Planet Neuroscientists

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Lille Papermille

in For Better Science on 2023-12-06 06:00:00 UTC.

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Open science round-up: November 2023 - International Science Council

in Open Access Tracking Project: news on 2023-12-06 00:05:00 UTC.

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These are Science News’ favorite books of 2023

Books introducing emerging areas of science, as well as new looks at familiar fields, were among the Science News staff’s favorite science reads this year. Did we overlook your favorite? Let us know at feedback@sciencenews.org.

Blight
Emily Monosson
W.W. Norton & Co., $28.95

HBO’s The Last of Us introduced many people to the dangers of fungi. But while a fungus-induced zombie apocalypse is pure fiction, this book warns that a fungal pathogen could spawn the next pandemic (SN: 8/12/23, p. 28).

Fires in the Dark
Kay Redfield Jamison
Knopf, $30

A psychiatrist examines what it takes to be a great healer of mental suffering by exploring the relationship between British poet Siegfried Sassoon, who suffered emotional wounds from combat during World War I, and his physician, W.H.R. Rivers (SN: 7/1/23, p. 28).

We Are Electric
Sally Adee
Hachette Books, $30

This trip through a slice of biology history shows how researchers have tended to ignore the electricity that flows through the body and brain. But that’s changing, and studies of the “electrome” could spark medical breakthroughs (SN: 2/25/23, p. 28).

Period
Kate Clancy
Princeton Univ., $27.95

Menstruation is such a taboo topic that even the people who experience it once a month or so hold many misconceptions about it. This book draws on history and science to clear up the confusion and destigmatize periods (SN: 4/8/23, p. 29).

Crossings
Ben Goldfarb
W.W. Norton & Co., $30

Millions, perhaps even billions, of animals become roadkill every year. This book highlights the work of a passionate group of scientists, known as road ecologists, who study how interventions like wildlife crossings can reduce the toll (SN: 8/26/23, p. 30).

Eight Bears
Gloria Dickie
W.W. Norton & Co., $30

A reporter travels across three continents to meet the world’s eight remaining species of bears, sharing tales of science, folklore and conservation along the way (SN: 7/15/23 & 7/29/23, p. 33).

Most Delicious Poison
Noah Whiteman
Little, Brown Spark, $30

One creature’s poison is another’s secret to making a balanced, full-bodied wine. In this blending of science and memoir, an evolutionary biologist chronicles how humans have co-opted nature’s toxins to do everything from spicing up food to putting people under anesthesia (SN: 11/4/23, p. 32).

The Deepest Map
Laura Trethewey
Harper Wave, $32

This adventure on the high seas follows scientific explorers who are charting the seafloor in exquisite detail. But as with any exploration of uncharted territory, mapping the bottom of the ocean risks spoiling a place largely untouched by humans (SN: 9/9/23, p. 34).

Under Alien Skies
Philip Plait
W.W. Norton & Co., $30

In this intergalactic travelog, readers are transported to the moon, a comet, Mars, Pluto, exoplanets, a black hole and other celestial worlds to imagine what it would be like to stargaze in these alien places (SN: 6/17/23, p. 30).

Off-Earth
Erika Nesvold
MIT Press, $27.95

As the possibility of humans living in outer space inches closer to reality, an astrophysicist ponders the numerous ethical questions that should be addressed while planning for future settlements on the moon, Mars and beyond (SN: 3/25/23, p. 28).

Is Math Real?
Eugenia Cheng
Basic Books, $30

In school, students often learn that the point of math is to solve equations and compute right-or-wrong answers to questions. But exploration is also fundamental to the field. By considering a series of seemingly simple questions, like why 1 + 1 = 2, a mathematician delves into the logical foundations of Western mathematics to reveal the discipline’s true nature (SN: 10/7/23 & 10/21/23, p. 32).

Ghost Particle
Alan Chodos and James Riordon
MIT Press, $32.95

Written by a physicist and a Science News writer, this comprehensive story of neutrinos is the perfect primer for anyone curious about how the elusive subatomic particles were discovered, why they matter to physics, and what mysteries are still waiting to be solved (SN: 3/11/23, p. 28).

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

in Science News on 2023-12-05 14:00:00 UTC.

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A telescope dropped dark matter data from the edge of space. Here’s why

Doomsday came on May 25 for the payload of a pumpkin-shaped balloon at the edge of space.

The floating gourd — inflated with more than 500,000 cubic meters of helium and large enough to fit 60 Goodyear blimps inside it — traversed the southern hemisphere some five times in 40 days, toting a telescope that could see the unseeable. NASA’s Super Pressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope, or SuperBIT, was on a mission to probe the cosmos for dark matter, the invisible substance thought to scaffold the universe and bind galaxy clusters together (SN: 8/8/22, SN: 6/23/23). By observing how cosmic structures with strong gravity deflect nearby light, SuperBIT could infer dark matter’s presence.

But things had not gone as planned. Early in the mission, satellite communications failed and the telescope’s operators could not retrieve data wirelessly. As SuperBIT made a sixth pass over South America, projections showed the solar-powered telescope heading toward gloomy weather and away from another stretch of land to safely alight upon.

Operators decided to terminate the flight early and anticipated a rough landing, so astrophysicist Ellen Sirks and colleagues instructed the aloft apparatus to send its data to Earth via capsules. The team simulated weather conditions to predict where the escape pods would land.

“We sort of envisioned these [drop capsules] as a redundant way of backing up the data,” says Sirks, of the University of Sydney in Australia. But they became important, she says, “because all the worst-case scenarios came true.”

By the end of the day, SuperBIT had been destroyed; the telescope’s parachute failed to detach upon landing and dragged the craft to pieces. But at 12:31 p.m. UTC, two small packages containing precious dark matter data separated from SuperBIT. Each 1.28-kilogram capsule contained a battery-powered circuit board that stored the data, encased in a foam-wrapped plastic shell sealed in a waterproof chicken roasting bag. They were also equipped with parachutes — bright orange to aid recovery. The team described the new drop capsule system November 15 in Aerospace.

While descending into a rural area in Argentina, the capsules drifted horizontally about 60 kilometers. A search-and-rescue team, following transmissions from the capsules, found the first one 3.8 km from its predicted landing site. The second capsule was found nearly 2 km away and a few meters from its signaled location.

A cougar may have moved the capsule, as a set of tracks was found nearby. Thankfully, the cat was nowhere to be found and had left the capsule unscathed. “We surmise that foam and parachute nylon are intriguing but not tasty,” Sirks and colleagues wrote in the study.

Researchers recovered data from both capsules and, eventually, the telescope’s remains. Sirks and colleagues are still analyzing those data, which she hopes will help map the distribution of dark matter in the universe. 

The crash-landing underscores the need for contingency plans, Sirks says, especially since NASA plans to execute many more balloon-borne missions. Her team is working on insulating the batteries in the capsules, which could enable them to transmit their locations as they descend through the cold atmosphere. Eventually, the researchers plan to make the capsule system available for future balloon missions. “It’s a fairly easy, lightweight solution,” Sirks says. “So why not?”

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

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10 things direct reports must do to get the most out of their 1:1 meetings

10 things direct reports must do to get the most out of their 1:1 meetings

1:1s are crucial in promoting positive outcomes such as increased employee engagement, higher retention rates, more innovation, and overall success for the team member, manager, and organization. A lot of focus is placed on the manager’s role in orchestrating 1:1s, where they are responsible for addressing direct reports’ practical and personal needs. However, it is also important to recognize that direct reports have agency in 1:1s and should play an active, not passive, role in the effectiveness of these meetings. When direct reports feel empowered to seek help, there are benefits to both the individual and organization.

As an employee, you need to take an active role in your 1:1s to get the most out of them. These 10 key behaviors are critical in making sure you are receiving the help that you need to grow in your career:

1. Know what you need: be ready to discuss your own needs, hopes, and goals, not just what you think you should say to your manager.
2. Be curious: do not just have a curious mindset, but also engage in curious behaviors such as asking questions, listening, and challenging yourself to discover new things.
3. Build rapport: get to know your manager on a personal and professional level by learning about their interests.
4. Actively engage: get the most out of your meeting by doing things like asking questions, expressing yourself, taking notes, and paying attention to non-verbal communication like maintaining good eye contact.
5. Communicate well: strive to be clear, concise, focused, honest and pay attention to voice infliction and tone. For difficult conversations, consider practicing before bringing them to your manager.
6. Problem solve: come to your 1:1 not only with your problems but also possible solutions. Be ready to constructively discuss counterarguments and differing viewpoints.
7. Ask for help (constructively): seek assistance from your manager that encourages independent problem solving. This includes asking to recommendations or help of others when your manager cannot assist you.
8. Ask for feedback: ask specific questions that focus on receiving suggestion on future behaviors such as “I want to improve at X, do you have any suggestions on how to get better at this?”
9. Receive feedback well: show that you are appreciative of the feedback by thanking your manager and asking further questions about issues that were raised.
10. Express gratitude: let your manager know you are grateful for their time and feedback.

Finally, as you proceed with these behaviors, it is important to keep in mind the science around asking for help. Namely, help-seeking behaviors have been categorized by social psychologists into two main types: autonomous help-seeking and dependent help-seeking.

Autonomous help-seeking can be understood as seeking information that enables individuals to be independent, accomplish tasks, and solve problems on their own. This tends to promote long-term independence—similar to the adage, “Give a person a fish and they’ll eat for a day but teach them to fish and they’ll eat for a lifetime.”

Dependent help-seeking, on the other hand, refers to searching for a “quick fix” and an “answer” from someone else. This style of help-seeking conserves time and effort and leads to immediate gratification, but typically doesn’t yield long-term self-sufficiency. Interestingly, job performance ratings have been shown to have a positive relationship with autonomous help-seeking, but a negative relationship with its counterpart—dependent help-seeking.

Bottom line: do your part in the 1:1 to maximize its value to you and approach it as an opportunity to learn to be the best you can seeking meaningful insights that enable you to thrive and grow both short-term and long-term. 

_{Featured image via Unsplash (public domain)}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

       

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in OUPblog - Psychology and Neuroscience on 2023-12-05 10:30:00 UTC.

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Electrical brain implants may help patients with severe brain injuries

For people with traumatic brain injuries, cognitive functions like memory, attention and mood regulation can become exceedingly difficult. But “there is no therapy for this kind of problem, even though it’s so prevalent,” says Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.

Now, in a small study of individuals who have suffered moderate to severe brain injury, five patients scored better on a test of attention and information processing after having electrodes surgically implanted into the thalamus, an early stop for information coming in through the senses, Schiff and colleagues report December 4 in Nature Medicine. The study participants and their families also reported improvements in their symptoms and daily lives after deep brain stimulation.

The results suggest that direct stimulation of the thalamus could be used to treat cognitive impairment caused by traumatic brain injuries. More than 5 million people in the United States alone live with the effects of moderate to severe traumatic brain injuries, often caused by common events like falls and car crashes.

In deep brain stimulation, electrodes are implanted into the brain and — powered by a pacemaker — used to electrically stimulate targeted brain regions. The technique has long been used successfully to treat other conditions, for instance to quiet the tremors caused by Parkinson’s disease or the seizures of epilepsy. More recently, scientists are studying its ability to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders and deep depression (SN: 9/21/23).

To see if the same approach could restore cognitive function in individuals with traumatic brain injuries, Schiff and colleagues recruited six patients to undergo surgery and have the electrical devices implanted. The time since the patients were injured ranged from three to 18 years ago.

The researchers decided to target the central lateral nucleus of the thalamus, a brain region responsible for relaying information to the brain’s prefrontal and frontal cortexes, which handle executive function. After a severe brain injury, “you have the situation that lots of cells have been disconnected, [and] many cells have died,” Schiff says. Electrically stimulating the relay center of the thalamus, he says, might restore those lost connections.

After identifying the target areas in each person’s brain and implanting the electrodes, the researchers programmed the devices for a 12-hour on/off cycle and optimized them for each patient over a two-week period. One patient developed a scalp infection and had the device removed. The remaining five were put to the test.

The patients were each given a sheet of paper with 25 circles, each containing a number from 1 to 13 or a letter from A to L. The task, called the Trail Making Test, is to draw a line connecting the dots in ascending order while alternating between numbers and letters: 1-A-2-B-3-C and so on.

After receiving stimulation for at least three months, patients decreased the time it took them to connect the circles by about a third on average. One patient, for example, took about 171 seconds to complete the test before treatment, but only about 89 seconds with electrical stimulation. Though the researchers suspected they would see improvement, “our whole group was super gratified and surprised by the effect size,” Schiff says.

In a separate paper published October 18 in Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, the researchers described the participants’ and their families’ thoughts on the treatment. Patients were better able to do everyday things — such as reading, playing video games and watching television — that their injuries had made difficult or impossible. One patient said the treatment made him “more as I was before the accident.” The mother of another told the researchers: “I got my daughter back, I got my daughter back. It’s a miracle.”

Work like this can help patients while also addressing “really fundamental questions about the basic science of human brain function,” says Winston Chiong, a neurologist and ethicist at the University of California, San Francisco who was not involved with the study. Enough is known about potential risks to make treatments reasonable for patients, he says, but there are still many unknowns about the brain.

With deep brain stimulation now shown to be safe and preliminarily effective for treating traumatic brain injuries, Schiff plans to conduct another trial with more patients and for a longer duration. “It’ll be five to 10 times as many patients,” he says, to collect information for an even larger third trial “to try to turn it into therapy.”

in Science News on 2023-12-04 16:48:30 UTC.

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Computer Vision and Image Analysis for Industry 4.0

On this week's Journal Club session, Shamim Ibne Shahid will talk about the book "Computer Vision and Image Analysis for Industry 4.0".

Eight years ago, since the Omniglot data was first released, very few papers have addressed the original Omniglot challenge, which is to carry out within-alphabet one-shot classification tasks as opposed to selecting the test samples between the al- phabets. Most researchers have made the task easier by introducing new splits in the dataset and have taken advantage of significant sample and class augmentation. Amongst the deep learning models that have adopted the Omniglot challenge as it is, the Recursive Cortical network has the highest performance of 92.75%. In this presentation , I will talk about a new similarity function to aid in the training procedure of matching network, which helps achieve 95.75% classification accuracy on the Omniglot challenge without requiring any data augmentation.

Reference:

• N.Siddique, M. S. Arefin, M. A. R. Ahad, and M. A. A. Dewan, "Computer Vision and Image Analysis for Industry 4.0". CRC Press, 2023.

Date: 2023/12/08
Time: 14:00
Location: online

in UH Biocomputation group on 2023-12-04 16:02:38 UTC.

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Ancient Maya power brokers lived in neighborhoods, not just palaces

Pots with fancifully molded eyes, noses and mouths were one of the tip-offs.

