Researchers at the University of Ottawa, in collaboration with Danilo Zia and Fabio Sciarrino from the Sapienza University of Rome, recently demonstrated a novel technique that allows the visualization of the wave function of two entangled photons, the elementary particles that constitute light, in real-time.

Nature, Published online: 21 August 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-02603-8

In a scientific culture that eschews admitting failure, some researchers are staring it in the face — and finding success.

A new study has demonstrated that the atlatl (i.e. spear thrower) functions as an 'equalizer', a finding which supports women's potential active role as prehistoric hunters.

Late to the Party

For all the hype about AI's untapped potential in the stock market, its real life debut across various stock portfolios has failed to impress.

The Wall Street Journal reports that there are already at least 13 exchange-traded funds (ETFs) being managed by an AI, and ironically, almost none of them bet on this year's surge of the benchmark S&P 500 index, which tracks 500 of the largest companies listed on 

 stock exchange  — a surge which was significantly driven by the boom in AI.

To put it bluntly: these AI-managed ETFs didn't even cash in on their underlying tech's own hype.

Eric Ghysels, an economics professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, noted that while an AI can be speedier than human investors moment-to-moment, it's sluggish to adapt to "paradigm-shifting events" like the war in 

 — or maybe even the rise of AI.  Meaning, in his opinion, an AI can't beat human investors over time.

"Maybe one day it will, but for now AI is limited to plagiarizing history," Ghysels told the WSJ.

Watson's Wager

A look at the oldest AI-run portfolio, the AI Powered Equity ETF (AIEQ), seemingly backs up Ghysel's thinking.

AIEQ is powered by IBM's Watson AI, calculating its bets based on millions of data points gathered from the news, analyst reports, and even social media. Yet according to the WSJ's analysis, AIEQ, while far from a disaster, is still drastically underperforming.

Since its launch in 2017, AIEQ has had a return of 44 percent. In that same period, the ETF based on the S&P performance, SPY, boasted a return of a whopping 93 percent, blowing AIEQ's gains out of the water.

A 44 percent return isn't bad on its own, but for stock traders wanting to be on the cutting edge, lagging behind the market at large isn't going to, well, cut it.

In AIEQ's case, as Ghysel predicted, the long term sees out AI-run fund management's pitfalls: it enjoyed an initial but short-lived lead on the S&P, but it absolutely tanked after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates last year. This year it's up nine percent, still behind the S&P's fifteen.

Staying out of IT

Harnessing all that technology just to perform worse than one of the most popular and no-brainer ETFs in the world doesn't scream game-changer.

Of course, AI has a very plausible potential to improve over time, and some AI-powered portfolios have reportedly outperformed the S&P in the very short term.

Still, to pragmatic investors, waiting for the tech to power up may not be worth the time or money, especially since the likes of ChatGPT have shown how often AI can get it wrong.

"I think mistakes are going to be made early on, and I don't really want to be part of those mistakes," Jack Butler, a business advisor, told the WSJ.

More on AI: Microsoft Deletes Bizarre AI-Generated Travel Guide That Recommended Visiting Food Bank With an "Empty Stomach"

The post AI Is Doing a Terrible Job Trading Stocks in the Real World appeared first on Futurism.

Nature Communications, Published online: 21 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-40824-7

Aberrant coagulation and   are associated with severe  -CoV-2 infection. Here, the authors show that the E protein are associated with coagulation disorders in COVID-19 patients and could directly enhance platelet activation and thrombosis through a  /p38 MAPK/NF-kB signaling axis.

As our planet undergoes significant transformations due to climate change, habitats are being altered, appearing, disappearing, or changing in quality. Understanding the impact of these changes on the geographic distributions of species is of great significance. The shrinking ranges of protected organisms and the expanding ranges of noxious species, such as pests and pathogens, highlight the urgent need to monitor range movements precisely.

As our planet undergoes significant transformations due to climate change, habitats are being altered, appearing, disappearing, or changing in quality. Understanding the impact of these changes on the geographic distributions of species is of great significance. The shrinking ranges of protected organisms and the expanding ranges of noxious species, such as pests and pathogens, highlight the urgent need to monitor range movements precisely.

Scientific Reports, Published online: 21 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-40833-y

Perineural invasion detection in pancreatic ductal   using artificial intelligence

Dallas is once again suing to try to force   Navy to finish cleaning up a contaminated former Naval airfield after the military branch has blown its previous deadline to clear the site by seven years.

Some of Drew Carhart's earliest memories remind him of his love of nature. Not just trees, flowers or birds—but the stars, planets and galaxies visible in the night sky.

Research is under way to determine whether the mutation-laden lineage BA.2.86 is nothing to worry about — or has the potential to spread globally

Plants are not exposed to herbivores without defenses. When an insect feeds on a leaf, thereby wounding it and releasing oral secretions, a signaling cascade is elicited in the plant, usually starting with a rapid increase in the amount of the plant hormone jasmonic acid and its active isoleucine conjugate. Jasmonic acid regulates various reactions in plants, including defenses against herbivores and responses to environmental stress.

Plants are not exposed to herbivores without defenses. When an insect feeds on a leaf, thereby wounding it and releasing oral secretions, a signaling cascade is elicited in the plant, usually starting with a rapid increase in the amount of the plant hormone jasmonic acid and its active isoleucine conjugate. Jasmonic acid regulates various reactions in plants, including defenses against herbivores and responses to environmental stress.

Located at CERN's North Area and receiving beams from the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), the NA64 and NA62 experiments search for dark matter, complementing searches at the LHC, as they cover a different energy range. Both experiments have recently published new results. The research is published on the arXiv preprint server.

Helping a child who struggles with reading can be a rewarding experience.

Dogs can be a faster, more precise, less expensive—not to mention friendlier—method of detecting 

-19 than even our best current technology, a new review shows.

A growing number of studies over the last two or so years has highlighted the power of dogs in detecting the stealthy virus and its variants, even when they are obscured by other viruses, like those from common colds and flu.

“It went from four papers to 29 peer-reviewed studies—that includes more than 400 scientists from over 30 countries and 31,000 samples,” says Tommy Dickey, professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who with collaborator Heather Junqueira of BioScent, Inc., gathered the recent massive number of findings into a review in the Journal of Osteopathic Medicine.

From their rigorous survey of exclusively peer-reviewed studies published by traditional academic publishers covering both field and clinical experiments, Dickey and Junqueira assert that the collective research demonstrates that trained scent dogs are “as effective and often more effective” than the antigen tests we’re keeping handy at home, as well as the gold-standard reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests deployed in clinics and hospitals.

Not only can dogs detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus faster, they can do so in a non-intrusive manner, without the environmental impact that comes with single-use plastics.

The magic lies in their highly evolved noses, with physical and neural optimizations for smell. Dogs have hundreds of millions of olfactory receptors, compared to roughly five to six million for humans, and a full third of their brains are devoted to interpreting smells, compared to a scant 5% in human brains. All these enhancements mean that dogs can detect very low concentrations of odors associated with COVID 

.

“They can detect the equivalent of one drop of an odorous substance in 10.5 Olympic-sized swimming pools,” Dickey says. “For perspective, this is about three orders of magnitude better than with scientific instrumentation.”

In some cases, dogs were able to detect COVID in pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic patients whose viral load was too low for conventional tests to work. And not only that, Dickey adds, dogs can distinguish COVID and its variants in the presence of other potentially confounding respiratory viruses, such as those of the common cold or flu.

“They’re much more effective,” Dickey says. “In fact one of the authors that we quote in the paper commented that the RT-PCR test is not the gold standard anymore. It’s the dog.

“And they’re so quick,” he adds. “They can give you the yes or no within seconds, if they’re directly smelling you.”

In some scenarios the dog gave the person a quick sniff, sitting down to indicate the presence of COVID. In others, the dog was given a sweat sample to smell, a process that could take a few minutes. The speed is especially important in situations like the earlier phase of the pandemic, when a gap of days between test and result could mean an exponential rise in infections if the person was positive, or scenarios that involve a high volume of people.

Scent dogs such as beagles, basset hounds, and coonhounds would be the ideal dog for the task, given their natural tendencies to rely on odors to relate to the world, but the studies showed a variety of other dogs are up to the challenge. Given a few weeks of training, puppies and older dogs, males and females, purebreds and mixed breeds all performed admirably. In one study, a “problem” pit bull terrier that had been abused found a second chance by becoming a perfectly capable COVID detector.

Despite these glowing reviews, there remain challenges to placing man’s best friend in the mainstream of medical diagnoses, although the animals have proven successful in the detection of other conditions, such as diabetes and cancer.

“There’s quite a bit of research, but it’s still considered by many as a kind of a curiosity,” says Dickey, a professor emeritus of geography whose love for Great Pyrenees dogs led him to become a certified therapy dog handler and author of therapy dog books after he retired from formal teaching.

Places that were open to using dogs in field experiments tended to be smaller countries such as Finland and Colombia, where there was a desire to explore fast and cost-effective methods of detecting COVID without having to wait for expensive tests to be developed or for reagents to become available.

Of their study, Dickey and Junqueira add, “After conducting this comprehensive review, we believe that scent dogs deserve their place as a serious diagnostic methodology that could be particularly useful during future pandemics, potentially as part of rapid routine health screenings in public spaces. Perhaps, most importantly, we argue that the impressive international quality and quantity of COVID scent dog research described in our paper for the first time, demonstrates that medical scent dogs are finally ready for a host of mainstream medical applications.”

Source: UC Santa Barbara

The post Dogs sniff out COVID more effectively than tests appeared first on Futurity.

Polar Vortex

Just days after Russia crashed its Luna-25 lunar lander on its way to the Moon's surface, India's space agency is gearing up for its own attempt.

The two countries were in a race to become the first country to softly land a craft near the lunar south pole, a region scientists believe could be rich with water ice, a key resource for potential settlement efforts.

But with Russia out of the race for now, all eyes are on India's Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, a followup to a precursor that crash-landed on its way to the lunar surface back in 2019.

We'll be watching closely because the stakes are high. If successful, the mission could make India only the fourth country to successfully land on the Moon, following the US, the Soviet Union, and China — and, in a sense both symbolic and technical, show that it's pulling ahead of Russia's increasingly disastrous space program.

Trying Again

The lander-rover pair will attempt their treacherous journey to the south pole on Wednesday, if all goes according to plan. Officials from India's space agency ISRO told reporters on Monday that all the spacecraft's systems are working "perfectly," Reuters reports.

