Planet Neuroscientists

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The Age of Flames Reaches the US East Coast

in WIRED Science on 2023-06-08 00:26:40 UTC.

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Episode 264 -- Birdsong Time Capsule: Allison Doupe, MD, PhD

On February 5, 2009, we were joined by Allison Doupe, who was Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Physiology at the University of California San Francisco. Allison talked with us about the value of learned birdsong as a model for sensory and motor learning, the brain circuitry responsible for learning, remembering and controlling the song, and the importance of variability in adapting the song to changes in animal state or the environment.

Somehow, that conversation was never posted. I encountered it while searching through old files looking for something else, and just recently heard it for the first time. It is a wonderful conversation with a creative and insightful neuroscientist, and the information is still current, so I am posting it now.

Stay on after the podcast to listen to an outtake containing a conversation between Allison and Michael Farries on the pallium, the functional equivalent of the cerebral cortex birds, and whether birds do or do not have a cerebral cortex.

Guest: Allison Doupe, University of California San Francisco

Participating:

Michael Farries Department of Biology, UTSA

Kelly Suter Department of Biology, UTSA

Nicole Wicha Department of Biology, UTSA

Carlos Paladini Department of Biology, UTSA

Rama Ratnam Department of Biology, UTSA

Todd Troyer Department of Biology, UTSA

Host:

Salma Quraishi, Department of Biology, UTSA

acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music

in Neuroscientists talk shop on 2023-06-07 17:07:55 UTC.

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The Parker Solar Probe may have spotted the origin of high-speed solar winds

A spacecraft plunging into the sun’s atmosphere has revealed the likely source of powerful blasts of plasma in fast solar winds.

Far from the sun, the solar wind is a nebulous, turbulent plasma. But when NASA’s Parker Solar Probe dipped within about 8 million kilometers of the sun’s surface, it detected narrow plasma streams (SN: 12/15/21). The streams appear to be guided by magnetic fields tracing back to two relatively cool regions of the sun’s atmosphere known as coronal holes, researchers report June 7 in Nature.

The solar wind — the steady stream of charged particles flowing from the sun — has two distinct speeds, dubbed as “slow” and “fast.” Until now, it wasn’t clear what was speeding the fast solar wind along. The plasma in most of the solar wind consists of protons, electrons and the nuclei of atoms blowing at hundreds of kilometers a second. But plasma from the area above the coronal holes can travel more than 10 times as fast.

The fast plasma streams were associated with events known as switchbacks, in which portions of the magnetic fields near the sun reverse direction (SN: 1/15/21). Switchbacks can result when magnetic field loops close to the sun’s surface connect to long field lines extending away from the sun. The reconnection leads to a sharp switchback kink that kicks the plasma on its way into space as the kink straightens out.

Higher energy streams, the researchers propose, are the result of newly reconnected field lines with sharply kinked switchbacks, while lower energy streams come from field lines with older kinks that had become more smoothed out.

Although the evidence that the fast solar wind is due to magnetic reconnections is compelling, it’s still circumstantial, says astrophysicist Stuart Bale of the University of California, Berkeley. “Our results suggest that the solar wind can be accelerated to high speeds very close to the sun,” Bale says. “This is somewhat different [than the] standard scenario of wind energization,” where the acceleration takes place farther from the sun.

Getting a handle on processes like the origin of the fast solar wind is important for practical reasons, Bale says. “We also believe that magnetic reconnection is responsible for solar flares and is involved in the release of coronal mass ejections, which have a major impact in space weather.” Solar flares and the space weather they create have led to electrical grid disruptions on Earth and interrupted radio communications, and they may threaten astronauts (SN: 7/30/2020).

The findings are also an important clue in the enduring mystery of why the sun’s atmosphere is millions of degrees Celsius hotter than its surface, says astrophysicist Gary Zank, who was not involved in the study (SN: 8/20/17). “But they do not identify the heating mechanism.”

The observations identify the importance of magnetic reconnection close to the sun, says Zank, of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. “The next step is to link that to the dissipation of the magnetic energy in determining the actual heating process.”

Another interesting aspect of the study is how the structure of the solar surface seems to be imprinted on the solar wind near the sun despite the presence of turbulence, says Amitava Bhattacharjee, a Princeton University astrophysicist who was not involved with the study. Other researchers have proposed that it can happen, he says, but in the new study, “the experimental and simulation evidence is more convincing.”

Parker’s ever closer encounters with the sun could confirm the source of the fast solar wind more definitively. And future passes will come as the sun heads into a phase with increasing numbers of sunspots and more solar wind, on the way to peak solar activity around July 2025.  “As we move into solar maximum,” Bale says, “we expect some serious surprises.”

in Science News on 2023-06-07 15:00:00 UTC.

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Journal pulls paper from Ethiopia for unlicensed use of questionnaire

A public-health journal has retracted a study from Ethiopia that made unlicensed use of a questionnaire developed by a U.S. researcher known to aggressively protect his intellectual property. 

This time, he didn’t have to: The journal’s publisher flagged the copyright infringement itself, Renee Hoch, managing editor at PLOS Publication Ethics, told Retraction Watch:

PLOS Global Public Health decided to retract the article because the authors did not have a license to use the MMAS-8 scale and the MMAS-8 data were essential in supporting the article’s conclusions. This decision is supported by the PLOS Licenses and Copyright policy and the COPE Retraction Guidelines.

The study found that people with diabetes who had a glucometer at home were more likely to take their medicine as prescribed. It has been cited three times since it was published last year, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, including once by a paper in PLOS ONE by the same group.

The Morisky Medication Adherence Scales (MMAS)-8 survey used in the study was first described in a 2008 publication by Donald Morisky of the University of California, Los Angeles. Since then, Morisky has demanded steep payments from hundreds of researchers using the questionnaire, causing some who couldn’t pay to retract their work, as we reported in 2017 in partnership with Science. 

Morisky registered the copyright for the MMAS-8 scale in 2018 and trademarked it the following year. Philip Morisky, managing partner of Donald Morisky, told us:

I am not familiar with the article in question. Copyright exists automatically in an original work of authorship once it is fixed, but a copyright owner can take steps to enhance the protections.

He did not comment on the chilling effect such steps could have on public-health research, particularly in poorer countries. But Hoch said: 

As an Open Access publisher, we regret that license fees and other restrictions can create barriers to utilization of resources such as the MMAS-8, thereby creating inequities within the research community and impeding the advancement of research. Nevertheless, work published in PLOS must meet all applicable ethical and legal requirements, and we will take editorial action as needed if authors did not have requisite permissions or licenses for use of a third party resource.

Hoch added:

Of note, this type of issue can arise due to honest error if researchers are unaware of the applicable license requirements.

Neither the corresponding author nor the second author of the paper responded to our requests for comment. 

In its May 10 retraction notice for the study, titled “Medication adherence and its associated factors among type 2 diabetic patients in Ethiopian General Hospital, 2019: Institutional based cross-sectional study,” the journal states that the issue regarding permission to use the questionnaire could not be resolved during discussions with the authors, adding:

Considering the nature of the concerns in this case, the article contents were removed from the journal’s website at the time of retraction.

The authors did not reply or could not be reached to comment on the retraction decision.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

in Retraction watch on 2023-06-07 12:35:28 UTC.

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A simulation of a dying star shows how it could create gravitational waves

Cocoons of debris around dying stars could shake ripples in spacetime unlike any astronomers have ever seen.

“This is a potential source of gravitational waves that has never been investigated before,” astrophysicist Ore Gottlieb of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., said June 5 in a news conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Albuquerque.

The waves could potentially be picked up in the latest run of LIGO, which began on May 24.

Since LIGO’s first detection in 2015, all the gravitational waves seen thus far have been from the spiraling death dance of two compact objects — black holes, neutron stars or both (SN: 2/11/16). These events give off what are called coherent gravitational waves. “You can think of it as an orchestra playing harmonically,” Gottlieb said.

A second type, incoherent waves, are expected to come from stellar explosions like supernovas (SN: 5/6/19). Because those bursts are spherically symmetrical and relatively slow, their waves are difficult for LIGO to detect. They’re more analogous to individual instruments playing different songs at the same time.

Gottlieb and colleagues considered another type of stellar death called a collapsar. When massive stars collapse into a black hole, they can emit jets of material traveling close to the speed of light. Computer simulations of how those jets form revealed a cocoon of material surrounding the jet, full of hot, turbulent gas and debris that expand in an asymmetric bubble around the dying star, says Gottlieb, who presented the research June 6.

As the bubble expands and pushes its way through the star, it could bump spacetime enough to produce incoherent gravitational waves, Gottlieb and colleagues concluded.

LIGO and its fellow detectors — Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan — currently have about a 1 percent chance of detecting cocoon gravitational waves. In future runs with improved detectors, that chance will go up.

Catching these waves could give astronomers a glimpse into the innermost parts of dying stars, which can’t be studied any other way, Gottlieb said.

in Science News on 2023-06-07 11:00:00 UTC.

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Virtual Clinics are Battling Inequalities in Women’s Health

in WIRED Science on 2023-06-07 11:00:00 UTC.

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Genomics Are a Lifesaver for Patients With Rare Diseases

in WIRED Science on 2023-06-07 11:00:00 UTC.

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When and why did masturbation evolve in primates? A new study provides clues

Though masturbation is common across the animal kingdom, it seems, at its face, to be an evolutionary paradox: Why would an animal waste time, energy and reproductive resources on self-pleasure instead of copulating with a partner?

Studies on individual species have found some explanations. Low-ranking Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata), for example, masturbate to keep their sperm fresh for when they get a rare chance to mate. But the questions of when and why masturbation evolved in the first place have remained unsolved.

A new study, published in the June 7 Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that the evolutionary history of masturbation in primates extends back at least 40 million years, and the behavior might indeed help male primates be ready to mate when they get the chance, and also stay free of disease.

The authors are “the first to use a cross-species approach” to explore the function of masturbation, says Lateefah Roth, a biologist at the Institute of Forensic Psychiatry and Sex Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. It’s “a great starting point,” Roth says.

To determine when masturbation first evolved in primates, evolutionary biologist Matilda Brindle of University College London and colleagues sifted through the scientific literature to find records of which primates masturbate and which do not, whether in the wild or in captivity.

To fill gaps in the data due to masturbation not always being easy to observe (or looked for at all) by biologists, Brindle also sent out questionnaires to researchers to ask about their observations of primate masturbation that weren’t reported in the literature. This was especially important for information on female masturbation, Brindle says, which tends to go unnoticed because of a lack of an easy-to-spot erection. The team then used computer analyses to determine where in the primate lineage the behavior most likely originated.

Because of missing data, Brindle can’t definitely say whether the first ever primates masturbated. But she can say that from around 40 million years ago, “the ancestors of all monkeys and apes” seemed to have masturbated. This would be around when simians — apes and monkeys — split from the tarsiers, diminutive, bug-eyed primates that live in Southeast Asia.

Once Brindle had identified when, she next turned to why. She looked at whether primates that masturbate tend to mate with multiple partners. This mating system would lead to evolutionary pressure for both males and females to gain more control over the mating process, like by being able to copulate more quickly, being readily aroused for preferred partners or by improving male sperm quality, as seen in the macaques.

Brindle also looked to see if primate species that masturbate tend to be infected by more pathogens, including those that cause sexually transmitted infections. Male Cape ground squirrels (Geosciurus inauris), for instance, are known to masturbate after sex to cleanse their systems of infectious agents.

Brindle found that multiple mating partners and pathogen prevalence are associated with masturbation in male primates, but not in females. Masturbation can help males be ready to mate quickly with fresh sperm while also purging their reproductive tract of pathogens. But for females, the two hypotheses don’t mix. “Normally, the vagina is mildly acidic to keep pathogens at bay,” Brindle says, but it becomes less so when the female primate is aroused so that sperm aren’t killed on arrival. Making the vaginal environment safer for sperm also makes it safer for pathogens.

While the study found no correlation between female primate masturbation and having multiple mating partners, Brindle suspects that there probably is a relationship that would come to light with more data. “I would bet a lot of money on the fact that if we got more data down the line,” she says, “then we would find an effect for females.” The paucity of data for females may be driven in part by the historical tendency to think of female animals as “passive recipients of male behavior,” Brindle says.

The stigma around studying masturbation and sexual behavior has started to ease up, Brindle notes, which makes her hopeful that more discoveries will be made soon. But given that other mammals, as well as birds and reptiles, also masturbate, Roth says, “if we want to understand the bigger evolutionary picture of this behavior, we need to look beyond primates.”

in Science News on 2023-06-06 23:01:00 UTC.

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A gene therapy shot might keep cats from getting pregnant without being spayed

Invasive surgeries to spay cats could one day be a thing of the past, replaced instead with a single shot.  

An injected gene therapy given to female cats prevented them from getting pregnant, researchers report June 6 in Nature Communications. None gave birth to a litter of kittens even after mating with a fertile male. The tactic, if it holds up in further testing, could offer a more efficient way to control a global population of feral cats that numbers in the hundreds of millions.

“We love domestic cats, but they are killers out in the environment,” says Bill Swanson, a conservation biologist at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden. Every year, free-roaming cats around the world probably kill billions of birds and small mammals (SN: 1/29/13). Spaying both feral and pet cats can help to keep feline populations, and their casualties, under control.  

The experimental gene therapy targets anti-Müellerian hormone, also known as Müllerian inhibiting substance, a protein that helps fetal sex organs develop. After injection, a modified virus introduces the gene that makes the hormone into the cats’ cells. The cells then make more anti-Müellerian hormone than normal. High levels of the protein may prevent a cat’s ovaries from releasing eggs by keeping follicles — the structures that house and release eggs — in a dormant state.

In the new study, Swanson and colleagues treated six female cats with the gene therapy. Three received a high dose and another three received a lower dose. An additional three control cats got a placebo. None had any severe side effects.

The team housed all nine cats together with a fertile male in two, four-month-long trials. One trial took place eight months after treatment; the second, with a different male, happened nearly two years after the injection. In both trials, the control cats gave birth to litters after mating with males only once. But none of the six treated cats became pregnant, despite two of them mating with the males.