Adrian Chase already had a growing sense that Maya society wasn’t quite what it’s been traditionally portrayed as: powerful rulers reigning while powerless commoners obeyed — or perhaps lived far enough from seats of power to operate largely on their own. Work by Chase and others had started to create a picture of a more politically complex society.

An archaeologist at the University of Chicago, Chase leads excavations of residential sites in and near the ancient Maya city center of Caracol in what’s now Belize. This city once sprawled across valleys, hillsides and hilltops. At its height, Caracol stretched 240 square kilometers, about the size of Milwaukee, before it was abandoned and swallowed by the forest.

Accumulating archaeological evidence had convinced Chase that shared social practices, such as placing pottery and other ritual items in special shrines, bonded groups of farm families into dozens of distinct neighborhoods within Caracol’s urban sprawl.

Consider those face-decorated pots. Varying shapes and spacings of molded eyes and other facial features added up to signature ceramic looks at different neighborhood-linked shrines. And those pots were just one element of a range of shrine offerings — including three-legged plates, curved jars with thin necks, and small medicine bottles and paint pots — that neighborhoods appeared to combine in distinctive ways.

And then there were the teeth. Individuals buried at some neighborhood shrines had either carved jade nuggets implanted in their teeth or their teeth filed in one of two styles. No such dental decorations appeared among the dead interred at other shrines. Various tooth alterations further defined neighborhood- specific shrine practices.

Pottery styles and tooth alterations together formed patterns specific to neighborhoods, Chase says. “There is a community aspect to these finds that reflects tight-knit neighborhoods.”

Caracol citizens, including those who lived well beyond downtown temples and pyramids, were not simple farmers growing crops in the service of a king, Chase suspects. Groups of as many as several hundred people had formed farming neighborhoods that built local ritual structures and followed distinctive ceremonial practices, apparently through their own collective efforts.

Neighborhoods, in turn, belonged to administrative districts with ties to royalty and other downtown political big shots. Stone compounds scattered throughout the city — each with their own ceremonial centers and plazas that probably hosted marketplaces and ritual events attended by crowds from nearby neighborhoods — represented districts’ bureaucratic service centers.

Neighborhoods and districts formed rungs of a political system in which central rulers sometimes gained power and laid down the law. At other times, royal dynasties crumbled and lower rungs in the political hierarchy assumed primary control.

Chase’s findings at Caracol have contributed to a shift in thinking about ancient Maya societies that has intensified over the last decade.

These societies, which originated as early as around 3,000 years ago, came to be known for giant stone pyramids, vast plazas and elite ballcourts discovered at jungle sites across Mesoamerica, a cultural region that extended from central Mexico to much of Central America before Spanish contact in the 1500s. These edifices had long suggested to researchers that Maya rulers wielded absolute power. So did hieroglyphics carved on stone slabs, which described kings’ exploits.

But expanded archaeological research, ongoing translations of Maya writings and the rise of airborne laser technology that sees through jungles are revealing a vast urban sprawl around major Maya ceremonial sites. Similarly extensive, low-density settlements have recently been discovered in other tropical areas around the world previously known only for giant ritual structures, such as Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple (SN: 5/14/16, p. 22).

Among the Maya, shifting circumstances would have tilted the balance of power. For instance, rural population booms might strengthen the hand of neighborhood-level elites. Military defeats of a royal dynasty could shift power to midlevel, district officials.

“A lot of Mesoamerican settlements probably had nested units of power,” Chase says. “There was no simple division between Maya elites and commoners.”

Vaulted stone structures give insight into Maya political structures

Laura Gilabert-Sansalvador did not have Mesoamerican politics on her mind in 2013 when she began studying stone palaces at La Blanca, an ancient Maya site in Guatemala. But her project ended up providing insights into not just physical structures, but also power structures.

Working toward a doctorate in architecture, Gilabert-Sansalvador wanted to decipher ancient techniques for erecting roofs on structures ranging from huts to temples.

Large rooms inside La Blanca palaces featured vaulted roofs, a tricky technical feat that Maya stonemasons worked to improve for more than 1,000 years. Inspired by La Blanca’s artfully angled room toppers, Gilabert-Sansalvador launched a project to draw, digitize and analyze vaulted buildings throughout the Maya lowlands of southern Mexico and Guatemala.

Vaulted structures featured two horizontal stone walls topped by rows of stones arranged to angle inward and meet at a central row of stones, creating an inverted V- or U-shaped roof.

Because Maya vaults required thick, load-bearing walls, they rarely exceeded 3 meters in width. Long, narrow vaulted structures in urban centers were often connected to form rectangular, oval or L shapes around courtyards. Some sites from the Classic Maya period — which ran from about A.D. 250 to 900 and is considered by many to be the zenith of the Maya civilization — include small numbers of vaulted stone buildings. These structures were much fancier and sturdier than farmers’ huts and thus researchers suspect high-ranking officials lived there. Other Classic Maya sites contain a high percentage of vaulted structures that may have served a variety of purposes, including storing important objects, hosting feasts and housing elites.

With her doctorate and a database of measurements for the remains of 200 vaulted stone buildings in hand, Gilabert-Sansalvador arrived at Tulane University’s Middle American Research Institute in New Orleans in 2021 as a visiting researcher. There she met Tulane archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli, who viewed her architectural expertise as essential for solving a Maya mystery.

Estrada-Belli had spent two decades excavating small structures that had been covered in dirt over time on forest floors at several ancient Maya sites. Some structures retained only plaster floors, consistent with having been farmers’ huts made of thatch and wooden poles that had long since decayed. But others were bordered by remains of thick stone and mortar walls, raising questions about who had lived there.

In reviewing aerial images of ancient Maya buildings across southern Mexico and Guatemala, Estrada-Belli had surmised that earth-covered mounds at least 1 meter tall corresponded to the rubble of collapsed stone structures, including those with vaulted roofs, like the ones he had excavated. But he could not be sure.

Gilabert-Sansalvador’s database offered an opportunity to evaluate that suspicion with lidar, short for light detection and ranging. In archaeology, airborne lidar technology uses laser pulses to detect remains of ancient structures and objects otherwise hidden by forests and ground cover. Lidar has revealed general features of interconnected Maya cities and extensive rural drainage channels and terraces dating to at least 2,300 years ago (SN: 10/27/18, p. 11).

The challenge was to develop a geometric measure of collapsed vaulted structures that lidar could detect.

Lidar illuminates Maya neighborhoods

In 2021 and 2022, Gilabert-Sansalvador, now at the Polytechnic University of València in Spain, joined Estrada-Belli and three other researchers to review measurements in her database plus measurements of another 251 vaulted structures collected by other excavation teams. Those buildings come from throughout Maya territory, from southern Mexico and Central America to as far north as the Yucatán Peninsula.

Inspecting the entire sample of 451 structures, the researchers found that collapsed vaulted buildings had a much higher volume of rubble, formed taller mounds and had steeper sides than same-sized buildings made of perishable materials, such as thatched-roof huts.

To verify that these mound dimensions spotlight only crumpled stone structures with vaulted roofs, the team examined stone buildings previously identified in excavations and ground surveys at the Classic Maya site of Tikal in Guatemala. Overall, the researchers’ method correctly distinguished between remnants of vaulted and nonvaulted structures, such as ballcourts lined by stone walls, ceremonial buildings and inscribed stone monuments, up to 97 percent of the time.

Confident in the method, the team then analyzed 11 lidar data­sets that covered Tikal and seven other Classic Maya urban centers, along with several rural territories. Lidar analyses encompassed a total of around 60,000 square kilometers, nearly the area of West Virginia. About 111,000 previously identified structures were analyzed for signs of having been built with vaulted roofs.

A picture emerged of clusters of vaulted stone buildings, typical of ruling elites’ houses in major centers. But they were in farming communities as far as five kilometers from the nearest urban core. As lidar images of rural stone compounds accumulated, Estrada-Belli felt increasingly surprised: “We checked our tests many times and concluded that this result was in fact correct.”

Small groups of huts, possibly occupied by extended families of farmers and other settlers, encircled shared plazas. Neighborhoods were made up of sets of huts clustered around stone buildings, which may have housed low-level nobles or other elites, the researchers reported in the September Journal of Archaeological Science. Sets of neighborhoods, in turn, clustered around large stone structures that may have housed higher-ranking officials, to form administrative districts.

“We now have quantitative measures of ancient Maya neighborhoods, which have been hard to define or identify,” Estrada-Belli says.

Urban sprawl managed by low- and midlevel officials flourished despite a lack of horses and wheeled vehicles, Estrada-Belli says. Transportation consisted of walking and river travel.

Raised roads, or causeways, ran from farmsteads, neighborhoods and districts to urban centers, making foot travel easier and pit stops convenient. Public plazas dotting the country­side hosted ritual gatherings and served as marketplaces. Rural elites’ duties included mediating local disputes and organizing community projects such as reservoir and causeway construction, Estrada-Belli suspects. In exchange, local officials probably collected taxes on market transactions.

Toward the end of the Classic Maya period, from around A.D. 600 to 900, local political authorities lived among many farming communities, Estrada-Belli says.

Linked in

Causeways linked many administrative centers (district nodes) within Caracol. At its peak of about 100,000 residents, estimated population densities reached over 1,000 people per square kilometer in the city center (dark red; lower densities in pink, yellow then green).

Any lingering suspicions that Maya farmers played no part in political decisions that affected their daily lives do not hold up, he contends. “We can now talk about one common model of urban organization among the Classic Maya that included the less populated countryside,” Estrada-Belli says. Maya political elites directed the construction of stone compounds at prominent locations in interconnected neighborhoods and administrative districts. This highlights the importance of central rulers in forming and running these complex political systems, he suspects.

Even among researchers impressed by the new lidar findings, though, some doubt that multilayered political systems always revolved around a king or elite political power brokers, as proposed by Estrada-Belli.

Some ancient Maya cities featured collective actions by local communities while others emphasized royal edicts, these investigators contend. And the same community could dramatically alter its political system as times and conditions changed.

Political variation across sites fits with archaeological and lidar discoveries over the last two decades that challenge a popular idea that Classic Maya cities collapsed rapidly around A.D. 900, over a span of 50 to 100 years. A group of 15 Maya researchers summarized these recent findings July 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Residents of Maya urban centers often found ways, whether through local or centralized decision making, to survive droughts and military defeats previously thought to have been society killers, research now suggests. Major sites suffered population losses over as many as 100 to 200 years before emptying out.

At that point, Maya people who had developed a taste for social and political flexibility established towns and smaller cities elsewhere. Maya culture soldiered on after Classic period cities lost their appeal.

Why urban centers turned into ghost cities over a couple of hundred years, some more quickly than others, is poorly understood. That raises questions about precisely who lived in Estrada-Belli’s newly identified Maya stone structures and what they were up to.

Who lived in vaulted buildings?

Excavations of those stone structures, guided by the lidar findings, will help to clarify who lived there.

Some occupants of rural vaulted structures may have belonged to noble lineages that served the royal interests, says anthropological archaeologist Andrew Scherer of Brown University in Providence, R.I. Ancient DNA evidence indicates that rulers of a 2,000-year-old nomadic empire in Asia followed a similar strategy, sending members of royal lineages to oversee distant territories (SN Online: 7/2/23).

But Maya rural elites may have acquired wealth and power in local communities without being appointed by a paramount ruler, Scherer cautions. If so, it’s not clear who, if anyone, pulled the strings of neighborhood and district officials.

Advances in deciphering Maya writing and ongoing excavations indicate that midlevel authorities wielded considerable power at rural settlements aligned with urban centers such as Tikal, says anthropological archaeologist John Walden of Harvard University. Midlevel elites ran public rituals and feasts, hosted marketplaces and maintained diplomatic ties with their counterparts in nearby communities, Walden concluded in the Spring 2023 issue of The Mayanist.

It’s an open question whether some vaulted structures served as homes for heads of local kin groups or clans that prioritized their own interests over those of kings and urban big shots, Walden says.

But the new lidar findings underscore a central point, Scherer says. “Authority in some fashion was dispersed on the landscape and not clustered in Maya civic ceremonial centers.”

Reconstructing Caracol politics

At Caracol, one of the largest Classic Maya cities, authority took chameleon-like turns, Chase says. “Caracol shifted between more collective and more autocratic systems of governance over its 1,500-year life span,” he says. “The city experienced great transformations and changes as it grew.”

Chase has reconstructed Caracol’s wild historical ride using an array of evidence accumulated over the last four decades, including deciphered Maya written records carved on stone slabs, archaeological finds and lidar imagery. His conclusions appear in the 2023 Research Reports in Belizean Archaeology and in a chapter of an upcoming book that he coedited, Ancient Mesoamerican Population History. For instance, carved hieroglyphics include dates when specific rulers assumed power and won or lost battles with kings of rival cities. And lidar maps have guided ongoing excavations of farming sites outside Caracol’s city core.

Chase’s own connection to Caracol began before he could talk. His parents, anthropological archaeologists Diane Chase and Arlen Chase, both at the University of Houston, brought him there every year, starting as an infant, after launching a Caracol fieldwork project in 1985.

As a high school junior steeped in archaeology, Chase helped run a Caracol excavation. Now he oversees multiple excavations and on-site lab investigations of unearthed artifacts.

Caracol started out small too. Around 600 B.C., three villages collectively built reservoirs, causeways and ceremonial sites. Residents of the villages formed a single site that was governed without central rulers for about 700 years. A royal dynasty assumed power in A.D. 331. Successful wars against the nearby cities of Tikal and Naranjo between 553 and 680 sparked a population boom. A minimum of 100,000 people inhabited Caracol at its peak.

Urban and rural areas coalesced into a “garden city,” Chase says. He has mapped 373 neighborhoods, each linked to a nearby public space that hosted market and ritual events. In each neighborhood, residents carved agricultural terraces out of adjacent hillsides and constructed small reservoirs. Groups of neighborhoods formed 25 districts, each containing a monumental center with reservoirs, ballcourts or other large structures that provided public services, he reported in the June Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.

Chase ended up defining neighborhoods not just by combinations of pottery offerings and dental practices, but also by distances of farmers’ huts to the nearest district plaza. Farmers who would have walked similar routes over Caracol’s rugged hills to district sites presumably forged ties on those trips, which cultivated feelings of belonging to neighborhoods with common practices, such as leaving certain types of offerings at local shrines, Chase suspects.

Naranjo’s military defeat of Caracol in 680 ushered in roughly a century of decentralized government, Chase says. “Faceless administrators” who went unnamed in Maya writings oversaw taxation and the provision of services to urban communities. Policies at that time led to widespread wealth, community-wide ritual ceremonies and relatively equal access to market products and agricultural land.