The mission's objectives are first to prove the country's capability of safely landing on the Moon, and then study the composition of the lunar south pole if successful.

Chandrayaan-3 features several technological upgrades over its precursor that could give it a better shot of sticking the landing later this week. For one, ISRO is giving itself a larger potential landing zone in the case of adverse conditions. It also has sturdier legs, an important because the south pole's terrain is comparatively rough.

Moon Stakes

If all goes according to plan — needless to say, that's still an astronomical "if" — the lander will release a 57-pound, six-wheeled rover that will explore the surrounding areas for evidence of water ice using an X-ray spectrometer and a laser spectroscope.

A success could catapult India ahead in the international race to establish a permanent presence on the Moon — especially now that Russia's attempt has failed.

"If Chandrayaan-3 succeeds, it will boost India's space agency's reputation worldwide," former ISRO scientist Manish Purohit told Reuters. "It will show that India is becoming a key player in space exploration."

More on India: India to Launch Third Moon Mission Next Week

The post After Russia's Failure, India Is Preparing to Land on the Moon appeared first on Futurism.

Nature Communications, Published online: 21 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-40757-1

The authors study a Pt/Nb hybrid structure by scanning microscopy and muon spin rotation. They find an anomalous absence of Meissner screening near the Pt/Nb interface due to spin-triplet pair correlations driven by spin-orbit coupling alone with no ferromagnetic layer necessary.

More than 2,000 athletes from about 200 countries have gathered in Budapest, Hungary, for the 2023 World Athletics Championships, competing in 49 track and field events. The competition began on August 19, and continues through August 27. Gathered below, images from some of the events over this weekend.

You may remember the syllabus. Handed out on the first day of class, it was a revered and simple artifact that would outline the plan of a college course. It was a pragmatic document, covering contact information, required books, meeting times, and a schedule. But it was also a symbolic one, representing the educational part of the college experience in a few dense and hopeful pages.

That version of the syllabus is gone. It has been replaced by courseware, an online tool for administering a class and processing its assignments. A document called “syllabus” persists, and is still distributed to prospective students at the start of each semester—but its function as a course plan has been minimized, if not entirely erased. First and foremost, it must satisfy a drove of bureaucratic needs, describing school policies, accreditation demands, regulatory matters, access to campus resources, health and safety guidelines, and more.

Last week, the office of the provost at Washington University in St. Louis, where I teach, sent out a new syllabus template for faculty use. It’s nine pages long and suggests that any detailed course content—a list of study topics, assigned readings, and weekly homework assignments—be sequestered at the very end. This is not unusual. I’ve seen and heard the same thing from colleagues all across the country, at schools big and small, public and private. At colleges and universities everywhere, the syllabus has become a terms-of-service document.

The change happened slowly. Long before courseware made it obsolete, the syllabus was pulled in two directions. On one side, it recorded a deliberate pedagogical plan plotted out by an expert. The syllabus, in its very brevity, offered evidence of that expertise. All of Greek lyric poetry or organic chemistry or political economy boiled down to this simple, confident itinerary. The syllabus was also meant to capture the letter and spirit of the learning environment: the nature of assignments, what success would mean, how the class would operate, the instructor’s style. It was a hallowed artifact in the mind of educators.

[Read: How to really fix higher ed]

But on the other side, students never seemed to read our syllabi. They didn’t know which reading would be coming next, or what would be on the exam, or when the papers were due. A tradition of professorial barbs and sneers developed around that state of affairs: It’s on the syllabus! Didn’t you read the syllabus? Intention underlied impatience: The traditional university student matriculates to learn but also to become an independent adult. In its own small way, as a document that could and should be consulted, the syllabus gave students an opportunity to exercise self-reliance—and teachers a way of holding them accountable.

Even though most students wouldn’t encounter syllabi until college, their legend leaked out. The syllabus encapsulated the educational side of college life. This wasn’t just a course plan; it was a document that mediated the student’s relationship with the professor. It was a contract, and those who paid that contract insufficient mind—students who might find themselves in breach—were considered lazy, incompetent, or truculent.

Then, 21st-century software upended how courses were run. Whether built in house or licensed, learning-management systems became commonplace. The move made sense: The web had fully matured, and you could bank, pay bills, shop, and socialize online. Why not manage your classes too? But courseware would explode the syllabus into shrapnel. Sure, you could just post a PDF of an old paper syllabus online, but courseware lets you install weekly “modules” that show materials and assignments for each class meeting. It offers places to store readings and other resources. It lists teachers’ contact information and facilitates announcements. Suddenly, professors could also change their course plans on the fly, tweaking topics and assignments as they liked. Adopting the legalese that now seemed best suited to the context, we’d put a broad disclaimer on our syllabi: “subject to change.”

[Read: The Toyota Corolla theory of college]

In effect, what had been marked as the “syllabus” section of a course website was no longer needed for that purpose. Now it was just a list of course policies. The syllabus had long been described as a course contract, an agreement between teacher and students about what would take place in the classroom and on what terms. But the “contract” part of that arrangement took over for the “course.”

For a time, courseware was optional. Some faculty kept using paper syllabi; others adopted the online tools. Some used a combination. But as universities invested big bucks in courseware, and as courseware companies made big bucks selling it, the pressure to adopt it increased. Student demand followed: They became irritated and confused by the notion that each course might be managed in a different way, and courseware gave students more information and greater feedback—or a sense of it, anyway. In particular, courseware’s ability to store and display grades allowed students to check in frequently—perhaps obsessively—on their performance, making courseware-run courses feel more student-centered than other kinds.

During the same period in which courseware was completing its takeover, the faculty-student relationship changed. Tuition prices rose, and the student’s role became more like that of a conventional customer. I’ve seen conflicts over grades or late assignments inspire faculty to add greater detail and more contract riders to their syllabi. Concerns about mental health, accommodation, disability resources, gender identity/personal pronouns, classroom climate, harassment and sexual assault, and other matters gave rise to pages’ worth of boilerplate. The pandemic demanded the addition of health and safety protocols. New ways of cheating, such as Chegg and ChatGPT, demanded fresh language about academic integrity. And each new policy clarification can beget subordinating policy clarifications; for example, using a software package called Turnitin to detect plagiarism requires that professors disclose that work submitted to courseware will be funneled through Turnitin, which vacuums data from those papers to benefit its business.

[Read: The first year of AI college ends in ruin]

If the syllabus had simply gone away, educators could mourn its loss and move on. Instead, the document persists as the bloated corpse of what it used to be, and also as a ghost haunting the distributed, corporate information systems that have slowly replaced it.

Professors still cling to their old-fashioned syllabi in private. They share them with their colleagues looking for course ideas. When proposing new courses to department heads, they still draw up plans in which topics and materials, and assignments and schedules, take the place of quasi-legal notices. The syllabus as it used to be is for faculty’s eyes only.

Students, for their part, may be better off with the syllabus dead. (Used effectively, courseware serves their needs quite well.) But the bureaucratization of the traditional course plan has changed what it feels like to teach, and to be taught. The syllabus used to make a promise: that the classroom was a distinct place, separated from the world even if still coupled to it, where a common project would be undertaken, and during which trust would be presumed. Now it’s just the opposite, more a legal waiver than an invitation—just another contract rendered in fine print. If students don’t bother reading syllabi today, who can really blame them?

Numerous studies highlight vocabulary as a critical predictor determining word and text reading comprehension in monolingual and bilingual children, but when measuring vocabulary, most studies focus on either breadth or depth, or conflate the two, which devalues the unique role each dimension plays in reading comprehension.

Examples of infections tied to gram-negative bacteria include pneumonia, bloodstream infections, wound-site infections and meningitis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There are an awful lot of people in this industry who are interested in the idea of targeted protein degradation (TPD), and I've blogged about the topic many times in the past few years. Picking out proteins and sending them into the vicious shredder that is the proteasome is a completely new mode of action for drugs, and there are many examples of it leading to effects that you just don't see (can't see!) with traditional small-molecule inhibitors. But as these things get further and further into development, and as more and more effort has been poured into them in both industry and academia, details inevitably emerge that make the whole picture more complicated. 

This preprint is a prime example of that. It's from a team at Genentech, and it's been widely read and discussed across the whole field this year. They start off with the widely-used example of degrading proteins in the BET family, such as BRD4. It seems to be the law that every new bifunctional idea or protein-degradation variation has to use BRD4 as a touchstone, but that's because it works so well and has demonstrated just those beyond-simple-inhibition effects mentioned above. You Would Think that by now we understood BRD4 degradation pretty well, but You Would Be Wrong. That's the message of this paper distilled down to one sentence!

What the authors show is that such degradation produces new peptides from the proteasome as the BRD4 gets chopped up there, and that some of those are actually binding to another set of proteins called IAPs. That stands for "Inhibitor of Apoptosis", the programmed cell-death pathway, and when these proteasome-produced-pieces bind to IAPs, that process takes the brakes off the apoptotic pathways and the cells die. We did not realize this! Degrading something like BRD4 was known to be cytotoxic and show apoptosis via caspase enzyme activation, but that effect was thought to be because the protein had been suddenly yanked from its place in multiple cellular pathways (which is a completely reasonable hypothesis). And while that may not be wrong, this new work shows the above completely different mechanism at work. For one thing, using siRNA to knock down BRD4 levels to similar degree as seen with targeted protein degradation does not lead to caspase activation.

Further experiments showed that it's specifically the "long isoform" of BRD4 (BRD4-L) that is having this effect. In fact, if you deplete that isoform and treat the resulting cells with BET degrader molecules, you don't see caspase activation and apoptosis. It looks like proteasomal procession of that BRD4-L isoform produces new amino-terminated peptides that are just the sort of thing that IAP proteins are constantly looking for, as a sign that it's time for this cell to fall on its sword. The paper also has a lot of good details on the differences between cells that have become resistant to the BRD4 inhibitor molecule JQ1 and the ones that have become resistant to a bifunctional degrader (MZ1) that uses JQ1 as its targeting end. You'd think that these two sorts of cells would overlap, but they don't! It turns out that the resistance that develops to the degrader molecule is tied to mutations that lower the efficiency of that apoptosis pathway and thus allow the cells to escape.