The proof-of-concept study is “the first real sign of hope that we could do something besides spaying cats,” says Julie Levy, a veterinarian at the University of Florida in Gainesville who was not involved in the study. The single-dose injection is especially promising to control feral populations, eliminating the need to bring wild-living cats into a clinic for surgery or trap animals more than once to administer multiple doses.

Past alternatives to surgery, such as vaccines, proved ineffective over the long term. Vaccines teach the body to attack foreign invaders. Crafting a contraceptive vaccine targeted at the pituitary, which releases the hormones that spark ovulation, was difficult. “Your whole immune system is tuned to know what’s you, and it should not attack, and what is foreign, and it should attack,” Levy says. Diseases can develop when immune responses learn to attack the body itself. 

Many researchers tried to develop various vaccines as a cat contraceptive, but “we gave up,” Levy says.  

The experimental gene therapy could be a better approach because it doesn’t rely on the immune system and instead makes more of something that the body already has, so the immune system ideally won’t get involved at all.

What’s more, the gene is delivered to muscle cells, says David Pépin, a reproductive biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. There, the cell makes the hormone using small, circular strings of DNA. These strings float around the cell and aren’t inserted into the cell’s instruction manual, the DNA housed inside the nucleus. Because muscle cells generally don’t die, the DNA can stick around for a lifetime.

The study reports results after two years, Pépin says, but to date the team has followed the cats for more than four. Because gene therapy can last for a lifetime in other animals, including people, it’s likely that, with proper dosing, the same would be true for cats.

In the study, two of the treated cats mated with males. One mated a total of nine times yet still never got pregnant. Zooming in on all the cats’ hormones revealed that the treated females didn’t ovulate, but other hormones involved in reproduction and estrus — also known as heat, a time when female cats are ready to mate — remained intact.

The four treated cats that never bred with the males had spikes in estrogen levels, one sign of estrus. But you’d never have guessed that based on the cats’ behavior, Swanson notes. The females didn’t allow the males to breed, a sign those females weren’t in heat.

Males pursuing a ready-to-breed female are incredibly persistent if she’s in estrus, he says. A male will become restless, endlessly following a female and attempting to mount her if he thinks it’s possible to breed. “It’s like velociraptors in Jurassic Park testing the fence. All the time they’re testing these cats if they’re in estrus.”  

That’s the kind of annoying behavior that makes people not want cats in their neighborhoods, Levy says. For her, the ideal cat contraception would keep females from allowing any males to breed with them. Hopefully that would stop fertile, disruptive males from yowling, spraying urine to mark territory and fighting other males when chasing a female rendered infertile by gene therapy. 

It will still be years before the treatment makes it to vet offices, if approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and similar agencies around the world. Swanson, Pépin and colleagues are still tweaking the gene and method of delivery, exploring how to make it as effective as possible as well as cost-effective to make. Clinical studies with more cats are also required to verify the injection’s safety and efficacy.

Still, “it’s a really different way to do contraception,” Pépin says. And anti-Müellerian hormone is common among animals, so it may be possible to expand to other invasive species. Pépin and others are even exploring ways to leverage the hormone in humans as a nonpermanent form of contraception (SN: 8/22/17). There’s still a lot to learn, “but I think there’s a great opportunity here.”

in Science News on 2023-06-06 15:00:24 UTC.

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Marjorie Weber explores plant-protecting ants and other wonders of evolution

A crack team of arthropod bodyguards may be defending that cherry tree in your backyard or the maple across the street. 

Mites protect plants by acting like herds of grazing sheep, munching the fungi that creep across leaves. And ants patrol branches, ready to bite or sting hungry caterpillars ­— or even elephants. In return for the protection, plants offer food and housing.

This kind of cooperation has evolved over and over again, says Marjorie Weber, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Plant bodyguards are everywhere, she says, but most people don’t even notice.

Weber says she has long been drawn to “bizarre and interesting and underappreciated species.” As a kid, she liked roly-polys, earthworms, beetles and spiders. But more than individual bugs, Weber is fascinated by the richness of life on Earth. How did this vast assortment of species come to be? Start talking biodiversity, and Weber bubbles with questions: Why do we have so many different types of flowers? Why are there millions of insect species and relatively few species of sharks? Why did one branch of the tree of life flourish while another withered? “I’m just really passionate about these big biological mysteries,” she says.

Her office at the university looks how you might imagine it would for someone so captivated by the natural world. A fiddle-leaf fig towers over her desk and potted plants crowd the window. Science art adorns the walls: a hanging print of flowering plants’ evolutionary history, a blown-up image of a glimmering orchid bee and an illustration of Charles Darwin, his famous finches peeking out from his beard.

Since Darwin’s time, scientists studying what drives evolution have focused largely on antagonistic interactions between species, like finches competing for seeds and arms races between predators and prey. Cooperation’s role in evolution hasn’t always been taken seriously, “largely because it was viewed as a more feminine perspective,” Weber says.

Weber’s lab focuses on how cooperation drives evolution and biodiversity. She spends her time in the field, greenhouse and the lab, documenting interactions between plants and arthropods, as well as using computational techniques to analyze evolutionary patterns.

Weber may be best known for her work on extrafloral nectaries. These nectar-filled knuckles bulge from leaves and stems on some plants, leaking sugary snacks that entice ants to stick around and fend off attacks. Weber looked at extrafloral nectaries in modern vascular plants and then reconstructed the trait’s evolution across ancient plant species. The trait, she discovered, was a recipe for evolutionary success. Once the sweet structures evolved in a branch of the plant family tree, that branch quickly accumulated more species. That suggests that the opportunity to trade nectar for insect protection actually spurred plants to diversify.

“That’s not what people expected,” says Judith Bronstein, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Scientists might assume such an adaptation would help a particular plant survive and its population to grow, but they don’t know why the number of plant species would multiply.  “Somehow, possessing extrafloral nectaries leads to diversification,” she says. “And that’s a fantastic avenue for future research.”

Weber’s work stands out because she’s able to pull together scientific threads and braid them into something “completely new and completely different,” Bronstein says. “That’s how you trailblaze in our field.”

Weber is blazing trails elsewhere too. In 2018, she cofounded Project Biodiversify, a program to make biology education not only accurate and compelling, but also “as equitable and inclusive as possible,” Weber says.

Weber didn’t see herself as a scientist when she was young. As a student growing up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, she didn’t see examples of women scientists, and she never thought about science as a career option. A biology course with spider scientist Greta Binford at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., changed everything. “Knowing that was a job and watching her do it was just incredibly life-shaping for me,” Weber says. Binford let Weber come work in her lab, studying brown recluse spiders. She encouraged Weber’s interests and “went out of her way to convince me that I was smart enough and could do this,” she says.

Years later, after Weber had a lab of her own, she and colleagues decided to investigate how well college biology textbooks represented a diverse set of scientists. The results, reported in 2020, called out the stark demographic mismatch between scientists featured in textbooks (mostly white men) and the students using them. Weber’s team works to bridge that gap by developing resources for teachers that highlight a diverse group of role models in biology.

Weber hopes to inspire students to learn about how the world works. She’s a “fantastic adviser,” says ecologist Eric LoPresti of the University of South Carolina in Columbia, a former postdoc in Weber’s lab. She builds a supportive community and makes sure that everyone feels involved, he says. It’s a culture LoPresti has tried to mimic in his own lab.

Weber’s advice for young people is to look around and take note of what sparks your excitement ­— maybe you’ll spot a curious-looking crew of ants marching up and down a tree. “That’s what it really means to be a scientist,” Weber says. “Pursue those feelings of awe and ask questions about the world with your eyes wide open.”

Marjorie Weber is one of this year’s SN 10: Scientists to Watch, our list of 10 early and mid-career scientists who are making extraordinary contributions to their field. We’ll be rolling out the full list throughout 2023.

Want to nominate someone for the SN 10? Send their name, affiliation and a few sentences about them and their work to sn10@sciencenews.org.

in Science News on 2023-06-06 12:00:00 UTC.

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The Quest for a Switch to Turn on Hunger

in WIRED Science on 2023-06-06 11:00:00 UTC.

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People Let a Startup Put a Brain Implant in Their Skull—for 15 Minutes

in WIRED Science on 2023-06-06 10:00:00 UTC.

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Homo naledi may have dug cave graves and carved marks into cave walls

An extinct, small-brained hominid known as Homo naledi intentionally buried its dead in two underground cave chambers 160,000 years or more before the earliest evidence of deliberate interments by Homo sapiens or Neandertals, researchers say. But that conclusion has already generated skepticism and calls for more thorough investigations of the new South African finds.

H. naledi, which lived in southern Africa between roughly 335,000 and 236,000 years ago, also engraved marks on the side of a corridor and entryway that connects the adjacent cave chambers, contends an international team led by National Geographic Explorer in Residence Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa (SN: 5/9/17). Many engravings consist of isolated lines or lines that form crosshatches, squares, triangles, crosses and X shapes.

If correct, Berger and colleagues’ interpretation of their discoveries indicates that an ancient Homo species with an orange-sized brain — which possibly displayed humanlike features — engaged in mortuary and symbolic activities often thought to have emerged only in larger-brained species such as H. sapiens (SN: 4/25/17).

“These are remarkable discoveries of a [Homo] species that had brains one-third the size of ours yet buried their dead and carved meaning-making symbols on cave walls,” Berger, said at a press conference on June 1. He and colleagues report the new H. naledi findings in three bioRxiv.org papers accepted for publication in eLife.

The oldest known H. sapiens grave dates to about 78,300 years ago in Africa (SN: 5/5/21). Contested Neandertal graves in Iraqi Kurdistan are roughly 70,000 to 60,000 years old (SN: 2/18/20). In South Africa’s Blombos Cave, a crosshatched design on a rock dates to around 73,000 years ago and geometric patterns incised on pigment pieces date to as early as about 100,000 years ago (SN: 9/12/18; SN: 6/12/09).

Some researchers consider the new evidence inadequate to confirm that H. naledi interred its own in cave graves. And there is no way to determine whether H. naledi or perhaps later H. sapiens visitors to the underground caves — part of South Africa’s Rising Star Cave System, about 40 kilometers west of Johannesburg — created the undated engravings found by Berger’s group.

“I think that deliberate burial of the dead by Homo naledi is clear, although it is unlikely that the evidence so far presented will satisfy all scholars,” says archaeologist Michael Petraglia of Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, who is not part of Berger’s team.

One objection comes from paleoanthropologist María Martinón-Torres, director of the Spanish National Research Center on Human Evolution in Burgos. She suspects that disconnected skeletal parts described in the new papers accumulated either after bodies of the dead that had been placed in cave shafts later fell through or had been left at the back of underground caves. Trampling or other H. naledi activities in caves could eventually have produced fragmentary sets of fossils uncovered by Berger’s group, says Martinón-Torres, who along with Petraglia studied the oldest known H. sapiens burial in Africa.

It’s possible that periodic water seepage into the underground caves helped to move partial or complete H. naledi corpses down sloping cave floors until they came to rest in natural depressions that Berger’s team suggests are intentional burial sites, says archaeologist Paul Pettitt of Durham University in England.

Previous suggestions that H. naledi lit campfires and deposited comrades’ dead bodies in passages that descend into underground chambers have also been criticized as lacking definitive evidence (SN: 12/2/22; SN: 11/4/21).

In 2018, Berger’s team excavated what they consider the skeletal remains of an adult H. naledi whose body was placed in a shallow pit that was dug in the Dinaledi Chamber, a cave space in the Rising Star Cave System where H. naledi fossils have previously been found. Bones of the newly unearthed individual became detached over time as the body decomposed in dry sediment that collapsed in on it, the scientists say. That process, or perhaps the digging of other burials in the chamber, caused bone fragments of at least one other individual to enter the grave.

A second set of fragmentary H. naledi fossils found in another shallow pit in the Dinaledi Chamber have not yet been analyzed.

In 2017, the scientists also removed fragile H. naledi remains encased in three blocks of sediment from a small section of an adjacent underground space dubbed the Hill Antechamber.

CT scans of the blocks have identified partial skeletal remains of a roughly 13-year-old H. naledi whose body, curled in a fetal position, was placed in a shallow, dug-out depression and covered with dirt, the scientists say. Scattered teeth of two other H. naledi individuals were also detected in this block, possibly entering via sediment disturbances or as H. naledi buried others in the Hill Antechamber, the team suspects.

A crescent-shaped stone identified among scanned H. naledi fossils includes a point, sharp edges and other signs of having been an implement of some kind, the investigators note. But scans of that stone reveal no clear indications of intentional modifications, Pettitt says. This find should be examined more closely after it’s removed from surrounding sediment, he says.

H. naledi must have used a tool capable of chiseling through extremely hard rock to engrave lines and designs found on the sides of a corridor and entryway into the Hill Antechamber, Berger said at the news conference. Later Stone Age cave art of Neandertals and H. sapiens includes similar geometric drawings. There is no evidence that present-day cavers have created comparable engravings anywhere in the Rising Star Cave System, he said.

But the underground cave engravings remain undated. There is no way to know whether people reached the cave chambers within the past few thousand years and carved those wall patterns, Pettitt says.

H. naledi may have had access to larger openings into the Dinaledi Chamber than exist now, says zooarchaeologist Aurore Val of Aix-Marseille University in France (SN: 4/19/16). Although the new reports don’t clearly establish that H. naledi dug cave graves and created rock designs, members of this ancient species were “doing something different and unusual” in the Rising Star Cave System, Val says.

in Science News on 2023-06-05 18:00:00 UTC.

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The pandemic showed scholarly publishing a better path forward

Author: Alison Mudditt, CEO, PLOS

Note: This blog is derived from remarks that I gave earlier this year at the UN Open Science Conference and has been lightly edited for length and format. This is the first of four blog posts on how we can collectively change scholarly publishing for the benefit of all of us.

For the past three years, scientists have been going to school in a giant lab whether they realized it or not. The pandemic placed research in the spotlight like never before. We saw global scientific collaboration on an unprecedented scale. Across countries and disciplines, thousands of experts focused urgently on a single problem, that of COVID-19.