New rulers who aligned themselves with powerful Maya gods assumed power in 798. These kings instituted autocratic policies and oversaw a sharp rise in wealth disparities. Those developments may have instigated a population exodus from Caracol. By 900, the garden city had been abandoned.

Estrada-Belli suspects a system of Caracol neighborhood and district officials operated out of regularly spaced, elite residences, much like the compounds of vaulted structures his team has identified elsewhere. Plans are in the works to probe lidar data at Caracol for signs of collapsed vaulted structures in or near previously identified neighborhoods, Chase says.

Classic-era sites in the northern Maya lowlands of the Yucatán Peninsula, which generally have drawn less scientific attention than Classic Maya sites to the south, also deserve closer lidar scrutiny. Vaulted structures still stand at some of those centers, including large sites such as Chichén Itzá, Estrada-Belli says.

New excavations guided by lidar discoveries, and lidar analyses informed by the dimensions of excavated buildings, may clarify Classic Maya power structures at sites on the Yucatán Peninsula.

The layering of authority and its reach across ancient Maya urban areas is just beginning to emerge from a forested shroud.

in Science News on 2023-12-04 15:00:00 UTC.

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Want to Store a Message in DNA? That’ll Be $1,000

in WIRED Science on 2023-12-04 13:00:00 UTC.

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Giant polygon rock patterns may be buried deep below Mars’ surface

Enormous polygon patterns in rock lie dozens of meters below Mars’ surface, ground-penetrating radar data suggest.

Similar patterns develop on the surface in Earth’s polar regions when icy sediments cool and contract. A comparable process long ago may have created the shapes on Mars, found near the planet’s dry equator, researchers report November 23 in Nature Astronomy.

If so, the finding hints that the Red Planet’s equator was much wetter and icier, more like a polar region, when the polygons formed 2 billion to 3 billion years ago.

“Buried possible polygons at that depth have yet to be reported” on Mars, says planetary scientist Richard Soare of Dawson College in Montreal, who was not involved in the study. Searching for ancient polygonal terrain on Mars using ground-penetrating radar is a new idea that “could be powerful,” he adds, and could help scientists understand how Mars’ climate has changed in the past.

On Earth, polygonal terrain forms in chilly climes when sharp temperature drops cause icy ground to contract and crack open. These thermal fractures are small at first. But the little cracks can fill with ice, sand, or a bit of both, forming “wedges” that prevent the cracks from healing and gradually pry open the earth as they grow. Because this wedging process requires multiple cycles of freezing and thawing, polygonal ground is a good hint that the terrain was icy when the patterns formed.

But the Chinese Zhurong rover’s landing site, on a part of Mars called Utopia Planitia, is not the kind of place one would expect to find the terrain on Earth — at least not today (SN: 5/19/21). Polygons have been spotted at higher latitudes on the Martian surface from orbit, but the landing site sits near the Martian equator in a dry, sandy dune field (SN: 8/24/04).

The polygons appear to be roughly 70 meters across and are bordered by wedges nearly 30 meters wide and tens of meters deep — about 10 times as large as typical polygons and wedges on Earth. So it’s possible, Soare says, the structures here formed a bit differently than ice-wedge polygons on Earth.

Forming polygons near the Martian equator wouldn’t be possible today, says study coauthor Ross Mitchell, a geoscientist also at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics. To form polygons, the region must have been colder and wetter in the past, he says — much like a polar region.

Changes in the tilt of Mars’ axis could explain such a shift in climate. Simulations of Mars’ orbit have suggested that the planet’s spin axis has at times been so extremely tilted that the planet essentially lay halfway on its side. This would cause the poles to receive more direct sunlight while equatorial regions froze. Finding potential polygons buried near the Martian equator, Mitchell says, is “smoking gun evidence” supporting the idea that the tilt of Mars’ axis has varied so substantially in the past.

“We think of every planet other than Earth as dead,” Mitchell says. But if Mars’s axis does swing around often, he says, our neighboring planet’s climate would be far more dynamic than currently believed.

in Science News on 2023-12-04 12:00:00 UTC.

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Cyberstalking pits Harvard professor against PubPeer

A deluge of bizarre and malicious emails targeting a professor at Harvard Medical School has left him reeling, while raising questions about the smear campaign’s use of a popular online forum where scientists publicly critique research.

Joseph Loscalzo sent a letter to PubPeer, the online forum, in September describing an “aggressive cyberstalking and harassment campaign” that “has relentlessly targeted myself and my colleagues” for many months with “misleading and often inaccurate comments.” He called PubPeer “a vehicle” for the attacks, alleging anonymous comments raising concerns about at least 15 papers were posted “in bad faith” and then used to defame and badger him in emails to other researchers, journals, and universities.

Loscalzo, physician-in-chief emeritus and former chair of the department of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, asked PubPeer to remove the offending comments and impose a six-month moratorium on anonymous posts about his work. The letter was obtained by Retraction Watch.

PubPeer has gained prominence in recent years as a place where amateur sleuths have flagged data manipulation and other scientific misconduct involving high-profile scientists, including most recently Stanford President and neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who resigned earlier this year after an investigation confirmed data manipulation in papers he co-authored.  (Full disclosure: Ivan Oransky, a co-founder of Retraction Watch, is a volunteer member of PubPeer’s board of directors.)

The online forum denied responsibility for how posts on its website are used and the intentions behind them. “We’re not yet president of the internet,” said Boris Barbour, who helped launch PubPeer. “All we can do is tend our own garden and make sure that what is on PubPeer is fair according to our guidelines.”

As for what goes onto the site, he explained, it is either posted “by a trusted commenter and subject to post-moderation as required, or will be examined before it’s posted.” To protect users, “we’re set up not to know who’s commenting and not to know if it’s the same person,” Barbour added.

He said PubPeer had removed “a few comments” that required more context or explanation, but most appeared to be valid points “about relatively minor things.”

“It’s not as if it’s revenge porn or some fabrication or something,” Barbour said, adding that the organization would not halt legitimate comments. “We to date have never yet practiced a moratorium under legal threat.”

Loscalzo is not the only researcher to complain about the nonprofit organization. Nobel Prize winner Thomas Südhof of Stanford University, who earlier this year earned two corrections and an editorial expression of concern following PubPeer posts, has accused the forum of lacking transparency and censoring comments. Others have taken legal action. In 2021, a pair of controversial researchers in France sued the highly regarded scientific sleuth Elizabeth Bik and Barbour for harassing them by exposing problems with their research on the website.

And in 2014, a cancer researcher at Wayne State University, in Detroit, brought claims against anonymous PubPeer commenters, subpoenaing the site for the commenters’ names, after allegedly losing a job offer due to posts raising concerns about his papers. He was unsuccessful.

Loscalzo declined several requests for an on-the-record interview. But Brigham and Women’s Hospital said in an emailed statement: “The allegations raised by these anonymous accounts are meritless and the ongoing cyber harassment of a member of our faculty and research team is extremely concerning.”

Loscalzo is a former collaborator of Piero Anversa, who left Harvard in 2015 after having fudged dozens of studies, according to a subsequent investigation, to make it look as if adult stem cells could repair damaged hearts. No evidence has implicated Loscalzo in the deception, but his tormentor, or tormentors, have weaponized PubPeer in an ever-widening online campaign to discredit him. 

The letter, dated Sept. 19, 2023, cites three examples of “many malicious emails,” all of which were sent from untraceable Proton Mail accounts using aliases. 

For instance, an email sent this summer by someone impersonating one of Loscalzo’s coauthors asked the editor of Circulation Research “to withdraw” a recent paper by the two researchers after “PubPeer comments brought to our attention to possible research integrity issue on our article [sic].”

Another email, sent to several faculty members at Brigham and Women’s, began: “Many people know Loscalzo Lab has a lot of academic and other ethical misconduct issues,” and linked to comments on PubPeer about his research.

The extent of the smear campaign is unclear. But the emails targeting Loscalzo are likely to number in the hundreds, if not more. During the past several months, Retraction Watch alone has received dozens of messages from Proton Mail accounts that were later deleted. Many claimed to be from South Korean academics, but included text lifted from Wikipedia about the sender; several pointed to comments on PubPeer and urged investigations of Loscalzo. Some struck a professional tone; others appeared unhinged.

“Loscalzo Lab people are crazy and full of the mentally disturbed,” wrote a self-described “former postdoctoral fellow” in the lab. 

Simultaneously, even more outlandish emails began arriving in Retraction Watch inboxes. They also came from Proton Mail accounts. Many were signed by a “Jennie Lee,” who described herself as a “manager and coordinator” of what appeared to be a campaign to defend Loscalzo called “Together Joe – We are stronger together with Joe Loscalzo.” Several ended with a nursery rhyme, of sorts, consisting of five stanzas and titled “Joey Lo and His Morning Report.”

One email read, in part: “We will do our best to protect Dr. Loscalzo from constant slander, research integrity allegations, and defamation directed at Dr. Loscalzo. Please ignore any malicious emails sent to Retraction Watch and also ignore malicious PubPeer comments by bad actors.” 

Whether these emails, which were sent out widely, were a bona fide attempt to shield the professor or a twisted part of the plot against him is unclear. Leonid Schneider, in an Oct. 23, 2023, post on his blog For Better Science, suggested Loscalzo had sent the emails himself using sock-puppet accounts. Schneider also posted a drawing of Loscalzo as a heavy-breasted drag queen.

Who is behind the scores of inimical Proton Mail emails also remains unclear – but in the letter to PubPeer, the researcher speculated that the onslaught has roots in a case involving a South Korean medical student who briefly worked in his Brigham lab. “In South Korea, this student was the subject of false allegations of research misconduct by other South Korean scientists,” Loscalzo wrote in his letter. “The allegations were formally dismissed by his university after an internal investigation, and the scientists who brought forward the allegations were discredited. Shortly thereafter, which is why we believe the conduct is related and retaliatory, the cyberstalker began harassing the student, as well as me and other colleagues who have worked with me and/or the student.”

The former student appears to have worked in the lab of a prominent cardiologist at Yonsei University in South Korea. Earlier this year, the cardiologist, Hui-Nam Pak, was found guilty of duplicate publication, a type of academic misconduct, by his institution. Since Retraction Watch first wrote about Pak last February, hundreds of hateful comments defending Pak and vilifying whistleblowers have flooded the blog; many were not posted because they violated commenting policies. 

Even Bik seems to have been snared in the campaign. She said she started looking into papers Loscalzo had coauthored after receiving a tip from someone using a Proton Mail account and signing off with an Asian name. Among several issues she flagged on PubPeer in October, she said only one seemed potentially serious: an image in a 2003 paper she said appeared to have “been digitally altered.” 

“It’s not like the Stanford president or like other cases I’ve followed,” she said, referring to Tessier-Lavigne. “I did search a lot of [Loscalzo’s] papers and I didn’t really find much other than the eight or seven that I reported, but it seemed to be all minor problems.”

In an email, Loscalzo dismissed any suggestion of image manipulation, adding that “if there was an error, it was unintentional. Importantly, the internal consistency of the other experiments in the [2003] paper strongly supports the conclusions, which have since been independently confirmed by other research groups.”

Meanwhile, the cyberattacks continue. After declining several interview requests, Loscalzo forwarded an email showing that on November 8, someone using a Proton Mail account had submitted a manuscript titled “Abilify Network medicine: Drug repurposing of aripiprazole in cardiovascular diseases” to Preprints.org, a server for archiving scholarly works in advance of publication. Loscalzo and several of his colleagues were listed as authors, but had never heard of the article, he wrote in an email to Preprints.org.

“No doubt, after the paper is published, the plan would be for the malicious culprit to post errors on PubPeer that would be used to defame us yet again,” Loscalzo said.

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

in Retraction watch on 2023-12-04 09:32:36 UTC.

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Next Open NeuroFedora meeting: 04 December 1300 UTC

Photo by William White on Unsplash.

Please join us at the next regular Open NeuroFedora team meeting on Monday 04 December at 1300 UTC. The meeting is a public meeting, and open for everyone to attend. You can join us over:

• Matrix

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

$ date --date='TZ="UTC" 1300 2023-12-04'

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

• New introductions and roll call.
• Tasks from last meeting.
• Open Pagure tickets.
• Package health check.
• Open package reviews check.
• CompNeuro lab compose status check for Fedora 40/rawhide.
• Neuroscience query of the week
• Next meeting day, and chair.
• Open floor.

We hope to see you there!

in NeuroFedora blog on 2023-12-04 09:22:00 UTC.

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Little Creatures

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

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An Invisible ‘Demon’ Lurks in an Odd Superconductor

in WIRED Science on 2023-12-03 13:00:00 UTC.

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Climate Cookbooks Are Here to Change How You Eat

in WIRED Science on 2023-12-02 13:00:00 UTC.

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Was Bobi the World’s Oldest Dog—or a Fraud?

in WIRED Science on 2023-12-02 12:00:00 UTC.

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Ozempic Could Also Help You Drink Less Alcohol

in WIRED Science on 2023-12-02 12:00:00 UTC.

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Weekend reads: Hijacked journals polluting an index; special issues take a hit; a data breach at a megajournal

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• A new way to support Retraction Watch this Giving Tuesday
• Purdue agrees to pay feds back $737,000 for grant submissions with fake data
• Professor in Jordan sues sleuth who exposed citation anomalies
• Author of ‘gibberish’ paper admits to extensive plagiarism
• Elsevier investigating articles linked to controversial French researcher

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to over 375. There are more than 45,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains well over 200 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? Or The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List?