The group goes on to show that this apoptosis mechanism shows up with a lot of other bifunctional degrader molecules (ones that hit targets beyond BRD4!) This means that we're all going to have to think about this whenever we develop such molecules. It's true that many times (especially in oncology) we just want to mess up our targeted cell thoroughly, and having them die via one route is as good a having them die via another. But that's not always the case! In many other situations we just want to alter the behavior of the cells without killing them off, so we need to keep our eyes on that IAP/caspase stuff for sure.

A very interesting aspect of all this is that it explains an apparently paradoxical effect in chemotherapy of multiple myeloma. Thalidomide famously made a comeback as a therapeutic drug in this area because of its anticancer properties, and this was later shown to be because of its “molecular glue” behavior leading to protein degradation via recruitment of the ubiquitinating enzyme partner cereblon. Indeed, this helped kick off the whole idea of TPD, making bifunctional degrader molecules with a thalidomide-like end to attract cereblon and a protein-targeting ligand end to aim it. But one combination treatment for multiple myeloma involves giving thalidomide along with bortezomib, which is a proteasome inhibitor. How can giving a drug that induces protein degradation synergize with a compound that gums up the protein degradation machine itself?

One answer is that borzetomib does not shut down the proteasome entirely; just some parts of it (particularly a chymotrypsin-like activity). Multiple myeloma is a malignancy of B cells, which are constantly degrading misfolded immunoglobin protein chains, and it appears that borzetomib treatment causes some of these to form IAP-binding proteins during that degradation. So both protein degradation and borzetomib treatment might be turning on apoptosis, and those two mechanisms could indeed add up even though at first it seems as if they wouldn’t.

It will be interesting to see how this work is received in the TPD world – there are enough companies interested in this area that a lot of attention will be paid to this idea, and probably has been paid already. We’ll first see how well these effects reproduce, then what assays we’d all need to put in place to reveal them during a drug development project, and then figure out how to cancel out or mitigate the IAP/caspase consequences in some programs and how to crank them up even higher in others. . .

Examples of infections tied to gram-negative bacteria include pneumonia, bloodstream infections, wound-site infections and meningitis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Epidemiologist David Dowdy says vaccines and a preventive drug for RSV offer hope for a healthier fall and winter this year.

Last year’s “tripledemic” of flu, COVID-19, and RSV left many of us wary of what the coming respiratory virus season might bring.

This year’s landscape is already different, however, with new vaccines and treatments, like the game-changing antibody that protects kids from RSV, offering new ways to tamp down infections and transmission.

In this Q&A, adapted from the July 28 episode of Public Health On Call, Dowdy, a professor in the epidemiology department at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, discusses what we can learn from last year’s virus season, how and why this year might be different, and why vaccinations continue to play a key role in determining how severe the viruses’ toll will be:

The post Why this year’s virus season could be different appeared first on Futurity.

Cooling weather on Monday gave firefighters a slight edge against what the prime minister described as "apocalyptic" wildfires blazing across western  , after tens of thousands were evacuated or put on alert.

The chief of the Russian space agency Roscosmos on Monday advocated for Russia to stay in the lunar race, a day after announcing its mission had crashed.

Last year was a grim season for sea turtles in Queensland's Wide Bay-Burnett region with more than 10 times the usual number of sick and dying animals, including over 100 turtles, pulled from the water.

The prevalence of blue-green algae blooms in southern Ontario will become more frequent as temperatures rise, say Brock University researchers.

Throughout the 21st century, teamwork has come to define the modern work environment. Driven by advances in communication technology, working collaboratively is, as management experts will tell you, how you harness the "collective intelligence."

The past few weeks have seen a huge surge of interest among scientists and the public in a material called LK-99 after it was claimed to be a superconductor at room temperature and ambient pressure.

Last year was a grim season for sea turtles in Queensland's Wide Bay-Burnett region with more than 10 times the usual number of sick and dying animals, including over 100 turtles, pulled from the water.

The prevalence of blue-green algae blooms in southern Ontario will become more frequent as temperatures rise, say Brock University researchers.

Low cost, human-made river barriers, similar to those built by beavers, can protect communities at risk of flooding.

Low cost, human-made river barriers, similar to those built by beavers, can protect communities at risk of flooding.

Maglevs are one of those technologies that still look like magic, even years after they were initially rolled out. While they have long been a workhorse of the transportation systems of some major cities, they don't often impact the day-to-day lives of people who don't use them to commute. But, they might be invaluable in another setting—lunar exploration. There's an ongoing debate about the best way to shuttle stuff around on the moon's surface, and a team from JPL and a company called SRI International think they have a solution—deploy a maglev track on the moon.

In 1772, Joseph Banks commissioned the foremost painter of animals in England, George Stubbs, to paint a dingo and a kangaroo.

In 1772, Joseph Banks commissioned the foremost painter of animals in England, George Stubbs, to paint a dingo and a kangaroo.

This year, the Australian government rejected Clive Palmer's coal mine proposal—but approved three others. Over 100 more fossil fuel projects are in the decision pipeline.

This summer has proven how destructive climate change can be. We have been plagued by harrowing images of Maui, Hawaii, in ashes, news about wildfires spreading smoke across Canada and   and record-breaking heat waves worldwide.

A study in the International Journal of Computational Systems Engineering has investigated the e-commerce landscape and how it is affected by financial crises. The insights from the study offer a financial accounting crisis early warning system that companies might use to predict and pre-empt economic turmoil.

Admit One

X-formerly-

 owner Elon Musk has admitted what we all suspect: that under his leadership, the site may not be thriving after all.

"The sad truth is that there are no great 'social networks' right now," the multi-hyphenate billionaire posted. "We may fail, as so many have predicted, but we will try our best to make there be at least one."

This admission comes after a glitch over the weekend caused some images and links posted before December 2014 to be deleted. As The Verge reports, the issue seems to be related to the social network's built-in URL shortener.

Among the deleted images was Ellen DeGeneres' famous star-studded Oscars selfie, which was apparently the most-retweeted photo of all time, though unlike most of the now-broken it was eventually restored.

It was a rare moment of self-reflection for Musk, whose chaotic run at the former bird site has been characterized by swaggering bravado. Twitter's new CEO Linda Yaccarino, for her part, did retweet — or "repost," per the new branding — Musk's message and add her own touch.

"There is an important place in the world for X," the CEO wrote.

Fail Me Once

Though his brand is built on braggadicio, this isn't the first time Musk seems to have pondered the possibility of defeat in the social media space.

Shortly after Yaccarino took over as CEO over the summer, the site's owner admitted in a Twitter Spaces discussion that "half of our advertising disappeared overnight" after he bought the site — though he qualified that statement by saying that it was due to his insistence on "free speech," which is Muskian code for letting bigots back onto the platform and refusing to punish hate speech.

He also appeared to concede earlier this year that buying the social network may not have been the best decision for his bottom line.

"It remains to be seen as to whether this was financially smart," Musk told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson during an interview in April. “Currently, it is not."

Those admissions aside, however, this latest acknowledgment doesn't have the same slathering of caveats, and instead does actually give the sense that Musk may be beginning to realize that he's driving the site into the ground — though as many have conjectured, that may have been the plan all along.

More on Elon's Twitter: Brands Horrified When Their Twitter Ads Appear on Nazi Posts

The post Elon Musk Admits Twitter May Be Failing Under His Leadership appeared first on Futurism.

Researchers model and map how neurons across the tiny brain of a C. elegans worm encode its behaviors, revealing many new insights about the robustness and flexibility of its nervous system.

Applying ground-up silicate rock to Midwestern farm fields can capture significant amounts of carbon dioxide and prevent it from accumulating in the atmosphere, according to a new study that successfully quantified those climate benefits for the first time.

A new study has found that a natural language processing (NLP) system showed excellent performance when ported to a new health system and tested on more than six million clinical notes of patients seen in Florida. Performance was evaluated for generalizability and portability, defined as ease and accuracy when deploying the software in a new environment and of updating its use to meet the needs of new data.

As children head back to school, two issues have climbed higher on their parents' list of concerns: the role of social media and the internet in kids' lives.

Struggling with a teenager who refuses to ditch digital devices at night and wakes up grumpy? Boarding school could be the answer.

Various medical circumstances, including heart attacks and extreme cases of COVID-19, necessitate the use of anticoagulants, medicines that prevent  . But the most commonly used, heparin, can induce potentially fatal side effects by making the blood clots worse rather than better. This only happens in a minority of patients so effective treatments are not commonly explored. Researchers have now proposed a side effect-free anticoagulating treatment that has so far proved effective in test mice and could be ready for human trials in just a few years.

A new study has found that a natural language processing (NLP) system showed excellent performance when ported to a new health system and tested on more than six million clinical notes of patients seen in Florida. Performance was evaluated for generalizability and portability, defined as ease and accuracy when deploying the software in a new environment and of updating its use to meet the needs of new data.

As someone who researches slavery in the ancient Mediterranean world, especially in the Bible, I often hear remarks like, "Slavery was totally different back then, right?" "Well, it couldn't have been that bad." "Couldn't slaves buy their freedom?"

People trust humans more than artificial intelligence, but when they think about God they are more likely to embrace AI recommendations over those from their peers.

That’s according to new research from Keisha Cutright, a marketing professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Across eight experiments, Cutright and Mustafa Karataş of Nazarbayev University, found that “actively thinking about God” promotes acceptance of AI recommendations in a variety of contexts, including in the choice of movies, financial products, dental treatments, and romantic partners.

“Thinking about God affects how we see things in our environment and our decision-making,” Cutright says. “One day it hit me that AI and technology are similar in a lot of ways to religion, in that both of them are often seen as diminishing the role of humans. We wanted to see if the salience of God affects how people rely on AI.”

In their experiments, the researchers randomly exposed half of the participants to tasks or experiences meant to make them think about God. In one study, they asked them to write what God meant to them. In other experiments, they used more subtle religious cues, like exposing people in the waiting room of a dental clinic to music evocative of God versus secular music; or comparing how proximity to a place of worship influenced choices.

“And of course, we also measured the extent to which participants were religious or not in the first place,” Cutright says. “Because if you are religious, it’s more likely that God is salient to you.”

The results showed when people are actively thinking about God, they are less averse to AI and more willing to consider AI-based recommendations.

“Regardless of whether or not we’re religious, we know that God is associated with a sense of power, vastness, and wonder,” Cutright says. “This awe for the divine elicits a sense of smallness and fallibility in people.”

Cutright says the findings don’t completely reverse people’s overall preference for human recommendations, but they certainly show that when God is salient, humans don’t have a big advantage over AI.

