Planet Neuroscientists

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What does the first successful test of a pig-to-human kidney transplant mean?

Surgeons in New York City successfully attached a pig kidney to a human patient and watched the pinkish organ function normally for 54 hours. While such procedures have been done in nonhuman primates, this is the first time that a pig kidney has been transplanted to a human body and not been immediately rejected. 

The procedure, announced in a news conference October 21, marks progress toward the goal of drastically expanding the supply of life-saving organs. Millions of people around the world are waiting for donated organs, many of which never come.

While the details of the procedure have not yet been peer reviewed nor published in a journal, “it’s a significant step,” says Megan Sykes, an immunologist at Columbia University who wasn’t involved in the research. But there are many more steps to be taken before patients waiting for a kidney can easily get one from a pig, she says.

Here are answers to some basic questions about the milestone.

Why pigs?

“We’re never going to satisfy the organ shortage problem with human organs,” says John Scandling, a nephrologist at Stanford University who wasn’t involved in this research. “There’s a limit to the number of deceased donor organs that are viable,” and too few donations from living people.

In the United States, over 100,000 people are on the national transplant waiting list, about 90 percent of whom need a kidney. But in 2019, less than 40,000 transplantations occurred. About 17 people die each day while waiting for an organ, according to the Health Resources & Services Administration.

Scientists have long sought to solve this shortage by using animal organs, a field known as xenotransplantation. Pigs have emerged as the primary focus of this research, since their organs are anatomically similar to human organs, and the animals can be bred in a highly controlled manner.

But simply transplanting another species’s organ into a person causes the immune system to revolt at the presence of a large, foreign object. When researchers tried such experiments using nonhuman primates in the mid-20th century, the scientists found that the transplanted organ would quickly turn black. “You could visibly see the organs fail in those days because there’s an immediate reaction,” Scandling says. That immediate reaction, called a hyperacute rejection, is the first major obstacle for a xenotransplant to stick.

In recent decades, genetic engineering has overcome some of these challenges. Scientists learned that the aggressive immune response seen after a pig xenotransplant is spurred on by antibodies that detect a specific sugar molecule called alpha-gal that dots pig blood vessels. It’s the same sugar molecule responsible for some allergic reactions to red meat (SN: 7/30/18).

In the early 2000s, scientists devised ways of disabling the pig gene responsible for this sugar. Subsequent studies have shown that kidneys and other organs from pigs with this gene disabled can be successfully transplanted to nonhuman primates, including baboons (SN: 12/5/18). But until now, a test of this sort of transplant hadn’t been done successfully in people. 

What did the researchers do?

Performing a first-of-its-kind operation like this on a living person raises many ethical questions. But in late September, the family of a woman who was brain-dead but kept alive on a ventilator consented to the operation, according to Robert Montgomery, a surgeon at NYU Langone Health in New York City who led the surgical team. She was taken off life support after the procedure.

The woman was an organ donor, but her organs were not suitable for donation. “I want to [acknowledge] how grateful we are to the family of the decedent, who in a time of profound grief, found a way to help their loved one realize her desire to give a gift to humanity at the time of her death,” Montgomery said at the news conference in New York City.

Over two hours, Montgomery and his team carefully attached a kidney from a pig genetically engineered to lack the alpha-gal sugar to blood vessels in the upper leg of the patient. The kidney was kept outside of the body so the team could assess its function in real time. The pig’s thymus gland, which can help educate the immune system to recognize the kidney as part of the body, was also transplanted with the organ to improve its chances of acceptance, Montgomery said. Drugs that suppress the immune system were also administered.

Within minutes, the kidney started producing large amounts of urine and showed other signs of normal functioning. The team kept close tabs on the kidney for 54 hours and saw no signs of rejection. “The pig kidney functioned just like a human kidney transplant,” Montgomery said. 

The research team stopped monitoring at 54 hours per guidance from ethics reviewers.

How big of a deal is the transplant?

To scientists who have been working in xenotransplantation, the news is welcome and important but not terribly surprising. 

“We were all pretty confident that hyperacute rejection wouldn’t happen,” says Parsia Vagefi, a transplant surgeon at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. He notes that pig kidneys of the sort used in this procedure have lasted in nonhuman primates for over a year.

“It’s a proof of principle,” Vagefi says, “but it didn’t really move the needle in terms of the science,” though details of how the surgeons did the procedure could provide a clearer picture of how the patient’s immune system responded, for example.

Peter Cowan, an immunologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia agrees. “This is completely as expected, but nevertheless it is an important piece of evidence to support moving to clinical trials of pig-to-human kidney xenotransplantation.”

What’s next for these sort of transplants?

Surviving for 54 hours is a crucial first step, but “nobody needs a kidney for three days,” Vagefi says. Before pig-grown organs can go mainstream, researchers will have to demonstrate that the organs can survive attacks from other players in the immune system and last for months or years in the human body.

For example, over time T-cells, a type of white blood cell, can come to recognize the transplanted organ as foreign and attack. Immunosuppressing drugs can help mitigate these sorts of responses, though the side effects of such drugs, such as susceptibility to infectious diseases, can be a major burden.

Including the pig’s thymus gland, which helps make immune system cells and antibodies, along with the kidney, may help lessen this longer-term rejection, says Kazuhiko Yamada, a surgeon and immunologist at Columbia University who has worked on this method in nonhuman primates for decades. “It’s like a teacher that can educate [the immune system] to not attack the kidney.”

Researchers will also have to show that such transplants are safe in the long-term to get approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Yamada says. For example, pig organs can contain retroviruses that lie dormant in genes. Some researchers are using the gene-editing technology CRISPR to remove those viruses to potentially improve safety (SN: 8/10/17).

Pigs may be able to provide other organs too, such as hearts or livers, though different organs present their own challenges.

“We’ve been working on this for 20 years,” Yamada says, and now it seems “we’re rounding the final corner and can see the finish line.” But exactly how long it will take before someone in need of a kidney can easily get it from a pig remains to be seen, he says.

Is raising pigs to harvest their organs ethical?

A future where potentially millions of pigs are raised to harvest their organs for humans raises significant ethical questions. “Pigs aren’t spare parts and should never be used as such just because humans are too self-centered to donate their bodies to patients desperate for organ transplants,” the organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, said in a statement. 

Advocates for xenotransplantation argue the potential benefits of vastly expanding the organ supply are worth any potential harm done to pigs.

“​​Nearly half of the patients waiting for a transplant become too sick or die before receiving one,” said Montgomery, the NYU surgeon. “The traditional paradigm that someone has to die for someone else to live is never going to keep up with the ever increasing incidence of organ failure.”

in Science News on 2021-10-22 17:02:47 UTC.

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Introducing the BMC Series SDG Editorial Board Members: Maha El Tantawi and Morenike Oluwatoyin Folayan

After a successful call for papers, BMC Oral Health is delighted to announce the publication of a Collection of articles on water fluoridation and oral health. Professor Maha El Tantawi and Professor Morenike Oluwatoyin Folayan, two senior members of the editorial board, launched the Collection to support the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The topic of water fluoridation and oral health addresses both Maha’s and Morenike’s research interests. Maha El Tantawi, a Professor of Dental Public Health at Alexandria University, Egypt, and Morenike, a Professor of Paediatric Dentistry at Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria, often collaborate to investigate the social determinants associated with early childhood caries and oral health status in Nigeria. Maha also researches the impact of public health measures, such as sugar tax and tobacco cessation counselling, on dental health. As well as investigating the risk factors associated with childhood caries, Morenike researches dental anxiety management and the determinants of oral health in marginalised communities. Morenike focuses on community engagement in research and supports the prompt translation of evidence-based research to policies and programs to reduce inequality and improve health and well-being for all. In this blog, Maha and Morenike discuss the articles included in the Collection and how they support the SDGs.

BMC Oral Health Collection – Something in the Water: Fluoridation and Caries

Fluoride is well known to have beneficial effects on dental health by helping to prevent cavities. Therefore, as a public health measure, fluoride is often added to community water supplies. However, when present in drinking water above the World Health Organisation’s (WHO’s) recommended concentration, long term exposure can lead to a disease called fluorosis. Fluorosis is characterised by staining and pitting of the teeth but can cause painful damage to bones and joints in severe cases. Therefore, communities must have access to drinking water containing safe levels of fluoride. As a result, water fluoridation is an important discussion topic among dentists, public health practitioners, policymakers and stakeholders interested in oral health and well-being. The review on water fluoridation strategy in England included in the Collection by Wordley and Bedi is an excellent example of such discussion.

The Collection aligns with multiple SDGs, including SDG#3, SDG#6, SDG#8, and SDG#10. For example, the Collection supports SDG#3 by further demonstrating the well-known anti-caries effect of fluorides; this information helps to ensure good health and well-being for all. Stangvaltaite-Mouhat et al. examined the association between fluoride levels in the drinking water and the susceptibility of different tooth surfaces to caries in Lithuanian adults. The researchers found that higher levels of fluoride (≥ 0.7 ppm) in the drinking water was associated with lower levels of dental caries in all tooth surface groups.

Research within the Collection also aligns with SDG #6 to “achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all” and SDG #10, which aims for reduced inequalities. The process of water fluoridation includes adjusting the concentration of fluoride in community water to predetermined levels to ensure access to safe drinking water. However, many communities are exposed to high fluoride levels in groundwater, leading to fluorosis. In this Collection, Rojanaworar et al. investigate the prevalence of dental fluorosis within agricultural communities in Thailand exposed to high levels of natural fluoride in groundwater used for household consumption. The researchers demonstrate that the occurrence of dental fluorosis among children exposed to fluoride concentrations in water sources greater than the WHO guideline value of 1.5mg/L is 1.62 times greater than those with drinking water containing the recommended concentration. This research highlights the need for access to safe drinking water in these areas. Furthermore, the Collection features an article by Rosário et al. that describes significant variability of fluoride concentrations in the water from treatment stations in Brazilian cities. Importantly, the group finds that over half of the public water supplies analysed had fluoride concentration levels outside the acceptable range, affecting the Brazilian population’s risk of developing oral diseases.

Articles within the Collection also support SDG #8 to “promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth”. The Collection features a scoping review by Mariño and Zaror of cost-effectiveness analyses of community water fluoridation (CWF), concluding that CWF represents an appropriate use of communities’ resources. In addition, a research article by Cronin et al. demonstrates that despite a reported increase in the prevalence of mild enamel fluorosis remains, CWF remains a cost-effective public health intervention for Irish schoolchildren.

To read these papers on water fluoridation and oral health, please visit <https://bmcoralhealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/collections>.

The post Introducing the BMC Series SDG Editorial Board Members: Maha El Tantawi and Morenike Oluwatoyin Folayan appeared first on BMC Series blog.

in BMC Series blog on 2021-10-22 16:30:22 UTC.

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How these sea-loving mangroves ended up far from the coast

Nearly 200 kilometers from the sea, red mangroves thrive in the rainforests along the San Pedro Mártir River on the Yucatán Peninsula. But how did these tangled trees that typically grow in salty water along coasts end up trapped so far inland and in freshwater?

Carlos Burelo has been mulling a version of that question ever since he visited the river on a fishing trip with his father 35 years ago. As a kid, he saw how the mangroves with their twisted aboveground roots were different from other trees, an observation that stuck with him into adulthood as a biologist at the Universidad Juárez Autónoma de Tabasco in Villahermosa, Mexico.

Now, genetic analyses, surveys of vegetation and sediments and simulations of shifts in sea levels show that the red mangroves (Rhizophora mangle) are part of a “relict ecosystem” that has existed for more than 100,000 years. When warming during the last interglacial period, which peaked about 130,000 years ago, raised sea levels approximately 9 meters above present-day levels, the lowlands of what’s now the Yucatán Peninsula flooded. As a result, the mangrove forest was displaced and started to grow inland by today’s standards, Burelo and colleagues report in the Oct. 12 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When sea levels dropped as the world cooled again, the trees were left far from the coast. 

“The remarkable resilience of these trees, in particular, is striking — that although they’re normally adapted to seawater, they’ve survived all this time inland is incredible,” says Holly Jones, a conservation biologist at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb who wasn’t involved in the new study.

To estimate where the mangroves may have been displaced from, the team collected leaves from the trees and from other mangrove forests along the coasts of the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico and compared the plants’ DNA. That work pinpointed the origins of the inland mangroves about 170 kilometers away along the Gulf of Mexico.

By comparing the number of DNA mutations in the inland population with the other mangroves and by estimating the ages of the trees using tree cores, “we were able to infer [that the San Pedro mangroves] have been isolated for 120,000 years,” says Felipe Zapata, an evolutionary biologist at UCLA. The calcium-rich water and riverbed of the San Pedro has buttressed the survival of these red mangroves over the years, Zapata says.

In addition to the mangroves, the team found various plant species in the inland area that also have a coastal heritage. More than 30 percent, or 112 species, of the total flora growing along the river, including orchids and legumes, are typically found in coastal lagoons or along shorelines, the researchers say.

With those findings in hand, the researchers decided to look at the soil too. The team expected to find “coastal sediments, ocean sediments and perhaps ocean fossils,” says Exequiel Ezcurra, an ecologist at the University of California, Riverside. A geologic survey of sediments near the mangroves revealed “exactly what we expected,” he says, including coastal gravels, shells of marine gastropods, clay sediments rich in shell fragments, coastal dunes and large oyster shells.

Those finds, along with simulations of past sea levels, confirm that at some point during the last interglacial period, the ocean must have merged with the lower basin of the San Pedro River, pushing the red mangroves and other coastal species inland, the researchers conclude. 

Discovering this relict ecosystem highlights the widespread impact past changes in the climate have had on the world’s coastlines, Ezcurra says, and it provides a chance to better understand how future sea level rise may affect these ecosystems.

in Science News on 2021-10-22 13:00:00 UTC.

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Face Stimuli In Psychology Are Often All White. That Needs To Change

By Emma L. Barratt

Research into first impressions is a well-established area. Hundreds of studies have been published with the goal of understanding how the subtleties of facial features cue assumptions about those we meet. Often, the stimuli used are tightly controlled, with some sets using faces whose features are digitally manipulated to be larger or smaller by tiny degrees; the effect of miniscule alterations to the wideness of eyes, for example, can be isolated and analysed without changing any other aspect of the face. By eliminating as many extraneous variables as possible, research teams hope to get a reading of exactly what specific features contribute to the first impressions we form.

While on the surface this sounds like a reasonable and solid scientific approach, it does tend to create one pressing problem in particular. If you’ve ever participated in or run a study using face stimuli, it’s likely that the faces used were exclusively White.

Authors typically give no explicit reasoning for this choice within their published work. Richard Cook of Birkbeck, University of London and Harriet Over of the University of York believe that there are four broad reasons for this common decision. In their recent paper in Royal Society Open Science, the two deconstruct the assumptions behind possible reasonings, and examine the limitations imposed on the field by avoiding non-White face stimuli.