This forced some key breakthroughs for Open Science as everyone rose to the challenge:

• Information previously locked behind paywalls, even though much of it was publicly funded, was opened to scientists globally.
• Many of the usual imperatives of the dysfunctional academic credit system were set aside as results and data were shared immediately. 
• Preprints and other online sharing become the norm when the delay of even a few weeks to publication could mean lives lost.
• Hundreds of clinical trials were launched, bringing together labs and hospitals around the globe.
• The usual secrecy and hoarding of data that might lead to grants and promotions was eroded by the urgency of the moment.

All of this happened because it was a matter of survival experienced urgently and simultaneously by societies around the world. But the fundamental flaws of traditional research practices and sharing were also laid bare by the pandemic. And they perfectly illustrate the imperatives of Open Science at global scale.

The lessons learned by all of us should light a better path forward. What became possible during the pandemic should become the norm, not the exception.

Publishers agreed that access to COVID-related research was critical to accelerate our response to the pandemic. Which raises both a practical and moral question as to why the same approach isn’t required to solve problems like the climate crisis or finding a cure for cancer.

Over the past decade, we’ve made tremendous progress with Open Access to scholarly knowledge. The vision that the entire body of published scholarship should be made available to everyone free of charge is now within sight.

But open science is about more than being able to read an article. It’s about providing the right context to understand it, the resources to replicate it, the tools to collaborate and make science better. And it is also about equitable participation in knowledge creation and sharing.

Take a problem such as the hunt for a universal coronavirus vaccine. Imagine if we all had access to all elements of past and current research. Imagine if we had enough detail about experiments to replicate them. Imagine if we had access to all the underlying data to be able to reuse it. And imagine if we knew as much about the experiments that failed as the ones that worked. Is there anyone who really thinks that we wouldn’t have found a vaccine both more quickly and efficiently?

What’s broken in scientific publishing and what it will take to institute radical change

For scholarly publishing to arrive at this future state requires some radical change. Without change, we risk a range of challenges, including one we are all experiencing today – the continuing erosion of trust in science and expertise.

At the societal level, trust and confidence in science are crucial if we are to collectively tackle our global challenges. How, for example, can we expect people to ‘get the jab’ if they don’t trust the science or scientists who developed it?

Here in the US, trust in science took a real hit during the pandemic. But what is really striking is how this trend has been dangerously fueled globally by the rise in populist movements. A shift that’s making it even harder to find agreement about causes and solutions to key threats such as the climate crisis.

Lack of public understanding – particularly among those with less knowledge about science – was a significant underlying cause. But the solution isn’t to put science back into its black box.

The ways we share and communicate the results of research can make an impact. Accessible publication of the results, data and ideas arising from research is a fundamental part of how science functions and advances. Incentivizing this transparency can help build trust among stakeholders and enable more robust evaluation. However, a world in which every stage of the research process is shared by default is very different from the way the system works today.

What’s wrong with the current system?

Plenty of people – primarily those who’ve benefited from the current system – think it’s fine. And those who want to change it, such as early career researchers, lack the power and influence to do so.

When it comes to scientific publishing, concerns about the ways in which commercial interests are distorting scientific values have been growing for decades.

There are most certainly commercial drivers at work. For many publishers, radical change is a threat to a very profitable business model that they want to protect.

Publishers operate in a conservative system in which change is slow and blocked, in large part by a fundamentally broken system of researcher incentives and rewards.

Most established researchers have been practicing closed science for years, even decades.  Changing these old habits requires some upfront time and effort. Technology is helping speed this process of adopting open habits, but behavioral change is hard.

Scientists, like other humans, tend to repeat behaviors that are rewarded. Given the profusion of demands for assessment for grants and promotion, it’s too easy to fall back on narrow and biased proxy metrics such as the Journal Impact Factor. It’s an extraordinarily poorly used metric, frequently used as a mark of prestige which overshadows indicators of good scientific practices.

And journal editors tend to favor publishing papers that tell a tidy story with perfectly clear results. This has led researchers to craft their papers to be free from blemish, omitting “failed” studies that don’t clearly support their theories.

There’s a particular set of challenges for researchers in the Global South who are pressured into norms set by the Global North. To illustrate, here’s a short story about an African scientist from the Jakarta Post.

She’s a leader in the field of crop science whose recent research examined the role indigenous vegetables might have in addressing poverty, malnutrition and food insecurity in Africa.  But when she submitted papers to well-regarded international scientific journals describing these findings, they were rejected. Not because the research was not good, but because the crops she was writing about were regarded as weeds by reviewers and editors in the Global North. 

It’s just one example of how African research is excluded from established science publishing. People in developed economies determine what good science is without knowledge of the varying circumstances. 

How We’ll Make Change

The challenges associated with changing these systems can feel overwhelming.

They start with a broken incentive system where we’re rewarding novelty and prestige. As a result, many research outputs aren’t available – often because there’s no incentive to share them. And this, in turn, fuels challenges with reproduction.

Finally, zooming up to the 30,000-foot level, it’s hard to believe that well into the digital age, publication remains slow and final when the research process itself is dynamic and subject to revision.

Collectively, these problems lead to an entrenched stasis which blocks change.

What we’re talking about here is a transformation of research culture and the incentives that drive researcher behavior. One that requires action from institutions, funders and policymakers along with publishers.

Publishers like to think of themselves as custodians of the research information supply chain. We pride ourselves on the critical role we play in weeding out poor quality and fraud, on curating what’s most relevant and important to different readers and users.

Without underestimating the profound systemic issues, there are meaningful ways in which we can start to make progress and build a publishing system that better matches the research process it serves.

You will soon hear more on that next week when I provide specifics about how Open Science publishing can lead to transformational change.

The post The pandemic showed scholarly publishing a better path forward appeared first on The Official PLOS Blog.

in The Official PLOS Blog on 2023-06-05 16:17:09 UTC.

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When Not to Treat Cancer

in WIRED Science on 2023-06-05 15:10:06 UTC.

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Air pollution monitoring may accidentally help scientists track biodiversity

The ability to track animals and plants is up in the air — literally — thanks to help from an unexpected source.

Around the globe, many air quality control stations filter air through small paper disks on a daily or weekly basis, allowing scientists to ensure concentrations of hazardous pollutants such as heavy metals are below certain levels. But the filters also pick up plant and animal DNA that has been scattered into the wind, researchers report June 5 in Current Biology.

The eDNA, short for environmental DNA, on those filters could make air quality control stations a treasure trove of samples cataloging local animals and plants. Such records could help researchers track biodiversity at a larger scale than ever before and more easily catch species declines or track how ecosystems are changing overall.

“It’s this incredible system that already exists, and we’re effectively piggybacking on it for a totally new use,” says Elizabeth Clare, a molecular ecologist at York University in Toronto. The facilities are widespread across North and Central America, Europe and Asia but are less dense in the global South.

“It never occurred to us that these filters capturing particulate matter could even be analyzed for environmental DNA,” says James Allerton, an air quality scientist at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, England. That changed when Allerton read a news story about two studies where scientists vacuumed animal DNA out of thin air at two zoos, one in England — led by Clare — and another in Denmark (SN: 1/18/22).

Learning about the potential for capturing eDNA sparked a “light bulb moment,” Allerton says, and he reached out to Clare to collaborate. The Teddington facility holds onto its pollution-monitoring filters for a year in case scientists need to do a repeat measurement for heavy metals, meaning there could be a year’s worth of eDNA to claim, he realized.

Clare, Allerton and colleagues analyzed filters from the Teddington facility that were exposed to ambient air for one hour, one day or one week. The team also examined eight-month-old filters from an air quality control station in Scotland that had each been exposed to air for a week.

Genetic material in the filters revealed the presence of more than 180 different types of local fauna including pine trees, badgers, owls, fungi and newts. That volume is surprising given that the filters and storage conditions weren’t set up with eDNA in mind, says David Duffy, a biologist at the University of Florida’s Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience in St. Augustine. That the researchers recovered so much eDNA from a system designed to monitor air quality shows how prevalent airborne DNA is and how much biodiversity data could be up for grabs.

The filters detected plenty of plant life, even on disks exposed to air for only an hour. Birds and mammals, on the other hand, were more likely to pop up in samples taken for longer periods of time. That’s probably because trees are stationary while animals are constantly moving around, so it takes more time to detect them, Clare says.

She notes that even older samples might exist. There are numerous filter-using stations around the globe, some of which have never thrown the disks away since their opening. “We do know of some places where there are potentially 50 or 60 years of these stored,” Clare says. It’s unclear if those samples are viable, but the idea being able to track biodiversity that far back is “unbelievable.” 

Not every air quality control station uses filters to monitor pollution, says Fabian Roger, an ecologist at ETH Zürich. Many stations rely on sensors that can detect airborne particles in real time. Those sensors can’t capture eDNA, so the number of suitable facilities to extract such genetic material will vary from place to place.

But air quality control stations that do rely on filters certainly have great potential, says Roger, who is also studying how the facilities could help biodiversity efforts. He says that researchers now need to figure out how useful the genetic information is. It’s unclear how closely the DNA from filters matches local fauna, he says. How far away any sources of DNA might be, whether it’s a few blocks, a few kilometers or even farther, is also unknown.

Answering those questions is a priority, Clare says. Still, “the idea that there’s something that’s been collected daily or weekly, that’s just unheard of in our discipline,” she says. “And if [an air quality control station] has the potential of producing data that’s this rich over and over and over and over again, that is an unbelievable treasure of biodiversity information that we have never noticed.”

in Science News on 2023-06-05 15:00:00 UTC.

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A Secret Key to Saving Species Is Blowing in the Wind

in WIRED Science on 2023-06-05 15:00:00 UTC.

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“Flagrant and frankly, inexcusable” data duplication leads to retraction

A biochemistry study has been retracted nearly a year after a whistleblower found significant overlap between the article and one published in a different journal by the same research group.

The study, “Berberine ameliorates renal injury in diabetic C57BL/6 mice: Involvement of suppression of SphK–S1P signaling pathway,” appeared in the journal Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics in July 2010. It has been cited 76 times. 

The study examines how berberine, a compound found in plants such as tree turmeric, might improve kidney injury in diabetic mice. People sometimes take berberine supplements to help treat diabetes, but the evidence for its effectiveness is mixed. The authors of the paper are researchers at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China.

The study was retracted on May 23 at the request of the journal’s editor-in-chief, according to the retraction notice. It states, in part:

This article shows significant data duplication and overlap with Liu, Weihua et al., Effects of berberine on matrix accumulation and NF-kappa B signal pathway in alloxan-induced diabetic mice with renal injury. European Journal of Pharmacology. 2010 Jul 25; 638(1–3):150-5 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejphar.2010.04.033) without adequate referencing. Although there is a slight difference in the methodology section regarding alloxan-induced diabetes models in the two articles, there is a clear overlap between Table 2 of Lan, Tian et al. (2010); and Tables 1 and 2 of Liu, Weihua et al. (2010). The two manuscripts were submitted from the same laboratory in the same year.

In July 2022, Bardia Askari, an associate professor of biomedical sciences at the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine in Old Westbury, noticed duplicated data and images in the two research papers. Askari was concerned enough that he decided to contact the publisher, Elsevier, by phone. In a later email message, which Askari provided to Retraction Watch, he wrote, in part:

I came across these observations when I was preparing a review on the benefits of nutraceuticals.  I was very impressed by the well-organized and well-presented papers, “Effects of berberine on matrix accumulation and NF-kappa B signal pathway in alloxan-induced diabetic mice with renal injury”, DOI: 10.1016/j.ejphar.2010.04.033, published in the European Journal of Pharmacology (EJJ 638: 150–155) and “Berberine ameliorates renal injury in diabetic C57BL/6 mice: Involvement of suppression of SphK–S1P signaling pathway”, DOI: 10.1016/j.abb.2010.07.012, published in the Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics (APP (502 (2):112-120)… However, as I delved into the papers I began to see some very glaring issues.

In his message, Askari detailed each instance of duplication, including multiple cases of common data listed in data tables, a duplicated image that was only slightly altered between studies, and figures that appeared to show the same kidney sample. Yet the studies purported to describe separate animal studies, Askari wrote.

Eventually, a senior journal manager at Elsevier, which publishes Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics, told Askari she would pass on the message to an editor-in-chief of the journal. Several days later, Askari received a message from one such editor, Henry Jay Forman, saying that the journal would be “following up on your concerns” and would contact the corresponding author for an explanation. Forman added that the editors did not have the manuscript of the 10-year-old paper.

We don’t know if Askari’s concerns ever reached the editors of the other journal, the European Journal of Pharmacology. The study in that journal contains no signs of being under investigation.  

In April, Askari received an email from an ethics editor at Elsevier informing him that the article would be retracted. The study was not pulled until late May, nearly 10 months after Askari initially contacted Elsevier.

Heqing Huang, the senior author of both studies, did not respond to an email from Retraction Watch. In reply to a question about the nearly year-long timeline of the retraction, Forman wrote that “the rules were followed, which cannot be rushed,” but referred any further comments to an ethics committee, which has not yet provided any comment to Retraction Watch. A spokesperson for Elsevier also said they were waiting to hear back from the ethics team. 

Considering that the article was over 10 years old, Askari said in an email to Retraction Watch that it didn’t bother him that the journal took 10 months to retract it.

“There were no implications for clinical guidelines nor any modifications on current therapeutic practices,” he said. Given this, “there didn’t appear to be any need for urgency or [expedited] decision-making.”

Askari said it did bother him that he had to go into such detail about the duplication before his concerns were sent to the journal editors and investigated. In an email to Retraction Watch, he wrote, in part:

I went into excruciating detail about my thought process before I started the inquiry. Frankly, it bothered me that I had to do this, as being “science police” was not my intent or goal.  I initiated this with the journals because I thought the use of duplicate data was flagrant and frankly, inexcusable.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

in Retraction watch on 2023-06-05 10:00:00 UTC.

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Next Open NeuroFedora meeting: 05 June 1300 UTC

Photo by William White on Unsplash.

Please join us at the next regular Open NeuroFedora team meeting on Monday 05 June at 1300 UTC. The meeting is a public meeting, and open for everyone to attend. You can join us over:

• Matrix (using your web-browser)
• IRC

You can use this link to convert the meeting time to your local time. Or, you can also use this command in the terminal:

$ date --date='TZ="UTC" 1300 2023-06-05'

The meeting will be chaired by @ankursinha. The agenda for the meeting is:

• New introductions and roll call.
• Tasks from last meeting.
• Open Pagure tickets.
• Package health check.
• Open package reviews check.
• CompNeuro lab compose status check for Fedora 38/rawhide.
• Neuroscience query of the week
• Next meeting day, and chair.
• Open floor.