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

• “41 hijacked journals are still compromising the data of legitimate journals in Scopus.” From the creator of the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker.
• “The SNSF is no longer funding Open Access articles in special issues.” More on the problem with special issues here.
• “Our customer database at Scientific Reports was accessed by an unauthorised person on November 19, 2023.”
• Head of company that accredits autism service providers resigns after article retraction.
• “Additionally, 43.3% of researchers acknowledged having intentionally engaged in some type of scientific misconduct (self-reported frequency).”
• “Mass resignations rock publication on international students.”
• “Bucking History, ORI Deputy Denies Requests For Misconduct NPRM Comment Extension.” Then the agency reverses itself.
• “Proposed changes to rules for policing fraud in U.S.-funded biomedical research draw a mixed response.”
• “Saudi universities lose highly cited researchers after payment schemes raise ethics concerns.”
• “Open Science Charter makes urgent appeal for open access.”
• “Providing a direct survey link, even with CAPTCHA-protection, evoked fraudulent responses.” Earlier: “Scammers threaten quality of research survey data.”
• “Submitting papers to several journals at once.”
• “UAE university breaks ties with beleaguered nanoscientist.”
• “Evidence from 10 RCTs suggests that training peer reviewers may lead to little or no improvement in the quality of peer review.”
• “Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers. We asked them about it — and they deleted everything.”
• “AI Use in Manuscript Preparation for Academic Journals.”
• “To improve social science publications let’s lose the discussion section.”
• At CNRS, “transparency in the way allegations of misconduct are treated is a difficult issue.”
• “Scientific fraud: science as we have never seen it.”
• “Patients ‘betrayed’ by Canadian researchers, advocate says of clinical trial probe.”
• “Poor statistical reporting, inadequate data presentation and spin persist despite Journal awareness and updated Information for Authors.”
• “Science is littered with zombie studies. Here’s how to stop their spread.”
• “The persistence of eugenics in mainstream journals highlights major gaps in research integrity.”
• “Retracted publications in BRICS countries: an analytical study.”
• “Most codes claim [research integrity] RI teaching is for all researchers, but without any in-depth guidance.”
• “The Publication Facts Label: Ascertaining a Publication’s Adherence to Scholarly Standards.”
• “Metadata analysis of retracted fake papers in Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology.”
• “Our findings add to others suggesting that communicators can be transparent about statistical uncertainty without undermining their credibility as a source but should endeavour to provide a quantification, such as a numeric range, where possible.”
• “The study was retracted years ago. How did it get into guidelines for pregnant women?”
• “‘Serious misconduct’ prompted Sydney whistleblower’s removal.”
• “Publishing concerns and budget problems bedevil research offices.”
• “The scientific world recognises when you stick your neck out and do the right thing.” An interview with Chelsea Polis.
• “Extreme productivity has become worryingly common across scientific fields with rapidly increasing rates in some countries and settings.”
• “From bench to bot: How to use AI tools to convert notes into a draft.”
• Our Ivan Oransky is speaking at a free DOAJ webinar on Dec. 7 about trust.

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

in Retraction watch on 2023-12-02 06:00:00 UTC.

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A mysterious ancient grave with a sword and mirror belonged to a woman

A roughly 2,000-year-old woman with a potentially violent streak has emerged from skeletal rubble found on an island off southwestern England’s coast.

A jumble of tooth and bone fragments in a Late Iron Age grave belonged to a young woman who was interred with items that include a sword, shield and bronze mirror, researchers report in the December Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. The team used a sex-linked protein extracted from tooth enamel to classify the remains as female.

The island grave dates to roughly 100 B.C. to 50 B.C., based on radiocarbon dating of a partial bone and the types of metal objects found in the burial. Given tooth wear, the woman died between the ages of 20 and 25.

Since the burial’s accidental discovery in 1999 by a farmer plowing a field on England’s Bryher Island, researchers have wondered whether the stone-lined grave contained a man or woman. No other Western European Iron Age grave includes a sword, typically found in male burials from that region, and a mirror, often associated with female burials.

Human skeletal biologist Simon Mays of Historic England, a public organization that protects and studies historical places, in Portsmouth and colleagues speculate that the woman may have fought in raids and helped to fend off enemy attacks. Violence between communities may often have occurred in Iron Age Europe (SN: 10/6/20). And growing evidence suggests that ancient women, not just men, could be warriors too (SN: 9/13/17).

One possible use of the mirror was to flash beams of reflected sunlight as a way of communicating with people on nearby islands and with seacraft, the researchers speculate. If so, and given the sword’s presence, it’s possible the Bryher woman helped to plan raids and defensive actions.

Still, the remains bear no signs of violent conflict. So it’s also possible that mourners placed the sword and mirror in the grave as tokens of allegiance to the woman’s kin group or as heirlooms, the researchers say.

in Science News on 2023-12-01 17:00:00 UTC.

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A new UN report lays out an ethical framework for climate engineering

The world is in a climate crisis — and in the waning days of what’s likely to be the world’s hottest year on record, a new United Nations report is weighing the ethics of using technological interventions to try to rein in rising global temperatures.

“The current speed at which the effects of global warming are increasingly being manifested is giving new life to the discussion on the kinds of climate action best suited to tackle the catastrophic consequences of environmental changes,” the report states.

A broad variety of climate engineering interventions are already in development, from strategies that could directly remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to efforts to modify incoming radiation from the sun (SN: 10/6/19; SN: 7/9/21; SN: 8/8/18).

But “we don’t know the unintended consequences” of many of these technologies, said UNESCO Assistant Director-General Gabriela Ramos at a news conference on November 20 ahead of the report’s release. “There are several areas of great concern. These are very interesting and promising technological developments, but we need an ethical framework to decide how and when to use them.”

Such a framework should be globally agreed upon, Ramos said — and that’s why UNESCO decided to step in. The new report proposes ethical frameworks for both the study and the later deployment of climate engineering strategies.

In addition to explicitly addressing concerns over how tinkering with the climate might affect global food security and the environment, ethical considerations must also include accounting for conflicting interests between regions and countries, the report states. Furthermore, it must include assessing at what point the risks of taking action are or are not morally defensible.   

“It’s not [for] a single country to decide,” Ramos said. “Even those countries that have nothing to do with those technological developments need to be at the table … to agree on a path going forward. Climate is global and needs to be a global conversation.”

The ethics-focused report was prepared by a UNESCO advisory body known as the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology. Its release coincided with the start of the U.N.’s international climate action summit, the 28th Conference of the Parties, or COP, in Dubai. COP28 runs from November 30 through December 12.

To delve more into the goals of the study and what climate engineering strategies the report considers, Science News talked with report coauthor Inés Camilloni, a climate scientist at the University of Buenos Aires and a resident in the solar geoengineering research program at Harvard University. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

SN: There have been a lot of reports recently about climate engineering. What makes this one important?

Camilloni: One thing is that this report includes the views from the Global South as well as the Global North. This is something really important, there are not many reports with the voices of scientists from the Global South. The U.N. Environment Programme’s report this year [on solar radiation modification] was another one. [This new report] has a bigger picture, because it also includes carbon dioxide removal.

I’m a climate scientist; ethics is something new to me. I got involved because I was a lead author of a chapter in the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] 1.5-degrees-Celsius special report in 2018, and there was a box discussion about climate engineering (SN: 10/7/18). I realized I was not an expert on that. The discussion was among scientists in the Global North, who had a clear position in some ways about the idea, but not Global South scientists. We were just witnessing this discussion.

SN: The report raises a concern about the “moral hazard” of relying too much on climate engineering, which might give countries or companies an excuse to slow carbon emission reductions. Should we even be considering climate engineering in that context?

Camilloni: What we are saying in the report is that the priority must be the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. But the discussion on climate engineering is growing because we are not on track to keep temperatures [below] 1.5 degrees C. We are not [at] the right level of ambition really needed to keep temperatures below that target. There are so many uncertainties that it’s relevant to consider the ethical dimensions in these conversations, to make a decision of potential deployment. And in most IPCC scenarios that can limit warming to below 1.5 degrees, carbon dioxide removal is already there.

SN: What are some of the carbon dioxide removal strategies under consideration?

Camilloni: Carbon dioxide removal combines two different methods: Restoring natural carbon sinks, like forests and soils, and investing in technologies that are maybe not yet proven to work at the scale that’s needed. That includes direct air capture [of carbon dioxide] and storage; bioenergy with carbon capture and storage; increasing uptake by the oceans of carbon dioxide, for example by iron fertilization; and enhancing natural weathering processes that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

But there are potential consequences that need to be considered. Those include negative impacts of terrestrial biodiversity, and effects on marine biodiversity from ocean fertilization. As for sequestering carbon dioxide — how do you store it for hundreds of years or longer, and what are the consequences of rapid release from underground reservoirs? Also there’s potential competition for land [between bioenergy crops or planting trees] and food production, especially in the Global South.

SN: Solar radiation modification is considered even more controversial, but some scientists are saying it should now be on the table (SN: 5/21/10). What type of solar radiation modification is the most viable, technologically?

Camilloni: That’s an umbrella term for a variety of approaches that reduce the amount of incoming sunlight reflected by the atmosphere back to space.

There’s increasing surface reflectivity, for example with reflective paints on structures, or planting more reflective crops (SN: 9/28/18). That reflects more solar radiation into space. It’s already being used in some cities, but it has a very local effect. Similarly, increasing the reflectivity of marine clouds — there were some experiments in Australia to try to protect the Great Barrier Reef, but it seems that also the scale is not global.

Another proposed strategy is to thin infrared-absorbing cirrus clouds — I don’t really know much about that or if it’s really possible. And there’s placing reflectors or shields in space to deflect incoming solar radiation; I also don’t really know if it’s possible to do that.

Injecting aerosols into the stratosphere, to mimic the cooling effect of a volcanic eruption, is the most promising for a global impact. It’s not so challenging in terms of the technology. It’s the only way that we have identified that can cool the planet in a few years.

SN: How soon could aerosol injection be used?

Camilloni: We need at least 10 to 20 years before we can think of deployment. The limitation is that we need the aircraft that can fly at around 20 kilometers altitude. Those are already being designed, but we need about 10 years for those designs, and another 10 to build a fleet of them.

SN: What are some of the ethical concerns around aerosol injection or other solar radiation modification technologies?

Camilloni: These new technologies may be risky in the potential for exacerbating climate problems or introducing new challenges. There are potential risks to changing precipitation patterns, even overcooling in some regions. A key consideration in deciding whether to pursue them is the need for a full characterization of the positive and negative effects of the different technologies around the globe, and a comparison against the risk of not intervening.

SN: In 2021, a research group at Harvard was barred from launching a balloon into the stratosphere to test equipment for possible future aerosol release. How might this report address similar studies?

Camilloni: In our report, we want to make a distinction among the different types of research. You can have indoor research — simulations, social analysis — and this is not so controversial. When you consider outdoor research — releasing particles into the atmosphere — that is more controversial. We are calling for more indoor research. We need to understand the potential impacts.

[For example,] I studied the impact of solar radiation modification on the hydrology of the La Plata Basin [which includes parts of southeastern Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay and northeastern Argentina]. It’s the most populated region on the continent, and very relevant for hydropower production. And it’s already a very impacted region by climate change.

However, that research was based on just one climate model. We need more — more resources, more capacity building in the Global South. My research group was the first to explore those impacts in Latin and South America. There are others doing research on this over the next few months, but I can count those groups on one hand.

We need more resources to be part of any discussion. Those resources include the Loss and Damage Fund to provide support to nations most vulnerable to the climate crisis [agreed to at the end of COP27 in 2022]. But nobody really knows now how that will be implemented.

SN: The report’s release was timed to the start of COP28. What are you hoping that policymakers will take away from it over the next two weeks?

Camilloni: These recommendations are really important to have in mind, of course. We need more research to make a decision about whether this is a good idea or a bad idea. And maybe people will cut admissions faster if they’re afraid of climate engineering.

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

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Dr. Nergis Mavalvala Detected the First Gravitational Wave. Her Work Doesn’t Stop There

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

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The Race to Find What’s Making America’s Dogs Sick

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

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How Dr. Clara Nellist Collides Art and Science

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

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BMC Environmental Science is now open for submissions!

We are pleased to introduce BMC Environmental Science, an important and timely addition to the BMC Series portfolio. The BMC Series is widely recognized for its commitment to reliable open-access publishing, tailored to the specific needs of the research communities we serve.

At a time of unprecedented global change and great uncertainties, scientific information is critical to mitigate human induced effects on global climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss. Our fully open access policy with freely available data aims to speed up the pace of discovery and produce robust and reproducible science. Like all BMC Series titles, we support transparent peer review and make editorial decisions based on the validity and rigor of a study rather than its perceived impact.

Scientific information is critical to mitigate human induced effects on global climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss

BMC Environmental Science also welcomes Dr. Marie-Therese Noedl as its Associate Editor. She shares her enthusiasm for the journal’s mission stating, “I look forward to driving the journal’s commitment in advancing our understanding of environmental phenomena and promoting sustainable practices. We are dedicated to publishing scientifically sound research that helps support informed decisions and formulate environmental policies necessary to make a real-life impact.”

Our new journal encourages a cross-disciplinary discourse and invites submissions from all scientific fields including natural, formal and applied sciences. Focusing on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)s we particularly encourage contributions that center on clean water and sanitation (SDG 6), affordable and clean energy (SDG 7), sustainable cities and communities (SDG 11), responsible consumption and production (SDG 12) climate action (SDG 13), life below water (SDG 14), and life on land (SDG 15). ). In addition, the journal welcomes manuscripts from a wide range of research areas addressing global sustainability, conservation and science policies including environmental protection, climate change, pollution, renewable energy and more.

Journal Collections

BMC Environmental Science is particularly delighted to invite research to our Guest Edited Collections “Ecotourism and conservation of biodiversity”, “Light pollution: the impact of artificial light on humans and wildlife”, and “Nature-based solutions in waste-water management”.

Join the board

BMC Environmental Science is now accepting submissions. If you’re interested in becoming part of our team of international academic editors, you can find detailed application instructions here.

Please contact us at: bmcenvsci@biomedcentral.com or marie-therese.noedl@springernature.com

in BMC Series blog on 2023-12-01 11:00:23 UTC.

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Exciting news: BMC Methods now open for submissions!

APC fees are covered by Springer Nature until December 1, 2024

As part of our commitment to championing reproducibility, transparency, and the continual advancement of scientific methods, BMC Methods is excited to introduce two article types designed to assist our authors in effectively showcasing their innovative techniques and procedures: Methodology Articles and Protocols. We are also pleased to announce that publication costs for BMC Methods are covered by Springer Nature until December 1, 2024. Authors whose articles are accepted for publication before that date won’t be charged an article-processing fee. 

Methodology Articles: advancing scientific frontiers

Methodology articles are expected to introduce experimental or computational methods that represent an advance in their respective fields. Whether it’s an entirely novel approach or an improved version of an existing method, authors are encouraged to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of their methodology in comparison to other alternatives. The method should have undergone testing, validation, and ideally, practical application demonstrating its value.

It’s important to note that Methodology articles do not provide a step-by-step description of the method. Instead, authors are encouraged to submit a detailed step-by-step protocol separately as a Protocol article type, or reference a previously published protocol.

Protocols: a deep dive into experimental techniques

Protocols offer detailed step-by-step descriptions of experimental techniques. To be considered for publication, protocols must provide sufficient details for easy replication, include evidence of the protocol’s success by referencing at least one peer-reviewed publication and represent an advance on previously available methods.

We strongly recommend that authors share their step-by-step protocols on protocols.io before submission. Protocols submitted to BMC Methods will then consist of two interlinked components:

• A step-by-step protocol on protocols.io, including detailed methodological information.
• A peer-reviewed BMC Methods article contextualizing the protocol, discussing background, advantages, applications, limitations, troubleshooting, expected results, benchmarking data, and sample datasets.