A Confounding Factor?

One of the concerns researchers may have about including non-White faces is that participants will infer traits of face stimuli based on just on ethnicity, regardless of the actual features of the face presented.

While it’s understandable to seek to limit the effects of racial bias when using face stimuli, the authors argue that this particular concern doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. In the lab, slight alterations in facial structure of Black face stimuli have been shown to affect the responses of White participants, suggesting that White viewers can form first impressions of Black faces based on features. Many studies also illustrate that participants do not apply blanket judgements to faces belonging to a particular group. For example, in a policing and judicial context, Black people with facial features that look more “stereotypically Black” (a term used centrally in the original 2006 paper) have been found to receive harsher sentencing decisions than those who do not.

The Other-Race Effect

Another concern for many researchers is the fallout of the Other Race Effect, in which some people have issues discerning between faces of those from races different to their own. It is often assumed that participants may lack the necessary perceptual expertise to process these faces, so datasets containing “other race” faces may not produce meaningful results.

However, the authors point out that the Other Race Effect produces relatively mild face processing deficits compared to face processing disorders such as prosopagnosia; even then, people with prosopagnosia nevertheless make judgements of facial traits typical of those without the condition. This concern also fails to consider the diverse environments in which people are raised. In many cities, locals are likely to have grown up with exposure to individuals from a large number of races. And of course, many people have family members of a different race. This leads the authors to believe that the Other Race Effect poses little practical concern, which is a view that seems to be supported by inconsistencies in racial exclusion criteria between many first impression studies — some studies allow non-White participants to assess White face sets, whereas others exclude non-White participants.

In addition, many face stimuli sets are computer generated — at times obviously so. This leads the authors of this paper to pose the question: “Given that synthetic faces with which participants have little or no perceptual experience can be valuable stimuli, then why not faces of colour?”

Overshadowing Subtle Effects

When inserting non-White faces into sets of White faces, it is possible that race would become a very salient factor, and so researchers may be concerned that participants will attend to race above all else, ignoring subtle changes in features.

The authors of this paper, however, argue that this is not necessarily something to shy away from. To the contrary, they assert that this is a key part of what the field of first impressions seeks to understand. Perceived ethnicity is an influential social cue — if we accept that first impressions based on ethnicity is quantitatively similar to other types of first impression (eg. based on sex or age), then it makes sense that this is a variable that we should seek to investigate, rather than exclude. Many studies already use interleaved male and female faces, and if ethnicity exerts a comparable level of effect, the authors emphasise there should also be few issues with interleaving diverse faces in research studies.

If studies require the ethnicity of face stimuli to be controlled, the authors suggest that this can also be achieved while including non-White faces. For example, all Black or all Asian face stimuli sets would be as effective at removing the influence of race as an all-White set.

The Logistics of Using Diverse Face Stimuli

In years gone by there were relatively few diverse face stimuli sets for researchers to choose from. Due to the effort involved in creating new stimuli sets, researchers looking to include non-White faces were faced with the prospect of spending hours perfecting their own set. For many, the impracticality was too much, and the readily available all-White sets were often chosen.

This, however, is changing. These days, there are several readily available diverse face sets, and the authors also note that computer generated sets allow for non-White faces to be generated. Even so, it appears that this option is rarely used within research — likely for the reasons discussed above. With these concerns addressed, however, hopefully that feature will see more use.

In recent years, psychologists have increasingly recognised the problems of studying only people from WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) backgrounds. Broadening stimuli to more resemble the real world, including widening investigations to assess first impressions across all races, is an important piece of this puzzle. Beyond being just a tick-box exercise, there is the potential to unearth findings that have substantial real-world impact; for example, understanding the types of faces that receive the harshest first impressions could help combat bias in everything from university applications to court judgements. And, though this paper focuses on research into first impressions, this isn’t the only topic that uses face stimuli. There are many other areas of psychology that make use of face stimuli whose validity may be hindered by not using stimuli sets that reflect the diversity of the real world. Without diverse data, we can’t know for sure.

Thankfully, we are beginning to see progress on this issue, and there have been some promising steps in the right direction in recent years. For instance, there have been replication attempts of studies focusing on dominance and trustworthiness in facial features, re-run with stimuli comprising equal numbers of Black, White, Asian, and Latin faces. Going forward, the authors believe that this amount of diversity should be routinely used. And, where researchers do not include diverse stimuli, explicit statements of reasoning behind this would be useful.

Perhaps most centrally to this argument, it is important that research into faces move past this so as not to imply that White is the default. In generations before us, this was very much the commonly held view. But in 2021, we are moving beyond that, and our stimuli need to make that journey too.

– Why is the literature on first impressions so focused on White faces?

Emma L. Barratt (@E_Barratt) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

in The British Psychological Society - Research Digest on 2021-10-22 12:27:50 UTC.

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Publisher does a “thorough sweep” of alternative medicine journal after a paper is published in error

in Retraction watch on 2021-10-22 10:01:00 UTC.

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Lasers reveal construction inspired by ancient Mexican pyramids in Maya ruins

At Teotihuacan, near Mexico City, three giant pyramids rise above the ancient city’s main street, the Avenue of the Dead. The smallest of these is the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, which sits within La Ciudadela, or the Citadel, a massive sunken plaza with tall walls.

Now, more than a thousand kilometers away at the Maya capital of Tikal in what’s now Guatemala, researchers have found a smaller plaza and pyramid possibly modeled after La Ciudadela and its temple.

Teotihuacan is thought to have conquered Tikal in the year 378 (SN: 9/27/18). The finding adds to evidence of Teotihuacan’s influence over Tikal, the team reports September 28 in Antiquity.

“The architectural layout revealed by this study is stunning,” says anthropological archaeologist Nawa Sugiyama of the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the new research. “The very orthogonal city planning with specific orientation of the pyramids gives Teotihuacan a very characteristic architectural style, making it easy to identify any Teotihuacan influence abroad.”

What’s more, the newfound structures had six construction phases, the researchers say, most dating to a time in Mesoamerica that archaeologists call the Early Classic period, which lasted from about 300 to 550. That means that the Tikal complex possibly predates the Teotihuacan conquest of the Maya city in 378. If true, that would add more evidence to an idea that scientists have worked on for decades — that these civilizations were in contact much earlier than the conquest of Tikal, possibly trading and making political connections with one another.

To uncover the pre-Columbian architecture, archaeologist Stephen Houston of Brown University in Providence, R.I., and colleagues at the Proyecto Arqueológico del Sur de Tikal along with the Pacunam LiDAR Initiative and the University of Texas at Austin used an airborne remote-sensing technique called lidar, or light detection and ranging.

“We knew this area in Guatemala was important to Teotihuacan culture,” says study coauthor David Stuart, director of the Mesoamerica Center of the University of Texas at Austin. But the place where the Citadel-inspired construction is located did not appear on old maps of the Tikal archaeological site because it is covered in vegetation. “As there was no visible stonework there, it was thought to be a natural hill,” Stuart says.

The team decided to look closer because the mound looked unusual for a Maya site. “Since the location was adjacent to an area in Tikal where many Teotihuacan-style artifacts were found in the 1980s, we thought it deserved more attention,” Stuart says. After reviewing the lidar mapping, Houston saw that the general plan of the buildings resembled the Ciudadela and its temple at Teotihuacan.

In her 2004 book The Ancient Maya: New Perspectives, Louisiana State University archaeologist Heather McKillop noted that the abundant presence of Teotihuacan-style architecture and pottery found in Tikal and a number of Maya sites across Guatemala is extensive evidence of the Teotihuacan influence across Mesoamerica from the year 400 to 700. The ancient city in Mexico thrived from about 100 to 750, but much about the people who lived there and why the city was destroyed and abandoned is still a mystery. The Aztecs gave the name Teotihuacanto the city centuries after its collapse.

“It is almost like Teotihuacan had installed their own neighborhood or embassy in Tikal,” says study coauthor and archaeologist Thomas Garrison, also at the University of Texas at Austin. Other research led by Sugiyama shows that “there was also a more permanent Maya presence in Teotihuacan before the conquest of Tikal as well, so influence probably went in both ways.”

Sugiyama studies the Plaza of the Columns Complex at Teotihuacan, where researchers have found Maya ceramics and evidence of Maya-style painted walls. “These murals were destroyed … before the 378 arrival event,” she says. “That makes us wonder whether the conquest [of Tikal] was one of the last chapters” in a long history of contact between the Mayas and the Teotihuacanos.

Eduardo Natalino dos Santos, a Mesoamerica historian at the University of São Paulo who did not take part in the study, agrees with Sugiyama. “The circulation of these ancient architectural styles show that the Mesoamerican Indigenous elites were connected. We used to see traces of one culture in a different region always as a result of a colonizing or domination process. Maybe this is not always the case,” he says.

in Science News on 2021-10-22 10:00:00 UTC.

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Schneider Shorts 22.10.2021 – Faking for Putin

in For Better Science on 2021-10-22 06:00:00 UTC.

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Tuskless elephants became common as an evolutionary response to poachers

When ivory poachers target elephants, the hunters can affect more than just animal numbers. In Mozambique, past hunting pressure led to an increase of naturally tuskless elephants in one park, a study finds. 

During the Mozambican Civil War, which lasted from 1977 to 1992, armies hunted elephants and other wildlife for food and ivory (SN: 5/5/19). This caused the number of large herbivores to drop more than 90 percent in the country’s Gorongosa National Park. 

Now, video footage and photographic records show that as elephant numbers plummeted, the proportion of tuskless female African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) rose from about 18 percent to 51 percent.

Decades of poaching appear to have made tusklessness more advantageous from an evolution standpoint in Gorongosa, encouraging the proliferation of tuskless females with mutations in two tooth genes, researchers report in the Oct. 22 Science.

The rapid culling of tusked individuals changed the makeup of traits in the elephant population in only two decades, leaving behind more tuskless individuals, say evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton of Princeton University and colleagues. The tuskless trait is heritable, and the evolutionary change in the population may stick around for several generations at least, even as poaching eases.

The team also analyzed the genetic instruction books of 18 tusked and tuskless females, zeroing in on two genes rife with mutations in tuskless females. In humans, the disruption of one of those genes can cause tooth brittleness and the absence of a pair of upper incisors that are the “anatomical equivalent of tusks,” Campbell-Staton says. Abnormalities in the other gene’s protein product can cause malformations of the tooth root and tooth loss. 

Poaching “changing the course of evolution” in Gorongosa’s elephants, Campbell-Staton says, can have reverberating effects through the ecosystem given elephants’ dramatic impact on their surroundings. 

“[Tusks are] not just ornamental. They serve a purpose,” he says, detailing how elephants use tusks to dig for water and strip tree bark for food. “If an elephant doesn’t have the tool to do those things, then what happens?”

in Science News on 2021-10-21 19:01:16 UTC.

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Some dinosaurs may have lived in herds as early as 193 million years ago

A treasure trove of fossilized eggs, nests and skeletons represents the earliest evidence yet of dinosaurs traveling in herds, a study finds.

The newly unearthed egg clutches were found alongside the skeletal remains of dozens of newborn, juvenile and adult dinosaurs, suggesting the creatures stayed together throughout their lives. At about 193 million years old, the finds displace the previous oldest evidence of herd behavior in dinosaurs by at least 40 million years, researchers report October 21 in Scientific Reports.

In southern Argentina, paleontologist Diego Pol of the Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio in Trelew, Argentina, and colleagues found 80 individuals and over 100 eggs, all of the early sauropod ancestor Mussaurus patagonicus. Nests consisted of eight to 30 eggs, and analyses of five nests revealed that in each, the eggs were arranged in two or three layers within shallow trenches. Analyses of some skeletons revealed a diverse array of ages: At least 11 were hatchlings less than a year old, two were adults and nine were juveniles.

Fossils of the first known dinosaurs, including sauropodomorphs — relatively diminutive ancestors of long-necked behemoth sauropods such as Dreadnoughtus schrani — date to around 245 million years ago (SN: 9/4/14). By the end of the Triassic Period, about 201 million years ago, sauropodomorphs, including Mussaurus, had become among the most abundant plant eaters on land. Mussaurus roamed in what’s now Patagonia’s deserts (SN: 5/20/19). The dinosaurs built the newly unearthed nests when the area was semi-arid, near a lake that may have periodically flooded and evaporated. A sudden flood may explain the dinosaurs’ demise.

Mind-bogglingly massive sauropods didn’t arise until the Jurassic Period, which followed the Triassic. But fossils of Triassic sauropodomorphs like Mussaurus were already showing evidence of a growth spurt. The increased energy demands of larger bodies, the researchers suggest, may have required these creatures to coordinate their efforts, forming herds to forage across long distances.

in Science News on 2021-10-21 15:00:00 UTC.

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Supportive Male Allies Can Make Male-Dominated Workplaces Less Hostile For Women

By Emily Reynolds

Despite much work to counter unequal workforces in science, technology, engineering and maths, stereotypes about who will succeed in science still abound — and some research suggests that these biases can actively put people off certain careers or fields. Other papers find that the competitive nature of STEM courses and roles can be particularly damaging, leading to low feelings of belonging and subsequent low retention rates for minority groups.

A new paper looks at the role of men in countering hostile environments — in particular, how men can signal their support and respect for women colleagues. Over three studies, the University of Kansas team found that supportive male allies helped reduce feelings of isolation and hostility for their women colleagues, potentially offering a new way to combat inequality in STEM.

In the first study, 241 White women were told to imagine they had recently received a job offer at a chemistry company. Participants were randomly assigned to four conditions: in each, they saw a slideshow of their future co-workers. In two conditions all co-workers were male, while in the other they were gender-balanced. Within those groups, some participants were also assigned to the “ally condition”, in which one of the male co-workers expressed support for gender equality, while in the “no-ally condition”, none of the men mentioned gender equality. After viewing this slideshow, participants indicated how much they felt they would be isolated at the new company and how much they felt their co-workers would support and empower them. 

Women without allies in workplaces with unequal gender compositions anticipated feeling significantly more isolation, though for those in gender-balanced contexts the presence of an ally didn’t make a difference to anticipated isolation. Participants in the all-men workforce with no ally also anticipated significantly less support from co-workers compared to those who had either been exposed to an ally or those in a more gender-balanced workforce. Having an ally in an unbalanced workforce, therefore, was as powerful at reducing feelings of isolation as having a gender-balanced group of colleagues.

The second study looked at the impact of allyship specifically on women of colour, with Black and White women participants recruited to take part. The procedure from the first study was employed again — only this time, the randomly assigned allies were either Black or White men, and all participants saw workforces in which women were underrepresented. After viewing the slideshow, participants completed the same measures as before, as well as indicating how much they anticipated hostility in the workplace and how much respect and equality they expected to encounter.