We hope to see you there!

in NeuroFedora blog on 2023-06-05 09:39:54 UTC.

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Finding purpose for the corporate office

Finding purpose for the corporate office

Over two decades ago, a new type of fictional TV series debuted on the BBC that established a foothold between reality TV and sit-com. The Office brought the viewer into a familiar, yet mundane environment loaded with caricatures of people they ran into on a daily basis and thereby blurred the line between fiction and reality. The format was so effective at creating tension between characters that it verged on cringe-worthy, especially when Ricky Gervais was in the role of David Brent. Common character arcs played upon power dynamics between boss and employee, ill-advised office romance, and useless business procedures, creating a solid foundation for the 10 global incarnations of the show. Regarding the American version, we remember fondly the rivalry between Jim and Dwight, the incompetence of Michael as manager, and the growth of Pam from receptionist to sales associate. The characters got deeper and the call-backs grew stronger as the show navigated nine seasons and 201 episodes, an amazing run for any show, especially considering its humble back-drop of Dunder Mifflin, a fictional wholesale distributor of paper and office supplies.

The Office was not the first TV series to depict the workplace, but it was probably the most effective at capturing what many of us experienced on a routine basis, due to the show’s mockumentary style. Sitting in a conference room for sales training, calling HR to resolve a personal dispute, and participating in a community service day were instantly relatable. In March 2020, the pandemic drew to an end this version of the corporate office, as a new normal of work was ushered in based upon virtual collaboration technology. The depiction of Dunder Mifflin has become more akin to a time capsule of the corporate office’s heyday than an enduring depiction of the workplace. Three years later and employee expectations are firmly set on hybrid work, averaging between two or three days from home each week. Moreover, a majority of employees are prepared to quit their jobs if employers do not offer the flexibility they desire. When pressed about whether employees desire greater flexibility in either where or when they work, they place greater weight on work hours, yet both forms of flexibility have become table stakes when defining a desired employee experience for attracting and retaining talent.

It is ironic that Dunder Mifflin was a paper company, as the primary purpose of a corporate office was based in large part on the creation and retention of documents. Around the same time as the premiere of The Office, early signs of a dwindling sense of purpose for the physical corporate workplace began, as companies introduced the concept of “the paperless office.” E-mail replaced letters and document retention transferred to large computer servers. Such a move did not immediately eliminate the need for a physical office, as employees still required computers, phones, scanners, printers, and fax machines to do their jobs. Office life continued, with confidential documents circulating from desk to desk via a sealed manila envelope and assistants printing important documents just in case the computer crashed. Soon after, the provision of work laptops and Blackberry phones further chipped away at its purpose. Employees embraced the ability to work from anywhere, including the local coffee shop. Office space that was designed for a world based upon paper was out of step with modern day working, as evidenced by the empty bookshelves and file drawers of a traditional office. Despite a lack of purpose based upon paper or technology, employees still traveled to the office, if nothing more than out of habit.

When the pandemic occurred, a major shift to virtual work occurred out of necessity and those in corporate settings adapted magnificently to a new way of working. Any apprehensions that collaboration technology was not ready for wide scale adoption were quickly put to rest and with them, the last meaningful purpose for a physical office. If meetings, workshops, and trainings could all be done from anywhere, how much value was left for informal water-cooler types of conversations and do they in any way justify a full return to the office, now that most health concerns have abated? It is important to note that many jobs never shifted during the pandemic; for those working in manufacturing, healthcare, or similar industries, their jobs are inherently linked to a physical environment where virtual work may not be an easy or effective option. For jobs based upon paper, the story is different, with occupancy rates in downtown settings still trailing pre-pandemic levels and likely to stabilize to around 20% lower than before.

So where does this leave the corporate office and what are the long-term ramifications for hybrid and remote work? To keep the physical office relevant, employers are searching for the core reason why employees should bother to travel in. Should the office act as a connector, primarily to foster conversations and innovation, or should it be considered a magnet, pulling employees in for key events and professional development? Alternatively, should it transform into a hub fully embracing the blend between work and personal time, with onsite facilities like day care? Regardless of the model, the effects of hybrid and remote work on psychological well-being will be experienced for years to come. Beyond the fatigue already felt by employees from attending endless video conferences, as well as the intrusion of work into personal time, there are likely some very real consequences for interpersonal relationships. For example, helping behavior relies upon individuals knowing that they are on point to be helpful, which is confused by the anonymity offered by virtual work and leads to free-riding. Alternatively, with less opportunity for intimate interactions, repairing strained relationships will likely become harder. As a third example, corporate identity is less pronounced without the experience of walking into a physical office, which can lead to a more transactional mindset amongst employees and a lack of shared social norms about acceptable performance.

In many ways, the relevance of the physical corporate office has been under fire for decades, but the pandemic accelerated the shift and eliminated any remaining hesitations about the feasibility of hybrid and remote work. Without finding a new purpose, it is unlikely that the antics of The Office will be repeated in the same way or frequency as before. We might look back at the series in a different way, more of a time capsule than the mockumentary that it was intended to be. With little of the original purpose for the corporate office left, it may be time for a reinvention of what the workplace should be, one that embraces the new reality of work and blends our personal and professional lives to a much greater extent. Instead of the towering skyscrapers from the twentieth century, a visual representation of an apartment above a storefront might be a closer depiction to where we are heading. If that means one less character like David Brent, then the future of work might be alright after all.

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

       

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• From deadness to life: how today’s conservative Protestants recovered and adapted the Protestant ethic

 

in OUPblog - Psychology and Neuroscience on 2023-06-05 09:30:00 UTC.

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Mathematicians Find Hidden Structure in a Common Type of Space

in WIRED Science on 2023-06-04 12:00:00 UTC.

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A ‘vampire einstein’ tile outdoes mathematicians’ latest feat

Einstein, meet “vampire einstein.”

It’s been just months since researchers reported the first  “einstein” — a single tile that can cover an infinite plane, but only with a pattern that never repeats (SN: 3/24/23). Now, the same team has found a shape that’s even more special.

The original einstein, nicknamed “the hat,” made a pattern that involved both the hat and its mirror image. The new tile also makes a pattern that never repeats, but without such reflections, the researchers report May 28 at arXiv.org. Because the shape isn’t accompanied by its reflection, you might call it a “vampire einstein,” the researchers point out. (The “einstein” part of the name comes from the German for “one stone,” not from the name of the famous physicist.) The shape is part of a family of vampire einsteins that the researchers found, which they called “spectres.”

Describing how tiles cover an infinite plane without any overlaps or gaps between them is a time-honored fascination for mathematicians. While certain other tiles can be arranged so that they don’t form a repeating pattern, einsteins are special because that’s the only way they can tile. Previously, mathematicians knew of sets of tiles that could tile the plane only with non-repeating patterns. But until this year, they didn’t know of a single tile that would do it.

After finding the first einstein, the researchers wondered if they could find a tile that would make a non-repeating pattern without any reflected versions of the tile. Starting from a shape related to the hat and curving its edges in such a way that the tile’s reflection no longer fit together with itself, the researchers created the vampire einstein tile.

“I would never have predicted that we’d stumble upon a shape that solves this [vampire einstein] subproblem so quickly,” says computer scientist Craig Kaplan of the University of Waterloo in Canada.

in Science News on 2023-06-04 11:00:00 UTC.

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What a Therapist Wants You to Know About Remote Therapy

in WIRED Science on 2023-06-04 11:00:00 UTC.

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The Upper Atmosphere Is Cooling, Prompting New Climate Concerns

in WIRED Science on 2023-06-03 12:00:00 UTC.

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Weekend reads: How university rankings lead to bad science; how to report research misconduct; the impact of Retraction Watch reporting

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Exclusive: Alleged research misconduct cost Turkish surgeons tenure
• Scientist with six retractions wins challenge of firing, funding ban
• In the Death of an Iranian Scientist, Hints of Unchecked Strife

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300. There are now 40,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains 200 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

• How Bibliometrics & School Rankings Reward Unreliable Science: Our Ivan Oransky’s talk at Stanford.
• “Reporting research misconduct: When, how, and to whom.” A UKRIO report.
• Retraction Watch reporting “significantly reduced post-retraction citations of non-swiftly retracted articles in biomedical sciences,” says a new study.
• “Our analysis shows large heterogeneity across scientific disciplines in the amelioration of gender imbalances with more prominent imbalances persisting among top-cited authors and slow promotion pathways even for the most-cited young scientists.”
• “How to assess whether IRBs are doing a good job—and first defining what that means—has bedeviled human research protection officials for years.”
• “Systematic review finds “spin” practices and poor reporting standards in studies on machine learning-based prediction models.”
• “Her implication is that rejecting a paper equates to rejecting its premise. This is not the case.” Readers respond to a New York Times op-ed.
• “His lawsuit settled, one of the two feuding Temple heart scientists is retiring.”
• “Authors from richer, English-speaking countries gain unconscious boost when identified to referees, study finds.”
• “Published registered reports are rare, limited to one journal group, and inadequate for randomized controlled trials in the clinical field.”
• How did nearly 250 different clnical studies use the same ethics committee approval?
• A look at “HIV-Related Stigmatizing Language in the Scientific Literature, From 2010-2020,” along with recommendations.
• “Worries mount about misinformation in science.”
• “Use of positive terms and certainty language in retracted and non-retracted articles: The case of biochemistry.”
• “She Said Her Professor Sexually Harassed Her. His Wife Won Damages.”
• “Distortion of journal impact factors in the era of paper mills.”
• “Expired scientific journal domain names can be a goldmine.” Hijacked journals in the Dutch media.
• “AI intensifies fight against ‘paper mills’ that churn out fake research. Text- and image-generating tools present a new hurdle…”
• “Ethics and academic integrity in doctoral training: the case of doctorates in education in Chilean universities.”

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

in Retraction watch on 2023-06-03 11:00:00 UTC.

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Attention Authors: Changes to announcement schedule for June and July, 2023

Planning a submission to arXiv in the next few weeks? Please be aware of the upcoming temporary change to our announcement schedule. This change only affects announcement of new submissions; 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.

The mailings and the public availability of new submissions will be deferred for the following dates. Help desk support will not be available on these days.

Wednesday, June 14: No announcement or help desk support. Articles received and accepted at or after 14:00 ET Tuesday, June 13 2023, and before 14:00 ET Thursday, June 15 2023, will be announced at 20:00 ET Thursday June 15, 2023.

Monday, June 19: No announcement or help desk support. Articles received and accepted at or after 14:00 ET Friday, June 16 2023, and before 14:00 ET Tuesday, June 20 2023, will be announced at 20:00 ET Tuesday, June 20 2023. 

Tuesday, July 4: No announcement or help desk support. Articles received at or after 14:00 ET Monday, July 3 2023, and before 14:00 ET Wednesday, July 5 2023, will be announced at 20:00 ET Wednesday, July 5 2023.

Submissions to arXiv are typically 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.

in arXiv.org blog on 2023-06-02 16:37:47 UTC.

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Let’s Make a Deal—With Python!

in WIRED Science on 2023-06-02 13:00:00 UTC.

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Weird black holes may hold secrets of the early universe

Our galaxy’s heart is a gluttonous monster. Like the mythical Kammapa of the Sotho people of southern Africa, the Milky Way’s central, supermassive black hole has swallowed nearly everything around it, growing heftier and heftier the more it eats. And it’s not alone. Black holes weighing as much as thousands, millions or even billions of suns sit at the center of nearly all known massive galaxies.

For decades, scientists thought that was the only place they’d find such behemoths, because only massive galaxies had enough material to feed the monsters’ excessive appetites. But beginning about two decades ago, computer simulations of the earliest black holes started turning up oddities — big black holes that weren’t smack-dab where they were expected. These misfits must be nothing more than flukes, many scientists reasoned at the time, dismissing the results without a second thought.

But others weren’t so certain the oddballs should be cast off. If observations show that these unusual black holes exist in the nearby universe, these astrophysicists speculated, they could be untapped clues to the universe’s infancy and adolescence.

“We can, weirdly, [learn about] the super-beginning of the universe by looking at things really close to us,” says theoretical astrophysicist Jillian Bellovary of Queensborough Community College in New York City.

The notion remained just an idea for years. But now, the existence of these misfits isn’t so easy to ignore. Astronomers have turned up signs of a number of unexpectedly massive black holes in the universe’s tiniest galaxies, and surprisingly, some of those black holes don’t appear to sit at their galaxies’ centers. Even more intriguing, astronomers have spotted evidence of black holes wandering at their galaxies’ edges, and in rare cases, being kicked from their homes into intergalactic space.

Perhaps these black holes aren’t merely cosmic nonconformists but instead big players in the story of our universe. If so, they are a tool for probing one of the greatest mysteries in all of astrophysics — how the cosmic Kammapas we see today came to be.

“Without understanding what black holes are doing, you cannot understand galaxy evolution,” says Xiaohui Fan, a cosmologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, making it impossible to explain the landscape of the universe.

Little galaxies can have big black holes

Our current cosmological understanding of how black holes got so big goes something like this: As galaxies grow, collide and merge over cosmic time, they take on gobs of new stars, gas and dust. The black holes at the galaxies’ centers grow in lockstep, ballooning as they merge with one another and feed on the newly acquired material. A rough estimate puts a supermassive black hole’s heft at somewhere around a thousandth of the mass of its home galaxy.

In this scenario, the universe’s littlest galaxies, called dwarf galaxies, probably didn’t go through many mergers in the past. Tipping the scales at only about a trillionth the mass of the Milky Way, they should have relatively runty black holes, or none at all.

But in the late 2000s, astrophysicist Marta Volonteri of Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris at Sorbonne University helped run computer simulations that tracked the evolution of massive black holes from birth to today. In those efforts, almost as soon as they popped into existence, even the smallest galaxies could have surprisingly large black holes. As time passed, some of those galaxies never grew or merged with others, leaving them unmarred after billions of years of cosmic evolution.

