at or after 14:00 ET Friday, 14 January 2022 and before 14:00 ET Tuesday, 18 January 2022 will be announced at 20:00 ET Tuesday, 18 January 2022. The help desk will be unavailable on Monday, January 17, 2022.

in arXiv.org blog on 2022-01-07 22:07:25 UTC.

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See stunning fossils of insects, fish and plants from an ancient Australian forest

A new trove of plant, insect, fish and other fossils offers an unprecedented snapshot of Australia’s wetter, forest-dominated past.

McGraths Flat in New South Wales contains thousands of beautifully preserved specimens of flowering plants, ferns, spiders, insects and fish, vertebrate paleontologist Matthew McCurry and colleagues report January 7 in Science Advances.

Images of the fossils’ soft tissues, captured with scanning electron microscopy, reveal them in astonishing detail, from the facets of a crane fly’s compound eye to phantom midges trapped in a fish’s stomach.

Once upon a time, Australia was carpeted with rainforests. During the Miocene Epoch, about 23 million to 5 million years ago, Earth underwent a climatic upheaval. For Australia, that meant drying out, with shrubs, grasses and deserts expanding into once-lush territory. McGraths Flat formed during that transition, between 16 million and 11 million years ago. At the time, it was part of a temperate forest around a small lake, new analyses of fossil pollen and leaves suggest. 

The fossils were cemented within fine layers of goethite, an iron hydroxide mineral that probably formed as acidic groundwater circulated through basalt rocks, leaching out their iron, the researchers suggest. As the groundwater seeped into the lake, the iron became oxidized and precipitated out as goethite particles. The tiny particles encased plants, insects and other creatures in the water — possibly while they were still alive — and later replaced some of the organisms’ interior structures.

“Until we studied these fossils, we wouldn’t have thought to look for well-preserved fossils in this type of rock,” says McCurry, of the Australian Museum Research Institute in Sydney. At other fossil-rich sites known for preserving soft tissues, such as Canada’s Burgess Shale or China’s Qingjiang biota, the organisms tend to be encased in the sort of soft mud found at the bottom of a sea (SN: 11/28/11; SN: 3/21/19). But, McCurry says, this site shows that goethite “has everything you need to create exceptionally well-preserved specimens.”

in Science News on 2022-01-07 19:00:00 UTC.

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Drug-resistant bacteria evolved on hedgehogs long before the use of antibiotics

Beneath the prickly spines of European hedgehogs, a microbial standoff may have bred a dangerous drug-resistant pathogen long before the era of antibiotic use in humans.

It’s no question that antibiotic use accelerates drug-resistance in bacteria that colonize humans, says Jesper Larsen, a veterinarian at Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen. But, he says, these microbes had to get the genes to give them resistance from somewhere, and scientists don’t know where most of these genes come from.

Now, for one type of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, Larsen and colleagues have tracked its evolution to hedgehogs hundreds of years ago. On the skin of these critters, a fungus that produces natural antibiotics may have created the environment for drug resistance to evolve in the bacteria, the researchers report January 5 in Nature.

One of the most common drug-resistant pathogens, MRSA infects hundreds of thousands of people worldwide each year, and these infections can be hard to treat. The specific type of MRSA that the new study focuses on causes a fraction of the cases in humans.

The team first found MRSA in hedgehogs by coincidence years ago when biologist Sophie Rasmussen, who was part of the new work and is now at the University of Oxford, approached Larsen’s team about sampling a freezer full of dead hedgehogs. Of these animals collected from Denmark, 61 percent carried MRSA. “We found this extremely high prevalence in hedgehogs,” Larsen says, suggesting that the animals were a reservoir for the drug-resistant superbug.

In the new work, the scientists surveyed hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus and Erinaceus roumanicus) from 10 European countries and New Zealand. Workers at wildlife rescue centers swabbed the noses, skin and feet of 276 animals. MRSA was prevalent in hedgehogs in the United Kingdom, Scandinavia and the Czech Republic.

Analyzing the S. aureus, the team found 16 strains of mecC-MRSA, named after the gene that confers resistance, and mapped the evolutionary relationships between them by comparing mutations across their genetic instruction manuals, or genomes. From the analysis, the team inferred that the three oldest lineages emerged 130 to 200 years ago in hedgehog populations, periodically infecting people and cattle long before penicillin hit the market in the 1940s. Hedgehogs may be the source of nine out of the 16 lineages, the researchers report.

“There is no doubt that our usage of antibiotics is the main driver of resistance in human pathogens,” says Anders Larsen, a microbiologist at Statens Serum Institut who was also was part of the team. “This is a very special case where we can just track it back to an origin.”