Additional details about our collaboration with protocols.io can be found here.

We encourage authors to discover the exciting possibilities that BMC Methods has to offer for sharing and advancing scientific methodologies, including intriguing topic-specific Guest Edited Collections, by exploring our website.
If you are interested in joining our our team of international academic editors, you can find detailed application instructions here.
To discover more, please do not hesitate to contact the Editor, Dr. Chiara Cilibrasi (chiara.cilibrasi@springernature.com)

We firmly believe your contributions play a crucial role in driving innovation and progress within the scientific community.
We look forward to receiving your manuscripts!

in BMC Series blog on 2023-12-01 10:45:27 UTC.

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Elsevier investigating articles linked to controversial French researcher

The publisher Elsevier is investigating an unspecified number of articles by authors affiliated with a French research institute for concerns about “the appropriate conduct of research involving human participants.” 

According to a “Publisher’s Note” that appeared November 9 in Elsevier’s New Microbes and New Infections, “concerns have been raised about a number of articles” published in the journal by researchers affiliated with the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Méditerranée Infection (IHU-MI) in Marseille. 

The journal and Elsevier’s “Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics Centre of Expertise” are investigating the allegations “by confidentially consulting with the authors and, where necessary, liaising with the institution where the studies took place,” the note said. It continued: 

Expressions of Concern will be issued to articles published in NMNI if it is deemed that there is a particular need to alert readers to serious concerns while investigation is ongoing.

These Expressions of Concern will remain appended to the articles until the investigation has concluded, and the journal has taken any further action deemed necessary (which may include updates to the Expressions of Concern). In instances where a permanent correction is deemed necessary, the journal will make appropriate corrections to the record, in accordance with Elsevier policies.

The journal wishes to thank those who have alerted us to these concerns.

The notice did not state which articles, or even how many, are under investigation, and an Elsevier spokesperson did not answer our direct questions about the matter. Instead, the spokesperson provided this statement, which indicates the publisher’s investigation extends beyond a single journal: 

We have recently published a “Publisher’s Note” at New Microbes and New Infections which outlines our approach to an ongoing investigation into articles authored by researchers from IHU – Méditerranée-Infection, Marseille.  In addition to papers published in NMNI, a central investigation is being conducted by the Elsevier Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics team that is assessing articles from IHU – Méditerranée-Infection, Marseille published in other journals. 

In accordance with COPE guidelines, we are currently discussing these articles with both the authors and field experts as a matter of due process, and where any corrections to the record are deemed necessary, these will be clearly communicated online in due course.

Didier Raoult, the French infectious disease scientist who came to prominence for promoting hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment, last year retired as director of IHU-MI, which he had overseen since 2011. His departure followed an inspection by the French National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products that found “serious shortcomings and non-compliances with the regulations for research involving the human person.”

Raoult has not responded to our request for comment. 

A group of researchers identified 456 clinical studies by authors affiliated with IHU-MI with “serious concerns on the ethics approvals of the trials,” such as nearly 250 that use the same ethics approval number despite significant differences in design. Of the studies they flagged with ethical concerns, 135 were published in New Microbes and New Infections. 

The critics published their findings, as well as their correspondence with editors and publishers of journals where the studies with ethical concerns had appeared. Their records indicate that Elsevier has been aware of their concerns since July 2022. 

Even after the article was published in August containing a figure identifying journals that had published more than three papers with ethical concerns, nothing seemed to happen, Lonni Besançon and Fabrice Frank, two of the article’s authors, said in an interview with Retraction Watch before Elsevier’s note was published. 

“I guess this speaks to the accountability of publishers about them publishing potentially fraudulent science,” Besançon said. “I don’t think they care much.”

The Springer Nature journal Scientific Reports in October retracted two papers the sleuths had flagged, which Besançon hoped would spur the publication of expressions of concern for other articles. Such notices “would have been the right course of action when we reached out to editors initially,” he said. 

Last December, the publisher PLOS marked nearly 50 papers by Raoult with expressions of concern while it continued to investigate the ethics approvals. The sleuths had reported 12 articles to PLOS, Frank said, and he wonders how many more articles have issues than have been publicly flagged: “Maybe we have seen only the part of the iceberg that is outside of the water and not the whole one below.”

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

in Retraction watch on 2023-12-01 08:00:00 UTC.

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Schneider Shorts 1.12.2023 – Determined to undermine people’s reputations

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

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World AIDS Day 2023: Highlights from the BMC Series

BMC Public Health – Feasibility and acceptability of peer-delivered HIV self-testing and PrEP for young women in Kampala, Uganda

This pilot study in Uganda aimed to assess the feasibility and acceptability of peer-delivered HIV self-tests (HIVST) and oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to young women with suboptimal PrEP adherence. Despite adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) accounting for a disproportionate 29% of new HIV infections in Uganda, this group remains underrepresented in the population. The study involved 30 young women aged 18–24 with suboptimal PrEP adherence. Peer-delivered interventions were well-received, with high completion rates at three and six months. Furthermore, qualitative analysis revealed positive experiences and motivation through peer support, emphasizing the importance of peer support in adherence to PrEP. The study concludes that peer delivery of these interventions is both feasible and acceptable, suggesting potential effectiveness in addressing HIV prevention challenges among African AGYW. Future controlled studies are recommended to further evaluate effectiveness on a wider scale.

BMC Infectious Diseases – Comprehensive knowledge about HIV/AIDS and associated factors among adolescent girls in Rwanda: a nationwide cross-sectional study

In this study researchers investigated the factors influencing comprehensive knowledge of HIV/AIDS among adolescent girls in Rwanda using data from the 2020 Rwanda Demographic and Health Survey. They found that of the 3258 participants, 53.6% demonstrated comprehensive HIV knowledge. Those with secondary education, health insurance, a mobile phone, exposure to television, and a history of HIV testing had where more likely to have a comprehensive knowledge of HIV/AIDS. Conversely, girls in Kigali and Northern regions, as well as those practicing the Anglican religion, had lower odds. The findings of this study highlight the importance of expanding HIV preventive education through education and social media. Continued involvement of decision-makers and community actors, particularly religious leaders, is crucial for enhancing comprehensive understanding of HIV/AIDS among adolescent girls.

BMC Primary Care – Determinants of access to general practice in a shared care model for people living with HIV: a qualitive study of patients’ perspectives in an Australian rural community

This study investigates the challenges and facilitators of implementing shared care models for people living with HIV in rural Australia. With improved HIV management, the aging HIV population faces comorbidities, necessitating coordinated care between general practitioners and specialists. However, those in rural areas experience barriers to accessing shared care. Thirteen qualitative interviews revealed that accessibility to general practice significantly influenced shared care engagement, moreover, participants doubted the additive value of general practitioners. Healthcare beliefs, stigma, and preferences for specialist care further impacted the use of shared care. The authors of the study found continuity of care in general practice helped facilitated shared care, however, logistical issues such as affordability and transport posed challenges. They concluded that overcoming patient priorities, anticipated stigma, and resource limitations in rural healthcare is crucial for effective shared care. Building rapport with general practitioners and ensuring continuity of care are essential strategies for quality primary care in shared models, supported by specialist physicians.

BMC Immunology – HIV specific Th1 responses are altered in Ugandans with HIV and Schistosoma mansoni coinfection

In fishing communities near Lake Victoria in Uganda, where HIV prevalence is high, Schistosoma mansoni (S. mansoni) infection rates are also significant. More than 50% of local fishermen are infected with S. mansoni. The authors of this study investigated how S. mansoni coinfection might modify immune responses against HIV. Using polychromatic flow cytometry and Gran-ToxiLux assays, the study compared HIV-specific responses, T cell phenotypes, and antibody-dependent cell-mediated cytotoxic (ADCC) potency and titres between individuals with HIV-S. mansoni coinfection and those with HIV alone. Interestingly, the findings revealed that S. mansoni coinfection was associated with modified anti-HIV responses, including a lower frequency of bifunctional CD4 T cells, higher overall CD4 T cell activation, and lower HIV ADCC antibody titres compared to individuals with HIV alone. The results suggest that S. mansoni infection affects T cell and antibody responses to HIV in coinfected individuals, highlighting the importance of understanding the impact of S. mansoni treatment upon HIV-specific immune responses and disease progression.

BMC Health Services Research – Comprehensive knowledge about HIV/AIDS and associated factors among adolescent girls in Rwanda: a nationwide cross-sectional study

The authors of this mixed-methods study investigated the attitudes, facilitators, and barriers to HIV drug resistance mutations (DRM) testing among pregnant women and children on antiretroviral therapy (ART) in Kenya. Despite lower rates of viral suppression in this population, the significance of DRM in treatment decisions is recognized, leading to the scaling up of national DRM testing programs in resource-limited settings. They conducted interviews with adolescents, caregivers, pregnant women, providers, and policymakers in five HIV treatment facilities. Results from the interviews highlighted the value of DRM testing in clinical decision-making and patient reassurance, with a desire among providers and policymakers for a streamlined, potentially decentralized testing process with greater patient and provider “empowerment” to increase comfort with testing protocols. The study highlights the potential of DRM testing to improve patient health outcomes and emphasizes the need for simplified and efficient implementation strategies.

Call for Papers!

The BMC Series is passionate about furthering research in HIV/AIDS and has a few Collections open which researchers may be interested in submitting their valuable HIV/AIDS research too:

• HIV care at BMC Health Services Research
• HIV long-acting treatments: prophylactic and therapeutic at BMC Infectious Diseases
• COVID-19 and HIV at BMC Infectious Diseases

in BMC Series blog on 2023-12-01 01:00:45 UTC.

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Fish beware: Bottlenosed dolphins may be able to pick up your heartbeat

To snap up fish, bottlenosed dolphins may rely on more than just sharp sight and sonar detection. The creatures might also pick up on the weak electric pulses prey produce each time their hearts beat or air filters through their gills.

In a new experiment, two bottlenosed dolphins named Dolly and Donna reliably sensed faint electric fields on the scale of microvolts, says Tim Hüttner, a sensory biologist formerly affiliated with the University of Rostock in Germany. That puts the marine mammals’ Spidey sense on par with the Guiana dolphin (Sotalia guianensis) and some egg-laying mammals like platypuses.

The ability to detect the electrical signals living things give off is called electroreception. It has been previously documented in fish, amphibians and sharks (SN: 6/27/16). But it was only in 2011 that the Guiana dolphin made the list, as researchers discovered telltale sensory receptors hidden in an organ on the animals’ snouts (SN: 7/27/11).

In 2022, Hüttner and his colleagues  identified the same structure in bottlenosed dolphins and confirmed that the creatures could detect electric fields on the scale of 0.5 millivolts per centimeter (or 500 microvolts), similar to those that some large fish and crustaceans emit. The new finding suggests that common bottlenosed dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) can likely make out the much subtler signals emanating off the majority of fish, the team reports November 30 in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

For the new study, the researchers trained Dolly and Donna to position their snouts in a metal apparatus and to swim away if they could sense an electrical impulse delivered to their sensory organs. The dolphins proved sensitive to both direct current and alternating current, two forms of electricity that living things generate. The dolphins excelled, however, at detecting direct current, which produces a steady signal. Donna picked up on fields as low as 5.5 microvolts and Dolly on those of 2.4 microvolts.

The study provides solid evidence for an intriguing theory, says Paul Nachtigall, a marine biologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Scientists have long regarded dolphins’ sensory organs, pits on their snouts, which prior to birth carried whiskers, as vestigial structures. It’s plausible that the organs may have evolved to fit another purpose, he says.

Electroreception may come in handy in situations where sight and echolocation are impaired. For instance, Guiana dolphins are benthic feeders, primarily hunting for food on the seafloor, where the sediment can muck up their senses.

Bottlenosed dolphins don’t hunt the same way but do often reside in murky waters and occasionally stick their heads into the sand to look for fish, in a hunting method called crater feeding. Echolocation stops working close up, but electroreception allows dolphins to spot prey a few centimeters away. The ability may just give the creatures the last push they need to nail a target, Hüttner says.

To test this idea, the team would like to study the dolphins’ electroreception while they are moving, Hüttner says.  

Other species of dolphins have pits on their snouts as well, raising the possibility that electroreception is more widespread, he notes. Given that these creatures adopt different hunting strategies, the ability may serve an additional function: helping dolphins to orient themselves along Earth’s magnetic field lines as they migrate.

“There’s just so much to find out,” Nachtigall says. “This study is just the first page of a book.”

in Science News on 2023-11-30 23:00:00 UTC.

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These nesting penguins nod off over 10,000 times a day, for seconds at a time

Nesting chinstrap penguins take nodding off to the extreme. The birds briefly dip into a slumber many thousands of times per day, sleeping for only seconds at a time. 

The penguins’ breeding colonies are noisy and stressful places, and threats from predatory birds and aggressive neighbor penguins are unrelenting. The extremely disjointed sleep schedule may help the penguins to protect their young while still getting enough shut-eye, researchers report in the Dec. 1 Science. 

The findings add to evidence “that avian sleep can be very different from the sleep of land mammals,” says UCLA neuroscientist Jerome Siegel. 

Nearly a decade ago, behavioral ecologist Won Young Lee of the Korea Polar Research Institute in Incheon noticed something peculiar about how chinstrap penguins (Pygoscelis antarcticus) nesting on Antarctica’s King George Island were sleeping. They would seemingly doze off for very short periods of time in their cacophonous colonies. Then in 2018, Lee learned about frigate birds’ ability to steal sleep while airborne on days-long flights. 

Lee teamed up with sleep ecophysiologist Paul-Antoine Libourel of the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center in France and other researchers to investigate the penguins’ sleep. In 2019, the team studied the daily sleep patterns of 14 nesting chinstrap penguins using data loggers mounted on the birds’ backs. The devices had electrodes surgically implanted into the penguins’ brains for measuring brain activity. Other instruments on the data loggers recorded the animals’ movements and location.

Nesting penguins had incredibly fragmented sleep patterns, taking over 600 “microsleeps” an hour, each averaging only four seconds, the researchers found. At times, the penguins slept with only half of their brain; the other half stayed awake. All together, the oodles of snoozes added up, providing over 11 hours of sleep for each brain hemisphere across more than 10,000 brief sleeps each day. 

Some marine mammals and other types of birds have strange or restricted sleep patterns too, often when staying alert is important. Dolphins can sleep with half their brain at a time, letting them remain vigilant for over two weeks straight. To stay wary of predators, mallard ducks can sleep with one half of their brain at a time too (SN: 2/6/99). And elephant seals dramatically reduce their sleeping hours while out at sea (SN: 4/20/23). But the sheer number of microsleeps seen in chinstrap penguins is unprecedented among animals, Lee says.