A wild idea occurred to Volonteri and her colleagues: These galaxies and their black holes were relics of the universe’s birth. If massive black holes in dwarf galaxies did exist, and if astronomers could find them, those black holes would be an unprecedented window into how the first black holes formed.

The first hints that they do exist came from a serendipitous find by astronomer Amy Reines. More than a decade ago, she was in graduate school at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville poring through telescope data on a dwarf galaxy 30 million light-years from Earth. It was bursting with stars, and Reines was trying to learn more about how these balls of hot gas are born.

Initially Reines looked at data from the galaxy, called Henize 2-10, in radio and near-infrared wavelengths of light. She spotted a cosmic baby rattle, a roughly 300-light-year-long bridge of gas connecting two dusty balls swaddling newly coalescing stars. A deeper dive into the data revealed extreme radio emissions right in the middle of the rattle, along with bright X-rays coming from the same spot, inklings of a huge black hole with a mass of a million suns.

“I hadn’t seen this before,” says Reines, now at Montana State University in Bozeman. Dwarf galaxies, she too had assumed, shouldn’t have big black holes. She remained skeptical of her interpretation until a few months later when she attended a talk in Seattle at the 2011 American Astronomical Society meeting.

It was there that Bellovary, then a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and collaborating with Volonteri, presented new simulations of galaxy formation. Bellovary described the formation of galaxies with a range of masses and histories, and discussed how the results could make predictions about how massive black holes are scattered throughout the universe.

Like Volonteri’s earlier work, Bellovary’s simulations suggested that big galaxies were not the only ones to harbor big black holes; scrawny galaxies could have them too.

In a session at the same meeting, Reines highlighted her discovery of dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10 and its uncharacteristically massive black hole. Like two black holes circling each other and then colliding, unexpected computer simulations met un­expected real-world observations.

The combined work suggested that not only do massive galaxies have big black holes, but maybe a majority of galaxies do too, Fan says. And that raised a lot of new questions about how black holes and galaxies grow up together.

After hearing Bellovary’s talk and publishing her own findings, Reines shifted her research focus from the birth of stars to finding big black holes. The behemoths pulled her in. She launched an effort to search for them in dwarf galaxies. Like other astronomers, she decided to scan the skies for the rings of cosmic crumbs that burn brightly around feeding black holes at the centers of galaxies — active galactic nuclei. That’s where black holes should be, she assumed. “I mean, it’s in the name, active galactic nuclei,” she explains.

Reines combed through data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey looking for the visible-light signatures of central black holes. Of the roughly 25,000 dwarf galaxies in her analysis, 151 of them appeared to harbor a big black hole, she and colleagues reported in 2013.

Volonteri says she was elated by the results. They validated her wild idea that dwarf galaxies could have really big black holes, and possibly that those black holes could tell us something about the very first black holes.

A key clue may be in the masses of dwarf galaxies’ black holes. The two leading ideas for how the first black holes formed create black holes of different masses. One idea supposes that these black holes formed from the implosion of the first stars and would tend to be relatively lightweight. The other idea suggests that the first black holes formed from the direct collapse of giant gas clouds and would be heavier. If the gas cloud idea is correct, it could explain another cosmic puzzle: how black holes in the early universe got so big so fast. “We observe them, and they are already huge,” Bellovary says. If the history of the universe was displayed on a clock, these monsters would have mere seconds to form, she explains.

If big black holes in dwarf galaxies are indeed ancient relics from the early universe, their masses should be akin to the masses of the first black holes. If so, they could help explain how the seeds of some of the heftiest black holes we see today formed.

According to a recent estimate, the black hole in Henize 2-10 tips the scales at a few million suns (SN: 9/11/21, p. 12). That’s a data point in favor of the direct cloud collapse idea, but it’s just one measurement with a lot of assumptions. For now, measuring black holes’ masses is no easy task.

Misfit predictions

In computer simulations, big black holes don’t show up only at galaxy centers. Simulations predict that this galaxy has many in its halo (black circles). The five heftiest black holes (orange) include four that are off-kilter. Simulated gas and X-ray views show how these black holes might appear to astronomers in telescope images.

Wandering black holes may offer cosmic clues

Fortunately, there’s another way to get a clue to the masses of early black holes. It relies heavily on another type of oddball — big black holes that don’t sit exactly at the center of dwarf galaxies.

When Bellovary shared her simulations back in 2011, the idea of big black holes in scrawny galaxies wasn’t the only surprise. Her work also predicted that some Kammapas would be off-kilter from their galactic centers, wandering around the dwarfs’ edges after failing to fall to their cores.

“I always like to think about the outliers, or the weird little rejects, or the nonconformists,” Bellovary says. She chose to rerun her simulations, zooming in on the littlest galaxies. When she did, she found that half of the massive black holes in dwarf galaxies should be off-center, she reported in early 2019 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

As if on cue, Reines came in a few months later with observations that bolstered Bellovary’s simulations. Using the Very Large Array of radio telescopes in New Mexico, Reines and colleagues had peered at emissions coming from 111 dwarf galaxies, 13 of which most likely had big black holes. Of those 13 big black holes, a few appeared to sit off-center from their galaxies’ cores (SN: 6/22/19, p. 12).

Finding wanderers was a jackpot. “Once a black hole starts wandering, it does not grow in mass anymore,” Volonteri says. The lowest-mass wanderers should roughly match the initial mass of the very first black holes, making them a good proxy for the seeds that would later grow into supermassive black holes.

Unfortunately, the mass of wanderers is even harder to figure out than the mass of Kammapas sitting at their galaxies’ cores. Researchers are instead turning to these wanderers’ overall numbers for clues. If the earliest black holes — the seeds of today’s supermassive black holes — formed from the direct collapse of huge gas clouds flowing into galaxies, then wanderers shouldn’t be very common in dwarf galaxies. That’s because converting a gas cloud’s mass into a massive black hole is difficult and thus expected to be a rare phenomenon, Volonteri explains. An easier way to form early black holes — through the implosion of the first stars — would result in many more wanderers.

Another possible scenario that scientists are now considering is whether mergers of early stars or black holes in dense galaxy cores could have made the seeds of supermassive black holes. That process would also result in a lot of wanderers. But these black holes would be somewhat more massive than black holes formed from stellar implosions.

Because signs of wanderers keep popping up, researchers are leaning away from the direct collapse idea. But to truly get a better sense of how big black holes formed, researchers need to census wandering black holes not only in the nearby universe but also further back in time, says Angelo Ricarte of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. We need to know if what’s happening now is similar to what happened then, because the environment in the early universe was very different.

Are rogue black holes real?

Massive galaxies appear to have wanderers too, some that are flying across their host galaxies at 10 times the speed of wanderers in dwarf galaxies.

But scientists aren’t entirely sure if these black holes gone rogue are real. When one turned up in 2003 in Volonteri’s simulations, scientists blew it off. The rogues showed up again in Bellovary’s simulations. The reaction? Skepticism. And that skepticism remained even when astronomers announced bright, flashy X-ray signals coming from candidate rogues.

Several years ago, a Hubble Space Telescope image and data from other observatories offered evidence of a black hole with a billion suns’ worth of mass getting booted to the edge of its galaxy (SN: 4/29/17, p. 16). And earlier this year, images from Hubble and the Keck Observatory revealed the possibility of a trifecta of supermassive black holes interacting, with one given so much oomph that it’s been ejected to intergalactic space (SN: 4/8/23, p. 11). But a separate team proposes that what some scientists are calling a rogue black hole might instead be a galaxy viewed edge on.

Volonteri continues to track each candidate rogue, along with other oddball black holes astronomers have put forward. They all somehow have to fit into our full understanding of the history of supermassive black holes, she says. And once again, how often they show up in observations could provide clues to the fuller picture.

If observations show that slow-moving wanderers are abundant, then collisions and mergers of really big black holes are presumably rare. Slow-moving wanderers haven’t interacted with other black holes and so haven’t picked up extra zing relative to the stars around them. The story the universe would be telling us is that the supermassive black holes we see today didn’t grow through repeated mergers after all. But, Volonteri says, if there are a lot of supermassive black holes being shot from the centers of their galaxies to the distant edges, black hole interactions, including mergers, must be common.

With a few dozen candidate oddballs in dwarf galaxies and only a few far-flung rogue candidates identified, the picture is not yet clear. What we do know, Fan explains, is that understanding cosmic evolution requires a good sense of the birth and evolution of the “dark sector” of galaxies — including black holes.

More observational evidence of oddballs would help, and more astronomers have joined the search. In 2021, a team including Reines and Mallory Molina of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City reported a new way to spot signs of massive black holes in dwarfs, specifically if the behemoths are feeding on gas and dust. The technique searches dwarfs for a red glow given off by an unusual type of iron. And a team from Dartmouth reported last year that very-high-energy X-rays may also reveal obscure behemoths.

Future observatories may aid in the hunt too. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located in Chile and slated to turn on next year, can sweep the skies looking for wanderers. And the next-generation Very Large Array, a proposed radio observatory, will be sensitive enough to spot signs of black holes in dwarf galaxies.

With the goal of detecting collisions of very massive black holes, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA, and the proposed Einstein Telescope may one day offer clues to how common cataclysmic black hole interactions are and have been.

Time and new technology will tell. For now, oddball black holes spark our imagination, prompting us to ask big questions and uncover new evidence in the pursuit of a deeper understanding of cosmic history. With each purported discovery, you can’t help but wonder: What else is hidden out there? Perhaps there are other oddities not yet discovered that could tie us to the earliest universe, Bellovary says, and reveal our cosmic origins. But only if we’re willing to chase the misfits and their stories.

in Science News on 2023-06-02 11:00:00 UTC.

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NASA’s Year-Long Mars Simulation Is a Test of Mental Mettle

in WIRED Science on 2023-06-02 11:00:00 UTC.

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The Doughnut Wars Are Here

in WIRED Science on 2023-06-02 10:00:00 UTC.

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Rethinking the future of work: an interview with Veronica Schmidt Harvey and Kenneth P. De Meuse

Rethinking the future of work: an interview with Veronica Schmidt Harvey and Kenneth P. De Meuse

Veronica Schmidt Harvey and Kenneth P. De Meuse, editors of The Age of Agility, offer valuable insight into the concept of “learning agility” and strategies that promote more effective leadership. They are both experts in the field of leadership practical experience developing healthy skills that help both individuals and organizations to thrive. 

Why is “learning agility” an important trend in organizations? 

There are several reasons. First: the pace of change. Most will agree that the world of work is a turbulent place. It only takes looking back at the COVID pandemic to recognize how quickly our world can be turned upside down! Then we can think of such recent trends as quiet quitting, AI, the virtual workforce, the mental health crisis, and on and on. Consequently, both leaders and organizations are recognizing that survival of the fittest equates to “survival of the agile.” Organizations that cultivate leaders who are learning agile are much better prepared to deal with change.

A second important reason is that organizations need high performing leaders. Challenges with an adequate leadership pipeline consistently show up on surveys as one of the things that keeps CEOs up at night! And the evidence is clear that learning agility is one of the most robust predictors of leadership success as measured by: 

• leadership potential
• performance 
• levels of effectiveness 
• promotions 
• advancement 
• international assignments
• salary increases 
• faster speed to competence in a new role

In fact, a meta-analysis conducted by Ken in 2019 found that learning agility is a stronger predictor of leadership performance than IQ, EQ, or job experience. It is not just hyperbole to say that the effectiveness of leadership in organization depends on the levels of learning agility among their leaders.  

Third, we believe the development of learning agility can help in diversifying the leadership pipeline. Research indicates that learning agility when properly assessed does not disproportionally screen out women, minorities, individuals over 40, or other marginalized groups. Organizations increase their objectivity and level the playing field for all employees and applicants alike. Supporting the development of learning agility shows promise for not only expanding but increasing the diversity of leadership pipelines.

Is learning agility a new concept? 

Although agility is a term that is clearly trending, the concept of learning agility does have considerable history. At least dating back to the early 1980s, organizations began to recognize the importance of identifying individuals with the potential to learn from their experiences and adapt to changing circumstances. Dr Morgan McCall and his colleagues at The Center for Creative Leadership published the now-classic book The Lessons of Experience in 1988. Veronica’s own dissertation in that same year focused on how successful leaders learn from their experiences rather than solely in a classroom (Schmidt, 1988).

The specific term “learning agility” was first coined more than two decades ago by Drs Mike Lombardo and Bob Eichinger (2000). They agreed with McCall that a primary indicator of leadership potential is learning agility, aptly describing it as “knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do.” While learning agility is a relatively new compared to some other psychological constructs, it is not simply a “shiny-new-object” that is likely to become irrelevant any time soon.

How would you describe learning agility to someone unfamiliar with the concept? 

Researchers have used a number of different definitions. And, like many complex constructs, there are differences in opinion among them. The following two definitions are frequently used: 

1. “The ability and willingness to learn from experience and then apply those lessons to perform well in new and challenging leadership situations” (De Meuse, 2017) 
2. “The self-regulated behaviors, strategies, and habits that enable learning at an accelerated pace, facilitate more agile adaptation to dynamic conditions and result in more effective leadership” (Harvey & Prager, 2021).

Despite multiple definitions, as we describe in Chapter 19 of The Age of Agility, there is considerable consensus among researchers and practitioners alike that learning agility is a “metacompetency.” One can think of learning agility as a “whole body exercise” involving (a) how we perceive things—the perceptual; (b) how we process information—the cognitive; (c) how we regulate our emotions, and (d) how all of these are manifest in our observable behavior. Learning agility is the ability and willingness to learn from experiences and the attitudinal, cognitive, and behavioral flexibility to apply those lessons to perform effectively in current and new leadership roles.

What are the most successful methods of developing agility in employees and organizations? 

As part of writing Chapter 6 for The Age of Agility, Veronica and her colleague Raphael Prager and took a deep dive into reviewing the literature on developing learning agility. As a result, an evidence-based model was that focuses on five sets of behaviors and strategies that can be learned:

• Observing includes mindful awareness of situations and experiences as well as the ability to scan and forecast what will be needed in the future.   
• Doing includes seeking information and experiences, experimenting with different behaviors, and deliberately practicing new ways of responding.  
• Connecting involves learning with and from others by asking for help, observing role models, learning through coaches and mentors, and seeking feedback.  
• Thinking includes cognitive strategies such as reflection, understanding the mental filters that may be biasing our actions, approaching situations with curiosity, and adapting a learning mindset.
• Mobilizing involves learning to set goals, regulate emotions, maintain focus and discipline, and recognize when resilience and periods of renewal are needed.