Those who were assigned an ally indicated that they expected to receive more respect and support in the workforce, would be less isolated, and would experience less hostility. There was no difference in results between Black and White women and the race of the male ally was also non-significant, suggesting that allies of all races can have an impact on women’s feelings of safety and inclusion at work. However, all workforces had 50/50 representation in terms of race; this could have mitigated any potential effects of the race of allies.

In a third and final study, participants saw allies who were either men or women. As well as completing the previous measures, participants also indicated how much they felt gender equality was the norm in the new workplace and how much they expected to fit in with their colleagues. Participants with either a male and female ally had significantly higher expectations of respect than those without. Interestingly, however, male allies outflanked female allies in other areas — participants expected gender equality to be the norm when a male ally was present but not a female ally, were more likely to feel they fit in and feel less isolated, and believed they would receive more support. They were also more likely to feel the workplace was not going to be hostile.

Though the results do seem to offer some hope — and a potential strategy for tackling unbalanced and stereotypically “male” environments — there are some limitations to the work. Firstly, the study only gave insights into women’s anticipated responses to allies, rather than looking at how it can help women when they are already in a workplace. Furthermore, looking at how allyship affects women in actually hostile environments versus generally gender equal ones could provide more detail on its impact (and its limits). The team also points to sincerity as a potentially mitigating factor — what happens to this gendered effect when men say they are dedicated to gender equality but don’t follow through, or if they exhibit other forms of hostility related to race, class or sexuality?

Despite limitations and lingering questions, however, the study does offer some tangible action that men could (and should) be taking in the workplace. Though such a strategy is obviously unlikely to completely reduce gender inequality, creating supportive, respectful and just working environments could go some way to make STEM a more equal place to be.

– Male Allies at Work: Gender-Equality Supportive Men Reduce Negative Underrepresentation Effects Among Women

Emily Reynolds is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

in The British Psychological Society - Research Digest on 2021-10-21 10:23:00 UTC.

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Scientist blames grad student for gibberish book chapter — a charge she calls ‘crazy’

in Retraction watch on 2021-10-21 10:01:00 UTC.

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When ‘out of print’ really means ‘retracted’

in Retraction watch on 2021-10-21 04:00:00 UTC.

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Maps of a Growing Brain Show That Genes Do Less Than We Thought

in The Spike on 2021-10-20 15:34:45 UTC.

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Scientists found modern domestic horses’ homeland in southwestern Russia

Much of human history was made astride, or beside, a horse. The animal’s stolid speed and strength powered massive migrations of people, pulled plows that transformed agriculture and revolutionized warfare. Now, researchers have pinpointed where and when horse and human history became intertwined.

Ancient DNA reveals that the modern domestic horse originated on the vast landscape of what is now southwestern Russia more than 4,200 years ago, researchers report October 20 in Nature. In just a few centuries, these horses’ descendants spread quickly across Eurasia, supplanting almost all previous wild horse populations. 

Hypotheses abounded for where modern horses were domesticated, ranging from Iberia to modern-day Kazakhstan (SN: 2/22/18), says Ludovic Orlando, ​​a molecular archeologist at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France. “It’s been debated and debated and debated,” he says, “but there was nothing like a smoking gun.” 

Orlando and colleagues analyzed ancient DNA from 273 horse bone specimens from across the continents, spanning 50,000 years of human and equine history. For most of that time, genetically varied wild horse populations were scattered across Eurasia. But starting around 2000 B.C., that variation vanished. By 1500–1000 B.C., domestic horses from Spain to Mongolia all descended from the same population, which the researchers traced back to more than 4,200-year-old specimens dug up on the Pontic-Caspian steppe, north of the Caucasus region and the Caspian Sea. 

Two genes were distinctly different in these modern horse progenitors and may have aided this rapid expansion, the researchers found. In studies of humans and mice, those genes influence endurance, weight-bearing ability and docility. Selective breeding by humans could have “recombined two really good factors not [previously] present in any horse,” Orlando says. “That created an animal that was both easier to interact and move with.”

Humans may have tamed horses before, but it wasn’t until this point that our relationship with horses really took off, he says. “This is the moment in history horses made history.” 

in Science News on 2021-10-20 15:00:00 UTC.

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Vikings lived in North America by at least the year 1021

Vikings inhabited North America exactly 1,000 years ago, a new study finds.

Counting tree rings reveals that wooden objects previously found at an archaeological site on Newfoundland’s northern peninsula were made from trees felled in the year 1021. That’s the oldest precise date for Europeans in the Americas and the only one from before Christopher Columbus’ voyages in 1492, geoscientists Margot Kuitems and Michael Dee and colleagues report October 20 in Nature.

Researchers have assumed that Norse Vikings built and lived at the site, called L’Anse aux Meadows, roughly 1,000 years ago. But earlier attempts to more precisely date the settlement, which included three dwellings and other structures made of timber and turf and is now a UNESCO historic site, were inconclusive. Evidence of a possible second Viking settlement in Newfoundland from around 1,000 years ago remains preliminary (SN: 4/1/16).

The new study focused on four wooden objects found at L’Anse aux Meadows, which was first excavated in the 1960s. It’s not clear how the objects were used, but each had been cut with metal tools. On three of the finds, Kuitems and Dee, both of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and their team identified an annual tree growth ring that displayed a signature spike in radiocarbon levels. Other researchers have dated that spike to the year 993, when a surge of cosmic rays from solar activity bombarded Earth and increased the planet’s atmospheric levels of radioactive carbon.

Counting growth rings out to the edge of each wooden object starting at the year 993 ring yielded the same age — 1021.

Despite its precision, that date leaves unanswered when Vikings first set foot in the Americas. L’Anse aux Meadows might have been part of Vinland, a region in what’s now eastern Canada that is described in 13th century Icelandic texts as having been settled by Vikings.

in Science News on 2021-10-20 15:00:00 UTC.

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Save the date October 27! Building Structural Equity in Open Access

In celebration of International Open Access Week, arXiv will host a free panel discussion, Thirty Years of Open Access: Challenges and Opportunities for Building Structural Equity. This hybrid virtual and in-person event will feature open access leaders from arXiv, AfricArXiv, and UCLA. We’ll discuss how this movement has grown and evolved — and look ahead at the next 30 years to ask: what opportunities can we seize to ensure that the open access movement continues to equalize and democratize access to research? What challenges must we overcome to truly serve all researchers around the world?

Panelists:

• Eleonora Presani, arXiv Executive Director
• Alison Scott, Associate University Librarian for Collections Management and Scholarly Communication at UCLA and arXiv Advisory Board Member
• Johanssen Obanda, Strategic Advisor at AfricArXiv
• Joy Owango, Executive Director of the Training Centre in Communication  & Member of the Board of Advisors at AfricArXiv

This event is open to all. Click here on October 27, 2021 at 12:00 EDT / 16:00 UTC to join the virtual event, or attend the event in person at Olin Library, 106G 161 Ho Plaza, Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, USA.

Giving Week

Who keeps arXiv open? The community! arXiv’s live panel discussion is part of arXiv’s Giving Week, October 25-31, our biannual fundraising drive. Voluntary contributions from foundations, members, organizations, and individuals comprise more than 85% of arXiv’s budget, and we are grateful for each and every donation we receive. Please consider donating today to arXiv to show your support for open access, open science, and the arXiv community.

More International Open Access Week Events at Cornell

• Monday, October 25, 11:30am – 12:30pm: Making Sense of Emerging Open Access Models and Agreements

• Wednesday, October 27, 12:00pm – 1:00pm: Thirty Years of Open Access: Challenges and Opportunities for Building Structural Equity

• Thursday, October 28, 10:30am – 12:00pm: Open Scholarship: Open Access, Open Science, Open Data 

• Friday, October 29, 11:30am – 12:30pm: Knowledge is Power: Open Access, Equity, and Cornell’s Land Grant Mission

More information about these events, including room (with snacks!) and  Zoom details, can be found on Cornell’s Open Access Week Lib Guide.

International Open Access Week is a global, community-driven week of action to open up access to research. The event is celebrated by individuals, institutions, and organizations across the world. Check out #OAWeek on Twitter for more events and information.

in arXiv.org blog on 2021-10-20 14:24:30 UTC.

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Here’s the physics of why ducklings swim in a row behind their mother

There’s physics to having your ducklings in a row.

By paddling in an orderly line behind their mother, baby ducks can take a ride on the waves in her wake. That boost saves the ducklings energy, researchers report in the Dec. 10 issue of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

Earlier measurements of duckling metabolism showed that the youngsters saved energy when swimming behind a leader, but the physics behind that savings wasn’t known. Using computer simulations of waterfowl waves, naval architect Zhiming Yuan of the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, and colleagues calculated that a duckling cruising in just the right spot behind its mother gets an assist.

When a duckling swims on its own, it kicks up waves in its wake, using up some energy that would otherwise send it surging ahead. That wave drag resists the duckling’s motion. But ducklings in the sweet spot experience 158 percent less wave drag than when swimming alone, the researchers calculated, meaning the duckling gets a push instead.

Like good siblings, the ducklings share with one another. Each duckling in the line passes along waves to those behind, so the whole brood gets a free ride.

But to reap the benefits, the youngsters need to keep up with their mom. If they fall out of position, swimming gets harder.  That’s fair punishment for ducklings that dawdle.

in Science News on 2021-10-20 11:00:00 UTC.

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“Drinking To Cope” Doesn’t Work, Even When We Believe That It Does

By Emma Young

Have you ever felt a little anxious or low, and decided that a beer or a glass of wine would help? If so, you’re hardly alone. This exact thought process must play across the country every night of the week. There’s been surprisingly little solid research, though, into whether alcohol does actually relieve these negative feelings. Now new work led by Andrea M Wycoff at the University of Missouri-Columbia, US, concludes that in fact, it does not — and that people who “drink to cope” can even make their symptoms worse.

The study involved 110 participants; 58 were from the general community and 52 had a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder. People with BPD are known to be more prone to drinking problems, and to experience more variable emotions; they are even more likely than the rest of us, then, to view alcohol as a way to manage negative emotions. Some of the BPD participants had in fact been diagnosed with Alcohol Use Disorder. The team chose to include this group to try to capture as much variability in emotional states and proneness to problem drinking as possible in their study.

After completing various questionnaires in the lab, each participant was given an electronic diary. Every day for the next three weeks, they received regular prompts to report on any alcohol consumption, and also to rate levels of various negative feelings, such as being jittery, nervous, downhearted and lonely.

Whenever a participant reported having had an alcoholic drink, they were asked to rate the extent to which whether they’d done this to make them “feel less guilty or depressed” or “feel more relaxed and calm”. At various points over the following three hours, they then rated the extent to which they felt the drink had “relieved unpleasant feelings or symptoms”, and also provided updated ratings of their levels of those various negative feelings.

The team found some clear links between the various self-reports. When a participant had indicated that they were drinking to cope with anxiety or to cope with both anxiety and depression, they were more likely afterwards to report feeling that those unpleasant feelings had been relieved. This seemed to support the concept of drinking to cope, and, indeed, it led the researchers to expect that, for these people, their levels levels of various anxiety and/or depression-related feelings would drop after a drink.

But in fact the team did not find this pattern. Alcohol had no impact on anxiety scores. And when a participant reported that they were drinking to cope with depression, their depression-related feelings actually increased afterwards. For those participants diagnosed with Alcohol Use Disorder, the increases were even more striking.

What might explain the discrepancy between the participants’ belief that the alcohol had helped on the one hand, and their own contradictory self-report score data, on the other? The researchers suggest that if someone expects alcohol to help, this could encourage them to believe that it has — even if their actual feelings have not changed, or even worsened.

People who “drink to cope” are more likely to develop problem drinking. And yet these new findings suggest that the very concept of drinking to cope is a fallacy — at least, in relation to the anxiety and depression-related measures used in this work. 

The team concedes various limitations to the study, mostly to do with factors affecting generalisability. The over-representation of women among the participants (as well as the fact that a large proportion were diagnosed with BPD) certainly means that the results are not necessarily applicable to the general population. However, with regard to gender, earlier research suggests that men are more prone to report drinking to cope, and to have alcohol problems. So if more men had been included, it’s possible that the links would have been even stronger, which the researchers say future research should explore.

For now, though, if the idea that alcohol helps to relieve feelings of anxiety and depression is mistaken, then helping people to appreciate this might also help them turn to other strategies known to help, and not to harm — such as physical exercise. 

– Real-time reports of drinking to cope: Associations with subjective relief from alcohol and changes in negative affect.

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

in The British Psychological Society - Research Digest on 2021-10-20 10:00:00 UTC.

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Publisher investigating paper a lucrative scale is based on following Retraction Watch reporting

in Retraction watch on 2021-10-20 10:00:00 UTC.

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Cell Death and Depravity

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Here’s what we know about booster shots for Moderna’s and J&J’s COVID-19 vaccines

Millions of people who got Moderna’s or Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccines will soon be lining up for another dose. 

On October 20, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized a third dose of Moderna’s mRNA vaccine for select groups. The groups include people age 65 and older as well as 18- to 64-year-olds who have underlying conditions that put them at higher risk for severe disease, or who live or work in conditions that put them at high risk of exposure or complications from falling ill. The agency also authorized a second dose of the J&J one-shot vaccine for everyone who got that jab. And FDA said the additional shots could come from any of the authorized or approved vaccines in a mix-and-match strategy.

On October 21, an advisory panel for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also gave the thumbs up for boosters for people in those groups. Soon after, CDC director Rochelle Walensky gave the official OK,  paving the way for Moderna and J&J shot recipients to join the millions more who received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine and became eligible for boosters in September (SN: 9/21/21).

These shots may be especially important for older people whose immune systems have weakened with age, and for those with medical conditions that put them at higher risk of serious complications of the disease. While the vaccines greatly reduce the chance of being hospitalized and dying, there are some chinks in the armor that still leave millions of such people vulnerable to the disease. Fully vaccinated people can get COVID-19 and die from it, though at much lower rates than unvaccinated people. 

Colin Powell, a former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state, died October 18 of complications of COVID-19 even though he was fully vaccinated, his family said in a statement posted on Facebook. Powell, 84, had multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that erodes immune defenses against infections. Booster shots may help rev up the immune systems of such vulnerable people, perhaps providing enough protection to stave off the disease’s worst complications. 

Even for healthy people, the vaccines’ effectiveness appears to be dipping. For instance, people in a clinical trial who got Moderna’s vaccine from August through December 2020 had a 36 percent to 40 percent higher chance of a breakthrough infection than those vaccinated in January through April this year, Jacqueline Miller, therapeutic area head for infectious diseases at Moderna, said at a meeting of the FDA advisory panel considering Moderna’s booster. That panel endorsed both the Moderna and J&J booster during meetings held October 14 and 15. 