But that doesn’t explain how the hedgehogs’ S. aureus developed resistance. The team got a clue from a 1960s research study about Trichophyton erinacei, a fungus that causes “hedgehog ringworm” in humans. That study reported that T. erinacei on hedgehog skin killed some S. aureus but not others that were resistant to penicillin. Growing T. erinacei in the lab, the researchers identified two penicillin-like antibiotics pumped out by the fungi.

This finding suggests that hedgehogs are a MRSA reservoir because “they’re living cheek by jowl with organisms that are producing penicillin,” says Gerry Wright, a biochemist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, who was not involved with the study.

The fungi “live in a bad neighborhood,” Wright says. They have to compete with other microbes, such as S. aureus, for resources and a spot to colonize on the host, and “they have to work out this arrangement where they can protect themselves.”

You can’t think about antibiotic resistance without considering environmental connections, Wright says. The evolution of resistance is a gradual process shaped by natural selection, he says. Wright’s work has shown that in places that have escaped human influence, antibiotic resistance has ancient origins. People have searched for this evolution mostly in the soil microbial community, or microbiome (SN: 2/14/06). But the microbiomes of animals provide another potential source for the genes that confer resistance as well as for sources of new antibiotics, he says.

The history of antibiotics in the last century is a cycle of new drug discoveries shortly followed by microbial resistance cropping up to those drugs. That shouldn’t be a surprise, Wright says. “Because antibiotics have been on the planet for billions of years, and resistance is billions of years old,” he says. If scientists don’t better understand where resistance comes from, even as researchers discover new drugs, he says, all we’ll be doing is playing catch-up.

in Science News on 2022-01-07 17:49:04 UTC.

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Paper on ‘language reclamation’ and decolonization plagiarized from eight papers, journal acknowledges

in Retraction watch on 2022-01-07 15:20:57 UTC.

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Schneider Shorts 7.01.2022 – Theranos Lesson

in For Better Science on 2022-01-07 07:39:05 UTC.

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Some volcanic hot spots may have a surprisingly shallow heat source

Some of the world’s volcanic hot spots may be fueled by molten material that originates surprisingly close to Earth’s surface.

While some of the hottest spots are fueled by plumes of buoyant material welling up from deep within Earth, as expected, molten flows driving activity at the coolest hot spots may result from relatively shallow geophysical processes, a new study suggests.

A lot of our planet’s volcanic activity occurs at or near the edges of the tectonic plates that make up Earth’s crust (SN: 1/13/21). At mid-ocean ridges, which often form the boundaries between some tectonic plates, hot material wells up from the mantle — the hot, thick layer that lies between the Earth’s core and its crust — to create fresh crust.

But more mysterious volcanic activity also occurs in many locales in the middle of a tectonic plate, far from mid-ocean ridges, says Xiyuan Bao, a geophysicist at UCLA. The islands of Hawaii, Ascension Island in the South Atlantic and the Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific are just a few examples of volcanoes created by such activity (SN: 1/29/19).

Scientists suspect that many of these sites of isolated volcanism are fed by plumes of hot material rising from deep within the mantle, somewhat akin to small packets of water rising to the surface in a pot of near-boiling water (SN: 9/16/13). But a new analysis by Bao and colleagues, described in the Jan. 7 Science, suggests that some of these isolated hot spots are fueled by material that isn’t as hot as expected, casting doubt that volcanic activity there is driven by deep-mantle plumes. The results could help scientists figure out the mysterious processes unfolding at various sites of volcanism in the interior of plates.

“This study helps sort out which volcanic plumes are deep-seated and which are not,” says Keith Putirka, an igneous petrologist at California State University, Fresno who wasn’t involved in the work.

The team focused on 26 volcanic hot spots in oceanic areas that previous studies had suggested were fed by deep-mantle plumes. The researchers used seismic data to estimate the temperature of mantle material at various depths from 260 to 600 kilometers. In general, the hotter the material is, the slower that seismic waves travel through it.

The team then compared the temperature estimate for each hot spot with the average temperature of mantle material welling up at mid-ocean ridges. Because tectonic plates are pulling apart there, there’s no resistance to upwelling of hot rock from deep in the mantle. That, in turn, provides a baseline against which scientists can compare temperatures of rocks deep beneath isolated hot spots.

Temperatures at mid-ocean ridges average about 1388° Celsius (2530° Fahrenheit). For a dozen of the hot spots the team studied, deep-mantle material was more than 155° C warmer than mid-ocean ridge material, Bao and his team report. Material that hot is more than warm enough to rise to Earth’s surface, chew through overlying crust and create prodigious volcanic activity.