“It seems that the penguins do not have any time where they decrease their vigilance,” Libourel says. “Just a slight increase of microsleep-bout length around noon.”

The sleep pattern may help the penguins balance the brain’s need for rest with the demands of nesting. Predatory birds like brown skuas (Stercorarius antarcticus) patrol penguin colonies looking to plunder undefended eggs and chicks. “Penguin parents should be vigilant all the time during breeding to keep their offspring safe,” Lee says. There’s also constant commotion and noise in the colony disrupting sleep. Such extremely interrupted sleep may reflect the penguins’ flexibility in handling the stressors of raising chicks.

The many micronaps did appear to be at least partially restorative to their brains, since the studied penguins were able to function well enough to both survive and successfully raise their chicks. It’s unclear if the penguins’ sleep pattern changes after the breeding season.

“Sleep seems to be very diverse and flexible among species,” Lee says. “I believe that there are still many things unrevealed about animal sleep. By studying their sleep behavior, we can understand how animals have evolved to achieve brain restoration.”

in Science News on 2023-11-30 19:00:00 UTC.

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Here are 10 early-career scientists you should know about in 2023

How do we adapt to climate change? Can we fight back against Alzheimer’s disease? What will it take to build a more equitable society? The researchers on this year’s SN 10: Scientists to Watch list are tackling slices of these and other grand challenges.

For the eighth year, Science News is recognizing 10 early- and mid-career scientists who have innovative ideas and unique skill sets — and are applying their talents to shape our future and our understanding of ourselves. But they aren’t doing it alone. Each credits parents, mentors and colleagues with inspiring their success. Many emphasize the power of collaboration, the value of other perspectives and the importance of mentoring the next generation of scientists. Speaking of the future, if you know someone who belongs on the next SN 10 list, send their name, affiliation and a few sentences about their work to sn10@sciencenews.org. — Elizabeth Quill, Executive Editor

Daniel Blanco-Melo

Daniel Blanco-Melo puzzles out how ancient pathogens have shaped human history and evolution.

Read more

Róisín Commane

Róisín Commane sleuths out greenhouse gas leaks to fight climate change.

Read more

Daphne Martschenko

Daphne Martschenko is a champion for ethical, inclusive genomics research.

Read more

Julian Muñoz

Julian Muñoz has a ‘ruler’ that could size up the early universe.

Read more

Deblina Sarkar

Deblina Sarkar is building microscopic machines to enter our brains.

Read more

Lauren Schroeder

Lauren Schroeder looks beyond natural selection to rethink human evolution.

Read more

Quinton Smith

Quinton Smith builds lab-made organs with tools from Silicon Valley.

Read more

Clara Sousa-Silva

Clara Sousa-Silva seeks out signatures of life in alien atmospheres.

Read more

Berkley Walker

Berkley Walker wants to revamp photosynthesis for a changing climate.

Read more

Marjorie Weber

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

Read more

in Science News on 2023-11-30 15:59:45 UTC.

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Cicadas Are So Loud, Fiber Optic Cables Can ‘Hear’ Them

in WIRED Science on 2023-11-30 15:00:00 UTC.

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Dr. Ishwaria Subbiah Is Reimagining Cancer Care

in WIRED Science on 2023-11-30 12:00:00 UTC.

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Inside India’s Gargantuan Mission to Clean the Ganges River

in WIRED Science on 2023-11-30 11:00:00 UTC.

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Author of ‘gibberish’ paper admits to extensive plagiarism

A paper that claimed to have developed a new method to predict acid drainage from mines was not so novel after all, according to one of its authors.

In a series of emails to Retraction Watch, Dulian Zeqiraj of the Polytechnic University of Tirana, Albania, admitted to lifting figures and tables from other articles and said he might also have left some “text as it is in original.”

His paper, “A Novel Stochastic Approach for Modeling Acid Mine Drainage in Three Dimensions,” was published November 17 in Process Safety and Environmental Protection, an Elsevier title.

That the article managed to clear peer review is astonishing, said Muhammad Muniruzzaman, a senior scientist at the Geological Survey of Finland in Espoo, who discovered last week that Zeqiraj’s team had plagiarized his work. 

At first, Muniruzzaman said, he was pleasantly surprised when he got an email from Google Scholar notifying him that some of his studies had been cited. “That did not last beyond 10 seconds when I started browsing through the paper,” he told Retraction Watch.

A dozen figures and tables from two of Muniruzzaman’s papers appeared, without citation, in the new article as examples ostensibly validating the modeling. And several chunks of text were simply paraphrases of sections in Muniruzzaman’s work.

“I tried to read their paper,” said Muniruzzaman, who is also an adjunct professor at the University of Turku. “It doesn’t really make sense. If you try to link from one section to another, there is no link whatsoever. It’s almost like gibberish, you feel like it’s not even human generated.”

He added that one of his coauthors had looked into other publications by Zeqiraj and had found what appeared to be a pair of duplicate papers, both crammed with mathematical formulas, in two Elsevier titles.

Zeqiraj said that although he had failed to cite Muniruzzaman’s work appropriately, “essentially my work is true and I can demonstrate the code in MATLAB. At this point I apologize for not mentioning the authors. I can do this now by asking Elsevier to give me the opportunity to cite the figures.”

In a later email, he wrote:

It is true that figures and tables are not cited. As for the text it is true that I have read his paper. But it works so: You for example read a paper and take from it the resume. Maybe in may [sic] case I have not made the resume but have left the text as it is in original. As for the plagiarism check it cost about 5 euros to control a paper online, practically nothing. I repeat: I have not used ChatGPT AND I AM OPEN FOR ANY DISCUSSION. Please give me the opportunity to speak with the Professor. But one thing is for sure. I will request the retraction from Elsevier if they don’t allow me to make the changes.

We asked Elsevier how the plagiarized paper could have passed peer review and whether it had gone through a plagiarism check. The publisher told us:

The manuscript was run through iThenticate and had a total similarity index of 28%, with a maximum of 5% from any one source. The manuscript was sent for peer-review, and following revision, was accepted for publication in Process Safety and Environmental Protection.

We are now investigating Dr Muniruzzaman’s concerns and have put the paper, which is an Article-in-Press, on hold until our investigation is complete.

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

in Retraction watch on 2023-11-30 08:00:00 UTC.

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Professor in Jordan sues sleuth who exposed citation anomalies

A PhD student in Switzerland who blogged about a series of dubious conferences linked to potential citation fraud is being sued by one of the conference chairs, a professor of computer science, Retraction Watch has learned.

The professor, Shadi Aljawarneh of the Jordan University of Science and Technology, reaped a prodigious number of citations from the conference proceedings, often in highly questionable ways.

“Fraud can pay off,” Solal Pirelli, a doctoral student at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, wrote on his blog in January. “Shadi Aljawarneh has 6082 citations and an h-index of 38 per Google Scholar, above many well-regarded researchers. This probably helped him sit on the editorial board of PeerJ Computer Science, alongside well-regarded researchers.”

Aljawarneh, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, also is a visiting professor at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The conferences were put together by an organization called the International Association of Researchers (IARES), of which Aljawarneh is a member, under the auspices of two major industry groups, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). 

Many conference papers published by these groups have been found to suffer from plagiarism and other problems hinting at compromised peer review, as we have reported before.

Pirelli, who moonlights as a scientific sleuth, said he decided to blog about his findings after he reported them to the ACM but didn’t hear back. In July, he got a letter (in French) from a lawyer representing Aljawarneh threatening legal action unless he took down his post. He didn’t.

Then on November 28, Pirelli received a judgment (in French) from an appellate court showing that, unbeknownst to him, Aljawarneh’s lawyer had filed defamation charges already in June. 

“This guy is suing me because … I uncovered his whole … scam association that was organizing a bunch of conferences that may or may not have even happened,” Pirelli told Retraction Watch. “One of them was supposedly in Kazakhstan in a time when Kazakhstan was closed due to COVID.”

An ACM press officer told us: “As part of ACM’s plagiarism and fraud practices, we do not comment on ongoing investigations.”

From the judgment, Pirelli learned that the charges against him had been dismissed by the public prosecutor. The appellate court, however, decided to let the lawsuit proceed.

The judgment also revealed that, following the blog post, an upcoming conference had been canceled and Aljawarneh had been removed from the editorial board of PeerJ Computer Science.

“It’s like, you know, yay, I did some sleuthing and I prevented more bullshit from being added to the pile of stuff in computer science, but at the same time I now have somebody suing me,” Pirelli says. 

But, he added, “in Switzerland, truth that is said in the general-public interest is a defense to libel, to slander, so I’m not too worried about that.”

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

in Retraction watch on 2023-11-29 18:27:32 UTC.

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A Cutting-Edge Cancer Treatment May Cause Cancer. The FDA Is Investigating

in WIRED Science on 2023-11-29 17:16:06 UTC.

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Before ancient Egyptians, nature sculpted sphinxes. Here’s how

The Great Sphinx of Giza might have been sculpted by desert winds long before it was ever touched by human hands.

Mysterious desert landforms called yardangs can bear an uncanny resemblance to seated lions — so much so that some researchers think one lionlike yardang might have had the honor of later being carved into the Sphinx by ancient Egyptians. The basic ingredients for these unusual rock formations might be rather simple, researchers report in the November Physical Review Fluids. Scientists were able to reliably sculpt hand-sized, sphinx-shaped yardangs from clay globs in a water tunnel so long as two basic conditions were met: consistent prevailing winds and a starting blob containing a mix of easily eroded and more resistant bits.

“This just came completely out of left field,” says geomorphologist Elena Favaro of the Open University in Milton Keynes, England, who was not involved in the study. Scientists aren’t sure exactly how yardangs start to form, but they appear in desert regions where winds wear exposed rock down into long, streamlined ridges facing into the prevailing winds. The study, Favaro says, is “a very inspired way to approach the problem” of how yardangs form.

Curious about how nature produces sphinxlike yardangs, New York University applied mathematician Leif Ristroph decided to take the question into his lab. He and his team study how natural shapes grow and change by compacting ages of erosion into experiments that last a few hours. They do this in a water tunnel, which is typically used to study fluid flow around stiff objects like wings.

“What we do, which is kind of abusive of the device,” Ristroph says, is “put things like a piece of ice in there and look how it changes shape” — or, “in this case, a chunk of mud.”

The team subjected their water tunnel to hundreds of muddy trials. Each time, they started with a stiff clay paste, sculpted it into a starting glob, embedded the glob with bits of hard plastic to represent harder parts of natural rock, and plopped the globs into the water tunnel to erode under a steady water “wind.”

Their setup reliably produced sphinxlike mini-yardangs. The initial shape of the glob and placement of the hard plastic bits didn’t matter much, so long as the plastic bits were in the windward half.

A fluid ‘mane’

To visualize the current flow around sphinxlike shapes carved out of clay by water, researchers made 3D-printed replicas of the ensuing shapes and coated them in clay laced with fluorescent dye. One of those replicas is shown here from both the side and the top. The currents around the mini-sphinx are made more visible by upstream injections of fluorescein dye, which create glowing filaments that swirl around the object.

But because the sphinxes dissolved quickly, the team had to get creative to take pictures of the fluid flows that sculpted them. The researchers scanned their mini-yardangs and 3D-printed reusable plastic models of the forms. Before each experiment, they coated the plastic models with a thin veneer of clay laced with fluorescent dye.

In the water tunnel, the glowing clay allowed the researchers to trace the whorling currents around the blob. This revealed a few patterns that the team is now working to model mathematically, including a turbulent “mane” of eddies cast from behind the sphinx’s head that carves out a sloping, feline spine. Whether centimeter-scale blobs in water say anything about landscape-sized rocks eroded by wind is a question Ristroph hopes the new study can tempt geomorphologists into answering.

in Science News on 2023-11-29 16:00:00 UTC.

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How to Set Your Thermostat—According to Science

in WIRED Science on 2023-11-29 14:43:47 UTC.

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This bird hasn’t been seen in 38 years. Its song may help track it down

How do you look for an animal you don’t even know exists anymore?

The last sighting of the purple-winged ground dove (Paraclaravis geoffroyi) — a small, bamboo-loving dove native to the South American Atlantic Forest in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay — was in 1985. But, researchers wondered, was it possible to capture the elusive bird’s sound in the wild to find out if any individuals are left?

It’s not an unheard-of idea. Scientists have used bioacoustics — a subfield of ecology that relies on sound to make environmental analyses — for everything from recording dolphins’ communication patterns to studying bats from afar to avoid virus spillover from humans (SN: 12/7/17; SN: 10/23/22). With artificial intelligence, it is now possible to use large audio datasets to train algorithms to spot different animal sounds within the cacophony of a natural background.

But the problem is that recordings of the purple-winged ground dove singing are as rare as the bird itself.

“I came across [the bird’s song] watching a 1985 interview with Carlos Keller, a former bird breeder in São Paulo state, who had a few individuals of the dove,” says Carlos Araújo, an ecologist at the Instituto de Biología Subtropical at the Universidad Nacional de Misiones in Argentina. “And they sang while he spoke.”

With Keller’s help, Araujo and colleagues accessed the decades-old recording and isolated the bird’s song.

The next challenge was to see if it was even possible to identify individual bird songs amidst the sounds of other birds chirping, leaves rustling, rain falling, insects whirring and gnawing and larger animals moving through the forest.

“We took a step back and did some analyses with other birds that are critically endangered but there are known individuals,” Araújo says. The team focused on three species found in Foz do Iguaçu, a national park that straddles the border of Brazil and Argentina: the cherry-throated tanager (Nemosia rourei), the Alagoas antwren (Myrmotherula snowi) and the blue-eyed ground-dove (Columbina cyanopis). These birds live in the same environments as the purple-winged ground dove. And the blue-eyed ground dove’s story inspires hope: The species went missing in 1941 and was rediscovered in 2016.

The researchers installed 30 recorders in strategic spots along green areas in the Brazilian part of Foz do Iguaçu and recorded from July 2021 to April 2022. They also used data from another 100 recorders on the Argentinian side of Foz.

“We went looking for the Guadua trinii bamboo to place the recorders,” says Benjamin Phalan, Head of Conservation at Parque das Aves, a private institution in Foz do Iguaçu focused on the conservation of Atlantic Forest birds. Like the purple-winged ground dove, the three bird species follow the flowering season of the G. trinii bamboo, which happens about once every 30 years.

The team pushed through thickets of bamboo, braved ticks and biting flies, and watched out for venomous snakes such as jacaracas pit vipers. Bumping into these snakes is “rare but can happen. So we use galoshes or gaiters to protect us in case anyone steps on a snake or near it,” Phalan says.

The recorders captured one minute of landscape sound every 10 minutes and generated about 3,000 days’ worth of recordings. “A lot of data to sift through,” says Araújo.