Still, experts emphasize that getting shots to unvaccinated people, not boosters to the vaccinated, will make the biggest difference in controlling the pandemic. “People who are in the ICU aren’t there because they haven’t gotten a third dose; they haven’t gotten any dose,” Paul Offit, director of vaccine education at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said at the October 14 advisory panel meeting. What’s more, he added, it may not be reasonable to expect the vaccines to prevent infections and mild illnesses. “That is a high bar to which we hold no other vaccines.”

Here are answers to five common questions about booster shots. 

Is Moderna’s jab really becoming less effective over time? 

Like the Pfizer vaccine, Moderna’s mRNA vaccine is holding strong against hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19. 

Preventing such severe complications of COVID-19 is the vaccines’s most important role, Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said at the October 14 meeting. But when evaluating the value of a booster shot, officials should also take into account complications such as blood clots or long COVID that might result from mild to moderate disease, he said.

Moderna’s shot was still 95.8 percent effective at preventing hospitalizations and 97.9 percent effective at preventing deaths, researchers reported September 4 in a preprint in the Lancet. But efficacy against any COVID symptoms was only about 88 percent, while its effectiveness against asymptomatic infection was 72.7 percent, the researchers found. That’s a decline from about 96 percent effectiveness against symptomatic disease and around 90 percent effectiveness against asymptomatic infections among health care workers vaccinated from December 28, 2020, through May 19, 2021, researchers reported September 22 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Concerns about waning immunity prompted the FDA panel to give the thumbs-up for vulnerable groups to get a third dose of the vaccine.

In an earlier study, it had appeared as if Pfizer’s vaccine effectiveness was slipping against the coronavirus, particularly the delta variant, while Moderna’s vaccine was maintaining its protection levels, researchers reported September 17 in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Some researchers speculate that the difference could stem from the Moderna vaccine having much higher doses — 100 micrograms of mRNA per dose compared with Pfizer’s 30 micrograms — that could produce higher levels of antibodies that would take longer to dip. 

But the result might also have been an artifact of geography, says David Dowdy, an infectious diseases epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. During the study period, delta was surging in the South where more people got the Pfizer vaccine than the Moderna vaccine. Moderna’s vaccine has been most widely used in the Midwest, where delta wasn’t as bad at the time of the study, he says. 

“People want to believe that the main driver of vaccine effectiveness is the immune response,” Dowdy says. “It certainly matters, but it’s also important how much you’re getting exposed to this virus.… The more exposure people see, the less effective these vaccines are going to appear to be.” 

Over time, naturally waning immunity and the rise of more infectious coronavirus variants along with social factors, such as relaxed masking and social distancing regulations, will also bite into the Moderna vaccine’s effectiveness, he says. “The same forces that are causing lower immunity over time for Pfizer are also acting on Moderna.”

The antibodies sparked by Moderna’s vaccine certainly wane in the eight months after the first dose, researchers reported October 15 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Those declining antibody levels hint that people may be becoming more susceptible to infection. But, so far, it’s still difficult to directly link antibody levels in the blood to how well people are protected against COVID-19. 

And antibodies aren’t the only tool our immune systems have to fight off disease. Immune cells called T cells, which can coordinate the immune response to an infection or kill off infected cells, appear to remain in the body at stable levels at least eight months after vaccination. So even if vaccinated people get infected, the immune system can quickly rally the troops and protect people from severe disease. 

What about Johnson & Johnson’s shot — is it becoming less effective? 

Clinical trial data suggest that the effectiveness of the J&J shot, made by the company’s pharmaceutical division Janssen, isn’t waning overall, company representatives said at the October 15 advisory panel meeting. Compared with the mRNA vaccines, antibody levels after a J&J shot increase over time rather than decrease, researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine study. What’s more, the amount of T cells remains steady over a period of eight months. 

While immune defenses prompted by the vaccine are steadfast, the coronavirus has found ways to evade protection from vaccine antibodies. When it was authorized in February, the J&J vaccine was about 85 percent effective at preventing hospitalizations, and about 66 percent effective at preventing moderate to severe disease (SN: 2/27/21). But the rise of viral variants has changed that. 

In countries where the delta variant is dominant, like the United States, the shot is still more than 70 percent effective at preventing COVID-19 symptoms. That number dips to around 50 percent in South America, where there are coronavirus variants that can evade parts of the immune system, including gamma, lambda and mu.   

What’s more, some real-world data hint that the shot might not be as effective as clinical trials suggest, the FDA’s Marks noted at the meeting. Starting about a month after a dose of the vaccine, the single shot was 68 percent effective at preventing hospitalization, researchers reported in the Sept. 17 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The study included adults who were hospitalized for COVID-19 at some point from March 11, 2021 through August 15, 2021. 

Crucially, regardless of whether or not immunity wanes over time, the protection that the one shot offers against severe disease or against milder infections is not equal to the mRNA vaccines, Cohn said. But a booster dose can help, which is why the FDA panel voted to make boosters available to everyone who got that shot. A second dose given two months after the first can boost protection to even higher levels, on par with Moderna’s and Pfizer’s mRNA jabs. In a U.S.-based clinical trial, the J&J booster dose had 94 percent efficacy at preventing COVID-19 symptoms. Global efficacy is lower, at 75 percent.  

“As far as I’m concerned, it was always going to be necessary for J&J recipients to get a second shot,” said James Hildreth, an immunologist and president and CEO of Meharry Medical College in Nashville. A single dose of the vaccine might be used in some situations, he said, such as to top up the immune responses of people who previously had COVID-19 (SN: 8/19/21).

Will the side effects after a booster dose be worse? 

In clinical trials, side effects of a Moderna booster were no worse than, and sometimes milder than, the effects seen after the second shot. Arm pain, some redness and swelling were worse for some participants, but those effects were short-lived. Most of the other side effects, including fever, chills, headaches and nausea were reported by fewer participants and were milder than after the second shot. Similarly, recipients of a second dose of J&J’s shot reported side effects on par with or milder than the reaction to the first shot.

There were no reports in the companies’ clinical trials of myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle, that is an uncommon, but potentially serious side effect of all three vaccines, particularly in young men (SN: 6/23/21). Such heart problems have been more prevalent with the mRNA vaccines. But the studies contain too few people to uncover rare side effects.

Some real-world data from Israel’s experience with the Pfizer booster suggests that the rate of myocarditis after a booster may be lower than after the second shot, said Sharon Alroy-Preis, Israel’s director of Public Health Services. A study of more than 5 million Israelis found that about 40 out of every million vaccinated males  develop myocarditis, especially after the second shot, researchers reported October 6 in the New England Journal of Medicine. But only 17 of the more than 2.5 million people ages 16 to 59 who got a booster developed myocarditis or pericarditis, inflammation of the sac surrounding the heart, Israeli officials said. 

The lower rate of the complication after a booster shot may be because the third dose came months after the first two, giving the immune system time to adjust and not overreact to another shot of vaccine, Alroy-Preis said.

Some studies found that the Moderna vaccine carried a slightly higher risk of the heart problems than Pfizer’s does. Other studies didn’t show discrepancies. In the United States, the highest rate reported for the inflammatory conditions was 39 cases per million doses of mRNA vaccine given to 18- to 24-year-old males, the CDC’s Kathleen Dooling said October 21 during a presentation at the advisory panel meeting.

Worries over the heart complications had prompted several members of the FDA advisory committee to withhold support for giving booster shots to people younger than 65. But others on that panel had pointed out that the risk of young people developing heart inflammation from COVID-19 are much greater than the risk of the vaccine causing the side effect. 

The J&J vaccine has other risks, including a blood clots accompanied by reduced platelet counts. That condition, called thrombosis with thrombocytopenia, happens most often in females ages 30 to 39, with about 10 cases for every million J&J doses given, Dooling said. As of October 13, 47 cases of the rare clotting disorder have occurred out of the 15.3 million doses given.  Of those 47 cases, five were fatal.

J&J’s vaccine also has a risk of a rare neurological disorder called Guillain Barré syndrome. Through July 24, 130 cases of the disorder have been reported after getting a J&J shot. The condition is most often seen in males ages 50 to 64. In that group, the condition was reported at a rate of 16 cases per million J&J doses.

Blood clots are also common among people with COVID-19, and Guillain Barré syndrome is a possible complication of the disease as well.

Should I stick with the same vaccine brand that I got before? 

The FDA gave the green light to allow people to get any of the three authorized vaccines as a booster. That decision gives health officials the flexibility to administer different shots, if necessary, the Washington Post reported October 19.

Some people are already getting boosters from a different manufacturer than the source of their original vaccination, says Julie Swann, a health systems and pandemic modeler at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “With Pfizer, you can go off-label since it is fully approved” by the FDA, she says. But vaccine providers probably need to wait for an official nod to mix and match with the Moderna and J&J vaccines, which are still under emergency use authorization.

Preliminary clinical trial data suggest that mixing and matching different vaccines is just as good, or better, than receiving the same vaccine for all doses. That trial, led by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is analyzing the immune responses of more than 450 vaccinated people who originally received either two doses of Pfizer’s or Moderna’s shot or one dose of J&J’s (SN: 6/11/21). The researchers divided the participants into one of nine groups. Some groups received another dose of the same jab — like, for example, a third dose of Pfizer’s vaccine. Other participants got a shot from a different developer — such as two doses of Pfizer’s vaccine followed by J&J’s.

Getting an additional dose of any kind boosted antibody levels across the board, researchers reported October 13 at medRxiv.org. When people received the same shot as before, antibodies that stop the virus from infecting cells increased compared to before the booster dose. But for some groups, a mixed regimen gave a bigger antibody boost than sticking with the original brand. That was particularly true for people who had originally received J&J’s shot, which triggers the body to produce fewer antibodies than mRNA vaccines. 

Those results mirror a recent mix-and-match trial of Pfizer’s vaccine with one from AstraZeneca, which is similar to the J&J shot. The AstraZeneca vaccine is used in many countries around the world, but is not authorized in the United States.  In that study, people who got an AstraZeneca jab made higher levels of antibodies if their follow-up dose came from Pfizer. Pfizer recipients made more antibodies when sticking with a second mRNA dose than from switching to AstraZeneca, researchers reported August 6 in Lancet. That study didn’t measure T cells or other types of immunity, though.

The results are promising, but there’s still lots to learn, Kirsten Lyke, a vaccinologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore who is involved with the NIAID study, said at the October 15 meeting. She and her colleagues plan to look at T cells, too, not just antibodies. What’s more, it’s possible that some combinations of the vaccines might spark immunity that lasts longer than others. For now, though, it’s impossible to say whether one regimen might be better than another. Lyke and her team are following participants for at least a year to find out.    

Some of the CDC advisory panel members said at the October 21 meeting that they would encourage people who got J&J’s jab to strongly consider getting an mRNA vaccine as their second shot. But people should be mindful of the risk of myocarditis for some people, panelists cautioned.

Are people going to need more booster shots in the future? 

No one knows. But that question was on the mind of many FDA panelists. 

Michael Kurilla, an immunologist at the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences in Bethesda, Md., noted that the rationale for mRNA boosters is that antibody levels in the blood are waning and over time vaccinated people become susceptible to infection. At the meeting, Kurilla wanted to know if there is any evidence to suggest that a booster dose might provide longer-lived protection than the first two doses.

That’s the “1-million-dollar question that I don’t have the answer to,” Israel’s Alroy-Preis responded.  

Alroy-Preis attended the October 14 meeting to provide an update on whether boosters for Pfizer’s mRNA jab were helping control the virus in Israel. Officials there began rolling out the shots to older people at the end of July and to all eligible age groups at the end of August. So far, booster shots are curbing severe cases of the disease, as well as infections, in all age groups shortly after the shot is administered, Alroy-Preis and colleagues reported in a preliminary study posted October 7 at medRxiv.org. 

It’s possible that the months between the original shots and the booster might help immunity last longer. But it’s still unknown when is the best time for people to receive each shot.

Data presented at the meeting from Moderna’s clinical trial, for instance, suggest that a third shot gives people with lower antibody levels a larger boost than people who still have lots of antibodies in their blood. Most people with fewer coronavirus-attacking antibodies had been vaccinated earlier, in 2020, a sign that it’s better to wait longer between doses. 

The shots also protect people from disease even when researchers can’t detect antibodies in the body, Kurilla said. That means other parts of the immune system, like T cells, are helping out. But it’s still far from clear whether mRNA vaccines will offer long-term immunity. And if they don’t, it could be either because protection from these types of vaccines simply isn’t long-lived or because people aren’t getting doses at the right time. 

For now, the question is what do we want the boosters to do, Kurilla noted. The jabs don’t appear to stop infection itself for very long, but are good against severe disease. “We can’t look at this as boost people every six months,” Kurilla said. Experts, however, seem to be more open to the idea of an annual shot, like for the flu.   

in Science News on 2021-10-19 15:54:53 UTC.

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Lancet retracts 10-year-old case report

in Retraction watch on 2021-10-19 11:00:00 UTC.

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An agile gecko found in India named after the legendary Jackie Chan

Martial arts legend Jackie Chan may not be aware of this yet but some of his biggest fans are a group of adoring herpetologists from India. These scientists have named a newly identified gecko species, the Jackie’s day gecko (Cnemaspis jackieii), after Chan.

This lizard is one of 12 new gecko species found in India that researchers describe September 23 in Zoological Research. All 12 species are endemic to the Western Ghats, a biodiversity-rich mountain range threatened by deforestation and changing land use (SN: 3/18/19).

Working at mid-elevation in the Western Ghats, the team noticed an extremely agile gecko. “Whenever we attempted to catch it, it would spring from one rock to the other, and crawl into the smallest of crevices to escape us,” says Saunak Pal of the Bombay Natural History Society in Mumbai. Immediately, it reminded the researchers of the nimble-footed Chan, spurring them to name it after the martial artist.

“Naming a species in this manner helps people connect with it especially when it is a less popular class of animals like reptiles,” says coauthor Zeeshan Mirza of the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore. Mirza has identified nearly 60 new faunal species to date, including the now world-famous snake Salazar’s pit viper (Trimeresurus salazar), named after Salazar Slytherin, a character in the Harry Potter series.

Unique skin patterns inspired names for some of the other newly described gecko species. The golden-crowned day gecko (C. regalis), or royal day gecko, earned its regal name from the golden-yellow head of the male of this species.

Another with body coloration that bears an uncanny resemblance to a galaxy of stars led the team to name it the galaxy day gecko (C. galaxia). The clouded forest gecko (C. nimbus) has a prominent cloudlike pattern on the upper side and flank of the male of the species.

Mirza hopes the catchy names will draw attention that “will help in conserving these species as well as the landscape.”

in Science News on 2021-10-19 10:00:00 UTC.

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If You Want To Enjoy Leisure Time, Don’t Think Of It As Wasteful

By Emily Reynolds

However you like to take time for yourself, from reading to hiking to playing video games, leisure time can be a vital way of relaxing, promoting good mental and physical health, boosting social relationships, and inducing happiness. But whether we fully experience those benefits, a new study suggests, may depend on the way we view leisure time itself.