But for 10 hot spots, deep-mantle material ranged between only 50° C and 135° C warmer than mid-ocean ridge material, just warm enough to rise to the surface and through crust. And four of the hot spots were less than 36° C warmer than mid-ocean ridge material, which suggests the hot spot material wouldn’t be able to rise fast enough to sustain buoyancy and break through the crust. Other sorts of geophysical processes occurring closer to Earth’s surface are fueling volcanic activity at these 14 cool-to-middling hot spots, the researchers propose.

“The evidence for mantle plumes under most volcanic islands is lacking,” says Godfrey Fitton, a geochemist at the University of Edinburgh who wasn’t involved in the work. An alternate source of molten material, he suggests, could be areas where tectonic plates collided to help create past supercontinents (SN: 1/11/17).

In those crumpled zones, Fitton explains, Earth’s crust would be thicker and thus help insulate the flow of heat from the mantle to the surface. The buildup of heat in the crust, in turn, could lead to local melting of carbonate-rich rocks that could fuel volcanism. In 2020, he and his colleagues suggested that such processes have fueled volcanism at hot spots off the western coast of Africa and off the northeastern coast of Brazil for the last 50 million years or more.

in Science News on 2022-01-06 19:17:35 UTC.

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One (more) small step for preprints, one giant leap for rapid and responsible sharing of medical research at PLOS

New opportunities to preprint with PLOS and medRxiv

We’re delighted to announce that PLOS and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) are expanding our longstanding partnership to offer authors more options for sharing their research in preprint form. Beginning this month, three PLOS journals, PLOS Medicine, PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, and PLOS ONE, will offer authors the option to have their manuscript forwarded to the medicine-focused preprint server medRxiv for posting as a preprint. 

Why choose preprints?

A preprint is a version of a scientific manuscript posted on a public server prior to or in parallel with formal journal peer review. As soon as it’s posted, each preprint becomes a permanent part of the scientific record, citable with its own unique DOI. At PLOS, we see preprints as integral to our overarching mission to accelerate progress in science and medicine. 

Preprints give researchers more control over their scientific communications, so they can share the outcomes of their research when they are ready. Early, transparent research communication surfaces results sooner, increasing efficiency across the entire scientific system. Publicly posted preprints open opportunities for collaboration and feedback, accelerating peer review, democratizing who can participate in peer review, and offering insight into the peer review process which in turn increases trust in research. And for individual researchers, preprints can be a powerful tool for establishing priority, increasing readership, and enhancing grant, job and tenure applications. 

Responsible preprint posting with medRxiv

Responsible preprint posting is essential, especially in fields that impact public health and welfare. medRxiv has worked closely with the editors of leading medical journals to develop a rigorous preprint screening process. Technical checks screen for non-scientific content, inappropriate language, plagiarism, and potentially identifying patient details, while volunteer researchers with related expertise assess each preprint to confirm that posting will not pose a risk to patients or public health. About 70% of submitted preprints pass this screening process and go on to be posted. A prominent notice appears on each preprint alerting readers to the peer review status of the post, and directing them to the final published article once it becomes available.

Partnering to make preprint posting (even) easier

At PLOS, we see preprints as an opportunity to improve scholarly communication, rather than a threat. As an organization, we have prioritized preprints and sought ways to make posting easy and convenient for our authors. In recent years, that has included accepting direct transfers from bioRxiv and medRxiv for publication consideration at relevant PLOS journals, and offering authors the option to have preprints posted to bioRxiv on their behalf right from the PLOS manuscript submission system.

Fourteen percent of all PLOS papers published in 2020 have an associated preprint—more than double the rate across scientific articles overall. PLOS author adoption is driven primarily by authors of life science studies who have used our integration with bioRxiv since 2018. But PLOS receives an even greater volume of submissions in public health and medicine.  Adding medRxiv alongside our existing bioRxiv integration will extend the ease of facilitated posting to more of the researchers and research communities we serve.

Looking ahead

PLOS is exploring partnering with more community-supported preprint servers to better serve researchers in disciplines across the entire breadth of our publication portfolio, and support our goal to increase adoption of open science practices.

The post One (more) small step for preprints, one giant leap for rapid and responsible sharing of medical research at PLOS appeared first on The Official PLOS Blog.

in The Official PLOS Blog on 2022-01-06 17:17:36 UTC.

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PLOS and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Extend Partnership to Accelerate Preprint Sharing in Medicine

Note: PLOS published the following press release on January 6, 2022

SAN FRANCISCO — The Public Library of Science (PLOS) and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) today announced an expansion of their longstanding partnership to offer authors more options for rapidly and easily sharing their research before publication in a journal. Beginning this month, three PLOS journals, PLOS Medicine, PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, and PLOS ONE, will offer authors the option to have their manuscript automatically forwarded to the preprint server medRxiv for posting as a preprint. 