How do we develop and support the next generation of leaders in a more remote world? 

As we explore new ways of working, one of the best ways we can support the next generation of leaders is to accurately identify them by assessing for learning agility along with other predictors of leadership. Then once identified, offer them numerous opportunities to develop their learning agility. It is incredibly empowering to have confidence in one’s own capability to learn what to do no matter what life may throw at you. A colleague Anna Marie Valerio and Veronica recently published an article in the Consulting Psychology journal on “Coaching to Develop Learning Agility.” It is likely one of the most critical things that leadership coaches can do! 

How does increased learning agility impact employees and organizations? 

The negative impact a poor leader can have on a team and in an organization is hard to overstate. The proper application of learning agility can help minimize such mistakes. Moreover, the promotion and hiring of effective leaders (regardless of age, gender, or minority status) sends a powerful signal to all employees that they matter and management has their back!

What do you think the world of work will look like in 10 years?

One thing that is certain is that it will look considerably different than it does today! It is impossible to predict with any precision what those change will be. However, we do feel certain that those leaders with strong learning agility will be better equipped to successfully respond. Perhaps, Alvin Toffler said it best in his book Future Shock (1970), “The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” And he wrote it more than 50 years ago!

_{Featured image: Canva}

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in OUPblog - Psychology and Neuroscience on 2023-06-02 09:30:00 UTC.

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Schneider Shorts 2.06.2023 – Systematic manipulation of the publication process

in For Better Science on 2023-06-02 04:31:15 UTC.

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Exclusive: Alleged research misconduct cost Turkish surgeons tenure

Two orthopedic surgeons in Turkey will not attain tenured professorships following alleged research misconduct that, so far, has also cost them a pair of publications, Retraction Watch has learned. 

Mehmet Faruk Çatma and Serhan Ünlü are among the authors of a paper about hip-replacement surgery that was published in 2016 in International Orthopedics and retracted earlier this year.

The February 16 retraction notice reads:

The Editor in Chief has retracted this article. After publication, concern have [sic] been raised that the authors may not have been in possession of the whole set of data reported in the paper. The journal received a local court verdict stating that the authors were unable to present the whole data set to the court. The authors did not provide an explanation of why they did not submit their dataset to the local court. The Editor, therefore, cannot be certain of the provenance and ownership of the data, and thus, the integrity of the paper’s findings. The authors have not explicitly stated that they agree to this retraction. 

The paper, “Femoral shortening osteotomy in total hip arthroplasty for severe dysplasia: a comparison of two fixation techniques,” has been cited 14 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The journal’s editor-in-chief, Marius Scarlat, and its publisher, Springer Nature, declined to give further details or share the court verdict. Neither Ünlü, Çatma nor the paper’s corresponding author, Alper Öztürk, responded to requests for comment. 

But as the retraction notice suggests, the story has twists.

It began seven years ago when Murat Altay, an orthopedic surgeon in Ankara, came across the now-retracted article in International Orthopedics. He realized the paper was based on work he had presented orally at a conference a couple of years earlier with some of the other authors. But his name had been left out of the publication.

And that wasn’t all. The paper claimed to include data from 76 patients whose surgeries were performed with an incision at the back of the hip, rather than at the side, which was Altay’s approach. “But in reality, there were only 8 patients who met the criteria for this publication,” he told Retraction Watch. 

Altay, now a professor at Keçiören Training and Research Hospital in Ankara, said he had evidence for this number because he obtained a patient list from Stryker, the company that supplied the hip implants used in the surgeries. 

Altay complained about the paper to organizations in Turkey, including the Intercollegiate Board, which conducts examinations for tenured professorships in the country, and the Turkish Society of Orthopaedics and Traumatology. Eventually, he took his case to the Ankara Regional Administrative Court.

The authors of the article were requested to provide their data, but failed to do so, as stated in a notarized translation of a court decision Altay shared with Retraction Watch.

While several parts of the story remain murky, the court appears to have relied on reports from three independent experts that supported Altay’s allegations. According to one of these reports, which was quoted by the court:

Dr. Ünlü’s failure to submit the aforementioned data despite the court decision supports the idea that there are not the number of patients stated in the publication in question, considering the mentioned issues; that the number of patients in the subject publication was reported, that the names in the oral statement were changed and removed, that it was understood that there were serious similarities between the subject publication and the other publication, therefore the subject article was evaluated as ethically flawed…

The “other publication” to which the expert refers is a 2018 paper in the Indian Journal of Orthopaedics, which was corrected that same year. The corrigendum states that:

the authors acknowledge that Mehmet Faruk Çatma and Serhan Ünlü did not co-author or contribute to this article and were erroneously listed as co-authors. The correct authorship is “Murat Altay, İsmail Demirkale, Hakan Şeşen, Mert Karaduman”.

Altay said he expects yet another 2018 publication, this one in the Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery, to be retracted due to “unfair authorship”:

Again, since I have contributed to this publication, I should have my name, but the authors unfairly removed my name from the publication. Likewise, ethical violation was proved by the court decision. My correspondence with the journal continues.

He also shared with Retraction Watch two letters (in Turkish) in which the Intercollegiate Board updated him on Ünlü and Çatma’s applications for associate professorships. In Ünlü’s case, two Turkish speakers who reviewed the letters told Retraction Watch that his application had been rejected. In Çatma’s case, it is unclear whether his application had been denied, or he had been stripped of an existing associate professorship. 

“The process took a long time and in the end, the publication of two separate articles received ethical violations and the associate professorships of two doctors were withdrawn,” Altay said.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

in Retraction watch on 2023-06-02 04:00:00 UTC.

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Coral reefs host millions of bacteria, revealing Earth’s hidden biodiversity

Coral reefs are hot spots for more than fish.

Fish and corals in reefs across the Pacific Ocean may harbor nearly 3 million varieties of bacteria, researchers report June 1 in Nature Communications.

That means scientists are vastly underestimating Earth’s microbiome, microbiologist Pierre Galand of Sorbonne University in Paris said at a May 31 news conference. The new count of bacteria living in the Pacific Ocean’s coral reefs alone falls within current estimates for the total microbial diversity of Earth, suggesting that there exponentially more bacteria living on the planet than previously thought.

Coral reefs are among the most diverse ecosystems on Earth, and microbes are key for keeping the captivating creatures that live there healthy. Bacteria can help corals get the nutrients they need to survive or guard against disease. A dose of probiotics may offer protection from deadly heat stress (SN: 8/13/21).

But the biodiversity of these reef-dwelling microbes is unclear. Most studies examine animal species in a small area or focus on only one species. And global surveys are hard to do.

During the Tara Pacific Expedition from 2016 to 2018, Galand and colleagues visited 99 coral reefs. At each site, they collected samples from plankton, three coral species and two fish species, amassing 5,392 samples. The team then categorized how many varieties of bacteria they could find in each sample, based on genetic differences among microbes.

“The word species doesn’t really work well for microbes,” says Jennifer Biddle, a microbial ecologist at the University of Delaware in Lewes who was not involved in the study. It’s difficult to compare physical characteristics like shape or color to separate such small and hard to see organisms into distinct species.

But genetic analyses identified more than 540,000 bacterial varieties living on the three types of organisms. That number alone — from a tiny fraction of Pacific reef fauna — accounts for up to about 20 percent of current estimates of all bacteria living on Earth, which range from 2.72 million to 5.44 million. Based on how many species of fish and corals live in the western and central Pacific, coral reefs from that ocean alone may harbor at least 2.8 million kinds of bacteria, the team calculated.

Such diversity may be a kind of “ecological insurance” for reefs, Galand said. For instance. multiple types of bacteria may help coral polyps in the same way, such as making sure the coral-building creatures get a key nutrient. With so much diversity, some bacteria may easily be able to replace others that are in trouble when something like high temperatures cause the bacterial population to crash (SN: 4/20/18).

The estimates may still be lowballing microbial diversity in Pacific reefs, Biddle says. It’s difficult to count something that’s invisible to the naked eye, and molecular tools to look at genetic material often exclude organisms that scientists are unaware of. “We’re always undercounting microbes with the methods we’re using.”

in Science News on 2023-06-01 15:00:00 UTC.

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Measurements of a key radioactive decay nudge a nuclear clock closer to reality

Hickory dickory dock, this nucleus could make a great clock.

A special variety of the element thorium hosts an atomic nucleus that could be used to keep time, scientists say. In a first, researchers have measured a type of decay of this thorium nucleus that releases a single particle of light. The measurement of the energy released in the decay is seven times as precise as estimates based on different types of decays, researchers report in the May 25 Nature. The improved energy measurement could galvanize work toward the first nuclear clock, which would follow in the footsteps of atomic timepieces.

“We have already amazing atomic clocks which run very precisely,” says nuclear physicist Sandro Kraemer of KU Leuven in Belgium. Those atomic clocks are based on the physics of the electrons that surround an atom (SN: 10/5/17). A nuclear clock would be based on the atom’s nucleus. Some scientists believe nuclear clocks could be even more precise than atomic clocks, which are already such powerful tools that they’re used in everything from GPS satellites to experiments that test whether fundamental laws of physics hold true (SN: 6/4/21).

The well-established technology of atomic clocks is based on how an atom’s electrons jump into a higher energy state. It takes a specific frequency of light, with just the right amount of energy, to initiate the jump. The oscillation of that light acts like the ticking of a clock. A nuclear clock would be based on similar energy jumps made by a nucleus.

Most atomic nuclei have energy levels too far apart to allow scientists to set the jump off with a laser — a necessity for building a clock. But a particular variety, or isotope, of thorium called thorium-229 has two energy levels unusually close together — about 8 electron volts. Still, no one has been able to initiate the jump with a laser, because the size of that energy gap wasn’t precisely known until now.

Kraemer and colleagues measured the energy released when the thorium-229 nuclei decayed, jumping down in energy from its higher energy state. First, the team had to get thorium-229 into that high-energy state, which is called an isomer. One way to do that is to start from another element that can decay into the thorium isomer. Using a radioactive beam at the ISOLDE facility at the European physics lab CERN near Geneva, the team embedded actinium-229 into crystals of calcium fluoride and magnesium fluoride. The actinium-229 decayed, producing the thorium-229 isomer.

This technique helped scientists sidestep a sticking point. Normally, thorium-229 decays in a way that makes the energy difficult to measure, by transferring its energy to an electron and kicking it out of the atom. A decay that emits a particle of light, or photon, is much easier to measure, but it normally happens only once in a billion decays.

Embedding the thorium-229 into the crystals suppressed the decay that is more difficult to measure, making the single-photon decay dominate. That allowed the researchers to detect the single photons from isomer decays and measure their energy. The researchers estimated the decay had an energy of 8.338 electron volts. That figure agrees with earlier measurements of how far apart the two energy levels are, but is much more precise.

“This is a milestone that people have been looking for,” says quantum physicist Simon Stellmer of the University of Bonn in Germany, who was not involved with the study. Previous claims of detecting this type of decay haven’t held up, Stellmer says. “This seems to be the first true and real observation of this isomer decay.”

Physicists are now working to use a laser to set off the energy transition, going from the low-energy state to the higher-energy isomer, in the next step toward creating a nuclear clock. “It is actually something that we in our lab are trying to do,” says physicist Ekkehard Peik of the National Metrology Institute of Germany in Braunschweig, who was not involved with the new research. “That’s why we are very excited.”

A nuclear clock could provide a new angle on physics phenomena. “It would be very interesting to compare conventional atomic clocks and nuclear clocks because the underlying physics … is different,” Peik says. For example, nuclear clocks could reveal subtle variations in fundamental constants of nature (SN: 11/2/16).

Another bonus of going nuclear: The clocks could be made with nuclei inside a solid material, as opposed to atomic clocks, in which atoms must be suspended inside a vacuum chamber. That means a nuclear clock could be more stable and make measurements more quickly, Kraemer says.

in Science News on 2023-06-01 12:00:00 UTC.

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A Pill Version of Ozempic Is Coming

in WIRED Science on 2023-06-01 12:00:00 UTC.

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Scientist with six retractions wins challenge of firing, funding ban

Ten years after a neuroscientist was fired from his job at a Veterans Administration Medical Center, he has won a challenge of the decision.

Wayne State University, where the researcher, Christian Kreipke, was studying traumatic brain injury, fired him in February 2012 following a research misconduct investigation that found he had faked data. At the time Kreipke had a dual appointment at the John D. Dingell Veterans Administration Medical Center in Detroit.

Kreipke maintains that Wayne State investigated him in retaliation for asking questions about how the university administered grant funding. He filed a whistleblower lawsuit after he was fired alleging that the university had committed grant fraud against the federal government, to the tune of $169 million. In 2014, a judge dismissed the case. 

In 2018, Kreipke was banned from receiving U.S. government funding for five years, after he went to court to challenge the Office of Research Integrity’s findings that he engaged in research misconduct. His challenge was unsuccessful, and the ban runs until July of this year. 

Following another research misconduct investigation, the VA terminated Kreipke in October 2013, when his temporary appointment expired. The agency also banned him from receiving internal research funding for 10 years. 

Kreipke, who has been working in the auto industry, appealed the actions, which he alleged were retaliatory, to the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board. An administrative judge ruled in his favor in an initial decision in 2017. The VA asked for a review of that decision, which the board upheld in its final decision, issued May 16. 

According to the final decision, the VA had the “ultimate burden of proving by clear and convincing evidence that it would have taken the same personnel actions in the absence of [Kreipke’s] protected disclosures.” 

The board affirmed the administrative judge’s initial decision that the VA did not meet this burden, even when considering the retraction of four of Kreipke’s journal articles which the agency submitted as additional evidence. The final decision stated: 

to the extent that the agency has submitted the retractions to impeach the appellant’s credibility, it has not shown that this evidence is new and material.

Kreipke has now had six articles retracted, by our count. 

The board’s final decision ordered the VA to rescind its termination of Kreipke’s appointment and a grant that was active at the time, as well as the 10-year funding ban, and to give him back pay with interest. 