“The preference for the human is pretty strong, but it starts to dampen a bit when you evoke thoughts of God,” she says. “It’s still not going to flip to the point where people have a preference for AI over humans, but now it is probably closer to 50/50 in many situations.”

She also says the studies found that in general, religious people prefer AI recommendations more than non-religious people do. Cutright says companies should consider these findings when they target certain markets.

“Counter to most people’s intuition, areas with more religious populations may be good places to start with AI-based recommendations,” she says.

She also says businesses using AI should carefully craft their communications.

“They could use subtle reminders of the smallness of mankind, whether through cues associated with God directly, or other awe-inducing stimuli,” Cutright says. “This may enhance consumers’ openness to AI-based recommendations.”

Source: Duke University

The post Thinking about God makes people more likely to trust AI appeared first on Futurity.

To address a lack of head coaches of color in the National Football League, management must first fix the problem at lower levels of coaching, new research shows.

Twenty years ago, the NFL adopted the Rooney Rule which attempted to address racial disparity in top positions by requiring teams to interview at least one person of color for every head coach opening.

The new study suggests the gap will persist unless it’s closed at the bottom. The NFL has a hierarchal labor pool, says Andreas Schwab, associate professor of entrepreneurship at Iowa State University and coauthor of the study in the 

 Journal of Sociology.

Under the head coach are two coordinators who oversee defense and offense. These coordinators supervise position-specific coaches who may have their own assistant coaches.

“To become a head coach, individuals need to move through the ranks. This paper shows that where you start in the hierarchy of coaching matters because the likelihood that coaches in that position get promoted to the next level differs,” Schwab says.

The researchers found 79% of the promotions to head coach were from the coordinator position. While the data shows no racial disparity in promotions from coordinator to head coach, white coaches were twice as likely to be promoted from a lower-level position to a coordinator position.

“Beyond providing entertainment, the NFL can help us as a society to better understand and manage employee hiring and promotion processes.”

“The lower level feeds the top. If bias is embedded in the entire process, then it’s difficult to get the most capable candidates into the pool for the top position,” he says.

The researchers collected and analyzed the career history data of more than 1,300 NFL coaches from all 32 teams between 1985 and 2015. They compared coaches who played the same position, started their careers coaching the same position, and performed equivalently based on a wide-range of objective performance measures, including:

• Percentage of games won by the team when the coach had a chance of being promoted
• Offensive or defensive performance related to each coach’s primary responsibilities
• Coaching position-specific performance based on 52 metrics

The researchers also ruled out alternative explanations based on remaining differences between teams and coaches. This included whether coaches had worked for a team that went to the Super Bowl and had relatives who also coached in the NFL.

Taking all these factors into account, the researchers found persistent racial bias in both the hiring and promoting of lower-level coaches.

“These data analyses show where biases are hiding, and once we know that, we can think about interventions and measure their effectiveness,” says Schwab.

The researchers say parity will be achieved only by rewarding coaches equally with promotions at the earliest stages of their careers. But Schwab emphasizes that there are no easy, quick fixes and any intervention requires adequate time to have an effect.

Schwab says the NFL offers a unique opportunity to study bias in organizations. Along with a large amount of objective performance data, it provides transparency in the hiring, firing, and promoting of coaching staff for an entire industry.

In other industries, a lack of data and more subjective performance metrics often prevent solid statistical analyses of employee careers, even though biases are likely “just as relevant in other organizations,” says Schwab.

“Beyond providing entertainment, the NFL can help us as a society to better understand and manage employee hiring and promotion processes,” Schwab says.

Additional coauthors are from the University of Michigan, George Washington University, Emory University.

Source: Iowa State University

The post There’s racial bias in lower-level NFL coach hiring and promoting appeared first on Futurity.

Nature Communications, Published online: 21 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-40846-1

The precise rule of replication origin selection and activation in metazoans remains unclear. Here, the authors identify   as a genome organizer and replication pioneer by facilitating nucleosome remodeling and chromatin assembly of the pre-RC.

The Big Wasp Survey, a citizen science project involving thousands of volunteers throughout  , has yielded important genetic insights into the common wasp, reports a study led by UCL researchers.

The Big Wasp Survey, a citizen science project involving thousands of volunteers throughout  , has yielded important genetic insights into the common wasp, reports a study led by UCL researchers.

New habitats that are emerging as mountain glaciers melt away represent huge ecological shifts and present new challenges for conservation

submitted by /u/heatmapnews [link] [comments]

Troldebakkerne hedder en station på Gribskovbanen i Nordsjælland, der for et par år siden blev oprettet i et nyt boligkvarter nord for Helsinge i retning mod Tisvilde. Vel at mærke en ensporet bane, hvilket fik smilet frem hos Jørgen Christiansen, da han under skiltet med stationsnavnet fik øje på et mindre skilt med teksten: ‘Spor 1’. »Hvis man da ellers skulle være i tvivl, men det er da godt at være forudseende. Med samme mistro til de rejsendes evner, burde der suppleres med et skilt: ‘Station’, skriver han.

Comet Nishimura has a hyperbolic orbit, which suggests that it may have come from outside the solar system and will likely be catapulted into interstellar space after slingshotting around the sun.

Here's how cats first finagled their way into human hearts and homes thousands of years ago.

The team of researchers and conservationists will collect scientific data, while also training the next generation of environmentalists.

Just days after the Russian military launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, stories of   resistance were already circulating with a ferocity all their own.

Memes galore centered on the "orca revolution" have inundated the online realm. They gleefully depict orcas launching attacks on boats in the Strait of Gibraltar and off the Shetland coast.

Fire devastates communities and families, and it makes identification of victims challenging. In the aftermath of the wildfire that swept through Lahaina, Hawaii, officials are collecting DNA samples from relatives of missing persons in the hope that this can aid in identifying those who died in the fire.

Almost two out of every five species of wild bird are of conservation concern across  , according to an updated and comprehensive assessment of their population status. That means these species are declining and becoming more scarce across the continent. Among the birds of conservation concern are some familiar species, including dunnock, goldcrest and meadow pipit.

Our understanding of animal behavior depends on observation. Researchers can study how animals are born, grow and develop. We can gather evidence of how they interact with each other and their environment.

Anti-estrogenic therapies can suppress the growth of   that does not express estrogen receptors; when combined with immune checkpoint inhibitor therapies, they halt tumor progression in mice models.

Pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) are artificial devices that can simulate the mechanics of human muscles, and have shown great promise in industries requiring human-robot interaction systems. Despite their potential, controlling the trajectory performance of PAM-based systems is challenging owing to their nonlinear characteristics. Now, researchers have developed a novel adaptive sliding mode controller that uses fuzzy logic to estimate PAM-based system's parameters, promising enhanced tracking accuracy and adaptability compared to traditional control methods.

Memes galore centered on the "orca revolution" have inundated the online realm. They gleefully depict orcas launching attacks on boats in the Strait of Gibraltar and off the Shetland coast.

Fire devastates communities and families, and it makes identification of victims challenging. In the aftermath of the wildfire that swept through Lahaina, Hawaii, officials are collecting DNA samples from relatives of missing persons in the hope that this can aid in identifying those who died in the fire.

Almost two out of every five species of wild bird are of conservation concern across  , according to an updated and comprehensive assessment of their population status. That means these species are declining and becoming more scarce across the continent. Among the birds of conservation concern are some familiar species, including dunnock, goldcrest and meadow pipit.

On the evening of Aug. 16, due to rapidly moving wildfires, an evacuation order was issued for the entire city of Yellowknife. Thousands of residents faced a long, stressful drive on the only road out of the city. The goal was for as many people as possible to flee one of the largest cities in  's North before the deadline for safe exit of Aug. 18 at noon Mountain Daylight Time.

Tropical Storm Hilary made landfall on  's Baja peninsula and moved into Southern California with damaging wind and heavy rainfall on Sunday, Aug. 20, 2023. Forecasters warned of a "potentially historic amount of rainfall" and dangerous flooding. California's governor declared a state of emergency on Saturday, and officials had urged people on Catalina Island and in other high-risk areas to evacuate. Nevada's governor declared a state of emergency on Sunday.

The devastating wildfire that destroyed the historic Maui town of Lahaina in Hawaii was still making headlines when the Northwest Territories issued an evacuation order for Yellowknife and British Columbia declared a provincewide state of emergency.

On the night of 13 January 1963, Togo's President Sylvanus Olympio was shot dead by rebels in the first military coup staged in Africa. A long list, as shown below, was to come. From the 1960s to the end of the millennium, there were an average of four military coups a year on the continent. By the end of the 1990s this phenomenon seemed to have faded away.

Our understanding of animal behavior depends on observation. Researchers can study how animals are born, grow and develop. We can gather evidence of how they interact with each other and their environment.

For hundreds of years, we've been told patents help deliver big new inventions, such as life-saving drugs.

In 2017, humanity got its first glimpse of an interstellar object (ISO), known as 1I/"Oumuamua, which buzzed our planet on its way out of the solar system. Speculation abound as to what this object could be because, based on the limited data collected, it was clear that it was like nothing astronomers had ever seen. A controversial suggestion was that it might have been an extraterrestrial probe (or a piece of a derelict spacecraft) passing through our system.

In 1929 Edwin Hubble published the first solid evidence that the universe is expanding. Drawing upon data from Vesto Slipher and Henrietta Leavitt, Hubble demonstrated a correlation between galactic distance and redshift. The more distant a galaxy was, the more its light appeared shifted to the red end of the spectrum.

Seismology has been ubiquitous on Earth for decades, and missions such as InSight have recently provided the same data for the inside of Mars. Understanding a planet's inner workings is key to understanding its geology and climate.

Australia's iconic grass-trees—aka yaccas—are hardy, drought-tolerant, and strikingly beautiful. Now, new research has revealed another, far more important, feature: their ability to protect wildlife from deadly weather extremes.

Australia's iconic grass-trees—aka yaccas—are hardy, drought-tolerant, and strikingly beautiful. Now, new research has revealed another, far more important, feature: their ability to protect wildlife from deadly weather extremes.

After many months of delays caused by the country's costly and reprehensible invasion of Ukraine, Russia's Luna-25 mission finally set off this month to return the country to the surface of the Moon for the first time in 47 years.

A lot was riding on the mission. The country's space program, Rocosmos, has already largely been cut off from the international space community due to Russia's belligerence, forcing it to blaze its own path.