Readily available analysis software wouldn’t work. These software, Araújo says, “need a lot of data input. With such rare species, we just don’t have that much data to train the identification algorithm.”

So the team started from scratch, working with the little data they had for the three endangered birds. First, Araújo created a signal template — exactly like the birds’ singing — based on just a few recordings. The algorithm then compares that template with the soundscape recordings, separating signal from noise. If it spots a sound that is similar to the template, chances are that it is the bird that the researchers are looking for.

The method relies on a statistical model “that is not new, but was used in a very clever and unusual way,” says David Donoso, an ecosystem ecology researcher at the Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany. Donoso and colleagues recently used bioacoustics to investigate the recovery of Choco, a biodiversity hot spot in Ecuador that had been transformed in an agricultural area.

There are different approaches to bioacoustics depending on what you’re looking for, Donoso says. “You can either use fewer recordings to map a whole animal soundscape to tell what species are there, like we did, or you can use lots of recordings to look for a single sound pattern,” he says. The study at Foz do Iguaçu “shows that you can use a relatively simple model to answer a complex question — and it works.”

The tool worked reasonably well to identify the cherry-throated tanager and blue-eyed ground-dove singing, but not so much for the Alagoas antwren, Araújo’s team reports October 23 in Bioacoustics. “We’re trying to understand what happened, but we know that the algorithm works,” he says.

The next step, Araújo says, is to refine the algorithm’s precision to find the Alagoas antwren and train it to look for the purple-winged ground dove. And they will do so at the same time. “We’re aiming at both goals at once because we’re running against the clock to find these birds,” Araújo says. “In the end, we are looking for a ghost.” But not a silent one, he hopes. 

in Science News on 2023-11-29 14:22:07 UTC.

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The Weirdest Reason the Poles Are Warming So Fast? Invisible Clouds

in WIRED Science on 2023-11-29 13:00:00 UTC.

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Dr. Dara Norman Wants to Bring More People Into Science

in WIRED Science on 2023-11-29 12:00:00 UTC.

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Miracles or Mirages – Should we be psyched up about psychedelics?

Katie Birditt delves into the world of mind-altering drugs with her review of 'Psychedelics' by Professor David Nutt. Psychedelic therapy has yet to be legalised in the UK and the substances themselves remain prohibited as Class A drugs. Is this holding back advances in the treatment of mental health issues?

I had given psychedelic research (relatively) little thought prior to reading the recently published book, ‘Psychedelics’, by Professor David Nutt. Embarking on this literary journey showed me that I had been missing out on one of the most radical, emerging fields within therapeutic neuroscience. As the famous author Aldous Huxley once said in 1950:

“these drugs are destined to play a role in human affairs at least as important as alcohol has hitherto” - Aldous Huxley

With the legislation around the use of psychedelics for scientific research beginning to change in some countries, Huxley’s statement could not seem more accurate. Evidently, it is time to start familiarising ourselves with this field!

Perhaps there is no one more suitable to tell the story of psychedelics than the neuropsychopharmacologist, David Nutt, who leads the first psychedelics research centre at Imperial College London. The engaging narrative he crafts encompasses aspects of the biological and the pharmacological, whilst also being enriched with added insights into the stigmatisation, history, and practicalities of psychedelic therapy. Probing the field through these various perspectives grounds the research - both its opportunities and challenges - in a real-world context where the forces of funding, public opinion, and governmental policy are all at play.

Delving into the pharmacology of substances like LSD, psilocybin, MDMA and ayahuasca (an Amazonian plant-based psychedelic), is truly fascinating and will encourage one to consider the related notions of consciousness and addiction. Classical and atypical psychedelics are introduced early in the book; their differences are explained by the ways in which they bind to various types of brain receptors to bring about their effects. Nutt elegantly discusses how these molecules can interfere with our brain’s perceptions of the world to cause the hallucinations characteristic of a “trip”. The power of psychedelics appears to reside in their ability to “switch off” master neural circuits, like the default-mode network (DMN) which can keep us locked in rigid thinking patterns. The DMN refers to a set of connected brain regions that seem to contribute to internal modes of cognition, such as thinking, remembering and mind wandering. Psychedelics appear to take this system “offline”, thus helping to unshackle an individual from compulsive thought and enable the formation of new connections between neurones (neuroplasticity at its finest). The therapeutic effect produced from this psychedelic-induced “rewiring” is optimal, provided that the patient is in the right mindset, the trip occurs in a controlled, safe setting and it is followed by therapy sessions that help individuals to process their experiences.

...will encourage one to consider the related notions of consciousness and addiction

Nutt’s style of writing throughout is concise, accessible and engaging, lending itself to this complex field where many unknowns still abound. So compelling is the writing that it becomes disconcertingly easy to get swept up in the “hype” that he builds around psychedelics. Many of the conditions that these substances could potentially be used to treat - such as eating disorders, depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder - have historically had unsatisfactory treatments, and devastate many lives. Given the disheartening landscape of psychiatric therapy, unbridled optimism could lead to vulnerable individuals attaching unrealistic expectations to radical therapeutics that may merely offer more “hype” than hope.

Another inherent problem with psychedelics research is related to the study of the effects of these drugs on individuals. The revered Randomised Double-Blind Clinical Control study design, that guides most therapeutic experiments, cannot be effectively employed in studies examining psychedelic effects. Blinding refers to giving participants either a treatment or a placebo and not informing them which they have been given to eliminate any confirmation bias towards taking a certain substance. Psychedelics have very distinctive effects, which introduces an inevitable and problematic bias into these experiments. For example if participants expect positive effects from psychedelic therapy and know they are receiving this treatment, a placebo effect may take place which can impact the validity of the study. This placebo effect that arises from knowing one’s treatment group, and believing a specific response will arise from that treatment, poses a significant challenge to psychedelic research.

I do not intend to discount the future potential of psychedelics. Whilst reading this book, I was frequently intrigued by the findings of studies investigating these substances. However, it is important, particularly at this stage, to remain objective. As Nutt points out, the research is still in its infancy. The long-term effectiveness of regular, psychedelic-assisted therapy sessions are unknown, as are the side effect profiles of these substances. One should also be aware that psychedelics are not a “one-size-fits-all” solution. Individuals with cardiovascular problems, and those susceptible to psychosis, are strongly advised to avoid these substances due to potential adverse effects. There would likely be significant and unprecedented implications if psychedelics were introduced into mainstream medicine too soon. Based on well-documented evidence, these substances might benefit from a reclassification that removes them from a drug category occupied by the most dangerous and addictive substances. This should accelerate research and, potentially, provide answers to some of these pressing questions.

Psychedelics are not a "one-size-fits-all" solution.

One must admire Nutt and his decades-long crusade championing the potential of these drugs. However, it is hard to escape the nagging feeling that the potentially detrimental effects of psychedelics are largely skirted around. I was left with the sense that, although the risks were briefly acknowledged, they were not meaningfully discussed. Two throwaway chapters towards the end of the book, designed to discuss concerns around the substances, felt more defensive, as if he could justify the risks associated with psychedelics by making comparisons with more dangerous drugs. Coupled with the knowledge that Nutt serves on multiple psychedelic advisory boards, the book starts to feel slightly skewed in favour of the substances’ benefits. In spite of this, I do recommend reading the book; the comprehensive information it provides, and the questions it raises, are becoming increasingly relevant in neuroscience today.

This article was written by Katie Birditt and edited by Rebecca Pope. Interested in writing for WiNUK yourself? Contact us through the blog page and the editors will be in touch!

in Women in Neuroscience UK on 2023-11-29 11:15:07 UTC.

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Purdue agrees to pay feds back $737,000 for grant submissions with fake data

Purdue University has reached a settlement with the federal government to pay back grant money the institution received through applications submitted with falsified data, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Indiana. 

The settlement resolves allegations under the False Claims Act related to the case of Alice C. Chang (who also uses the name Chun-Ju Chang), a former associate professor of basic medical sciences at Purdue’s College of Veterinary Medicine in West Lafayette, In. Inside Higher Ed reported first on the settlement.

Last December, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity found Chang had faked data in two published papers and nearly 400 images across 16 grant applications. As we reported then: 

Two of the grant applications were funded. Chang received $688,196 from the National Cancer Institute, a division of the (NIH), from 2018-2019 for “Targeting metformin-directed stem cell fate in triple negative breast cancer.” The other grant ORI says was submitted in 2014 and funded, “Targeting cell polarity machinery to exhaust breast cancer stem cell pool,” does not show up in NIH RePorter. The rest of the grants were not approved. 

Purdue agreed to pay the federal government $737,391, which the USAO release said “includes restitution and punitive damages.” 

However, Tim Doty, a Purdue spokesperson, told us the university “did not agree to any punitive damages.” He said: 

When in mid-2018 the university received notice from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services calling into question the authenticity of some results that Dr. Alice Chang had included in proposal submissions to federal funding agencies since 2014, Purdue University cooperated and thoroughly investigated the alleged misconduct. When Purdue’s investigation was nearing conclusion in mid-2019, Dr. Chang left the university.  

Based on its investigation, Purdue agreed that the funding was not deserved and should be returned. 

Chang has been banned from all federal contracting, including grant funding, for 10 years. 

The False Claims Act allows the government to recover up to three times the amount it was defrauded, meaning that Purdue could have had to pay much more, said Eugenie Reich, a whistleblower lawyer and former investigative science journalist. 

“I think the university has got off relatively lightly in comparison to what it could have been in recognition of it self-investigating,” Reich told Retraction Watch. “This kind of settlement should incentivize other universities to self-investigate.”

Indeed, the amounts of settlements can vary a lot. Massachusetts General Hospital got off with repaying the government less than $900,000 in grant funds in 2021, compared with nearly $10 million in an earlier case that the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, another Harvard facility, paid to settle claims based on allegations it said it brought to the government’s attention. Columbia University had to pay $9.5 million in 2016, and Duke University settled a case for $112.5 million in 2019.

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

in Retraction watch on 2023-11-28 19:22:37 UTC.

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Capturing methane from the air would slow global warming. Can it be done?

This summer was the hottest ever recorded on Earth, and 2023 is on track to be the hottest year. Heat waves threatened people’s health across North America, Europe and Asia. Canada had its worst wildfire season ever, and flames devastated the city of Lahaina in Maui. Los Angeles was pounded by an unheard-of summer tropical storm while rains in Libya caused devastating floods that left thousands dead and missing. This extreme weather is a warning sign that we are living in a climate crisis, and a call to action.

Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main culprit behind climate change, and scientists say they must be reined in. But there’s another greenhouse gas to deal with: methane. Tackling methane may be the best bet for putting the brakes on rising temperatures in the short term, says Rob Jackson, an Earth systems scientist at Stanford University and chair of the Global Carbon Project, which tracks greenhouse gas emissions. “Methane is the strongest lever we have to slow global warming over the next few decades.”

That’s because it’s relatively short-lived in the atmosphere — methane lasts about 12 years, while CO₂ can stick around for hundreds of years. And on a molecule-per-molecule basis, methane is more potent. Over the 20-year period after it’s emitted, methane can warm the atmosphere more than 80 times as much as an equivalent amount of CO₂.

We already have strategies for cutting methane emissions — fixing natural gas leaks (methane is the main component of natural gas), phasing out coal (mining operations release methane), eating less meat and dairy (cows burp up lots of methane) and electrifying transportation and appliances. Implementing all existing methane-mitigation strategies could slow global warming by 30 percent over the next decade, research has shown.

But some climate scientists, including Jackson, say we need to go further. Several methane sources will be difficult, if not impossible, to eliminate. That includes some human-caused emissions, such as those produced by rice paddies and cattle farming — though practices do exist to reduce these emissions (SN: 11/28/15, p. 22). Some natural sources are poised to release more methane as the world warms. There are signs that tropical wetlands are already releasing more of the gas into the atmosphere, and rapid warming in the Arctic could turn permafrost into a hot spot for methane-making microbes and release a bomb of methane stored in the currently frozen soil.

So scientists want to develop ways to remove methane directly from the air.

Three billion metric tons more methane exist in the atmosphere today than in preindustrial times. Removing that excess methane would cool the planet by 0.5 degrees Celsius, Jackson says.

On the rise

Over the last 40 years, the concentration of methane in the atmosphere has steadily risen, with a lull in the late 1990s and 2000s. Overall, the amount of methane in the atmosphere has more than doubled over the last 200 years.

Global average methane concentrations, 1983–2023

Similar “negative emissions” strategies are already in limited use for CO₂. That gas is captured where it’s emitted, or directly from the air, and then stored somewhere. Methane, however, is a tricky molecule to capture, meaning scientists need different approaches.

Most ideas are still in early research stages. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine is currently studying these potential technologies, their state of readiness and possible risks, and what further research and funding are needed. Some of the approaches include re-engineering bacteria that are already pros at eating methane and developing catalytic reactors to place in coal-mine vents and other methane-rich places to chemically transform the gas.

“Methane is a sprint and CO₂ is a marathon,” says Desirée Plata, a civil and environmental engineer at MIT. For scientists focused on removing greenhouse gases, it’s off to the races.

Microbes already remove methane from the air

Methane, CH₄, is readily broken down in the atmosphere, where sunshine and highly reactive hydroxyl radicals are abundant. But it’s a different story when chemists try to work with the molecule. Methane’s four carbon-hydrogen bonds are strong and stable. Currently, chemists must expose the gas to extremely high temperatures and pressures to break it down.

Even getting hold of the gas is difficult. Despite its potent warming power, it’s present in low concentrations in the atmosphere. Only 2 out of every 1 million air molecules are methane (by comparison, about 400 of every 1 million air molecules are CO₂). So it’s challenging to grab enough methane to store it or efficiently convert it into something else.

Nature’s chemists, however, can take up and transform methane even in these challenging conditions. These microbes, called methanotrophs, use enzymes to eat methane. The natural global uptake of methane by methanotrophs living in soil is about 30 million metric tons per year. Compare that with the roughly 350 million tons of methane that human activities pumped into the atmosphere in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency.

Methane culprits  

Experts estimate that in 2022, about 590 million metric tons of methane were released into the atmosphere. About 60 percent of those emissions came from human activities.

Methane emissions in 2022, by source

Source: Global Methane Tracker/IEA 2023

Microbiologists want to know whether it’s possible to get these bacteria to take up more methane more quickly.

Lisa Stein, a microbiologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, studies the genetics and physiology of these microbes. “We do basic research to understand how they thrive in different environments,” she says.

Methanotrophs work especially slowly in low-oxygen environments, Stein says, like wetland muck and landfills, the kinds of places where methane is plentiful. In these environments, microbes that make methane, called methanogens, generate the gas faster than methanotrophs can gobble it up.