The practice of sharing preprints is becoming more prevalent in medicine, with more preprints posted since the beginning of 2020 than in the four previous years combined. The COVID-19 pandemic has driven much of the increase in preprint sharing in medicine, and demonstrated the benefits of rapidly and responsibly sharing findings prior to traditional peer review.

“Since 2018, through our partnership with CSHL, we have posted thousands of manuscripts as preprints on bioRxiv on behalf of researchers in the biological sciences,” said Veronique Kiermer, Chief Scientific Officer, PLOS. “I believe that our support, as publishers, has helped authors gain the confidence to share their results before formal publication. We are delighted to be extending this service to authors in the medical sciences, allowing important research results to be shared early and responsibly to accelerate research. It has never been more important.”

“PLOS has been a much valued partner in bioRxiv’s transformation of communication among bioscientists,” said John Inglis, co-founder of medRxiv and bioRxiv at CSHL. “The further support of such an innovative publisher for medRxiv’s service to the health science research community is immensely encouraging.”

The medRxiv preprint server was launched by CSHL in June 2019 as a not-for-profit, community-based author service that is publisher-independent but integrated with many journals.  It currently hosts more than 27,500 manuscripts from 153,000 researchers in 140 countries. PLOS is the first publisher to implement this “journal-to-medRxiv” integration via the Editorial Manager journal submission system and at the scale of PLOS ONE. PLOS ONE alone received more than 19,000 submissions in Public Health and Medicine in 2020.

Responsible preprint posting is essential, especially in fields that impact public health and welfare. MedRxiv has worked closely with the editors of leading medical journals to develop a rigorous preprint screening process. In-house screening looks for nonscientific content, plagiarism, potentially identifying patient details, and ethical approval statements, while volunteer researchers with relevant expertise assess each preprint to confirm that posting will not pose a risk to patients or public health.

PLOS is committed to enhancing the integrity of preprints and confidence in them as research outputs. A key part of its mission has been to act as a catalyst, not only demonstrating the viability of new models through its own operations but also supporting them elsewhere. PLOS has been successful in steadily increasing adoption of preprints by its authors. 14% of all PLOS papers published in 2020 have an associated preprint, a figure that is driven largely by authors of Life Science studies who have used our integration with bioRxiv. PLOS receives an even greater volume of submissions in public health and medicine, and adding medRxiv alongside our existing bioRxiv integration will extend the ease of facilitated posting to more researchers around the world. 

The post PLOS and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Extend Partnership to Accelerate Preprint Sharing in Medicine appeared first on The Official PLOS Blog.

in The Official PLOS Blog on 2022-01-06 16:01:28 UTC.

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Why do some people succeed when others fail? Outliers provide clues

Northern Somalia’s economy relies heavily on livestock. About 80 percent of the country’s annual exports are meat, milk and wool from sheep and other animals. Yet years of drought have decimated the region’s grazing lands. By zeroing in on a few villages that have defied the odds and maintained healthy rangelands, an international team is asking if those rare successes might hold the secret to restoring rangelands elsewhere.

Answering this question requires turning traditional data processing on its head. Statistically speaking, success stories like those Somali villages with sustainable grazing are the outliers, says Basma Albanna, a development researcher at the University of Manchester in England. “The business as usual is that when you have outliers in data, you take them out.”

Yet those outliers can hold vital information, say Albanna and others who use the “positive deviance” approach. They sift through data to find signals in what many deem noise. The researchers search for “deviants” — outliers in big datasets — to uncover why some individuals or communities succeed when others facing near-identical circumstances fail. Then, armed with these insights, the researchers develop strategies that help those in the languishing majority attain positive results.

Positive deviance has the potential to address a nagging problem, says Megan Higgs, a statistician and independent consultant in Bozeman, Mont. “In research in general we have an overemphasis on quantifying averages,” Higgs, the editor of the International Statistical Institute’s blog Statisticians React to the News, says. She notes that few people in a research pool may actually fit the average. Sometimes, averages obscure vital information.

Without approaches such as positive deviance that look at groups and individuals in the margins, “I just worry that we are missing a hugely important part of the picture,” Higgs says.

Rebels among us

The term “positive deviance” first appeared in the mid 1970s, but the approach did not gain traction until nearly two decades later. In 1990, Monique Sternin and her late husband Jerry Sternin, then aid workers with the humanitarian organization Save the Children, piloted a positive deviance project in Vietnam to address the country’s soaring rates of childhood malnutrition. Vietnamese government officials asked the couple to help communities without resorting to food handouts or other common, yet unsustainable, aid practices.

Instead, the Sternins sought to identify children in impoverished communities who remained well fed against tremendous odds. Working in four villages in Thanh Hoa province, which combined had 2,000 children under age 3, the Sternins trained villagers to weigh the children. The effort revealed that almost 70 percent of the children were malnourished; about half were at risk of death.