But it wasn't meant to be. Luna-25 slammed into the lunar surface over the weekend, according to a brief Roscosmos update posted to Telegram — and that's a catastrophe for the credibility of the country's struggling space program, as modern-day Russia fails to follow up on the successes of the USSR.

According to a "preliminary analysis" by Rocosmos, the craft "switched to an off-design orbit" right before it crashed.

"During the operation, an emergency situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters," the state corporation wrote, as translated by Google. "The management team is currently analyzing the situation."

The demise of Luna-25 couldn't have come at a worse time for the space agency. With the International Space Station's days already numbered, the country's presence in space could soon be undermined.

Recent high-profile failures have even brought into question the dependability of Russia's number one space export, the Soyuz space capsule — especially with SpaceX swooping in with its reusable Dragon capsule, giving the US and much of the Western world a vendor to greatly cut their dependability on Russia for access to orbit.

And the situation has only gotten worse over the last couple of years. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has put considerable pressure on the country's space program, with former Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin fanning the flames by making unhinged threats squarely aimed at the US (adding to the general aura of madness, Rogozin was subsequently sent to Ukraine, where he was reportedly injured by shelling).

Roscosmos even went as far as to use its presence on the ISS to spread anti-Ukraine propaganda, a stunt that was met with outrage by NASA.

It's the unfortunate culmination of decades of largely peaceful US-Russia cooperation on board the aging orbital outpost, a relationship that's bound to change once the station is decommissioned via de-orbiting through controlled thruster fires at the end of this decade.

Even before its latest invasion, Russia's actions in space have raised many eyebrows among its collaborators.

A 2020 anti-satellite missile launch, for instance, caused a defunct Russian communications satellite to break into thousands of pieces, which could "endanger commercial satellites and irrevocably pollute the space domain," according to a statement by US Space Command commander James Dickinson.

"Russia has made space a warfighting domain by testing space-based and ground-based weapons intended to target and destroy satellites," Dickinson said. "This fact is inconsistent with Moscow's public claims that Russia seeks to prevent conflict in space."

In 2023, the fate of Roscosmos doesn't look much better. With a strained budget, a greatly reduced demand for its Soyuz capsule, glaring technical issues — the ISS was literally spun out of control due to Russian thrusters unexpectedly firing on more than one occasion — and canceled international space exploration collaborations, the ailing agency is desperately looking for new sources of revenue.

In the meantime, Russia's adversaries have made considerable steps towards returning astronauts to the Moon, with NASA successfully completing a flyby with its Orion spacecraft, setting the stage for the first crewed landing attempt since Apollo 17 in 1972.

China has also successfully sent three landers, including two rovers, to the lunar surface, becoming only the third country to softly land on the Moon ten years ago, following the United States and the Soviet Union.

While Russia and China have announced joint plans to establish a research station near the Moon's lunar south pole in the 2030s, it's anybody's guess whether those plans will end up panning out. Given the dramatic rise of its space program, China certainly has political and financial reasons to embark on the mission without Russia.

There are plenty of signs the relationship between the two nations is already strained, from awkwardly overlapping plans to explore the south pole to China actively looking for new international collaborators.

In short, the demise of the Luna-25 mission — which was meant to follow up on the Soviet Union's Luna-24 mission in 1976, the USSR's third successful sample return mission — is the last thing Russia's space program needs right now.

Over three decades following the dissolution of the USSR, Russia joins a growing number of countries that have launched lunar landing missions that unceremoniously crash-landed, including Israel, India, and Japan.

That's also in stark contrast to the country's lofty stated goals, from 3D-printed Moon bases to futuristic observatories designed to keep an eye out for dangerous asteroids.

Of course, Russia isn't simply giving up, and Luna-26 and Luna-27 missions are already in the works. But as Ars Technica points out, nobody really knows when they'll actually launch, given Luna-25's considerable delays.

In the longer term, whether the country still has a shot to revive its ailing space program and return it to its former Soviet Union-era glory is anybody's guess.

But the space race is already well underway — and Russia's already falling way behind.

More on Luna-25: Russia Sends Back Photos From Trip to Moon

The post Russia's Moon Lander Crashing Is a Catastrophe for Its Space Program appeared first on Futurism.

Nature Communications, Published online: 21 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-40827-4

Light-driven actuators have great potential in different types of applications but is still challenging to apply them in flying devices owing to their slow response, small deflection and force output. Here, the authors report a rotary flying photoactuator with fast rotation and rapid response.

Nature Communications, Published online: 21 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-40695-y

The   E3 ubiquitin ligase is essential for genome integrity, mutations lead to primordial dwarfism in patients. Here, the authors show that TRAIP degradation in S-phase, results in cell arrest due to DNA damage caused by replication-transcription conflicts.

The upcoming bushfire season in Australia may be bad, but future years pose a more significant threat, says a University of New South Wales bushfire expert.

Cutting edge technology delivers cytokines with high purity, high bioactivity, high batch-to-batch consistency, and high stability.

New research has improved the accuracy of the parameters governing the expansion of the Universe. More accurate parameters will help astronomers determine how the Universe grew to its current state, and how it will evolve in the future.

Zinc-air batteries have emerged as a better alternative to lithium in a recent study into the advancement of sustainable battery systems.

Recent research in cell biology highlights groundbreaking results. An international team of researchers have recently established a tool they developed to study the mechanics of the cell. The tool can be used to study the inner forces of the cell, for example, the stretching of the nuclear membrane. The microscopic force sensor, only about 0.00002 mm long, is constructed of exotic ingredients such as spider web protein parts, fluorescent proteins from jellyfish, and antibodies from alpaca. In addition, the multidisciplinary team of researchers has developed further the sensitivity of super-resolution microscopy technique.

Genetic remnants of viruses that are naturally present in the human genome could affect the development of neurodegenerative diseases. Researchers come to this conclusion on the basis of studies on cell cultures.

Researchers have developed a new tool, REBURN, that can simulate large forest landscapes and wildfire dynamics over decades or centuries under different wildfire management strategies. The model can simulate the consequences of extinguishing all wildfires regardless of size, which was done for much of the 20th century and has contributed to a rise in large and severe wildfires, or of allowing certain fires to return to uninhabited areas to help create a more 'patchwork' forest structure that can help lessen fire severity. REBURN can also simulate conditions where more benign forest landscape dynamics have fully recovered in an area.

The answers to today’s slithery enigmas

Earlier today I set you the following two puzzles. The first is a retrograde analysis puzzle about snakes and ladders, and in the second you have to work out a symbol. Here they are again with solutions.

1. Brand new it’s retro

The game starts with each player putting their marker on 1.

Each player roles a single die. If you roll a 6, you get an extra throw.

The players take turns in a fixed order.

You go up ladders, and down snakes. It is possible to go up two ladders, or down two snakes, or up a ladder and down a snake on the same turn.

The winner is the player who lands exactly on 100. (If you are on 98 and roll a 3, you ‘bounce back’ and land on 99.)

If a player lands on a square occupied by another player, the player is not sent back to square 1.

Continue reading…

Nature, Published online: 21 August 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-02659-6

The Luna 25 mission has ended in failure, raising major questions about the future of Russia’s space program.

These services deliver freshly roasted, delicious coffee picks right to your door—each with its own twist.

Recent research in cell biology highlights groundbreaking results. An international team of researchers have recently established a tool they developed to study the mechanics of the cell. The tool can be used to study the inner forces of the cell, for example, the stretching of the nuclear membrane. The microscopic force sensor, only about 0.00002 mm long, is constructed of exotic ingredients such as spider web protein parts, fluorescent proteins from jellyfish, and antibodies from alpaca. In addition, the multidisciplinary team of researchers has developed further the sensitivity of super-resolution microscopy technique.

Clues about the formation of major ice sheets on Antarctica have been found in mud cores drilled in Mississippi, providing an important lesson about a major climate cooling event, sometimes known as the Grande Coupure or great cut.

One of the most in-depth catalogs of an animal’s brain-body connections ever compiled ties neural activity to roundworm behavior

Climate change is making wildfires more likely and more intense, exposing more people to dangerous wildfire smoke. Scientists are continuing to learn how much damage that smoke can do to the environment and human health

Luna-25, Russia's first moon mission in nearly a half-century, was the vanguard of a planned series of lunar probes

Whether you need a travel-friendly slate or something affordable for the kids, we tested every model to find the right one for everybody.

Novel stem cell therapy called a CALEC transplant was performed safely in four patients with serious chemical burns tracked in a phase I clinical trial for 12 months. The patients experienced early clinical gains: two were able to undergo a corneal transplant and two reported significant improvements in vision without additional treatment. CALEC procedure takes small amount of stem cells from healthy eye, grows and expands stem cells on a graft, before it is transplanted into the patient's damaged eye.

 (ALS) is a widespread   caused by the loss of neurons that control movement. Although abnormal accumulation of proteins called TDP-43 accompanies ALS, its role in disease progression is not well understood. Recently, using novel mouse models of ALS, researchers have identified the neurological spreading patterns through which TDP-43 perpetuates the degeneration of the movement-related neural circuitry.

One of the most in-depth catalogs of an animal’s brain-body connections ever compiled ties neural activity to roundworm behavior

One-year-olds exposed to more than four hours of screen time a day experienced developmental delays in communication and problem-solving skills at ages 2 and 4, according to a new study

One of the most in-depth catalogs of an animal’s brain-body connections ever compiled ties neural activity to roundworm behavior

New research shows how the visual system contributes to memory.

When we use our working memory, we temporarily retain information in our brain. For instance, you are able to comprehend this sentence because you are briefly storing in working memory each of the words you are reading until you put them together to form the meaning of the sentence.

The importance of working memory to many of our cognitive abilities is well known, but less clear are the neurological machinations driving this process.

Researchers have now demonstrated that the key to understanding working memory relies not only on what one is storing in memory, but also why. This is the “working” part of working memory, which emphasizes the purpose of storing something in the first place.

“We now know that our visual memories are not simply what one has just seen, but, instead, are the result of the neural codes dynamically evolving to incorporate how you intend to use that information in the future,” explains Clayton Curtis, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University and the senior author of the paper in the journal Current Biology.

Specifically, the study focuses on both how we store the visual properties of our memories in the occipital lobe, where our visual system resides, and on how the neural codes that store those memories change over time as people begin to prepare a response that depends on the memory. In the Current Biology study, the response simply required people to look where they remembered an object that disappeared several seconds ago.