But it might be possible to develop soil amendments and other ecosystem modifications to speed microbial methane uptake, Stein says. She’s also talking with materials scientists about engineering a surface to encourage methanotrophs to grow faster and thus speed up their methane consumption.

Scientists hope to get around this speed bump with a more detailed understanding of the enzyme that helps many methanotrophs feast on methane. Methane monooxygenase, or MMO, grabs the molecule and, with the help of copper embedded in the enzyme, uses oxygen to break methane’s carbon-hydrogen bonds. The enzyme ultimately produces methanol that the microbes then metabolize.

Boosting MMO’s speed could not only help with methane removal but also allow engineers to put methanotrophs to work in industrial systems. Turning methane into methanol would be the first step, followed by several faster reactions, to make an end product like plastic or fuel.

“Methane monooxygenases are not superfast enzymes,” says Amy Rosenzweig, a chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Any reaction involving MMO will impose a speed limit on the proceedings. “That is the key step, and unless you understand it, it’s going to be very difficult to make an engineered organism do what you want,” Rosenzweig says.

Enzymes are often shaped to fit their reactants — in this case, methane — like a glove. So having a clear view of MMO’s physical structure could help researchers tweak the enzyme’s actions. MMO is embedded in a lipid membrane in the cell. To image it, structural biologists have typically started by using detergents to remove the lipids, which inactivates the enzyme and results in an incomplete picture of it and its activity. But Rosenzweig and colleagues recently managed to image the enzyme in this lipid context. This unprecedented view of MMO in its native state, published in 2022 in Science, revealed a previously unseen site where copper binds.

But that’s still not the entire picture. Rosenzweig says she hopes her structural studies, along with other work, will lead to a breakthrough soon enough to help forestall further consequences of global warming. “Maybe people get lucky and engineer a strain quickly,” Rosenzweig says. “You don’t know until you try.”

Chemists make progress on catalysts

Other scientists seek to put methane-destroying chemical reactors close to methane sources. These reactors typically use a catalyst to speed up the chemical reactions that convert methane into a less planet-warming molecule. These catalysts often require high temperatures or other stringent conditions to operate, contain expensive metals like platinum, and don’t work well at the concentrations of methane found in ambient air.

One promising place to start, though, is coal mines. Coal mining is associated with tens of millions of tons of methane emissions worldwide every year. Although coal-fired power plants are being phased out in many countries, coal will be difficult to eliminate entirely due to its key role in steel production, says Plata, of MIT.

To develop a catalyst that might work in a coal mine, Plata found inspiration in MMO. Her team developed a catalyst material based on a silicate material embedded with copper — the same metal found in MMO and much less expensive than those usually required to oxidize methane. The material is also porous, which improves the catalyst’s efficiency because it has a larger surface area, and thus more places for reactions to occur, than a nonporous material would. The catalyst turns methane into CO₂, a reaction that releases heat, which is needed to further fuel the reaction. If methane concentrations are high enough, the reaction will be self-sustaining, Plata says.

Turning methane into CO₂ may sound counterproductive, but it reduces warming overall because methane traps much more heat than CO₂ and is far less abundant in the atmosphere. If all the excess methane in the atmosphere were turned into CO₂, according to a 2019 study led by Jackson, it would result in only 8.2 billion additional tons of CO₂ — equivalent to just a few months of CO₂ emissions at today’s rates. And the net effect would be to lessen the heating of the atmosphere by a sixth.

Cattle feedlots are another place where Plata’s catalytic reactor might work. Barns outfitted with fans to keep cattle comfortable move air around, so reactors could be fitted to these ventilation systems. The next step is determining whether methane concentrations at industrial dairy farms are high enough for the catalyst to work.

Another researcher making progress is energy scientist and engineer Arun Majumdar, one of Jackson’s collaborators at Stanford. In January, Majumdar published initial results describing a catalyst that converts methane into methanol, with an added boost from high-energy ultraviolet light. This UV blast adds the energy needed to overcome CH₄’s stubborn bonds — and the carefully designed catalyst stays on target. Previous catalyst designs tended to produce a mix of CO₂ and methanol, but this catalyst mostly sticks to making methanol.

Is geoengineering a path to methane removal?

A more extreme approach to speed up methane’s natural breakdown is to change the chemistry of the atmosphere itself. A few companies, such as the U.S.-based Blue Dot Change, have proposed releasing chemicals into the sky to enhance methane oxidation.

Natalie Mahowald, an atmospheric chemist at Cornell University, decided to evaluate this type of geoengineering.

“I’m not super excited about throwing more things into the atmosphere,” Mahowald says. To meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, limiting global warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average, though, it’s worth exploring all possibilities, she says. “If we’re going to meet these targets,” she says “we’re going to need some of these crazy ideas to work. So I’m willing to look at it. But I’m looking with a scientist’s critical eye.”

The main strategy proposed by advocates would inject iron aerosols into the air over the ocean on a sunny day. These aerosols would react with salty sea spray aerosols to form chlorine, which would then attack methane in the atmosphere and initiate further chemical reactions that turn it into CO₂. Mahowald wondered how much chlorine would be needed — and if there might be any unintended consequences.

Detailed modeling revealed something alarming. The iron injections could have the opposite of the intended effect, Mahowald and colleagues reported in July in Nature Communications. Chlorine won’t attack methane if ozone is around. Instead, chlorine will first break down all the ozone it can find. But ozone plays a key role in generating the hydroxyl radicals that naturally break down atmospheric methane. So when ozone levels fall, Mahowald says, the concentration and lifetime of methane molecules in the atmosphere actually increases. To use this strategy to break down methane, geo­engineers would need to add a tremendous amount of chlorine to the atmosphere — enough to first break down the ozone, then attack methane.

Removing 20 percent of the atmosphere’s methane, thus reducing the planet’s surface temperature by 0.2 degrees Celsius by 2050, for example, would require creating about 630 million tons of atmospheric chlorine every year. That would in turn require injecting perhaps tens of millions of tons of iron. A form of particulate matter, these iron aerosols could worsen air quality; inhaling particulate matter is associated with a range of health problems, particularly cardiovascular and lung disease. This atmospheric tinkering could also create hydrochloric acid that could reach the ocean and acidify it.

And there’s no guarantee that some of the chlorine wouldn’t make it all the way up to the ozone layer, depleting the planetary shield that protects us from the sun’s harmful UV rays. Mahowald is still studying this possibility.

Mahowald is ambivalent about doing research on geoengineering. “We’re just throwing out ideas here because we’re in a terrible, terrible position,” she says. She’s worried about what could happen if all the methane locked up in the world’s permafrost escapes. If scientists can figure out how to use iron aerosols effectively, without adverse effects — and if such geoengineering is accepted by society — we might need it.

“We’re just trying to see, is there any hope this could work and would we ever want to do it? Would it have enough benefits to outweigh the disadvantages?”

The committee organized by the National Academies to investigate methane removal is taking these kinds of ethical questions into account, as well as considering the potential cost and scale of technologies. Stein, a committee member, says a framework proposed by Spark Climate Solutions provides some guidance. The organization, a nonprofit based in San Francisco that evaluates methane-removal technologies, proposes investing in tech that can remove tens of millions of tons of methane per year in the coming decades, at a cost of less than $2,000 per ton. Spark cofounder David Mann says the numbers are designed to focus attention and investment on technologies that can make a real difference in curbing climate change in the near term.

The National Academies group aims to make recommendations about research priorities on methane-removal technologies by next summer. It’s likely that a portfolio of different technologies will be necessary. What works in a cattle feedlot may not work at a wastewater treatment plant, for instance.

Scientists focused on methane removal are eager for more researchers, research funding and companies to enter the fray — and quickly. “It’s been a crazy year,” Jackson says of 2023’s extreme weather. We’re already feeling the effects of global warming, but we can seize the moment, he says. “This problem is not something for our grandchildren. It’s here.”

in Science News on 2023-11-28 15:00:00 UTC.

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One mountain in Brazil is home to a surprising number of these parasitic wasps

The tropics are teeming with life, tending to hold far more species than milder environments closer to the poles. But one group of insects, the Darwin wasps, were thought to buck that trend.

Researchers who compared wasp diversity in the United Kingdom and the United States with tropical areas in the 1970s and ’80s concluded that these wasps were most diverse at mid-latitudes — say, Kentucky or England. But others thought that people just weren’t looking hard enough in the tropics.

It’s easy to look for wasps in a British garden, says Peter Mayhew, but “it’s very hard to do long-term work” in a tropical rainforest. Mayhew, a biologist at the University of York in England, was up to the challenge.

Now, after years of sifting through wasps collected from a single mountain in the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest a decade ago, Mayhew and colleagues have identified nearly 100 Darwin wasp species. The result, published November 7 in the journal Insects, suggests that the tropics are home to far more types of the wasp than was previously recognized.

Darwin wasps are one family of parasitic wasps, the Ichneumonidae, which lay their eggs on or inside other creepy-crawlies so that the hatched larvae have a ready-made meal (SN: 7/28/56; SN: 8/5/15). In this way, the Alien-esque wasps help control the populations of their prey, serving a vital ecological role similar to that of apex predators like wolves and sharks. With 25,000 described species, there are more kinds of Darwin wasp than there are known mammal and bird species combined.

To understand where the wasps might live in the tropics, Mayhew and his Brazilian colleagues took a hike, several in fact. The team trekked up a mountain in Brazil’s Serra dos Órgãos National Park, placing pairs of traps known as Malaise traps at 15 sites along the way. The path started along a road, which made carting the traps — each consisting of a tent and a jar of alcohol weighing about a kilogram — relatively simple.

After that, though, the team had to carry them by hand up through the jungle. “The first hour is pure hell,” Mayhew recalls. “Very steep, very hot and very humid.” After laying the traps, members of the team returned every month for one year to swap the jars for fresh ones.

The rainforest is, unsurprisingly, full of critters, which led to each alcohol jar becoming what Mayhew calls “insect soup.” To simplify things for now, the researchers chose to focus on only half of the sample jars and look specifically for one subfamily of Darwin wasps called the pimplines.

With the help of an “army of undergraduates” and taxonomist Ilari Sääksjärvi of the University of Turku in Finland, the team identified 98 pimpline species, only 24 of which have been previously described and named. What’s more, there tended to be fewer pimpline species as researchers scaled the mountain — but the higher-elevation species weren’t found lower down. For comparison, the British Isles have 109 known pimpline species, and wasp diversity there has been sampled much more than in Brazil.

Based on this study, Mayhew says, middle to low elevations in the tropics could be targeted for protection in order to conserve the most Darwin wasp diversity there and preserve the insects’ key ecological role. “[At] 1,500 meters and below is where you get quite a lot,” he says.

The new research is “more evidence that, yes, this wonderful group of really interesting wasps has this amazing unexplored diversity in the tropics, and we need more people working on them,” says Laura Timms, a conservation biologist at Canada’s Credit Valley Conservation in Mississauga who was not involved with the research.

Mayhew next hopes to examine other types of Darwin wasp that were collected in the insect soup to see if they are as diverse as the pimplines.

The wealth of creatures collected in the traps could also be useful to researchers interested in other insects too, Mayhew says, such as leaf beetles and fireflies. “Quite a lot of what’s in those bottles is going to be new to science.”

in Science News on 2023-11-28 12:00:00 UTC.

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Dr. Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski Will Change How You Think About Space

in WIRED Science on 2023-11-28 12:00:00 UTC.

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A new way to support Retraction Watch this Giving Tuesday

Dear Retraction Watch reader:

Earlier this week, The Retraction Watch Database surpassed 45,000 retractions. 

45,000.

That’s three times as many as you’ll find in other data sources. And in a recognition of the value of the Database, earlier this year Crossref acquired it – and made its contents freely available. The fact that the acquisition included five years of funding to cover the continued operation of the Database was critical to our sustainability. We were, in a word, overjoyed by the deal.

But the journalism side of Retraction Watch – the part that digs deep into stories about retraction and related issues, files public records requests, and occasionally faces legal threats – still needs regular sources of funding. At the moment, the salaries of our two reporter-editors – Ellie Kincaid and Fred Joelving – are funded by a combination of a generous two-year grant from the WoodNext Foundation, partnership with news outlets, and individual donations from readers like you.

In nonprofit parlance, we’ve diversified,  but we always face the risk that one or more of those streams may dry up. We have a few ways you can help.

This year, we’re pleased to offer a new way to support our work. As readers know, we offer two free newsletters: the Retraction Watch Daily five days per week, and Weekend Reads on Saturdays, full of our own items and material from elsewhere we think you’ll find of interest. Some of you have said that’s too many emails, that you’d like a weekly digest instead.

We’re sympathetic – but as I handle the newsletters as a volunteer, adding another newsletter option is very challenging. The RW Daily is an important way for us to reach all of you – yes, including for fundraising – and to populate our social media feeds, which is where even more people follow or work. It’s worth the effort.

Being able to provide a service to readers while working toward our sustainability is what gets me up early in the morning. So we’ve added a subscription-only newsletter, The Retraction Watch Weekly. The cost is modest: $5 a month, $50 a year, or more if you’re inclined to be a founding subscriber.

To be completely transparent, there are really just two advantages to The Retraction Watch Weekly: Only one email from us per week, instead of six, and some minimal thoughts on why a particular item we include is noteworthy. We’ll link to all of our posts for the week, and to a selection of items that are also included in the RW Daily and Weekend Reads.

In other words, you can get a lot of this at Retraction Watch or our existing newsletters. which will always be free. But your tax-deductible subscription will help us continue to do our work. (If you’ve made at least $50 in contributions in the last 12 months, contact us to be added to The Retraction Watch Weekly list for free. We’ll contact everyone who has in order to make this offer, but that may take us a bit of time!)

If you’re just as happy as can be with the RW Daily and our other free offerings, we can still use your support. This Giving Tuesday, please consider a tax-deductible donation to support the Center For Scientific Integrity, our parent non-profit organization. You can make a one-time tax-deductible contribution by PayPal or by Square, or a monthly tax-deductible donation by Paypal. Or if you prefer to send a check, please make it out to The Center For Scientific Integrity and mail it to 121 W. 36th St., Suite 209, New York, NY 10018. Should you be in a position to donate securities, please contact me at ivan@retractionwatch.com for instructions.

Thank you in advance, and thank you for your ongoing support.

Best,

Ivan Oransky
Co-Founder

in Retraction watch on 2023-11-28 06:00:00 UTC.

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Environmental Pseudoscience and Polluted Research

in For Better Science on 2023-11-28 06:00:00 UTC.

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A Life-Extension Drug for Big Dogs Is Getting Closer to Reality

in WIRED Science on 2023-11-28 05:01:00 UTC.