The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, explores how the enjoyment of leisure time changes when or if we think of that time as ‘wasteful’. It not only finds that people who believe leisure time is unproductive find it less enjoyable, but also that these beliefs are associated with depression, anxiety, and stress.

For the first study, the team recruited 302 participants who had recently celebrated Halloween. These participants first indicated what they had done for the holiday, including going to a party, going to a bar, going to a haunted house, taking kids trick or treating, or something else. All of the events were either instrumental (a means to an end, such as taking children trick or treating to fulfill a parental responsibility) or terminal (something done for its own end or for pleasure).

Participants then indicated how much they had enjoyed these activities and how much they agreed with five statements assessing whether time spent on leisure activities is wasted or unproductive. And those who had engaged in terminal leisure activities (like going to a party) indicated overall that they were less likely to enjoy those activities if they believed that leisure is wasteful.

A second study replicated the first, only this time with more general activities (e.g. spending time with friends, watching TV, meditating); these participants also completed measures of happiness, depression, anxiety, and stress. Again, a belief that leisure is wasteful was associated with significantly reduced enjoyment of activities done for their own end, but not of activities done to fulfil a particular purpose. Those holding these negative beliefs also reported lower levels of happiness and higher levels of depression, anxiety and stress, suggesting that such beliefs may negatively impact wellbeing (though we can’t make any conclusions here about cause and effect).

In a third study, participants were put into one of four conditions, with all reading a mocked-up New York Times article. Depending on the condition, the article described leisure as wasteful, unproductive, or productive; those in the final condition read an unrelated article about coffee makers. Participants then watched a funny cat video, before rating how much they enjoyed the video and completing measures on positive and negative affect.

Reflecting results from the previous studies, those who were primed to believe leisure is wasteful and unproductive were less likely to enjoy watching the video than those who read that it was productive and those who were in the control condition. And while there were no significant effects on negative affect, positive affect was lower in the wasteful and unproductive conditions compared to the productive and control conditions. A final study replicated these findings.

Overall, the study suggests that viewing leisure as wasteful or unproductive can significantly impact not only our enjoyment of downtime but actively counteract the positive effects of such time on our wellbeing. Future research could also look at how beliefs about leisure time affect people’s behaviour. Do people who find leisure time less enjoyable engage in fewer recreational activities, or does it simply change the types of activity they pursue?

And while priming people to believe leisure is “productive” mitigated the negative emotional effects, more work could be done to explore interventions that are more oriented towards enjoyment. Leisure time, after all, should be a place to detach from goal setting, growth and other markers of productivity.

– Viewing leisure as wasteful undermines enjoyment

Emily Reynolds is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

in The British Psychological Society - Research Digest on 2021-10-19 09:10:00 UTC.

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Company fires employee, ends cash for citation scheme following Retraction Watch post

in Retraction watch on 2021-10-19 09:00:00 UTC.

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Caught in a SNARE

in For Better Science on 2021-10-19 05:45:13 UTC.

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COVID-19 testing in schools works. So why aren’t more doing it?

In August 2020, the school superintendent in Omaha, Neb., approached a microbiology lab at the local university’s medical center. School districts across the country were starting to design pilot programs for routine COVID-19 testing in the coming fall semester, and Omaha Public Schools wanted to join the trend.

The result? During Omaha’s pilot of frequent, asymptomatic testing, the rate of cases detected in the school testing program was six times as high as the case rate reported by traditional testing for symptomatic students only. The pilot program detected 70 cases per 1,000 students, compared with 12 per 1,000 in the official tally reported by the local public health department, researchers report September 22 in JAMA Network Open.

“Asymptomatic screening dramatically increases case detection among students and staff in the K through 12 setting,” says M. Jana Broadhurst, a microbiologist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center who led the team that designed and implemented pilot programs for the school district. In other words, regular testing of all students and staff will catch far more COVID-19 cases than simply testing those who demonstrate COVID-19 symptoms or have a known exposure to the virus. Catching those cases is crucial to nipping outbreaks in the bud and keeping kids in school and healthy.

But this fall, Omaha Public Schools does not have a COVID-19 testing program at all. Why? “The absence of public health guidance on how to utilize and act upon those test results,” Broadhurst says.

Omaha isn’t alone. Throughout the United States, numerous K–12 schools have struggled to implement routine COVID-19 testing, despite expansive funding from the federal government and a recent surge in cases, fueled by the delta variant (SN: 7/30/21). This surge has taken a huge toll on children, demonstrating for many experts the need for deploying testing as a safety measure (SN: 9/20/21). Many school districts have seen more cases among students — and more shut-down classrooms — in fall of 2021 than they did last fall, before vaccines were widely available.

But major hurdles to testing include a lack of clear guidance on how testing programs should work, obtaining tests, gaining consent from parents and communicating the value of testing to families and staff in increasingly polarized environments.

Putting testing to the test

In the last year, both real-world testing pilots like Omaha’s and simulations of different testing scenarios have shown that by routinely testing students and staff, school leaders can identify cases and quickly pull infected people out of the classroom, preventing widespread outbreaks.

“Testing has been widely used at institutions ranging from colleges and universities to the NBA,” says Alyssa Bilinski, a biostatistician at Brown University School of Public Health in Providence, R.I. Testing programs “find people who are currently infectious and isolate them so they don’t spread COVID-19 further.”

At the same time, Bilinski says, testing can provide school leaders with valuable insight into coronavirus transmission in the classroom — information that can inform decisions about increasing or pulling back on other safety measures (SN: 8/9/21).

“Routine testing really has the potential to greatly reduce within-school COVID-19 transmission, and in some cases, even completely eliminate it,” agrees Divya Vohra, an epidemiologist at Mathematica, a research organization with headquarters in Princeton, N.J., who studies testing pilot programs. “We think that it really is a very powerful tool when you layer it on top of all of the other mitigation strategies that schools are implementing, like masking and distancing.”

Some testing strategies can reduce in-school coronavirus transmission by 100 percent, Vohra and colleagues reported July 26 in a study posted on Mathematica’s website. Pool testing, a method in which samples from an entire classroom are combined and PCR-tested together, is particularly effective at cutting down on transmission when case numbers in the community around the school are high, the models of testing scenarios suggest. This testing method is highly accurate, because PCR tests identify coronavirus DNA in samples, and it provides results more quickly than if each student’s test was processed one by one.

“You’re more likely to catch an infection that an antigen test might miss,” Vohra says. Antigen tests detect proteins on the surface of the coronavirus; they provide results in just 15 minutes and are easy to administer in a school setting. While these tests are less accurate than PCR tests, they are almost as capable of reducing transmission when used once a week or more, especially when community transmission is lower, Vohra says. Testing is most effective when all students and staff are routinely swabbed, but programs may still identify cases when just a subset of the school population is included.

Start-up challenges

Despite the value of routine COVID-19 testing in schools, any school administrator aiming to test their students faces numerous challenges. Setting up such a program is “like taking the whole entire school on a field trip to somewhere that nobody’s ever been,” says Leah Perkinson, a lead coordinator of K–12 testing pilot programs run by New York City–based nonprofit Rockefeller Foundation.

The first test, she says, is the most difficult. To make that test happen, school leaders have numerous decisions to make. They have to determine which testing strategy to use — PCR or pooled PCR or antigen; nasal swabs or saliva tests — and then procure enough of those tests for hundreds of students and staff. They need to determine who will conduct the tests, when and where testing will occur, how to report test results and how to collect consent from students’ parents and guardians. And, crucially, school officials need to determine what will happen when a test result is positive: Who needs to quarantine and for how long?

Many of these decisions are, in essence, public health decisions — yet school leaders are not trained in public health. As a result, schools need “coordination and support coming from experts, particularly at the state and federal level” to set up routine testing, Vohra says.

Like numerous other aspects of the pandemic, coordination and support for school testing varies greatly across states. Some, including Utah, Delaware, Rhode Island and California, have taken advantage of funding from this past spring’s federal stimulus package to buy tests for their public school districts and provide guidelines on how those tests should be used. But in other places, state-level leaders have refused funding entirely, leaving school districts on their own.

At the federal level, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that schools set up regular COVID-19 testing but offers very limited guidance on specifics. Instead, the agency recommends that school leaders coordinate with their local public health departments.

To fill in the testing information gap for school leaders that lack state guidance, the National Institutes of Health, the Rockefeller Foundation and others have created detailed online resources that let school and public health leaders compare testing strategies and connect with test providers. Still, Perkinson says, these resources may be challenging for school administrators to find and use because the information is “not all in one centralized place.”

Quarantine queries

Another major challenge that routine school testing programs face, Vohra says, is determining what happens when a student or staff member tests positive. “If you’re identifying more cases, then that’s going to mean that more students are going to be isolating or quarantining,” she says.

Some schools have adjusted their quarantine policies to minimize the number of students missing out on in-person learning. Instead of quarantining an entire classroom, for example, a school may require only those students who sit within six feet of an infected student to quarantine. Policies may also differ for students who are and are not vaccinated. And there is no right answer when it comes to the best strategy, Vohra says.

To help local leaders understand different test and quarantine combinations, Vohra and colleagues built a dashboard based on the results from their modeling study. Users can plug in their testing goals, quarantine policies, community transmission rates and more; the tool offers comparisons of how well different testing strategies fare in reaching those goals.

Another strategy — one not included in the dashboard — is called “test to stay.” Instead of requiring quarantines for students who are exposed to the coronavirus, officials may require those students to get tested at a higher frequency, such as one test a day for a week. A study of secondary schools in the United Kingdom shows that schools where close-contact students were tested daily had similar success in identifying and isolating COVID-19 cases as schools where contacts were all required to isolate immediately. In other words, the “test-to-stay” strategy saved in-person school days while still catching cases, the researchers report September 14 in the Lancet.

In Utah, public schools are required by state law to conduct a “test-to-stay event” when they face an outbreak. In these events, schools host mass testing days; all students must test negative to continue attending classes. A pilot version of the program saved over 100,000 days of in-person instruction for about 60,000 students, according to a CDC report published in May 2021 (SN: 8/13/21).

This fall, the program has been implemented statewide but is facing new challenges, says Maggie Graul, an epidemiologist with Utah’s state public health department who manages the program.

The state defines a school outbreak as 2 percent of the student body in large schools or 30 students in small schools testing positive within two weeks — a slightly higher threshold than was used in the pilot program. Schools, public health departments and other local institutions that support “test-to-stay events” are often hesitant to set up mass testing until they hit that outbreak threshold, as they may face community pushback for testing before it is required, Graul says. As a result, she says, the school outbreaks “are actually larger, and we’re not able to contain them as well as last year” during the pilot program.

Opt in versus opt out

A routine school testing program is most effective when all students and staff participate. If testing is voluntary, the families who opt in are likely to be the same families who also follow other COVID-19 precautions, such as wearing masks in public spaces. But schools that institute these programs have struggled with everything from collecting easy-to-misplace consent forms from students to gaining consent in the first place from some parents.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s pilot programs found that, even when families and school staff expressed support for testing in the abstract, it was much harder to get people onboard for a specific testing regimen. For instance, staff opt-in rates at the foundation’s six pilot sites ranged from 25 percent in Tulsa, Okla., to 100 percent in Los Angeles.

To increase the share of students who get tested, some schools use an opt-out strategy. Rather than students needing a consent form to get tested, they’re automatically enrolled in testing and need a permission form to get out of the program. Baltimore has used this strategy, Perkinson says. New York City also piloted an opt-out strategy in the 2020–2021 school year, requiring all students who attended class in-person to participate in weekly random testing — essentially a participation rate of 100 percent. In fall 2021, however, testing has become opt-in instead of opt-out. Fewer than a quarter of students had opted in as of October 6.

In parts of the country where COVID-19 safety measures in schools have become intensely political, convincing people to opt in can be challenging. Fall 2021 has seen numerous parent protests over these measures — ranging from angry crowds at school PTA meetings to individual families pulling their children out of public schools.

Routine testing programs have not faced the same degree of scrutiny as mask mandates or vaccination requirements. But “testing has been politicized as much as every other aspect of the response to this pandemic,” Broadhurst says. Some of Rockefeller’s pilot programs faced some “families and community members who didn’t really see the value of testing and didn’t really think that schools should be in the business of testing,” Vohra says.

It’s not just politics, either. “Testing can’t happen in a vacuum,” Broadhurst says. If a student tests positive, not only is this student out of school for two weeks, but also a whole family may be out of work in order to quarantine and care for that child, losing crucial income. This creates tension between public health measures and economic security, Broadhurst says. Integrating testing programs with other services —such as free meals and a space to isolate — for socioeconomically vulnerable families may help them agree to participate in testing programs.

Keeping an eye on the goal

Despite the many challenges of routine testing, school leaders and researchers who work on K–12 COVID-19 testing programs are optimistic about this strategy’s potential in the current school year and beyond.

“This is public health; it is not public perfect,” Perkinson says. If a school is not able to meet an ideal testing benchmark for lowering transmission, every individual test is still a win, she says. Every positive result may identify a case before it turns into an outbreak.

in Science News on 2021-10-18 15:00:00 UTC.

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What a difference a data repository makes: Six ways depositing data maximizes the impact of your science

Data is key to verification, replication, reuse, and enhanced understanding of research conclusions. When your data is in a repository—instead of an old hard drive, say, or even a Supporting Information file—its impact and its relevance are magnified. Here are six ways that putting your data in a public repository can help your research go further.

1. You can’t lose data that’s in a public data repository

Have you ever lost track of a dataset? Maybe you’ve upgraded your computer or moved to a new institution. Maybe you deleted a file by mistake, or simply can’t remember the name of the file you’re looking for. No matter the cause, lost data can be embarrassing and time consuming. You’re unable to supply requested information to journals during the submission process or to readers after publication. Future meta analyses or systematic reviews are impossible. And you may end up redoing experiments in order to move forward with your line of inquiry. With data securely deposited in a repository with a unique DOI for tracking, archival standards to prevent loss, and metadata and readme materials to make sure your data is used correctly, fulfilling journal requests or revisiting past work is easy.

2. Public data repositories support understanding, reanalysis and reuse

Transparently posting raw data to a public repository supports trustworthy, reproducible scientific research. Insight into the data and analysis gives readers a deeper understanding of published research articles. Offering the opportunity for others to interpret results demonstrates integrity and opens new avenues for discussion and collaboration. Machine-readable data formatting allows the work to be incorporated into future systematic reviews or meta analyses, expanding its usefulness.

3. Public data repositories facilitate discovery

Even the best data can’t be used unless it can be found. Detailed metadata, database indexing, and bidirectional linking to and from related articles helps to make data in public repositories easily searchable—so that it reaches the readers who need it most, maximizing the impact and influence of the study as a whole.