“The research makes it clear that memory codes can simultaneously contain information about what we remember seeing and about the future behavior that depends on those visual memories,” notes Hsin-Hung Li, a postdoctoral researcher and the paper’s lead author. “This means the neural dynamics driving our working memory result from reformatting memories into forms that are closer to later behaviors that rely on visual memories.”

Textbook theories state that the storage codes for our working memory are stable over time. This means that the pattern of neural activity that stores a given visual memory is the same as when it was first seen and encoded—whether it is a second later or 10 seconds later. These patterns of neural activity store visual memories, providing a bridge across time between a past stimulus and a future memory guided response.

However, recent studies of animals indicate that these neural patterns are much more dynamic—in fact, the memory codes are not stable and, instead, appear to change over time in puzzling ways.

To explore this, Li and Curtis, who previously uncovered how our working memory is formatted in the brain, devised innovative methods to both measure changing neural dynamics and critically make the dynamics interpretable. To do so, they projected the complex neural measurements into a simple 2D plane, like the screen of your laptop or smartphone.

The video below depicts how the pattern of neural activity evolves during a working memory trial. Initially, you can see a bump of activity encoding the briefly presented visual target (pink circle) in both primary visual cortex (V1) and a high-level visual area (V3AB). In V3AB, this bump remains at the target location throughout the memory delay. However in V1, a line of activity evolves during the delay between where the person is looking (pink cross) and where they will move their eyes after the delay.

The researchers believe that this line reflects the trajectory of the shift of gaze that is being rehearsed in people’s minds, but has yet to be executed.

Although previous work had documented neural dynamics during working memory, the reason for why these dynamics occur had remained unknown. These new results help address this mystery. They indicate that the dynamics reflect transformations of past sensory events— what we have just seen—into future memory guided behaviors—what we might do with the memory.

“We’ve now shown that mnemonic codes can simultaneously contain information about a past remembered stimulus and the subsequent behavior that depends on that stimulus,” observes Curtis. “The neural dynamics of our working memory result from reformatting memories in order to align them with how we use them in the future.”

Support for the research came from National Institutes of Health grants from the National Eye Institute [NEI]. Hsin-Hung Li was supported by the Swartz Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Source: NYU

The post How the visual system shapes your memory appeared first on Futurity.

Researchers design dual CRISPR treatments to remove HIV DNA and prevent   in vitro.

Gene therapy may be the first step toward curing a rare genetic  .

Quokkas residing in the Northern Jarrah Forest, Western Australia have been found to be using fire exclusion zones to ensure their own safety and longevity.

In many cases, cells are very active in their movement and serve as power generators. The ability of cells to produce physical forces is one of the basic functions of the body. When running, for example, the forces generated in the cells cause the muscles to contract and the breath to work. It has been possible to measure even the forces experienced by individual proteins by force sensors developed in the past, but previously intracellular forces and mechanical strains could not have been measured.

Quokkas residing in the Northern Jarrah Forest, Western Australia have been found to be using fire exclusion zones to ensure their own safety and longevity.

In many cases, cells are very active in their movement and serve as power generators. The ability of cells to produce physical forces is one of the basic functions of the body. When running, for example, the forces generated in the cells cause the muscles to contract and the breath to work. It has been possible to measure even the forces experienced by individual proteins by force sensors developed in the past, but previously intracellular forces and mechanical strains could not have been measured.

Luna-25, Russia's first moon mission in 47 years, was the vanguard of a planned series of lunar probes.

Nature Communications, Published online: 21 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-40759-z

Since their initial operation, free-electron lasers are regularly upgraded in their performance and parameter control. Here the authors present the first lasing results of the soft X-ray free-electron laser beamline of the Paul Scherrer Institute, demonstrating different modes of operation and polarisation control of the tailored soft X-ray pulses.

Nature Communications, Published online: 21 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-40514-4

Here, authors have identified two pairs of large hydrophobic residues in the channel S6 segments that form the inactivation gate of eukaryotic Na+ channels.

Nature Communications, Published online: 21 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-40566-6

Cardiovascular ageing is characterised by a progressive decline in function, which contributes to multi-morbidity. Here, the authors use machine learning to predict biological age and identify key genetic risk factors.

Nature, Published online: 21 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06534-2

Quinone-mediated hydrogen anode for non-aqueous reductive electrosynthesis

Nature, Published online: 21 August 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-02656-9

Research is under way to determine whether the mutation-laden lineage BA.2.86 is nothing to worry about — or has the potential to spread globally

 have voted to stop an oil drilling project in an   reserve, according to the results Monday of a referendum hailed as a historic example of climate democracy.

New research by Cardiff University has measured the impact of ant invasions on native species at a global scale for the first time, finding that the introduction of invasive ants into new environments can reduce species numbers by 53% through competition and predation.

's manned space project was approved in 1992 with a three-step strategic plan, and building a space station is the final goal of this plan.

New research by Cardiff University has measured the impact of ant invasions on native species at a global scale for the first time, finding that the introduction of invasive ants into new environments can reduce species numbers by 53% through competition and predation.

Yvonne Newbold's son, Toby, is one of the millions of young people living with a disability. Parenting Toby has offered her some lessons on how to help children move from anxiety-led behavior towards happier times. Drawing on her personal experience, she outlines some of the most effective and actionable of these strategies — starting with a dash of curiosity, kindness and creative thinking.

After-ripening, an extension of seed maturation is pivotal for seed dormancy release, which has implications for germination and subsequent seedling robustness. The efficacy of this process varies with species traits, storage conditions, and environmental factors. Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is one of the most important food crops in  . Understanding the complex physiological and molecular processes in rice after-ripened seeds is paramount for enhancing agricultural productivity.

Rice (Oryza sativa L.), the staple that feeds over half of the globe, has undergone significant transformation and regeneration advancements over the last two decades. Although agrobacterium-mediated transformation has been successful in several rice cultivars, it has encountered efficiency obstacles, particularly in newly developed indica cultivars from South  . The absence of a consistent 'gold standard' protocol for transformation, particularly in indica varieties, highlights the need for more in-depth exploration and understanding.

Scientific Reports, Published online: 21 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-40476-z

Author Correction: Dynamical diagnostic of extreme events in Venice lagoon and their mitigation with the MoSE

Some experts want to apply recent neuroscience research to the decision making that could lead to doomsday.

After-ripening, an extension of seed maturation is pivotal for seed dormancy release, which has implications for germination and subsequent seedling robustness. The efficacy of this process varies with species traits, storage conditions, and environmental factors. Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is one of the most important food crops in  . Understanding the complex physiological and molecular processes in rice after-ripened seeds is paramount for enhancing agricultural productivity.

Rice (Oryza sativa L.), the staple that feeds over half of the globe, has undergone significant transformation and regeneration advancements over the last two decades. Although agrobacterium-mediated transformation has been successful in several rice cultivars, it has encountered efficiency obstacles, particularly in newly developed indica cultivars from South  . The absence of a consistent 'gold standard' protocol for transformation, particularly in indica varieties, highlights the need for more in-depth exploration and understanding.

Link to climate activism is seven times stronger for anger than it is for hope, say 

 researchers

Anger is by far the most powerful emotional predictor of whether somebody plans to take part in a climate protest, research suggests.

The study, which asked 2,000 Norwegian adults how they felt about the climate crisis, found the link to activism was seven times stronger for anger than it was for hope. The effects were smaller for other actions, but fear and guilt were the best predictors of policy support, while sadness, fear and hope were the best predictors of behavioural change.

Continue reading…

Ecosystem services (ESs) provide a variety of services and benefits for human well-being, but the supply-demand mechanism of ecosystem services under different spatio-temporal scales is unclear.

 particle physics community is preparing for a major research program with the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). DUNE will study neutrino oscillations. These quantum mechanical oscillations are only possible because neutrinos have mass, albeit it very small masses.

Ifølge Klimarådet kan der stadig opstå startvanskeligheder med storskala CO2-fangst og -lagring, som gør det svært at nå reduktionsmålene ved hjælp af CCS.

Ecosystem services (ESs) provide a variety of services and benefits for human well-being, but the supply-demand mechanism of ecosystem services under different spatio-temporal scales is unclear.

Suppose you have an issue you are really passionate about—taxes, gun control or some other important policy. You want to do more than vent on social media, so you decide to write an email, place a phone call or even draft a letter to your state legislator expressing your views.

Biological cells undergo a process known as "heat stress response" when exposed to excessively high temperatures. Heat stress triggers a cascade of signaling mechanisms to produce a variety of heat shock proteins (Hsps), including small heat shock proteins (sHsps). These "cellular firefighters" protect heat-sensitive structures, prevent proteins from clumping, and help refold damaged proteins.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope obtained images of the Ring Nebula, one of the best-known examples of a planetary nebula. Much like the Southern Ring Nebula, one of Webb's first images, the Ring Nebula displays intricate structures of the final stages of a dying star. Roger Wesson from Cardiff University tells us more about this phase of a sun-like star's stellar lifecycle and how Webb observations have given him and his colleagues valuable insights into the formation and evolution of these objects, hinting at a key role for binary companions.

Up to twice the amount of subglacial water that was originally predicted might be draining into the ocean—potentially increasing glacial melt, sea level rise, and biological disturbances.

Biological cells undergo a process known as "heat stress response" when exposed to excessively high temperatures. Heat stress triggers a cascade of signaling mechanisms to produce a variety of heat shock proteins (Hsps), including small heat shock proteins (sHsps). These "cellular firefighters" protect heat-sensitive structures, prevent proteins from clumping, and help refold damaged proteins.

 science correspondent Pallab Ghosh has the age of his heart assessed by artificial intelligence.

Dr Chris Clough and David Canter on people with psychopathic traits

The common theme of the murders committed by Lucy Letby, Beverley Allitt and Harold Shipman is the failure of colleagues to consider that someone in the caring profession could act with malice towards patients in their care (Lucy Letby joins grim list of Britain’s most notorious serial killers, 18 August).

Perhaps we should consider the contrary – that people with psychopathic traits would preferentially join these professions so as to be in a position to exert control and harm patients who are inevitably vulnerable.

Continue reading…

Just watched a rom-com on Netflix? Well, now there are "top picks" just like it in your queue, thanks to the streaming service's matching system.

Imperial researchers have filmed, for the first time, the activity of bodily "pressure sensors" whose discoverers won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Imperial researchers have filmed, for the first time, the activity of bodily "pressure sensors" whose discoverers won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Deeper snowpack than normal in some parts of the Arctic is driving the thawing of long-frozen permafrost carbon reserves, researchers report.