The couple then asked the villagers to identify children with healthier weights among the poorest families. Each village had a handful of families that fit the bill. “We went to talk to those people,” says Monique Sternin, now a positive deviance consultant in Boston, Mass.

The Sternins discovered that kids with healthier weights came from families who fed their children tiny shrimp and crabs that lived in rice paddies and potato greens found along roadsides. Village wisdom regarded these foods as “taboo,” or dangerous, Sternin says. The families with healthier kids also fed their children three to four meals per day instead of the customary two meals. 

On the surface, the solution seemed simple: Get more families to feed their children these taboo foods. But implementing this solution was not at all easy. “The positive deviants are outliers, rebels,” Sternin explains. The Sternins could not ethically “out” families that were bucking social norms and traditions.

Instead, they promised villagers free rice. In exchange, villagers attended cooking sessions with their kids, facilitated by aid workers and taught by village women. Those sessions provided villagers with an extra meal every day for 12 days. But to participate, the villagers had to bring and take turns preparing the tiny shrimp and crabs, along with wild greens. Over those 12 days, parents and caregivers saw for themselves that the foods made the children healthier, not sicker.   

Although their work was not based on a formal study, “what we found quickly was children were putting on weight,” Sternin says. And the children stayed healthy thanks to their altered diets — after a year, more than a thousand children in the villages were no longer malnourished.

The couple went on to establish similar programs around the country. Others adopted this method, and today, similar nutrition programs exist worldwide.

Going bigger

The Sternins’ work was inspirational, but required a personalized approach to gather data. Albanna wondered if big data, such as government surveys, satellite images and social media content, coupled with qualitative research, could get the job done with lower start-up costs.

Big data offers several benefits, Albanna explains. The datasets already exist, so the process is initially less labor intensive than going door to door. Identifying outliers at the level of villages or neighborhoods instead of individuals reduces privacy concerns.

Large datasets also reduce the risk of selecting those who got ahead through luck. “Positive deviants are very rare to find. We’re talking 2 to 10 percent of whatever sample you are investigating,” Albanna says. So the larger the dataset, the more positive deviants you would be able to identify, she notes.

In 2019, Albanna and several international partners cofounded the Data Powered Positive Deviance collaborative. Pilot projects in the collaborative are identifying the safest public spaces for women in Mexico City and mapping communities producing the most millet in Niger. A project locating districts that were best at stopping the spread of COVID-19 in Germany reported its findings in September in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. The collaborative also conducts the Somalia healthy rangeland project.

In Somalia, the team first had to find successful villages. “We started, hoping that we would be able to identify communities that are able to sustain and maintain the numbers of their livestock after the 2016-2017 drought,” Albanna says. That drought was severe, leaving more than half the country with food shortages (SN: 1/19/19, p. 7).

Counting livestock directly proved tricky. So the team focused on a different metric: Rangeland health. Healthy vegetation likely makes for healthier livestock, Albanna explains.

The team then zoomed in on 314 villages in northern Somalia’s mountainous West Golis region and looked at three sets of data. The researchers grouped similar villages together using rainfall and land cover data. Earth-observing satellite data from 2016 to 2020 provided a gauge of vegetation density. That process helped them identify 13 potential positive deviants, villages that had maintained healthier vegetation despite the drought.

Detailed satellite images of those outliers revealed unique conservation techniques that helped preserve nearby rangeland. For instance, some villages used shrub barriers around settlements to limit erosion or carved half moon-shaped basins into landscapes to retain water, the researchers reported online December 24 in Development Engineering.

To find out what propelled the villagers to adopt those successful practices, the team sent a local pastoralism and rangeland consultant, Mohamed Jama Hussein, to sleuth around. Hussein compared 10 of the potential positive deviant villages with two villages showing average levels of vegetation density and eight hard-hit, low-vegetation villages — the negative deviants. He discovered that the leaders of positive deviant villages had aggressively blocked private citizens from enclosing communal lands for personal use. By contrast, “squatting” on public lands remained common in the other villages.

Hussein also observed that farmers in the successful villages were moving away from the purely pastoral life to diversify their sources of income. Some villagers had started growing their own crops and even livestock feed. Many women, meanwhile, had started keeping bees, which offered an unexpected perk, Albanna says. The bees’ presence deterred people from cutting down rangeland shrubs and trees for fuel.

Targeted interventions 

Besides giving researchers and policy makers the information they need to design new interventions, the positive deviance approach can also strengthen existing interventions, says behavioral science and public policy expert Kai Ruggeri of Columbia University in New York.