“No money can restore the 12 years or more he has lost out of the field of scientific research to clear his name,” Shereef Akeel, Kreipke’s lawyer, told us. He said: 

Unfortunately, the damages that he has suffered are devastating and long lasting.  As an upcoming scientist, who was making scientific breakthroughs in his field, to be retaliated in such a horrific manner for blowing the whistle simply shocks the conscious.  Every American needs to know what happened to Professor Kreipke so it never happens again.  

The John D. Dingell VA Medical Center in Detroit has not responded to our request for comment.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

in Retraction watch on 2023-06-01 11:32:03 UTC.

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The Race Is On to Crack an Artist’s ‘Test’ Signal From Aliens

in WIRED Science on 2023-06-01 11:00:00 UTC.

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The Explosive Legacy of the Pandemic Hand Sanitizer Boom

in WIRED Science on 2023-06-01 10:00:00 UTC.

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Culturally Safe and Trauma-Informed Care for Indigenous Women: The Indigenous Birth Support Worker (IBSW) Program

Culturally Safe and Trauma-Informed Care for Indigenous Women

A recent systematic review highlighted that Indigenous women in Canada face systemic barriers and historical trauma that hinder their access to quality healthcare. Recognizing the need for change, the Indigenous Birth Support Worker (IBSW) Program was developed at the Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital Maternal Care Centre in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. IBSWs are Indigenous women who received teachings in Indigenous birthing ceremonies, cultural practices, Doula training, breastfeeding and nutrition. They completed a practicum placement at the Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital Maternal Services Unit. The IBSW program aims to provide respectful, culturally safe, and trauma-informed care to Indigenous women and their families throughout their birthing journey, offering a positive and empowering experience.

Background and Program Development

The IBSW Program was established in response to an external review of tubal ligation procedures in the Saskatoon Health Region, which uncovered disturbing accounts of Indigenous women being pressured into these procedures. Indigenous women felt helpless and invisible, unable to advocate for their healthcare needs. These negative experiences resulted in unmet needs, dissatisfaction with care, and a lack of trust in the healthcare system.

To address these challenges and respond to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Call to Action #22, the IBSW Program was created. This program integrates Elders and cultural healing practices into Canadian healthcare institutions to provide culturally safe and trauma-informed care for Indigenous women.

Principles of the IBSW Program

The IBSW Program is guided by six fundamental principles proposed by Perinatal Services, BC, aligning with cultural safety and holistic care:

1. Cultural safety and cultural humility: The program ensures Indigenous patients feel supported and respected by incorporating cultural practices and traditions into their birthing experiences.
2. Self-determination: Indigenous women are empowered to make informed decisions about their healthcare, gaining agency and control over their birthing journey.
3. Trusting relationships: Building trust between IBSWs and Indigenous clients is a cornerstone of the program, which includes open communication, active listening, and mutual respect to foster trust.
4. Respect for traditional practices and knowledge: IBSWs demonstrate understanding and respect for Indigenous cultural traditions, values, and traditional knowledge related to childbirth.
5. Addressing anti-Indigenous racism: The program raises awareness of overt and covert racism experienced by Indigenous individuals in healthcare settings, combating discrimination and creating inclusive care.
6. Strengths-based and trauma-informed care: The IBSW Program recognizes and builds upon the strengths of Indigenous women and their families.

The IBSW Program represents a significant step toward achieving equitable and inclusive healthcare for all

Implementing these principles, IBSWs bridge the cultural gap, allowing Indigenous families to integrate their traditional birthing ceremonies and practices. This approach restores birth as a ceremony, fostering cultural continuity and pride.

Evaluation Findings

A qualitative research design was employed to explore the perspectives of program workers and clients. The study, conducted between December 2019 and January 2021, included 1023 clients who accessed care through the program.

As reported in our new paper in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, the IBSWs discussed services provided, client needs, barriers to care, communication with other healthcare professionals, lessons learned, and recommendations for improvement. Client interviews focused on program services received, experiences with IBSWs and other healthcare staff, and overall satisfaction.

The findings highlight the significant, positive impact of the IBSW Program. Both program workers and clients expressed high satisfaction with the services provided. The IBSWs’ understanding of Indigenous cultural practices bridged the gap between Western healthcare and traditional birthing protocols, restoring cultural continuity and ceremony.

Clients reported feeling empowered and having increased agency in making informed decisions about their healthcare. The trusting relationship facilitated effective communication and collaboration with other healthcare professionals involved in the client’s care.

The strengths-based and trauma-informed care approach of the IBSW Program proved crucial in supporting Indigenous women and families who had experienced historical and intergenerational trauma. By focusing on their strengths and providing holistic care, the IBSWs fostered resilience and healing.

Recommendations:

The program contributes to healing, resilience, and the well-being of Indigenous women and their families.

1. Continued Education and Training: Ongoing education and training are essential to enhance IBSWs’ knowledge and skills in cultural practices, trauma-informed care, and Indigenous health.
2. Strengthening Collaboration: Stronger collaboration between IBSWs and other healthcare professionals involved in Indigenous clients’ care can ensure a holistic and coordinated approach to healthcare delivery.
3. Community Engagement: Connecting with local Indigenous communities, organizations, and Elders can foster cultural relationships, share knowledge, and provide comprehensive support to Indigenous families.
4. Increased Program Awareness and Expansion: Promoting the IBSW Program among Indigenous communities through community events, outreach initiatives, and collaboration with Indigenous organizations and leaders and increasing program capacity and availability.
5. Culturally Appropriate Resources: Providing culturally appropriate resources and educational materials reflecting Indigenous traditions, practices, and values to support informed decision-making and promote cultural continuity.

Lessons Learned:

1. Importance of Cultural Safety: Creating an environment where Indigenous clients feel safe, respected, and supported is fundamental to their positive birthing experiences.
2. Empowerment through Advocacy: The IBSWs’ advocacy empowered clients, enabling them to voice their needs, preferences, and concerns.
3. Value of Traditional Practices: Integrating traditional birthing protocols and practices into the process fosters cultural pride and continuity.

Conclusion

The IBSW Program effectively addresses Indigenous women’s negative experiences and unmet needs in the healthcare system. By incorporating the recommendations and building upon existing strengths, the IBSW Program can serve as a model for culturally safe and trauma-informed care in Indigenous communities across Canada. Ongoing collaboration, evaluation, and involvement of Indigenous communities are crucial to ensure the program remains responsive to the diverse needs and aspirations of Indigenous women and their families.

The IBSW Program represents a significant step toward achieving equitable and inclusive healthcare for all, honouring Indigenous traditions, and promoting positive birthing experiences. By valuing cultural safety and humility, addressing historical trauma, and promoting self-determination, the program contributes to healing, resilience, and the well-being of Indigenous women and their families.

This paper is part of the ‘Disparities in access to sexual and reproductive health services’ Collection in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth and BMC Women’s Health.  You can see all of the papers in the Collection here.

in BMC Series blog on 2023-06-01 06:00:28 UTC.

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Get Ready for 3D-Printed Organs and a Knife That ‘Smells’ Tumors

in WIRED Science on 2023-05-31 16:08:46 UTC.

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These ants build tall nest hills to help show the way home

Some ants have figured out how to keep from getting lost: Build taller anthills.

Desert ants that live in the hot, flat salt pans of Tunisia spend their days looking for food. Successful grocery runs can take the insects as far as 1.1 kilometers from their nests. So some of these ants build towering hills over their nests that serve as a landmark to guide the way home, researchers report in the July 10 Current Biology.

“I am surprised and fascinated that ants have visual acuity at the distances implied in this work,” says ecologist Judith Bronstein of the University of Arizona in Tucson who wasn’t involved in the new study.  It “also implies that ants regularly assess the complexity of their local habitat and change their decisions based on what they conclude about it.”

Desert ants (Cataglyphis spp.) use a navigation system called path integration, relying on the sun’s position and counting their steps to keep track of where they are relative to their nest (SN: 1/19/17). But this system becomes increasingly unreliable as distance from the nest increases. Like other types of ants, desert ants also rely more generally on sight and smell. But the vast, almost featureless salt pans look nearly the same in every direction.

“We realized that, whenever the ants in salt pans came closer to their nest, they suddenly pinpointed the nest hill … from several meters distance,” says Markus Knaden, a neuroethologist at Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. “This made us think that the hill functions as a nest-defining landmark.”

So Knaden and colleagues captured ants (C. fortis) from nests in the middle of salt pans and from along their shorelines. Only nests from the salt pan interiors had distinct hills, which can be up to 40 centimeters tall, whereas the hills on shoreline nests were lower or barely noticeable.

Next, the team removed any hills and placed the captured insects some distance away from their nests. Ants from the salt pans’ interiors struggled more than shore ants to find home. Since the shore ants were adept at using the shoreline for guidance, they weren’t as affected by the hill removal, the researchers conclude.

The team wanted to know if the ants were deliberately building a taller hill when their surroundings lacked any visible landmark. So, the researchers removed the hills of 16 salt pan nests and installed two 50-centimeter-tall black cylinders apiece near eight of them. The other eight nests were left without any artificial visual aid.

After three days, the researchers found that ants from seven of the unaided nests had rebuilt their hills. But ants from only two of the nests with cylinders had bothered to rebuild.

“These desert ants already told us about path integration and step counting for orientation…. But this business of building your own visual landmark, incredible,” says entomologist John Longino of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City who wasn’t involved in the research. “Are they sitting down to a council meeting to decide whether they need a bigger landmark? Is this somehow an evolved behavior in this one desert ant species?”

For now, it’s unclear how the ants decide to build, or not to build, a hill. Interestingly, nest building is usually performed by younger ants that are not foragers yet, Knaden says, and have not experienced the difficulty in finding a nest in the absence of a hill. That means there is an exchange of information between the veteran foraging ants and their novice nest mates, he says.

Bronstein also wonders about the risks of building the taller structures. Such risks “are implied by the fact that the ants don’t build such a structure where it isn’t needed,” she says. But, “for instance, isn’t it a clear cue to ant predators that food can be found there?”

in Science News on 2023-05-31 15:00:14 UTC.

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How a new Lyme vaccine for mice may protect people

A vaccine to fight Lyme disease, decades in the making, has received a temporary green light from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But it’s not for people — it’s for mice.

The vaccine isn’t a rodent-sized injection, which wouldn’t work for targeting large populations quickly. Instead, it’s coated onto edible, nutrition-free pellets that mice gobble up.

The vaccine makes mice develop antibodies that neutralize Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes most U.S. cases of Lyme disease. When ticks imbibe the blood of a vaccinated mouse, the idea goes, they won’t get an active infection and so can’t transmit the bacteria to people or other animals. 

“Mice are probably one of the most important reservoir hosts for Lyme disease,” especially in the eastern United States where Lyme disease is rampant, says Jean Tsao, a disease ecologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing who was not involved in developing the new vaccine. Reservoir hosts are animals with B. burgdorferi in their blood (SN: 2/5/21).

The vaccine has a conditional license, granted on April 29. That means it is available on request by groups such as federal and state health agencies under certain conditions for roughly one year, with the possibility of renewal.

The first well-documented case of Lyme disease in a person in the United States was in 1970. A vaccine for humans was available from 1998 to 2002, but it was taken off the market due to low consumer demand, likely related to fears over the vaccine’s safety. Some vaccinated people reported developing arthritis, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found no meaningful difference in joint problems in vaccinated versus control groups.

Both the mouse and human vaccines use a protein called OspA, found on the surface of B. burgdorferi, to spur antibody production and prevent infection.

Biologist Maria Gomes-Solecki co-led the early development of the new mouse vaccine. Her team distributed an early version of the vaccine to areas in upstate New York from 2007 to 2011. B. burgdorferi has a two-year life cycle in ticks. This and other factors mean it takes time to see meaningful reductions in infections, says Gomes-Solecki, of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis. After two and five years of vaccination, the researchers found that tick infections were reduced by 23 and 76 percent, respectively, compared with control sites.

That early vaccine used live Escherichia coli bacteria to deliver the OspA protein. But the current, green-lighted version of the vaccine uses inactive E. coli. A 2020 study of the new vaccine found a 30 percent reduction in the proportion of infected ticks in residential areas after two years, compared with control sites. Several coauthors on that study work for US Biologic, the company Gomes-Solecki cofounded to develop the vaccine.

“The vaccine they have works, but it’s not spectacular” in terms of the rate of reducing B. burgdorferi–infected ticks, says Sam Telford III, an epidemiologist at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., who was involved in the development of the human vaccine and led research in the 1990s for vaccinating mice.

Edible vaccines targeted at hosts have worked well for other diseases and species. For instance, vaccinating prairie dogs against the plague has decreased levels of the disease. For now, it remains to be seen whether vaccinating mice will result in lower Lyme risks for humans. “With additional studies as the product rolls out … we’ll see more data on how well it does,” Telford says. “It’s certainly a step in the right direction.”

Researchers are studying many approaches to controlling Lyme disease, including genetically engineered mice that produce B. burgdorferi antibodies without the need for vaccination (SN: 8/9/17). Tsao and Telford are studying how to limit tick populations by controlling deer numbers. And a new vaccine for humans is in late-phase testing in several thousand people.

Vaccines that target wildlife hosts will remain one tool among many for managing exposure to Lyme disease, the researchers say. Showering after being in areas with ticks, wearing long sleeves and pants and doing tick checks will still be important.

“We have to continue to be vigilant,” Gomes-Solecki says.

in Science News on 2023-05-31 12:00:00 UTC.

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In the Death of an Iranian Scientist, Hints of Unchecked Strife

The news of Zahra Jalilian’s death seemed to change as quickly as it spread.

On Dec. 4, 2022, the University of Tehran announced that the nanotechnology graduate student had died following “a tragic self-harm incident.” Political opposition groups quickly countered that darker forces were likely at work, attributing the 31-year-old Ph.D. student’s death to Islamic mercenaries, government functionaries, and other plots. Jalilian’s family, meanwhile, has accused her adviser of getting rid of his student in order to take credit for her work — charges that he steadfastly denies.

What is clear amid the varying and sometimes overheated accounts is that Jalilian was struggling under the pressures of her research. Interviews with her former colleagues, alongside voice memos that appeared on a university messaging platform shortly after her death, provide a rare glimpse into the culture of a scientific lab in a country that is often opaque to the outside world — and where mental illness is often ignored, denied, and deeply freighted with stigma.