4. Public data repositories reflect the true value of data

Data shouldn’t be treated like an ancillary bi-product of a research article. Data is research. And researchers deserve academic credit for collecting, capturing and curating the data they generate through their work. Public repositories help to illustrate the true importance and lasting relevance of datasets by assigning them their own unique DOI, distinct from that of related research articles—so that datasets can accumulate citations in their own right.

5. Public data demonstrates rigor

There’s no better way to illustrate the rigor of your results than explaining exactly how you achieved them. Sharing data lets you demonstrate your credibility and inspires confidence in readers by contextualizing results and facilitating reproducibility.

6. Research with data in public data repositories attracts more citations

A 2020 study of more than 500,000 published research articles found articles that link to data in a public repository have a 25% higher citation rate on average than articles where data is available on request or as Supporting Information. The precise reasons for the association remain unclear. Are researchers who deposit carefully curated data in a repository also more likely to produce rigorous, citation-worthy research? Are researchers with the time and resources to devote to data curation and deposition more established in their careers, and therefore more highly cited? Are readers more likely to cite research when they trust that they can verify the conclusions with data? Perhaps some combination? 

The post What a difference a data repository makes: Six ways depositing data maximizes the impact of your science appeared first on The Official PLOS Blog.

in The Official PLOS Blog on 2021-10-18 14:26:42 UTC.

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An atomic clock measured how general relativity warps time across a millimeter

A millimeter might not seem like much. But even a distance that small can alter the flow of time.

According to Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity, clocks tick faster the farther they are from Earth or another massive object (SN: 10/4/15). Theoretically, that should hold true even for very small differences in the heights of clocks. Now an incredibly sensitive atomic clock has spotted that speedup across a millimeter-sized sample of atoms, revealing the effect over a smaller height difference than ever before. Time moved slightly faster at the top of that sample than at the bottom, researchers report September 24 at arXiv.org.

“This is fantastic,” says theoretical physicist Marianna Safronova of the University of Delaware in Newark, who was not involved with the research. “I thought it would take much longer to get to this point.” The extreme precision of the atomic clock’s measurement suggests the potential to use the sensitive timepieces to test other fundamental concepts in physics.

An inherent property of atoms allows scientists to use them as timepieces.  Atoms exist at different energy levels, and a specific frequency of light makes them jump from one level to another. That frequency — the rate of wiggling of the light’s waves — serves the same purpose as a clock’s regularly ticking second hand. For atoms farther from the ground, time runs faster, so a greater frequency of light will be needed to make the energy jump. Previously, scientists have measured this frequency shift, known as gravitational redshift, across a height difference of 33 centimeters (SN: 9/23/10).

In the new study, physicist Jun Ye of JILA in Boulder, Colo., and colleagues used a clock made up of roughly 100,000 ultracold strontium atoms. Those atoms were arranged in a lattice, meaning that the atoms sat at a series of different heights as if standing on the rungs of a ladder. Mapping out how the frequency changed over those heights revealed a shift. After correcting for non-gravitational effects that could shift the frequency, the clock’s frequency changed by about a hundredth of a quadrillionth of a percent over a millimeter, just the amount expected according to general relativity.

What’s more, after taking data for about 90 hours, comparing the ticking of upper and lower sections of the clock, the scientists determined their technique could measure the relative ticking rates to a precision of 0.76 millionths of a trillionth of a percent. That makes it a record for the most precise frequency comparison ever performed.

In a related study, also submitted September 24 to arXiv.org, another team of researchers loaded strontium atoms into specific portions of a lattice to create six clocks in one. “It’s very exciting what they did, as well,” Safronova says.

Shimon Kolkowitz of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and colleagues measured the relative ticking rates of two of the clocks, separated by about six millimeters, to a precision of 8.9 millionths of a trillionth of a percent, which itself would have been a new record had it not been beat by Ye’s group. With that sensitivity, scientists could detect a difference between two clocks ticking at a rate so slightly different that they’d disagree by just one second after about 300 billion years. Ye’s clock could detect an even smaller discrepancy between the two halves of the clock of one second amassed over roughly 4 trillion years. Although Kolkowitz’s team didn’t yet measure gravitational redshift, the setup could be used for that in the future.

Authors of both studies declined to comment, as the papers have not yet been through the peer-review process.

The measurements’ precision hints at future possibilities, says theoretical physicist Victor Flambaum of the University of New South Wales in Sydney. For example, “atomic clocks are now so precise that they may be used to search for dark matter,” he says. This stealthy, unidentified substance lurks invisibly in the cosmos; certain hypothesized types of dark matter could alter clocks’ tick-tocks. Scientists could also compare atomic clocks made of different isotopes — atoms with varied numbers of neutrons in their nuclei — which might hint at undiscovered new particles. And atomic clocks can study whether fundamental constants of nature might vary (SN: 11/2/16).

The ability to precisely compare different clocks is also important for a major goal of timekeeping: updating the definition of a second (SN: 3/24/21). The length of a second is currently defined using an earlier generation of atomic clocks that are not as precise as newer ones like those used in the two new studies (SN: 5/20/19).

“There is a very bright future for the clocks,” Safronova says.

in Science News on 2021-10-18 11:00:00 UTC.

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Next Open NeuroFedora meeting: 25 October 1300 UTC

Photo by William White on Unsplash.

Please join us at the next regular Open NeuroFedora team meeting on Monday 25 October at 1300UTC in #fedora-neuro on IRC (Libera.chat). The meeting is a public meeting, and open for everyone to attend. You can join us over:

• Matrix
• 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 2021-10-25'

The meeting will be chaired by @shaneallcroft. 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 35/36.
• Neuroscience query of the week
• Next meeting day, and chair.
• Open floor.

We hope to see you there!

in NeuroFedora blog on 2021-10-18 10:28:43 UTC.

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Another journal distances itself from cash for citations after Retraction Watch report

in Retraction watch on 2021-10-18 10:00:00 UTC.

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The “Maybe Favour”: We More Readily Commit To Helping A Stranger If We Might Not Have To Follow Through

By Emma Young

Imagine that a neighbour asks for a favour — to help move some garden furniture at the weekend, say. Now imagine that, instead, they explain that they’d lined up a friend to help, but that friend has become ill, and you’ll only be required if they’re not better in time.

Rather than a firm favour, this second scenario involves what the authors of a new paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied dub a “maybe favour”. And, Michael K. Zurn at the University of Cologne and colleagues report, we are more likely to agree to grant these favours than ones that we know for sure we’ll have to come good on. This might not be surprising in itself — but the team goes on to show that exploiting the “maybe favour” effect could have big implications for society.

In a preliminary study, 113 students were presented with various vignettes describing requests for help in moving furniture, either from a close friend or a stranger. The amount of helping time required varied from 10 minutes to an hour, and the likelihood that the participant would actually have to help — in the case of the original helper still being sick — was estimated at 99%, 50%, 10% or 1%. Unsurprisingly, the participants were more likely say they’d help a friend than a stranger. But offers of help to a stranger became more likely when the chance of being needed was low vs high – when, in other words, a “maybe favour” was requested.

For close friends, the team in fact found the opposite pattern. They suspect that if a close friend says that they might need help, this signals that their need isn’t really very high. But the participants’ greater willingness to grant a “maybe favour” to a stranger suggests that just showing this willingness brings the benefits that come from granting a favour, while reducing the expected costs. These benefits could involve simply feeling good about agreeing to help someone else out.

Of course, for every 100 granted and delivered “firm favours”, 100 “maybe favours” will not result in the same total number of good deeds. But, the team reasoned, if we are much more likely to agree to maybe favours than firm favours, this could result in more good deeds overall. So they explored this next.

In two studies on a total of more than 1,000 US residents, participants were offered a 20 cent payment for taking part. After they had read a description of the non-profit environmental organisation The Conservation Fund, half were asked if they wanted to donate their payment to this charity (granting the equivalent of a firm favour). The rest were asked if they wanted to donate their payment, but with the promise that 5% of these donations would be cancelled, and no donation would actually be made. This was the “maybe favour”.

In the first study, 31% of those in the definite-donation group donated their payment, while 47% of those in the maybe group did. Even though 5% of the donations from people in this second group were cancelled, this meant that the team donated a total of US$29.96 from them, but only US $20.60 from the definite-donation group. In a replication of this study, the percentages who agreed to donate were similar, though not quite as different, at 38% and 47%. Though the effect size was smaller this time, the absolute donations from the “maybe” group were still higher ($17.30 vs $15.80).

In further studies that also involved requests for small donations to charity, the team found that whether someone made a definite donation or a maybe-donation — or made a maybe-donation but learned that their donation had been cancelled — they got the same “feel good” feelings as a result. Importantly, then, adding a “maybe” to the donation didn’t affect the subjective benefits of granting it.

It’s worth highlighting one other statistic from the pooled study results: though only 5% of maybe-donators didn’t actually give away the money, donation rates on average were 18% higher for this group. This might also reflect a known cognitive bias: that we tend to overweight small probabilities (and underweight high probabilities). So, though the probability of having the donation revoked was small, it had an over-sized impact on decision-making.  

Overall, “our findings show that with a simple ‘maybe’ we can capitalise on fundamental biases of human cognition to get more good deeds done,” the researchers write.

In theory, introducing a “maybe” to a pledge might have a big net impact not just on the total value of charitable donations, say, but also blood or organ donations, or a willingness to help refugees, the team suggests.

Of course, these studies involved very small amounts of money that the participants didn’t possess in the first place. More work is needed to explore how this maybe effect might play out in the real world. But, the team concludes, “we think that in times where altruism and solidarity are needed more than ever, this simple intervention may be used to really get more good deeds done.”

– Maybe favors: How to get more good deeds done

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

in The British Psychological Society - Research Digest on 2021-10-18 09:01:00 UTC.

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Ivermectin now against COVID-19, because

in For Better Science on 2021-10-18 06:15:00 UTC.

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Paper linking COVID-19 vaccines to myocarditis is temporarily removed without explanation

in Retraction watch on 2021-10-17 17:57:08 UTC.

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Weekend reads: Attacks on scientists; NAS ousts researcher; how much it costs to publish

in Retraction watch on 2021-10-16 12:29:58 UTC.

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5 cool things to know about NASA’s Lucy mission to the Trojan asteroids

For the first time, a spacecraft is headed to Jupiter’s odd Trojan asteroids. What Lucy finds there could provide a fresh peek into the history of the solar system.

“Lucy will profoundly change our understanding of planetary evolution in our solar system,” Adriana Ocampo, a planetary scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., said at a news briefing October 14.

The mission is set to launch from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla., as early as October 16. Live coverage will air on NASA TV beginning at 5 a.m. EDT, in anticipation of a 5:34 a.m. blast off.

The Trojan asteroids are two groups of space rocks that are gravitationally trapped in the same orbit as Jupiter around the sun. One group of Trojans orbits ahead of Jupiter; the other follows the gas giant around the sun. Planetary scientists think the Trojans could have formed at different distances from the sun before getting mixed together in their current homes. The asteroids could also be some of the oldest and most pristine objects in the solar system.

The mission will mark several other firsts, from the types of objects it will visit to the way it powers its instruments. Here are five cool things to know about our first visit to the Trojans.

1. The Trojan asteroids are a solar system time capsule.

The Trojans occupy spots known as Lagrangian points, where the gravity from the sun and from Jupiter effectively cancel each other out. That means their orbits are stable for billions of years.

“They were probably placed in their orbits by the final gasp of the planet formation process,” the mission’s principal investigator Hal Levison, a planetary scientist at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.,  said September 28 in a news briefing.

But that doesn’t mean the asteroids are all alike. Scientists can tell from Earth that some Trojans are gray and some are red, indicating that they might have formed in different places before settling in their current orbits. Maybe the gray ones formed closer to the sun, and the red ones formed farther from the sun, Levison speculated.

Studying the Trojans’ similarities and differences can help planetary scientists tease out whether and when the giant planets moved around before settling into their present positions (SN: 4/20/12). “This is telling us something really fundamental about the formation of the solar system,” Levison said.

2. The spacecraft will visit more individual objects than any other single spacecraft. 

Lucy will visit eight asteroids, including their moons. Over its 12-year mission, it will visit one asteroid in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and seven Trojans, two of which are binary systems where a pair of asteroids orbit each other.

“We are going to be visiting the most asteroids ever with one mission,” planetary scientist Cathy Olkin, Lucy’s deputy principal investigator, said in the Oct. 14 briefing.

The spacecraft will observe the asteroids’ composition, shape, gravity and geology for clues to where they formed and how they got to the Lagrangian points.

The spacecraft’s first destination, in April 2025, will be an asteroid in the main belt. Next, it will visit five asteroids in the group of Trojans that orbit the sun ahead of Jupiter: Eurybates and its satellite Queta in August 2027; Polymele in September 2027; Leucus in April 2028; and Orus in November 2028. Finally, the spacecraft will shift to Jupiter’s other side and visit the twin asteroids Patroclus and Menoetius in the trailing group of space rocks in March 2033.

The spacecraft won’t land on any of its targets, but it will swoop within 965 kilometers of their surfaces at speeds of 3 to 5 meters per second relative to the asteroids’ speed through space.

There’s no need to worry about collisions while zipping through these asteroid clusters, Levison said. Although there are about 7,000 known Trojans, they’re very far apart. “If you were standing on any one of our targets, you wouldn’t be able to tell you were part of the swarm,” he said.

3. Lucy will have a weird flight path.

In order to make so many stops, Lucy will need to take a complex path. First, the spacecraft will swoop past Earth twice to get a gravitational boost from our planet that will help propel it onward to its first asteroid.

The closest Earth flyby, in October 2022, will take it within 300 kilometers of the planet’s surface, closer than the International Space Station, the Hubble Space Telescope and many satellites, Olkin said. Observers on Earth might even be able to see it. “I’m hoping to go near where it flies past and look up and see Lucy flying by a year from now,” she said.

Then in December 2030, after more than a year exploring the “leading” swarm of Trojans, Lucy will come back to the vicinity of Earth for one more boost. That final gravitational slingshot will send the spacecraft to the other side of the sun to visit the “trailing” swarm. This will make Lucy the first spacecraft ever to venture to the outer solar system and come back near Earth again.

4. Lucy will travel farther from the sun than any other solar-powered craft.

Another record Lucy will break has to do with its power source: the sun. Lucy will run on solar power out to 850 million kilometers away from the sun, making it the farthest-flung solar powered spacecraft ever.

To accomplish that, Lucy has a pair of enormous solar arrays. Each 10-sided array is more than 7.3 meters across and includes about 4,000 solar cells per panel, Lucy project manager Donya Douglas-Bradshaw said in a news briefing on October 13. Standing on one end, Lucy and its solar panels would be as tall as a five-story building.

“It’s a very intricate, sophisticated design,” she said. The advantage of using solar power is that the team can adjust how much power the spacecraft needs based on how far from the sun it is.