That thawing is leading to increased emissions of greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and methane.

“It is the first long-term experiment where we directly measure the mobilization of ancient carbon year-round to show that deeper snow has the possibility to rather quickly mobilize carbon deep in the soil,” says Claudia Czimczik, a professor of earth system science at the University of California, Irvine and the lead author of the study in AGU Advances.

“Unfortunately, it supports the notion that permafrost carbon emissions will be contributing to already-rising atmospheric CO₂ levels.”

Fieldwork for the study took place at the International Tundra Experiment at Toolik Lake in Alaska, an experiment started in 1994 by study co-lead author Jeff Welker of the University of Alaska. The original goal of the experiment, Welker explains, was to understand how deeper snow would affect Arctic tundra ecosystems.

Over the last several years, the team carried out fieldwork at the ITEX site and found that a common Arctic ecosystem, tussock tundra, had turned into a year-round source of ancient carbon dioxide. This was a result of thawing permafrost buried under snow where the snow has been three to four times deeper than the average long-term snow depth since 1994.

When the research started, neither Welker’s team nor climate scientists thought that the deeper snow experimental treatment would lead to such a rapid thawing of the permafrost.

“These findings suggest that the stability of permafrost in Arctic Alaska, and possibly globally, can respond rather rapidly to changes in Arctic winter snow conditions, where winter can be up to eight months long,” says Welker. “Winter climate feedbacks like this are a tundra characteristic not previously recognized and fully appreciated.”

The team’s findings, Czimczik explains, suggest that even if humanity stopped emitting planet-warming gasses like carbon dioxide immediately, emissions from Arctic sources would still continue.

“The implications are that if the climate models are right and the observations continue to show an increase in snow, then in addition to the strong warming, the snow will greatly accelerate emissions from permafrost,” says Czimczik. “I was very concerned when I saw the data.”

Until now, climate change models that help groups like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast different climate change scenarios do not take emissions from permafrost into account in part because those emissions are hard to quantify. But Czimczik and her team built sensors at UCI and were able to directly measure permafrost carbon emissions at their Arctic field site.

“We weren’t sure if we would be able to see permafrost carbon emissions in the field,” says Czimczik. “However, we can even see the ancient carbon emissions during the summer,” when carbon emissions from plants should be dominant.

Former UC Irvine PhD student Shawn Pedron and University of Alaska postdoctoral researcher Gus Jespersen visited the site in 2019 to install the sensors.

“Collecting the data in the remote Arctic was quite difficult but also very memorable,” says Pedron. “The result that ancient carbon is mobilized in soil insulated by snow is what we had expected to find from our earlier work, but we were also surprised to find how much more carbon overall was in the area of enhanced snow.”

“Having an experiment in place for nearly 30 years, especially one that focuses on winter conditions, is such a rarity in the Arctic,” says Jespersen. “That timeframe has given us a unique window into one possibility for the future Arctic, and it’s been sobering to witness and document the cascade of ecosystem changes that have all resulted from simply having more snow on the ground.”

Current climate change is causing snow and ice to retreat across much of the Arctic. But the same warming driving the retreat is also driving increased evaporation and, therefore, precipitation in certain regions. Deeper snow acts like a blanket, insulating the ground that warmed up in the summer from cold air temperatures. This causes the permafrost to thaw, which allows microorganisms to consume the previously frozen organic matter and, in the process, release planet-warming gasses.

“Permafrost emissions are likely going to start earlier than we expected,” says Czimczik.

Czimczik adds that she hopes a growing awareness of the threat of emissions from natural sources will further encourage people to curb emissions from other sources that are under human control. “It’s an opportunity for individuals, but also CEOs and governments, to decrease emissions and invest in carbon capture solutions, and we need to do an even better job than we thought since permafrost emissions will make us miss our greenhouse gas and temperature target.”

Source: UC Irvine

The post Deeper snow in Arctic can thaw permafrost appeared first on Futurity.

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Learn about the legacy of liquid handling in molecular breakthroughs and how effortless automation enables more accurate and precise research processes.

A study of 14 astronauts suggests that while space travel depletes red blood cells and bone, the body can eventually replenish them back on Earth with the help of fat stored in the bone marrow. The study, published in Nature Communications, has important implications for health in space and on Earth.

Global efforts to eradicate the poliovirus were recently described as unsuccessful—yet Afghanistan and Pakistan are now on the verge of eliminating it

A team of archaeologists from the Indian Institute of Technology and the Geological Survey of India, has unearthed the first ever remains of a dicraeosaurid sauropod in India. In their paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, the group describes the fossil, its condition and where it fits in with other dinosaurs of the Middle Jurassic.

One of the world’s foremost conservation biologists is being accused of plagiarism and bullying by a former PhD student, Retraction Watch has learned.  

The biologist, Stuart Pimm of Duke University, strongly denies the charges, but he and his colleagues have acknowledged the existence of “closely related” work following an internal investigation by Duke.

The allegations surfaced late last month on X, formerly known as Twitter, in a thread that quickly went viral, garnering hundreds of thousands of views and drawing comments from a broad swath of scientists. 

In the thread, Ruben Dario Palacio claimed his former academic advisor “threatened to kick me out of Duke” to make him work faster. Palacio decided to change labs due to the alleged “bullying and harassment,” he said, and three months later, in April 2020, published his research as a preprint. The article appeared in the journal Diversity and Distributions in October 2021.

But in November 2021, Pimm’s group published a paper in PLOS ONE describing work that was “remarkably similar to mine, and I was not cited. It’s plagiarism,” Palacio wrote on X.

In an interview with Retraction Watch, he said he believes Pimm’s actions were meant as retribution.

“He wanted to retaliate against me for … having the balls to leave his lab because no one else had done it before, to my knowledge,” Palacio said. 

In support of his accusations, he has shared several emails with Retraction Watch, as well as a secret recording of a conversation he had with Pimm before they parted ways.  

Pimm, a professor at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, said Palacio’s allegations had “no merit” and that internal investigations at Duke had cleared him of the harassment charge and had not found research misconduct on his part.

“For Ruben to claim that ideas that have been developed for well over a decade in my lab and with many of our co-authors were his is patently silly,” Pimm told Retraction Watch.

He also denied threatening to fire Palacio: “That’s not a decision that individual professors make in 

”

The secretly taped conversation, however, reveals Pimm did repeatedly threaten to terminate his then-student and take away the research Palacio had been leading — promises he appears to have made good on.

Palacio first met Pimm in 2015, the year after he graduated from Icesi University in Cali, 

, with a bachelor’s in biology. He had helped organize a conference that Pimm attended as “one of the VIPs,” Palacio recalled. On field trips, Palacio volunteered as a bird guide, and the two biologists talked over several days. Eventually, Pimm suggested Palacio join him as a PhD student at Duke. 

Palacio was impressed. The following year he traveled to Durham, North Carolina, with a Fulbright scholarship under his belt.

“I was just thrilled to be his student,” Palacio wrote on X.

At Duke, Palacio set to work on a project mapping the distribution of bird species. The research was meant to help the organization American Bird Conservancy do conservation work in Ecuador, Palacio said, and Pimm wanted him to use a method Pimm had published in 2008, known as a geospatial workflow. Essentially, this is a series of steps to follow to find out where a species lives. 

Pimm’s method relied on expert-drawn maps and had been criticized by other scientists. Palacio wasn’t happy with it. He suggested improving the protocol by creating a new workflow based instead on data of bird sightings. It took a long time to convince his then-advisor his idea was sound, he said.

“I wanted to tell Stuart like, hey, we can do better, we can do something much nicer than your old protocol,” Palacio said. “That took a lot of finesse, because, you know, his ego is like, over the sky.”

He added: “I have all the emails, very detailed, showing how I came up with the idea, and how [Pimm] wasn’t even aware we could do this.”

But the work on the new method dragged out, and they were running behind schedule, Palacio said. The delays created tension between the student and his professor. As Palacio explained to the assistant director of the school’s PhD programs in an email from October 2019, he felt “very anxious and stressed” by the pressure he alleged Pimm was putting on him.

One day, Palacio said, Pimm had invited him for lunch at the cafeteria where the school’s faculty eat. 

“I started walking with him and then he goes, ‘Ruben, you will never graduate with a PhD from Duke,’” Palacio recalled Pimm saying. “He’s like, ‘You don’t work hard enough. You need to put in 16, 18 hours a day of work.’”

When they sat down to eat, Palacio said, “I couldn’t even swallow. And he was like, ‘Just remember that just with one email I send to Fulbright, I can terminate your scholarship.'”

After Palacio confronted Pimm about the high levels of stress he was experiencing, his advisor wrote in an email on January 5, 2020, that Palacio had “played a ‘health card’ … which very strongly limits my options. Duke very clearly prohibits me from stressing you. So, were you to wish to remain in my programme, you would need to assert categorically that the progress I expect from you will not stress you.” 

That progress “would likely involve very long days, seven days a week for at least the next three weeks,” Pimm wrote in the email. (This passage is part of a longer email that was pasted into in a harassment complaint Palacio filed with Duke. Palacio said he no longer has the full email after his Duke account was closed.)

Pimm declined to “make specific comments about Ruben” to Retraction Watch, but pointed out that, “I alone am not empowered to make the decision as to whether a student remains within Duke or retains a scholarship.” He added that he had “found the quality of [Palacio’s] work lacking.”

After the lunch with Pimm, Palacio decided he needed to change labs. He received help from university counselors to navigate the situation, which he said had left his mental health in tatters. He also complained about Pimm to Duke, but the school found no fault with the professor’s behavior, according to both Palacio and Pimm. 

Pimm attracted controversy in the past for using misogynistic language in a book review, as we reported in 2014. 

Duke did not respond to phone calls or repeated emails requesting comments.

On January 7, 2020, Palacio met with his advisor to follow up on the email and discuss how to move forward. In a recording of the conversation that Palacio made without Pimm’s knowledge and later shared with Duke, Pimm can be heard calling his student’s writing “inexcusably incompetent” and complaining that Palacio was two months behind on his work. 

Pimm repeatedly threatened to terminate Palacio if he did not promptly deliver a number of updates on the project. 

“If you can’t handle that and turn around some results by this time tomorrow, then I will fire you,” he told his student. “If I fire you, I promise you it will look bad on you. Right? So I don’t want any more bloody excuses from you. If you can’t do that stuff on that kind of schedule, you need to resign.”