Read the rest of this Retraction Watch-Undark story here.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

in Retraction watch on 2023-05-31 10:00:00 UTC.

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Dr. Mohammad Arjmand showcases his work to German President Steinmeier

in For Better Science on 2023-05-31 05:10:35 UTC.

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Quantum computers braided ‘anyons,’ long-sought quasiparticles with memory

Anyons, anyone?

Scientists have created strange new particle-like objects called non-abelian anyons. These long-sought quasiparticles can be “braided,” meaning that they can be moved around one another and retain a memory of that swapping, similar to how a braided ponytail keeps a record of the order in which strands cross over each other.

Two independent teams — one led by researchers at Google, the other by researchers at the quantum computing company Quantinuum — have reported creating and braiding versions of these anyons using quantum computers. The Google and Quantinuum results, respectively reported May 11 in Nature and May 9 at arXiv.org, could help scientists construct quantum computers that are resistant to the errors that currently bedevil the machines.

Non-abelian anyons defy common intuition about what happens to objects that swap locations. Picture the street game with cups and balls, where a performer swaps identical cups back and forth. If you weren’t watching closely, you’d never know if two cups had been moved around one another and back to their original positions. In the quantum world, that’s not always the case.

“It’s predicted that there is this crazy particle where, if you swap them around each other while you have your eyes closed, you can actually tell after the fact,” says physicist Trond Andersen of Google Quantum AI in Santa Barbara, Calif. “This goes against our common sense, and it seems crazy.”

Particles in our regular 3-D world can’t do this magic trick. But when particles are confined to just two dimensions, the rules change. While scientists don’t have a 2-D universe in which to explore particles, they can manipulate materials or quantum computers to exhibit behavior like that of particles that live in two dimensions, creating objects known as quasiparticles.

All fundamental subatomic particles fall into two classes, based on how identical particles of each type behave when swapped. They are either fermions, a class that includes electrons and other particles that make up matter, or bosons, which include particles of light known as photons.

But in two dimensions, there’s another option: anyons. For bosons or fermions, swapping identical particles back and forth or moving them around one another can’t have a directly measurable effect. For anyons, it can.

In the 1990s, scientists realized that a specific version of an anyon, called a non-abelian anyon, could be used to build quantum computers that might safeguard fragile quantum information, which is easily knocked out of whack by minute disturbances.

“For fundamental reasons these anyons have been very exciting, and for practical reasons people hope they might be useful,” says theoretical physicist Maissam Barkeshli of the University of Maryland in College Park, who was not involved with either study.

Google’s team created the anyons using a superconducting quantum computer, where the quantum bits, or qubits, are made of material that conducts electricity without resistance. Quantinuum’s study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, is based on a quantum computer whose qubits are composed of trapped, electrically charged atoms of ytterbium and barium. In both cases, scientists manipulated the qubits to create the anyons and move them around, demonstrating a measurable change after the anyons were braided.

Scientists have previously created and braided a less exotic type of anyon, called an abelian anyon, within a 2-D layer of a solid material (SN: 7/9/20). And many physicists are similarly questing after a solid material that might host the non-abelian type.

But the new studies create non-abelian states within qubits inside a quantum computer, which is fundamentally different, Barkeshli says. “You’re kind of synthetically creating the state for a fleeting moment.” That means it doesn’t have all the properties that anyons within a solid material would have, he says.

In both cases, much more work must be done before the anyons could create powerful, error-resistant quantum computers. Google’s study, in particular, produces an anyon that’s akin to a fish out of water. It’s a non-abelian within a more commonplace abelian framework. That means those anyons may not be as powerful for quantum computing, Barkeshli says.

It’s not all about practical usefulness. Demonstrating that non-abelian anyons really exist is fundamentally important, says Quantinuum’s Henrik Dreyer, a physicist in Munich. It “confirms that the rules of quantum mechanics apply in the way that we thought they would apply.”

in Science News on 2023-05-30 13:00:00 UTC.

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With tools from Silicon Valley, Quinton Smith builds lab-made organs

While volunteering at the University of New Mexico’s Children’s Hospital in Albuquerque, Quinton Smith quickly realized that he could never be a physician.

Then an undergrad at the university, Smith was too sad seeing sick kids all the time. But, he thought, “maybe I can help them with science.”  

Smith had picked his major, chemical engineering, because he saw it as “a cooler way to go premed.” Though he ultimately landed in the lab instead of at the bedside, he has remained passionate about finding ways to cure what ails people.

Today, his lab at the University of California, Irvine uses tools often employed in fabricating tiny electronics to craft miniature, lab-grown organs that mimic their real-life counterparts. “Most of the time, when we study cells, we study them in a petri dish,” Smith says. “But that’s not their native form.” Prodding cells to assemble into these 3-D structures, called organoids, can give researchers a new way to study diseases and test potential treatments.

By combining Silicon Valley tech and stem cell biology, scientists are now “making tissues that look and react and function like human tissues,” Smith says. “And that hasn’t been done before.”

The power of stem cells

Smith’s work began in two dimensions. During his undergraduate studies, he spent two summers in the lab of biomedical engineer Sharon Gerecht, then at Johns Hopkins University. His project aimed to develop a device that could control oxygen and fluid flow inside minuscule chambers on silicon wafers, with the goal of mimicking the environment in which a blood vessel forms. It was there that Smith came to respect human induced pluripotent stem cells.

These stem cells are formed from body cells that are reprogrammed to an early, embryonic stage that can give rise to any cell type. “It just blew my mind that you can take these cells and turn them into anything,” Smith says. 

Smith ultimately returned to Gerecht’s lab for his Ph.D., exploring how physical and chemical cues can push these stem cells toward becoming blood vessels. Using a technique called micropatterning — where researchers stamp proteins on glass slides to help cells attach — he spurred cells to organize into the beginnings of artificial blood vessels. Depending on the pattern, the cells formed 2-D stars, circles or triangles, showing how cells come together to form such tubular structures.   

While a postdoc at MIT, he transitioned to 3-D, with a focus on liver organoids.

Like branching blood vessels, a network of bile ducts carry bile acid throughout the liver. This fluid helps the body digest and absorb fat. But artificial liver tissue doesn’t always re-create ducts that branch the way they do in the body. Cells growing in the lab “need a little bit of help,” Smith says. 

To get around the problems, Smith and his team pour a stiff gel around minuscule acupuncture needles to create channels. After the gel solidifies, the researchers seed stem cells inside and douse the cells in chemical cues to coax them to form ducts. “We can create on-demand bile ducts using an engineering approach,” he says.

This approach to making liver organoids is possible because Smith speaks the language of biology and the language of engineering, says biomedical engineer Sangeeta Bhatia, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at MIT and Smith’s postdoc mentor. He can call on his cell biology knowledge and leverage engineering techniques to study how specific cell types are organized to work together in the body.

For example, Smith’s lab now uses 3-D printing to ensure liver tissues grown in the lab, including blood vessels and bile ducts, organize in the right way. Such engineering techniques could help researchers study and pinpoint the root causes behind some liver diseases, such as fatty liver disease, Smith says. Comparing organoids grown from cells from healthy people with those grown from cells from patients with liver disease — including Hispanic people, who are disproportionately affected — may point to a mechanism.

Looking beyond the liver

But Smith isn’t restricting himself to the liver. He and his trainees are branching out to explore other tissues and diseases as well.

One of those pursuits is preeclampsia, a disease that affects pregnant women, and disproportionately African American women. Women with preeclampsia develop dangerously high blood pressure because the placenta is inflamed and constricting the mother’s blood vessels. Smith plans to examine lab-grown placentas to determine how environmental factors such as physical forces and chemical cues from the organ impact attached maternal blood vessels.

“We’re really excited about this work,” Smith says. It’s only recently that scientists have tricked stem cells to enter an earlier stage of development that can form placentas. These lab-grown placentas even produce human chorionic gonadotropin, the hormone responsible for positive pregnancy tests.

Yet another win for the power of stem cells.

Quinton Smith is one of this year’s SN 10: Scientists to Watch, our list of 10 early and mid-career scientists who are making extraordinary contributions to their field. We’ll be rolling out the full list throughout 2023.

Want to nominate someone for the SN 10? Send their name, affiliation and a few sentences about them and their work to sn10@sciencenews.org.

in Science News on 2023-05-30 11:00:00 UTC.

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This Machine Makes You Hallucinate

in WIRED Science on 2023-05-29 12:00:00 UTC.

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Charting a course for the future of Science News

When Science News got its start in 1921, our founders knew that the surest path to deliver the latest news of science was through the dominant media of the day: newspapers. Our first iteration, Science News Bulletin, was mailed to subscribing newspapers across the country. Soon, librarians, teachers and science buffs asked if they could subscribe too. To meet that demand, in March 1922 the editors launched a new consumer publication, Science News-Letter (SN: 3/26/22, p. 16). That was the first iteration of the magazine you read today.

And in 1924, they launched yet another new product: “Science News of the Week” scripts that announcers read on local radio stations. Radio had just debuted; the first commercial broadcast was in 1920. The editors were clearly eager to embrace this revolutionary technology. By the 1930s, we were on the air nationwide, partnering with CBS on the Adventures in Science show, featuring editor Watson Davis interviewing scientists about the latest discoveries.

If I could tell our editorial forebears that nowadays most people read Science News on their mobile phones, I bet they’d be fascinated by the technology and the possibilities for connecting people with science anywhere, anytime.

I’d explain that people can find our journalism not just through the magazine and website, but also via RSS feeds, Twitter and Facebook. Email newsletters bring the science straight to people’s inboxes, and our YouTube channel draws more than 200,000 views a month. Video on a phone? Imagine that.

I’d also say that to better serve our varied audiences, we’re expanding our efforts on Instagram and TikTok, where vertical videos are wildly popular with teens and young adults — the next generation of science fans. I’d note that we also have coverage tailor-made for young people and teachers, through our Science News Explores website and print magazine and the Science News Learning program, which delivers the latest news and educator materials to more than 5,000 schools across the United States.

And I’d say that while we don’t know what new technology will disrupt the news industry next, we’ll be ready for it. This summer, we’re embarking on a strategic planning process that will help us chart our path forward for the next three to five years. We will continue to deliver top-quality journalism in written form, develop innovative new products and build a business model that sustains us through the ongoing turbulence of the media economy.

I’m as excited about the future of Science News as I’m sure those very first editors were. It wouldn’t be possible without you, our loyal readers. Stay tuned!

in Science News on 2023-05-29 11:15:00 UTC.

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A hunt for fungi might bring this orchid back from the brink

If you ever come across a Cooper’s black orchid in the wild, you probably would mistake it for a stick — or perhaps an odd potato if you dig a little underneath it. Unlike many others of its kind, this delicate flower is devoid of lush green leaves and flashy petals. Its stem lies on the floor of New Zealand’s broadleaf forests for most of the year, only popping up during the summer months to blossom with pendulous brown and white blooms. And rather than growing a tangle of roots, the orchid sprouts a pale brown tuber.

But the chances of encountering a Cooper’s black orchid (Gastrodia cooperae) are getting slimmer. Fewer than 250 adult plants have been found since botanist Carlos Lehnebach identified the species in 2016, and they live in only three sites across New Zealand. To make matters worse, feral pigs, rabbits and other animals like to nosh on the tubers. And the forests where the orchid grows are being cleared for farmland (SN: 12/21/20). In 2018, New Zealand’s Department of Conservation  classified the orchid as nationally critical, emphasizing its high risk of extinction.

At the Lions Ōtari Plant Conservation Laboratory in Wellington — part of the country’s only botanical garden focused on native plants — Lehnebach and colleagues are working to bring Cooper’s black orchid back from the brink (SN: 9/6/18).

From one of the lab’s three fridge-sized incubators, conservationist Jennifer Alderton-Moss pulls out dozens of petri dishes containing the orchids’ speck-sized seeds and root-emanating tubers.

The researchers dissect the roots under a microscope to look for fungi that could help the seeds germinate. Early in life, most orchids rely on fungi for essential nutrients and minerals. To conserve Cooper’s black orchids, the team needs to identify exactly which fungal species supplies the plant with nutrients. DNA testing helps the team rule out known orchid pathogens. Potential candidates are then extracted from roots and grown on petri dishes. Once they’re mature enough, fungi get paired up with seeds on another dish.

“We’re working with a rare species, so we can’t just [take] hundreds of seeds,” says conservationist Karin van der Walt. The team first tested its methods on Gastrodia sesamoides, a common orchid that also grows tubers. “If we get it wrong, at least we’re not causing extinction,” she says.

It took the researchers about a year of trial-and-error to find the right germination method for Cooper’s black orchid. Once they did, they had to wait another two to four months for the seeds to sprout.

Alderton-Moss removes a dish from a resealable bag and points out a fungus, an orchid leaf for the fungus to feed on and a few seeds that have now developed into light brown tuberlike grains. Cooper’s black orchid may have finally found its perfect match in Resinicium bicolor.

Commonly known as white-rot fungus, R. bicolor is a scourge on Douglas fir trees — a farmed nonnative tree in New Zealand — but seems to provide Cooper’s black orchid seeds with the nutrients and minerals they need to germinate. The next step is to grow Cooper’s black orchid plants from seedlings. That will reveal whether the fungus that helps seeds germinate is the same one that sustains the adult plant.

In the meantime, seeds and fungi are kept in a chilly slumber in one of the lab’s sterile rooms. Seeds are stored inside an incubator at –18° Celsius, while fungi are stored inside a cryogenic container with liquid nitrogen at –200° C. “If we lose [the orchid entirely], we have seeds banked in the lab,” van der Walt says. “We can at least grow them back — we know we can get that far.”

To test the viability of banked seeds and fungi, the team plans to thaw them at quarterly intervals to see how much they’ll grow.

Ultimately, researchers want to seed wild areas with this plant-fungi pair to boost the population — without all the lab steps. Though there are still other factors to work out to make wild growth a reality, the lab technique is “a powerful way to prevent extinction,” van der Walt says, not only for the Cooper’s black orchid but other endangered species, too.

in Science News on 2023-05-29 11:00:00 UTC.