5. The inspiration for Lucy’s name is decidedly earthbound.

NASA missions are often named for famous scientists, or with acronyms that describe what the mission will do. Lucy, on the other hand, is named after a fossil.

The idea that the Trojans hold secrets to the history of the solar system is part of how the mission got its unusual name. To understand, go back to 1974, when paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and a graduate student discovered a fossil of a human ancestor who had lived 3.2 million years ago. After listening to the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” at camp that night, Johanson’s team named the fossil hominid “Lucy.” (In a poetic echo, the first asteroid the Lucy spacecraft will visit is named Donaldjohanson.)

Planetary scientists hope the study of the Trojans will revolutionize our understanding of the solar system’s history in the same way that studying Lucy’s fossil revolutionized our understanding of human history.

“We think these asteroids are fossils of solar system formation,” Levison said. So his team named the spacecraft after the fossil. 

The spacecraft even carries a diamond in one of its instruments, to help split beams of light. Said planetary scientist Phil Christensen of Arizona State University in Tempe at the Oct. 14 briefing: “We truly are sending a diamond into the sky with Lucy.”

in Science News on 2021-10-15 11:00:00 UTC.

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Publisher retracts paper with ethics committee discrepancy after question from Retraction Watch

in Retraction watch on 2021-10-15 10:00:00 UTC.

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Episode 28: Why Songs Get Stuck In Our Heads

This is Episode 28 of PsychCrunch, the podcast from the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest, sponsored by Routledge Psychology. Download here.

Why do some songs get stuck in our heads? In this episode, our presenter Ginny Smith explores the psychology of earworms. Ginny hears about the possible evolutionary reasons for why we experience the phenomenon, learns what earworms can teach us about memory — and finds out how to get rid of them.

Our guests, in order of appearance, are Kelly Jakubowski, assistant professor of music psychology at Durham University; Petr Janata, professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis; and Michael K. Scullin, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University.

Subscribe and download via iTunes.
Subscribe and download via Stitcher.
Subscribe and listen on Spotify.

Episode credits: Presented and produced by Ginny Smith. Mixing and editing by Jeff Knowler. PsychCrunch theme music by Catherine Loveday and Jeff Knowler. Art work by Tim Grimshaw.

Research from our guests includes:

Dissecting an Earworm: Melodic Features and Song Popularity Predict Involuntary Musical Imagery

Spontaneous mental replay of music improves memory for incidentally associated event knowledge.

Bedtime Music, Involuntary Musical Imagery, and Sleep

And Kelly Jakubowski’s website has more information, including a Spotify playlist of common earworms

Further background reading from the Digest:

Bedtime Music Can Disrupt Your Sleep By Triggering Earworms

How to kill an earworm

What triggers an Earworm – the song that’s stuck in your head?

A natural history of the Earworm – the song that won’t get out of your head

PsychCrunch is sponsored by Routledge Psychology

Routledge Psychology are giving PsychCrunch listeners the chance to discover even more ground-breaking research: free access to 5 articles of your choosing from over 4.5 million at tandfonline.com, plus a 20% discount on books at routledge.com.

For links to all our previous podcasts, check out our main podcast page

in The British Psychological Society - Research Digest on 2021-10-15 06:32:31 UTC.

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Schneider Shorts 15.10.2021 – Russophobia!

in For Better Science on 2021-10-15 06:00:00 UTC.

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Academic societies continue strong support of arXiv

Since 2019, seven academic societies have contributed to arXiv with funding and expertise. This type of steady support directly helps arXiv keep pace with exponential growth in usage and achieve its mission to provide an open research sharing platform where scholars can share and discover new, relevant, and emerging science, and establish their contribution to advancing research.

This year, the American Physical Society (APS) increased its contribution fivefold and became the first society to contribute as a Gold Affiliate. In addition to APS, the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Astronomical Society, and the American Mathematical Society have all pledged to continue supporting arXiv in 2022. arXiv is grateful for this support.

“For 30 years arXiv has played an essential role in the lives of physicists and other researchers around the world, making their research more open and accessible. APS and arXiv share a common mission to serve the global physics community, advance scientific discovery and research dissemination, and promote education broadly. Both organizations are strongly committed to open access and to sustainable open science initiatives,” said Jonathan Bagger, APS CEO. “For these reasons, APS has been a leading supporter of arXiv across the past three decades (even before arXiv was arXiv). We have worked together to ensure arXiv’s uninterrupted service and stability, to integrate services and metadata, and to provide technical advice and other assistance. The new sustainability model enables APS to formalize and reaffirm our commitment. We are proud to be among the first Gold Affiliates, and look forward to continuing our collaboration over the coming decades.”

“arXiv exists thanks to the scientific community, and we are happy to announce the renewed support of professional societies, our partners in serving the scientific community,” said Eleonora Presani, executive director of arXiv. “We are grateful for their support.”

arXiv was founded strictly for research and education — not profit. That’s why we rely on the generosity of members, affiliates, sponsors, and other donors to support daily operations, critical infrastructure updates, and new initiatives. Learn more about arXiv’s funding model here.

Thank you, societies, for supporting arXiv since 2019!

American Astronomical Society
American Institute of Physics Publishing
American Mathematical Society
American Physical Society
Association for Computing Machinery
Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft
Institute of Physics Publishing

in arXiv.org blog on 2021-10-14 19:04:26 UTC.

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Can Kidney Disease Affect Your Thinking?

Patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) are at an increased risk of both dementia and its precursor, mild cognitive impairment. Cognitive dysfunction impacts about 20–50% in elderly patients with moderate CKD and may reach as high as 70% in severe CKD/dialysis. Dementia is more common among the elderly, women, and non-white patients with end-stage kidney disease (ESKD).  It has been shown to be less common among patients receiving peritoneal dialysis (PD) and transplant patients. Cognitive dysfunction in patients with CKD likely results from uremic neurotoxins interacting with neural progenitor cells, the brain vasculature, the lymphatic system, and monoaminergic neurons [1].

Månsson et al. set out to examine if having a GFR < 60 mL/min/1.73m2 impacted cognitive development. They specifically looked at the development of dementia or mild cognitive impairment during a 6-year period. They also examined specific cognitive domains: learning and memory, language, complex attention, executive function, perceptual-motor, global cognitive function, and meta-memory. They found that processing speed, a subdomain of complex attention, was affected by kidney disease. There was no statistical significance in dementia or mild cognitive impairment associated with mild renal impairment (mean GFR was 74 mL/min/1.73m2).

Knowing that patients with kidney disease are at risk of cognitive impairment, what can I do to better serve this population as their physician? We should provide this population with support and resources including support groups and patient education with the potential to improve outcomes though there is not strong data yet to support this. Providing additional resources like social workers, counseling with pharmacists, and other therapies might prevent adverse outcomes in this group. After reading Månsson et al. article, I know I will work towards recognizing and accommodating mild cognitive impairment in my CKD clinic. I intend to change my practice by giving patients additional time to complete forms during the visit such as intake forms. I frequently provide patient education during a visit, such as low sodium diet, dialysis modalities, etc. This may be better served through going at a slower pace or incorporating a separate visit focused on CKD education instead of speeding through it in a 20-minute follow-up visit. I don’t always write down all of my treatment changes for the patient such as stop this medication or increase this medication, but I will now. I hope to provide written information that they can return to later by typing out my patient instructions more thoroughly or giving handouts on topics we discuss during our education. And finally, repetition is key to allow them to process it in their own time.

References

[1] Viggiano, D., Wagner, C.A., Martino, G. et al. Mechanisms of cognitive dysfunction in CKD. Nat Rev Nephrol 16, 452–469 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41581-020-0266-9

The post Can Kidney Disease Affect Your Thinking? appeared first on BMC Series blog.

in BMC Series blog on 2021-10-14 13:00:15 UTC.

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Barnacles are famed for not budging. But one species roams its sea turtle hosts

Barnacles aren’t exactly renowned for their athleticism, staying glued in place for much of their lives. But turtle-riding barnacles are fidgety travelers. 

As adults, the turtle barnacles (Chelonibia testudinaria) can move about 1.4 millimeters a week across turtle shells, researchers report October 6 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Previous observations of barnacles stuck on green sea turtles suggested that the creatures were somehow mobile, propelled by either outside forces or their own actions. But this is the first experimental confirmation that they embark on self-directed treks.

Barnacles start life as free-swimming larvae, eventually settling and adhering to rocks, ship hulls or even the skin of marine mammals (SN: 9/27/16). Some species have been known to rotate on their base or even scooch a smidge when nudged by a too-close neighbor. But once settled in, they live and grow, eating particles of food drifting by what was long considered their permanent address.

Now it turns out some may need forwarding addresses. Benny K.K. Chan, a marine ecologist at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan, decided to test C. testudinaria’s mobility experimentally when one of his students successfully transferred turtle barnacles from crabs to an acrylic plate. The team followed 15 transferred barnacles with time-series photography over a year.

Chan’s team also collaborated with researchers in Spain to track the movement of barnacles on the shells of five captive loggerhead sea turtles over a few months and with citizen scientist divers who gathered photos of wild green sea turtles in Taiwan. The team logged the positions  of the green turtles’ barnacles over 16 weeks.

Turtle-riding barnacles moved as much as 54 millimeters — a little less than the length of an adult human’s thumb — during this time. Laboratory barnacles moved too, leaving trails of pale cement in layered, crescent-shaped patterns. “We were amazed,” says Chan.

How the barnacles move is still a mystery, but researchers think the crustaceans may partially dissolve their own cement and lift their soft base slightly off the surface. “Then the barnacle can secrete a new cement layer and probably surf on the cement,” says Chan.

The barnacles mostly traveled against the flow of any currents, showing that they weren’t just moving from the pressure of flowing water. They also didn’t get closer together, suggesting that the barnacles are seeking better locations to filter food out of the water rather than mating opportunities. 

“This is rock-solid proof of something that is otherwise anecdotal,” says marine biologist Henrik Glenner at the University of Bergen in Norway , who was not involved with this study.

Barnacles typically exemplify biological competition for space and resources, because after settling they must compete in that spot for the rest of their lives, Glenner says. But being mobile upends this dynamic.

And it raises new questions. Glenner wonders if any barnacles in crowded, intertidal environments might also be capable of movement. And Tara Essock-Burns, a marine ecologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, wants to learn more about the cement itself and its flexible properties. “It is possible that turtle barnacle cement has a very different biochemistry than other barnacles that permanently adhere to [surfaces],” she says. This is precisely what Chan and his team plan on investigating next.

“There is a reason that Darwin was so captivated by barnacles,” says Essock-Burns. “They never cease to amaze us.”

in Science News on 2021-10-14 13:00:00 UTC.

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A correction is retracted (sort of)

in Retraction watch on 2021-10-14 11:16:43 UTC.

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Earth is reflecting less light. It’s not clear if that’s a trend

The amount of sunlight that Earth reflects back into space — measured by the dim glow seen on the dark portions of a crescent moon’s face — has decreased measurably in recent years. Whether the decline in earthshine is a short-term blip or yet another ominous sign for Earth’s climate is up in the air, scientists suggest.

Our planet, on average, typically reflects about 30 percent of the sunlight that shines on it. But a new analysis bolsters previous studies suggesting that Earth’s reflectance has been declining in recent years, says Philip Goode, an astrophysicist at Big Bear Solar Observatory in California. From 1998 to 2017, Earth’s reflectance declined about 0.5 percent, the team reported in the Sept. 8 Geophysical Research Letters.

Using ground-based instruments at Big Bear, Goode and his colleagues measured earthshine — the light that reflects off our planet, to the moon and then back to Earth — from 1998 to 2017. Because earthshine is most easily gauged when the moon is a slim crescent and the weather is clear, the team collected a mere 801 data points during those 20 years, Goode and his colleagues report.

Much of the decrease in reflectance occurred during the last three years of the two-decade period the team studied, Goode says. Previous analyses of satellite data, he and his colleagues note, hint that the drop in reflectance stems from warmer temperatures along the Pacific coasts of North and South America, which in turn reduced low-altitude cloud cover and exposed the underlying, much darker and less reflective seas.

“Whether or not this is a long-term trend [in Earth’s reflectance] is yet to be seen,” says Edward Schwieterman, a planetary scientist at University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the new analysis. “This strengthens the argument for collecting more data,” he says.

Decreased cloudiness over the eastern Pacific isn’t the only thing trimming Earth’s reflectance, or albedo, says Shiv Priyam Raghuraman, an atmospheric scientist at Princeton University. Many studies point to a long-term decline in sea ice (especially in the Arctic), ice on land, and tiny pollutants called aerosols — all of which scatter sunlight back into space to cool Earth.

With ice cover declining, Earth is absorbing more radiation. The extra radiation absorbed by Earth in recent decades goes toward warming the oceans and melting more ice, which can contribute to even more warming via a vicious feedback loop, says Schwieterman.

Altogether, Goode and his colleagues estimate, the decline in Earth’s reflectance from 1998 to 2017 means that each square meter of our planet’s surface is absorbing, on average, an extra 0.5 watts of energy. For comparison, the researchers note in their study, planet-warming greenhouse gases and other human activity over the same period boosted energy input to Earth’s surface by an estimated 0.6 watts of energy per square meter. That means the decline in Earth’s reflectance has, over that 20-year period, almost doubled the warming effect our planet experienced.

in Science News on 2021-10-14 10:00:00 UTC.

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PLOS Global Public Health publishes first papers

The Public Library of Science (PLOS) today announced that PLOS Global Public Health published its initial cohort of papers. PLOS announced the launch of five new journals earlier this year and PLOS Global Public Health is the first of these journals with papers ready for publication. The journal’s mission is to address deeply entrenched global inequities in public health by broadening the range of perspectives from which we learn. The journal has so far received more than 700 submissions from researchers around the world.

“We are thrilled that less than six months after the journal was launched, our first issue is ready,” said Catherine Kyobutungi, Co-Editor-in-Chief, PLOS Global Public Health. “It is a reflection of how timely and necessary a journal with a mission like PLOS Global Public Health is and the hard work by hundreds of enthusiastic researchers, reviewers and editors who believe in that mission.”

“We are happy to see the diversity of papers, since our aim with the journal is to amplify the work of researchers and practitioners, especially from lower-middle-income-countries, historically underrepresented groups, and individuals working and living within their impacted communities,” said Madhukar Pai, Co-Editor-in-Chief, PLOS Global Public Health.

The journal is underpinned by PLOS’ new Global Equity model designed to remove financial barriers for researchers and institutions across all geographies and funding backgrounds to participate in Open Access and Open Science at PLOS. We’re partnering with institutions in this model to provide unlimited publication support for their authors through a single, annual fee that is based on each institution’s historical research output in the field and is reflective of their regional economy according to their country’s World Bank lending tier. Our existing fee-assistance program also supports authors who are unable to pay any portion of their publication fees.