“It’s such an easy adaptation that could potentially have major impact,” says Ruggeri, who wrote a commentary encouraging researchers to consider using the positive deviance approach in November 2021 in Perspectives in Psychological Science.

Consider nudges, a popular intervention that relies on simple tools to change behavior, wrote Ruggeri and coauthor Tomas Folke, a computer scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. Researchers have tested if nudging people with reminders to attend their doctor appointments can reduce no-shows. For instance, a study published in 2011 in the Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare showed that, across 29 studies, automated recordings or text messages increased attendance by 29 percent.

But when another research team, which included Ruggeri, scoured the electronic medical records of almost 64,000 low-income urban patients, who can miss up to 45 percent of their appointments, a robocall followed by a text message failed to increase attendance. Those results were published in April 2020 in BMC Health Services Research.

Nudge interventions often target the average participant, Ruggeri says. “If you look at the way nudging is largely done, it speaks to a middle-class-and-above population.” But researchers attempting to shrink societal inequalities could use a positive deviance approach to help the neediest individuals, Ruggeri says.

In the above examples, that would mean identifying low-income participants who did go to the doctor after receiving an automated reminder. Mapping those individuals’ paths could potentially lead to nudges and other behavioral interventions targeting potential no-shows in similar situations. That way, Ruggeri says, policy makers could reach the cohort most likely to benefit from preventive care.

That is the hope in Somalia, where Hussein wrapped up his fieldwork a few weeks ago. The team is now investigating how to use their newfound knowledge of successful outliers to develop behavioral and policy interventions.

Such interventions have an added benefit: They empower communities to harness the wisdom of their own people, Sternin says. The solutions exist within the community and implementing those solutions, she notes, “is transformational.” 

in Science News on 2022-01-06 11:00:00 UTC.

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Authors unhappy as “battlefield acupuncture” paper earns an expression of concern

in Retraction watch on 2022-01-06 11:00:00 UTC.

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Antiprotons show no hint of unexpected matter-antimatter differences

It’s confirmed: Protons and antiprotons are well-matched. The two types of subatomic particles mirror each other in the ratios of their electric charge to mass, a new extremely precise experiment verifies.

Antiprotons are the antimatter counterpart of protons. Every type of matter particle has such an alter ego, with similar properties but opposite electric charge. But antimatter is an enigma: Scientists still don’t understand why matter is common in the universe while antimatter is rare (SN: 11/25/19). To investigate the origins of this asymmetry, scientists keep checking, to ever greater precision, for differences between matter and antimatter particles, which could hint at how matter came to dominate the cosmos.

The Baryon Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment, or BASE, at the European particle physics laboratory CERN, near Geneva, measures the oscillations of a single antiproton confined within an electromagnetic trap. These oscillations, which reveal the charge-to-mass ratio of the antiproton, are compared with those of a trapped hydrogen ion, comprising a proton and two electrons, which give the proton charge-to-mass ratio.

After more than 24,000 of these oscillation comparisons, BASE researchers found that the two charge-to-mass ratios mirror one another with a precision of 1.6 billionths of a percent, the team reports January 5 in Nature. That’s more than four times as precise as the previous measurement (SN: 8/12/15). 

The result also tests physicists’ understanding of gravity’s effect on antimatter, says Stefan Ulmer, a spokesperson of BASE and physicist at RIKEN in Wako, Japan. The Earth’s gravitational environment changes as the planet orbits the sun, so if gravity affected protons and antiprotons differently, that effect would have surfaced during the year and a half over which the data were taken. “We have shown that antimatter and matter interact with gravity … in an exactly identical way,” to within an uncertainty of 3 percent, Ulmer says.

in Science News on 2022-01-05 16:00:00 UTC.

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‘Feeling & Knowing’ explores the origin and evolution of consciousness

Feeling & Knowing
Antonio Damasio
Pantheon, $26

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio believes that the link between brain and body is the key to understanding consciousness. In his latest book, Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious, he explains why.

Consciousness is what gives an individual a sense of self; it helps one stay in the present, remember the past and plan for the future. Many scientists have argued that consciousness is created by vast networks of nerve cells, or neurons, in the brain. While it’s clear that the brain plays a major role in conscious experiences, it doesn’t act alone, argues Damasio, director of the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute.

Instead, he argues, consciousness is generated by a variety of structures within an organism, some neural, some not. What’s more, feelings — mental experiences of body states — help connect the brain to the rest of the body. “The  feelings that we have of, say, hunger or thirst, or pain, or well-being, or desire, etc. — these are the foundation of our mind,” Damasio says. In his view, feelings have played a central role in the life-regulating processes of animals throughout the history of life.

In Feeling & Knowing, Damasio suggests that consciousness evolved as a way to keep essential bodily systems steady. This concept is also known as homeostasis, a self-regulating process that maintains stability amid ever-changing conditions. Consciousness emerged as an extension of homeostasis, Damasio argues, allowing for flexibility and planning in complex and unpredictable environments.

Science News spoke with Damasio about why feelings are crucial to understanding consciousness, why consciousness is not exclusive to humans and whether it’s something a computer could ever have. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

SN: Why is understanding homeostasis so crucial to understanding consciousness?

Damasio: Homeostasis is central to the entire operation. It’s why we developed consciousness. Once we access feeling, we can then get a mental picture of how the state of life really is in our organism. So, we can get a warning that things are going wrong, and we get suffering. Or, we get a signal that things are reasonably OK, and we can afford to do other things, which is what happens with positive feelings. So I can afford to have this conversation with you because I’m not having a fever; I’m not terribly thirsty, hungry, or I’m not in pain.

SN: How do feelings help an organism manage life?

Damasio: Feelings are representations of the state of your body. To have a feeling of pain, pleasure, well-being, sickness, thirst, hunger or desire is to generate a picture of some parts of your organs. For example, the feeling of well-being is related to parameters that you can locate and measure. This is something that we can analyze; we can actually study it in the laboratory. A lot of what would be described as [the feeling of] well-being is related to the simple musculature that is around blood vessels in organs, like the stomach, the gut and so forth. And even muscular skeletal components of our body, how they are: Are they contracted? Are they distended, a large part, or not so much? What we are feeling from well-being is, in fact, describing states of our body; that’s what feelings are about. So the root of feeling in the state of the organism is unquestionable.

SN: How did the nervous system enable the coordination of diverse systems in the body?

Damasio: Once organisms became more and more complex, it was very difficult to maintain coordination [among respiration, digestion and other systems]. Having a system that runs a survey of the whole organism is a great advantage. With that master coordinator, the nervous system, came the possibility of generating [internal] representations [of one’s self]. We had to have nervous systems to have some kind of mapping of different parts of the body. Out of that, an image was generated, and a new development, which is a mind connected to the body. The entire story of consciousness is really a story that the body is telling about itself. Consciousness did not emerge from the get-go. It was not available, for example, in bacteria, or very simple organisms.

SN: You argue that consciousness is unlikely to be exclusive to humans.

Damasio: Right. We have different lineages in evolution, but it doesn’t mean that other creatures don’t have the possibility of getting to consciousness. Take, for example, the octopus. They have extremely complex behaviors. I would be flabbergasted if someone said they are not conscious. They have all the hallmarks of creatures that were able to develop a mind and have a sense of who they are and an awareness of how to protect themselves.

SN: In the future, could machines and computers be conscious?

Damasio: For robots to be conscious, we would need to give them a bit of vulnerability that they don’t have [right now]. If you could introduce into a computer something that would be homeostatic and regulatory — that would allow it to sense deviations — then you would be on the way to creating feelings for the computer, and it could detect its own inner states.

Buy Feeling & Knowing from Bookshop.org. Science News is a Bookshop.org affiliate and will earn a commission on purchases made from links in this article.

in Science News on 2022-01-05 14:00:00 UTC.

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‘Blastoids’ made of stem cells offer a new way to study fertility

Newly created “blastoids” could give scientists a faster and simpler way to research embryonic development than using fertilized human eggs.

Made of human stem cells, these blastoids are the most developmentally accurate model yet for studying how the blastocyst — a structure present at an early stage of embryonic development — grows and implants into the lining of the uterus, researchers report December 2 in Nature.  

Conducting research on human embryos, which are often in short supply, is highly regulated and controversial. But lab-made blastoids can avoid some of those hurdles. While blastoids have been created before, the researchers argue those models don’t replicate blastocyst cells as well as the new blastoids do. What’s more, the team has already used its blastoids to reveal molecules that could be candidates for new contraceptives and fertility treatments.

A week after fertilization, developing human embryos implant into the uterus using a blastocyst, a spherical envelope of cells surrounding the cells that will become the embryo. To replicate this process, the team led by stem cell biologist Nicolas Rivron at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna looked to lab-grown human stem cells.

The researchers chemically inhibited molecular pathways involved in the cells’ growth and the timing of life cycle events. As a result, the cells formed blastoids that had the same three cell types found in blastocysts. 

When the team put the blastoids on lab-grown cells from the lining of the uterus, the spheres adhered to the surface, re-creating a crucial step in early pregnancy. And the researchers identified a compound that prevents blastoid attachment as well as one that encourages it, revealing their potential as nonhormonal contraceptives or fertility treatments.