“In full alignment with the proposed UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, our journal will ensure diversity and equity of representation at all levels – editors, editorial boards, reviewers, authors – and will intentionally seek out research from under-represented communities,” said Julia Robinson, Executive Editor, PLOS Global Public Health. “We want to amplify expert perspectives from every region of the world to reach across disciplines and continents. We believe diversity makes science stronger.”

Here are links to three of the 16 papers that PLOS Global Public Health just published, as well as two opinion pieces:

●        In areas where COVID-19 vaccines are limited, vaccinating essential workers before older adults can prevent infections and deaths,      

●        Mosquito-based method to reduce dengue could be highly cost-effective in Singapore,

●        Gold mine workers in Tanzania face risk of death more than double that of other community members,

●        Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Helen Clark discuss the growing COVID-19 vaccination gap and explore how global interdependence and cooperation are urgent to achieve vaccination justice,

●        Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, discusses discusses five concrete, urgent steps that are needed to end the global crisis in vaccine equity and may help end the pandemic.

For more information about PLOS Global Public Health, visit the homepage.

The post PLOS Global Public Health publishes first papers appeared first on The Official PLOS Blog.

in The Official PLOS Blog on 2021-10-13 17:59:30 UTC.

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A Jupiter-like planet orbiting a white dwarf hints at our solar system’s future

A glimpse of our solar system’s future has appeared thousands of light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. There a giant planet like Jupiter orbits a white dwarf, a dim, dense star that once resembled the sun.

In 2010, that star passed in front of a much more distant star. Like a magnifying glass, the white dwarf’s gravity bent the more distant star’s light rays so that they converged on Earth and made the distant star look hundreds of times brighter. A giant planet orbiting the white dwarf star also “microlensed” the distant star’s light, revealing the planet’s presence.

In 2015, 2016 and again in 2018 astrophysicist Joshua Blackman of the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia and colleagues pointed the Keck II telescope in Hawaii at the far-off system, which lies some 5,000 to 8,000 light-years from Earth. The team was in search of the giant planet’s star, but saw, well, nothing.

“We expected that we’d see a star similar to the sun,” Blackman says. “And so we spent quite a few years trying to figure out why on Earth we didn’t see the star which we expected to see.”

After failing to detect any light from the spot where the planet’s star should be, Blackman’s team concluded that the object can’t be a typical star like the sun — also known as a main sequence star, which generates energy by converting hydrogen into helium at its center. Instead, the star must be something much fainter. The microlensing data indicate that the star is roughly half as massive as the sun, so the object isn’t massive enough to be a neutron star or black hole. But a white dwarf star fits the bill perfectly, the researchers report online October 13 in Nature.

“They’ve carefully ruled out the other possible lens stars — neutron stars and black holes and main sequence stars and whatnot,” says Ben Zuckerman, an astronomer at UCLA, who was not involved with the work. He notes that only a handful of planets have ever been found orbiting white dwarfs.

The new planet is the first ever discovered that is orbiting a white dwarf and resembles Jupiter in both its mass and its distance from its star. Blackman’s team estimates that the planet is one to two times as massive as Jupiter and probably lies 2.5 to six times farther from the white dwarf star than Earth does from the sun. For comparison, Jupiter is 5.2 times farther out from the sun than Earth is. The white dwarf is somewhat larger than Earth, which means the planet is much bigger than its host star.

The white dwarf formed after a sunlike star expanded and became a red giant star. Then the red giant ejected its outer layers, exposing its hot core. That former core is the white dwarf star.

Our sun will turn into a white dwarf about 7.8 billion years from now, so the new discovery is “a snapshot into the future of our solar system,” Blackman says. As the sun becomes a red giant, it will engulf and destroy its innermost planet, Mercury, and perhaps Venus too. But Mars, Jupiter and more distant planets should survive.

And Earth? No one yet knows what will happen to it.

in Science News on 2021-10-13 15:00:00 UTC.

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A Cerebellar-Based Solution to the Nondeterministic Time Delay Problem in Robotic Control

This week on Journal Club session Volker Steuber will talk about a paper "A Cerebellar-Based Solution to the Nondeterministic Time Delay Problem in Robotic Control".

The presence of computation and transmission-variable time delays within a robotic control loop is a major cause of instability, hindering safe human-robot interaction (HRI) under these circumstances. Classical control theory has been adapted to counteract the presence of such variable delays; however, the solutions provided to date cannot cope with HRI robotics inherent features. The highly nonlinear dynamics of HRI cobots (robots intended for human interaction in collaborative tasks), together with the growing use of flexible joints and elastic materials providing passive compliance, prevent traditional control solutions from being applied. Conversely, human motor control natively deals with low power actuators, nonlinear dynamics, and variable transmission time delays. The cerebellum, pivotal to human motor control, is able to predict motor commands by correlating current and past sensorimotor signals, and to ultimately compensate for the existing sensorimotor human delay (tens of milliseconds). This work aims at bridging those inherent features of cerebellar motor control and current robotic challengestextemdash namely, compliant control in the presence of variable sensorimotor delays. We implement a cerebellar-like spiking neural network (SNN) controller that is adaptive, compliant, and robust to variable sensorimotor delays by replicating the cerebellar mechanisms that embrace the presence of biological delays and allow motor learning and adaptation.

Papers:

• I. Abad'ia, F. Naveros, E. Ros, R. Carrillo, N. Luque, "A Cerebellar-Based Solution to the Nondeterministic Time Delay Problem in Robotic Control", 2021, Science Robotics, 6,

Date: 2021/10/15
Time: 14:00
Location: online

in UH Biocomputation group on 2021-10-13 12:28:39 UTC.

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Huge numbers of fish-eating jaguars prowl Brazil’s wetlands

In a tract of central Brazilian wetlands, jaguars spend their days wading through chest-deep waters searching for fish. When not hunting, the big cats playfully grapple with each other back on land. Their life is unlike any other known jaguar population’s existence in the world.

New findings reveal a degree of flexibility in diet and lifestyle previously unseen among jaguars. The discovery may provide key context on the cats’ role in food webs, helping scientists better understand the effect of environmental changes on the species, researchers report October 6 in Ecology.  

Jaguars (Panthera onca), which are usually territorial loners that hunt on land, live in a wide array of habitats, ranging from North American deserts to grasslands and tropical rainforests in Central and South America. The cats are also found in the Pantanal, an immense tropical wetland — the largest of its kind in the world — that sprawls over parts of Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay. 

Ecologists Manoel dos Santos-Filho of the Universidade do Estado de Mato Grosso in Cáceres, Brazil, and Carlos Peres of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, knew of rumors of large numbers of jaguars sighted near Brazil’s Taiamã Ecological Station. That large ecological reserve is located in the remote, northern reaches of the Pantanal.

After relaying these anecdotes to Taal Levi, a wildlife ecologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, the researchers started a project to better understand the jaguars’ biology and population status in the protected area.

Taiamã is seasonally flooded, with no roads or trails, so the team had to access the reserve by boat, setting up motion-activated cameras along waterways to gather data on jaguar numbers. The area’s abundance of jaguars, however, was obvious immediately.

“You set your foot out of the boat, and there’s a jaguar footprint there already,” says Charlotte Eriksson, a wildlife scientist also at Oregon State University. “There are scratches on trees. There are jaguar scats. There’s just an unbelievable presence of this apex predator wherever you go, which is something I’ve never experienced anywhere before.”

The team deployed 59 cameras, which operated from 2014 to 2018, and collected more than 1,500 videos of jaguars. The researchers also captured 13 jaguars and fitted them with GPS or radio-tracking collars to gain insight into the animals’ population density, movements and social interactions. 

Based on their data, Eriksson and colleagues estimate that the Taiamã Ecological Station hosts the highest density of jaguars ever recorded: 12.4 animals per 100 square kilometers, nearly triple some of the next highest estimates elsewhere. Jaguars were also the most common mammal spotted on the cameras.

Video footage showed jaguars carrying off large fish. When the team analyzed 138 scat samples, the researchers found 46 percent had fish remains in them and 55 percent contained aquatic reptiles, such as caiman or turtles. Just 11 percent contained mammal remains.

Jaguars are well-documented in taking on challenging prey, including underwater fare (SN: 7/15/16). Eriksson and her team think that the Taiamã felines have not only the most fish-dependent diet among jaguars, but also among all big cats. There are tigers in Bangladesh that live in flooded mangrove forests and sometimes eat fish, but those cats still primarily eat land-based food, the researchers say. 

The cameras and tracking collars also showed that the Taiamã jaguars were spending a lot of time near each other, sometimes traveling, fishing and playing together. This is all exceptionally odd behavior for jaguars, at least based on what scientists know about the cats elsewhere in the world.

In terms of social behavior, “what we knew of jaguars from before this study is basically that they are solitary, and they meet up to mate. And that’s about it,” Eriksson says, noting anecdotes of the cats sharing prey carcasses as rare counterexamples. 

The profusion of aquatic prey in the flooded preserve — protected from human encroachment — may be responsible for the jaguars’ superlative density and their rich social lives. It’s possible there’s so much food available, Eriksson says, that there is “no real need to fight over it.” 

Another idea is that aquatic prey concentrated along the river margins are accessible in only certain areas, Levi says. This may encourage jaguar territories to dissolve, since obtaining access to multiple fishing spots requires getting along with other jaguars. Other animals behave in similar ways. Brown bears, for example, congregate in great numbers to feed at salmon spawning grounds, despite the bears’ typically solitary nature, Levi says. 

The abundance of jaguars and their social behavior is not surprising, given the available food resources, says Todd Fuller, a conservation biologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Still, he finds the new information exciting. 

Fuller, who was not involved with the research, says the study helps bring researchers’ understanding of jaguars’ ecology and conservation closer to what’s known about most other large cat species, and “that is a very good thing.”

Jaguars in the Pantanal face many threats and are declining within Brazil, Eriksson says, suffering from drought, fire and agricultural expansion. Evaluating how jaguars might respond to such changes is paramount. In 2020, half of the study area burned, so Eriksson is currently assessing the impact of the fires on the jaguars and their periodically submerged home. 

She also wants to investigate how the Taiamã jaguars’ taste for fish is affecting how often the animals eat land-living prey and what strategies the cats use to catch fish.

“We think we know a lot about these charismatic, large predators,” she says, “but there are still things to learn.”

in Science News on 2021-10-13 11:00:00 UTC.

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Scared Of Spiders? There’s An App For That

By Emma L. Barratt

Specific phobias are incredibly common. According to estimates, around 3‒15% of people will develop one in their lifetime, the majority of whom won’t seek treatment. Phobias can manifest around a huge number of stimuli, such as lightning, dentists, and — most commonly — animals such as spiders.

Although exposure therapy is well established and is very effective at reducing fear and anxiety in those with specific phobias, not many end up accessing treatment. Unsurprisingly, the certainty of being exposed to terrifying things doesn’t entice many people. Even those who do make it into a therapeutic setting are also quite likely to drop out due to the extreme fear caused by these controlled exposures.

However, modern technology may help us to sidestep these issues entirely. Anja Zimmer and team at the University of Basel and Saarland University believe that the solution may lie in augmented reality.

Though exposure therapy using virtual reality (VR) technology has been shown by several studies over the last decade to be effective and well tolerated, its rollout has been somewhat underwhelming. Practically speaking, many clinicians cite concerns about motion sickness, costs, or trouble using the hardware. This means that, although VR headsets are now relatively accessible, only the minority of clinicians have chosen to offer this approach as an option.

Augmented reality (AR) is a close relative of VR. Instead of donning a bulky headset, users are able to open their phone cameras and view on-screen virtual objects overlaid on their surroundings in real time. Not only is programming AR experiences much less time intensive (and therefore more cost effective) than doing so in VR, but users are also able to see their own bodies through the camera lens, creating a greater level of engagement with the virtual objects.

These qualities make it a potentially good choice for a new method of delivering exposure therapy. So, in order to test the efficacy of exposure therapy administered via AR, the team designed Phobys, a smartphone based AR app designed to reduce fear of spiders.

Over the course of six 30-minute sessions administered within two weeks, users are able to work through nine short levels of virtual spider exposure. These involve tasks such as looking at the virtual spider, approaching and “collecting” them (like in a video game), superimposing spiders onto their hand, and even walking through groups of spiders. After each level, users give a rating of how fearful and disgusted they felt on a scale of 0 to 10; once a rating of 4 is achieved, they can advance to the next level. Perhaps most endearingly, if users get close enough to a spider in the ninth and final level, a kiss sound is triggered and hearts float across the screen. Gamification elements such as this are widely recognised to improve uptake, and are used throughout the levels.

In this study, published in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 33 participants (18 diagnosed with arachnophobia) used the Phobys app as recommended. Before and after using the app, they provided responses to several measures of fear: subjective fear ratings when approaching a real spider (a Behavioural Approach Test), the Fear of Spiders Questionnaire (FSQ), and the Spider Phobia Beliefs Questionnaire (SBQ), as well as a measure of disgust. They were also asked to rate how much they felt that their fears had reduced, post-intervention. A further 33 (17 diagnosed with arachnophobia) participants received no intervention, in order to provide control data.

Analyses of these measures revealed that use of Phobys led to significantly lower subjective levels of fear when approaching real spiders, when compared to controls. Those who had used the AR app were also able to progress further in a Behavioural Approach Test with spiders than those who had received no intervention. The story was similar across all measures — app users subjectively felt less disgusted, scored lower on the FSQ and SBQ, and estimated higher levels of fear reduction than those assigned to the control group.

Since this intervention was completed at home, there were varying levels of uptake. The majority of participants did more than one session (lasting 30 minutes), though some used it for upwards of two hours. Data analysis showed that after an average of only 90 minutes of training with the app, clinically significant improvements in fear were seen — however, the authors note that due to the design of this study, they can’t rule out a contribution from placebo to this effect. That is, users might have expected an improvement from using the app, so they got a short-term boost from using it that’s not necessarily reflective of long-term fear reduction.

Improvements in fear and disgust were seen regardless of whether or not participants crossed the DSM-5 threshold for a specific phobia, meaning that an AR approach may be suitable for all levels of spider fear requiring exposure therapy. Whether AR exposure will work for other types of specific phobia, though, is still somewhat unclear. For example, while spiders can neatly and convincingly be superimposed into environments, larger animals, or even more elaborate experiences such as dental visits, may be tricky to condense into such a small and neat format. Further explorations of whether users are more comfortable with fear stimuli in the long term are also needed. Even so, this study indicates new and highly accessible avenues for exposure therapy.

– Effectiveness of a smartphone-based, augmented reality exposure app to reduce fear of spiders in real-life: A randomized controlled trial

Emma L. Barratt (@E_Barratt) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

in The British Psychological Society - Research Digest on 2021-10-13 10:02:00 UTC.

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‘We have done a terrible job’: Journal retracts, replaces paper on mosquito-borne infections

in Retraction watch on 2021-10-13 09:43:46 UTC.