These blastoids aren’t thought capable of developing into humans. Still, the team did not let the models develop past 13 days, in accordance with guidelines for human embryos that cap research on their development at two weeks of existence (SN: 6/9/21).

in Science News on 2022-01-05 12:00:00 UTC.

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Cancer journal with hefty retraction record retracts another 15

in Retraction watch on 2022-01-05 11:01:00 UTC.

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Week5 Blog Post

Hi again!

This should be a very interesting one, let's dive right into it...

What makes Fedora packaging project exciting?

Well...Anyone can be a package maintainer (cool right?!) yes you must not know how to code! You just need to be willing to learn and be persistent.

This particular project is not just exciting but important as well

How?

RPM is an open source program for installing, uninstalling and managing software packages in Linux.

So here's how this works

RPM packaging helps you install softwares using a simple command line ... let's use chrome for an example.

Steps to install chrome using the Fedora Linux Terminal

Install Third Party Repositories

$ sudo dnf install fedora-workstation-repositories

Enable the Google Chrome repo

$ sudo dnf config-manager --set-enabled google-chrome

Finally, install Chrome

$ sudo dnf install google-chrome-stable

How Packages Are Made

Fedora docs gives us detailed expalanations so let's get right into it.

Getting started

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/package-maintainers/Joining_the_Package_Maintainers/

Setting up envirnonment / Building the RPM

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/package-maintainers/Packaging_Tutorial_GNU_Hello/

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/package-maintainers/New_Package_Process_for_New_Contributors/

Creating a review request

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/package-maintainers/New_Package_Process_for_New_Contributors/#create_your_review_request

Add package to source code management (SCM)

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/package-maintainers/New_Package_Process_for_New_Contributors/#add_package_to_source_code_management_scm_system_and_set_owner

And for another interesting part. When packages are made, after a period of time the spec files needs to be updated, and here's how packages are updated.

RPM Package Updates

1) Fork the project from upstream

Forking the project simply means creating a copy of the upstream project for yourself. That way you can make modifications without affecting the original project.

2) Create a pull request (PR)

After making modifications to your copy of the project (fork), you may want to add those changes to the main project (upstream). In that case you create a PR and wait for your changes to be merged to the main project (upstream)

3) Build for the Fedora system

• Clone your project

fedpkg co <package name> 

• Navigate to the Project directory

cd <package name> 

• Because the repo is up to date for rawhide after the PR is merged, we just build

fedpkg build 

• For other branches: f35/f34

fedpkg switch branch <branch name>

git merge rawhide

git push

fedpkg build

• Push the update using the bodhi web interface because you can choose both the f35 and f34 builds and select the bug ID etc. all at once there.

Before the outreachy program I didn't know softwares are even packaged by people :smile: I thought we had bots doing all the work. Fedora is just like any other Linux distro like Ubuntu, Manjaro and the likes, but fedora has its own unique commands.

Some packages takes longer than the others to finish because it is an endless journey of learning . Through this exciting journey I learnt how to set up my Fedora work station, how to package, and i feel this great fufilment that i am contributing to the society and to open source! Thank you Outreachy.

in Vanessa Christopher's blog on 2022-01-04 19:00:00 UTC.

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Here’s how spider geckos survive on Earth’s hottest landscape

A handful of small, nocturnal geckos have spilled their guts for science, revealing how the creatures get by in a part of Earth’s hottest landscape.

Surface temperatures in the Lut Desert in Iran, home to the Misonne’s spider gecko (Rhinogecko misonnei), soar past 65° Celsius more frequently than anywhere else on the planet. The extreme heat makes it difficult for life to thrive, and for years, ecologists have regarded the desert as mostly barren.

To find out how the geckos sustain themselves in this desolate oven, entomologist Hossein Rajaei of the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany and colleagues analyzed the stomach contents of six geckos using DNA metabarcoding (SN: 4/18/16). The technique compares chunks of DNA with a species identification database, like a bar code scanner in a grocery store. “It’s very accurate, very comprehensive and very trustable,” Rajaei says.

Within the geckos’ digestive soup stewed DNA from 94 species, about 81 percent of which hail from outside the Lut Desert, the team reports November 18 in the Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research.

The majority of these outsiders were winged insects such as flies, moths and wasps that migrate through the desert from bordering temperate landscapes. The remaining species — arachnids, arthropods and more moths — are endemic to the Lut, but are elusive in its heart, where the geckos were collected. The unexpected diversity highlights that there’s more living in this desert than meets the eye, Rajaei says.

The findings underscore the importance of intertwined food webs for animals to survive in hostile habitats, says Robert Pringle, an ecologist at Princeton University who was not involved in the research. “The movement of insects from outside the immediate area subsidizes the geckos and helps them to persist in this extreme desert environment,” he says.

in Science News on 2022-01-04 18:04:31 UTC.