After Palacio explained that he already found a new advisor, the conversation returned to Palacio’s research. Pimm told his student that if he sent updated results within “a couple of days,” he would “get senior authorship” of the ensuing manuscript.

“Should you choose not to do that, I can promise you that I have the firepower with your former colleagues to recreate that stuff in a matter of a few days. And we will produce that work and we will publish it and you won’t have any say in that whatsoever,” Pimm said, continuing:

“So the other decision you need to make … is what you propose to do with that [research]. If you move that work forward at a pace that I find acceptable, then I will continue to let you lead it. If you don’t, I will simply take all of that stuff away and you’ll have to use the other ideas that you have in the community.”

Asked about his threats to take away the research Palacio had been leading and publishing it without his former student, Pimm said: “It wasn’t his work. He was offered a project. He didn’t complete it. His work on that project was inadequate.”

Palacio was crying and shaking when he finally left Pimm’s office, he recalled. 

“It was probably one of the toughest times in my life,” he said. “That’s the thing with the PhDs. Like, your advisor has so much power over you and you feel helpless at the beginning.”

Responding to Palacio’s thread on X, a number of scientists expressed sympathy. 

“This sounds like a massive power abuse situation rather than “just” plagiarism. What’s the University doing now?” one data scientist asked, while an ecologist argued:

“This type of bullying & unethical behaviour is far too common in academia; we need to hear more stories like this. I too looked up to Pimm but later realised how lucky I was that I ended up at a different lab for my PhD.”

On X, Palacio also posted screenshots of an exchange he had with one of Pimm’s coauthors, who told him: “I’m not proud of this, of the way ‘we’ kicked you out and took your idea, and also because I never really said anything to the others involved.” 

The coauthor, whose name Palacio redacted, said they had “alerted people about your [preprint], and Stuart Pimm explained that the methods were sufficiently different to still go ahead. I did not know at that time that you had left his group, that this was your project and that you were not involved in it.” (The identity of the coauthor is known to Retraction Watch, but they asked not to be named as they did not have full knowledge of the case, they said.) 

Ryan Huang, a researcher in Pimm’s lab and first author of the PLOS ONE paper, also contested the plagiarism accusations. 

“Ruben did not make any contribution to our paper,” he told Retraction Watch. “The shared intellectual history of ideas accounts for the similarities Ruben uses as evidence for his claims.”

Huang said that while he had been aware of Palacio’s preprint, he had not read it “for the explicit purpose that I did not want to cross-contaminate ideas, but I also told Ruben that we would not cite a pre-print as it was not peer-reviewed.”

In the acknowledgments of his papers, Palacio thanked Pimm and Huang “for suggestions during the initial development of the geospatial workflow.” But he stood by his claim that the new method was his creation and said his preprint created “scientific precedence” and should have been cited.

Pimm and his coauthors, Palacio argued, “could have said, OK, we developed this workflow based on Palacio and colleagues, or we looked into Palacio and colleagues and we think their protocol is shit, so we came up with another one. That’s what you do in the sciences.”

Palacio said Duke investigated his research-misconduct complaint against Pimm, but that the school would not share its findings. 

Duke has drawn criticism in the past for not responding adequately to cases involving potential research misconduct. Following several incidents at the university, in 2019 the U.S. National Institutes of Health suspended a number of grants to the institution due to concerns about “clinical research irregularities” that could affect patient safety. The same year, the university settled a lawsuit with the U.S. federal government for a record $112.5 million after researchers were accused of using fake data in grant applications.

In an email concerning its investigation of Pimm, Duke told Palacio:

We are not able to provide you with a report due to the confidentiality requirements of our policies; we can only provide the outcome, which was the comment added to the PlosOne [sic] publication noted below.

The comment to which the statement refers was posted in April by Huang and Pimm under “Reader Comments” on the PLOS ONE paper website. It has since disappeared, but Palacio posted a screenshot of it on X.

Titled “Similar Work,” it read, in part: 

On behalf of the authors, we want to inform the readership and research community about a closely related journal article published shortly before ours.

The comment also provided links to Palacio’s journal paper and the preprint. According to Pimm:

Ruben’s paper appeared three weeks before ours appeared and well after the final version of our paper had been accepted. As a courtesy, we agreed to notice his paper having been published and the university was happy with our doing that.

“I’ve never really seen anything like that before,” Palacio said about the “Similar Work” comment. He added that he has asked PLOS ONE to retract the paper and that the journal told him it would investigate his allegations. 

A spokesperson for the publisher declined to comment on the specific case, but said:

In principle, comments may be used to inform readers of related work that has not been cited in a PLOS article. Whether a comment would be a suitable [sic] for this purpose depends on case-specific details such as the relative publication date(s), the relationship of the related work to the PLOS publication, and whether the related work introduces editorial or ethics concerns that need to be addressed by a different means.

As for the missing comment, the spokesperson said:

Based on PLOS records, the comment appears to have been removed in error due to a technical issue with the commenting system.

After leaving Pimm’s group, Palacio said, he completed his doctorate in 2022 at another lab at Duke that he described as a “much better environment.” He is now back in Colombia heading the conservation non-profit Fundación Ecotonos and is about to publish a “great paper” in a top ecology journal with his second advisor.

It was “sort of a happy ending for me,” he said.

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

 

A team of archaeologists from the Indian Institute of Technology and the Geological Survey of India, has unearthed the first ever remains of a dicraeosaurid sauropod in India. In their paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, the group describes the fossil, its condition and where it fits in with other dinosaurs of the Middle Jurassic.

Tropical Storm Hilary drenched Southern California with record rainfall, shutting down schools, roads and businesses before edging in on Nevada on Monday.

Nature, Published online: 21 August 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-02642-1

Wellcome report identifies more than 140 initiatives to make health research more environmentally sustainable

As a single organ, our skin is able to perform a broad repertoire of vital functions. Dermatology experts call for a reference guide to single-cell composition of normal human skin, which is still lacking. A grassroots movement to establish a "Human Skin Cell Atlas" is taking shape, as reported in a review in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.

As a single organ, our skin is able to perform a broad repertoire of vital functions. Dermatology experts call for a reference guide to single-cell composition of normal human skin, which is still lacking. A grassroots movement to establish a "Human Skin Cell Atlas" is taking shape, as reported in a review in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.

The ability to utilize a mere single alternative food source is all it takes for diarrhea-causing Salmonella bacteria to bloom when a gut is already colonized by a closely related strain, according to researchers from ETH Zurich. This coexistence enables the exchange of antibiotic resistance.

AI technologies promise more chatbots and replicas of people who have passed. But giving voice to the dead comes at a human cost.

The ability to utilize a mere single alternative food source is all it takes for diarrhea-causing Salmonella bacteria to bloom when a gut is already colonized by a closely related strain, according to researchers from ETH Zurich. This coexistence enables the exchange of antibiotic resistance.

Stem cells are special kinds of cells in our bodies that can become any other type of cell. They have huge potential for medicine, and trials are currently under way using stem cells to replace damaged cells in diseases like Parkinson’s.

One way to get stem cells is from human embryos, but this has ethical concerns and practical limitations. Another way is to turn adult cells from the skin or elsewhere into what are called “induced pluripotent stem cells” (iPS cells).

However, these cells sometimes carry a “memory” of the kind of cell they used to be, which can make them less predictable or efficient when we try to turn them into other types of cells.

In a study published in Nature, my colleagues and I have found a way to erase this memory, to make iPS cells function more like embryonic stem cells.

Great Promise for Regenerative Medicine

Mature, specialized cells like skin cells can be reprogrammed into iPS cells in the lab. These “blank slate” cells show great promise in regenerative medicine, a field focused on regrowing, repairing, or replacing damaged or diseased cells, organs, or tissues.

Scientists can make iPS cells from a patient’s own tissue, so there’s less risk the new cells will be rejected by the patient’s immune system.

To take one example, iPS cells are being tested for making insulin-producing pancreas cells to help people with diabetes. We’re not there yet, but it’s an example of what might be possible.

Research using iPS cells is a rapidly advancing field, yet many technical challenges remain. Scientists are still figuring out how to better control what cell types iPS cells become and ensure the process is safe.

One of these technical challenges is overcoming “epigenetic memory,” where the iPS cells retain traces of the cell type they once were.

Epigenetic Memory and How It Can Impair the Use of iPS Cells

To understand “epigenetic memory,” let’s first talk about epigenetics. Our DNA carries sequences of instructions known as genes. When various factors influence gene activity (turning them on or off) without changing the DNA sequence itself, this is known as epigenetics—literally meaning “above genetics.”

A cell’s epigenome is a collective term to describe all the epigenetic modifications in a cell. Each of our cells contains the same DNA, but the epigenome controls which genes are turned on or off, and this determines whether it becomes a heart cell, a kidney cell, a liver cell, or any other cell type.

You can think of DNA as a cookbook and the epigenome as a set of bookmarks. The bookmarks don’t alter the recipes, but they direct which ones are used.

Similarly, epigenetic marks guide cells to interpret the genetic code without changing it.

When we reprogram a mature cell into an iPS cell, we want to erase all its “bookmarks.” However, this doesn’t always work completely. When some bookmarks remain, this “epigenetic memory” can influence the behavior of the iPS cells.

An iPS cell made from a skin cell can retain a partial “memory” of being a skin cell, which makes it more likely to turn back into a skin-like cell and less likely to turn into other cell types. This is because some of the DNA’s epigenetic marks can tell the cell to behave like a skin cell.

This can be a hurdle for using iPS cells because it can impact the process of turning iPS cells into the types of cells you want. It might also affect the function of the cells once they’re created. If you want to use iPS cells to help repair a pancreas, but the cells have a “memory” of being skin cells, they might not function as well as true pancreatic cells.

How to Clear iPS Cell Epigenetic Memory and Improve Function

Overcoming the issue of epigenetic memory in iPS cells is a widely recognized challenge for regenerative medicine.

By studying how the epigenome transforms when we reprogram adult skin cells into iPS cells, we discovered a new way to reprogram cells that more completely erases epigenetic memory. We made this discovery by reprogramming cells using a method that imitates how the epigenome of embryo cells is naturally reset.

During the early development of an embryo, before it is implanted into the uterus, the epigenetic marks inherited from the sperm and egg cells are essentially erased. This reset allows the early embryo cells to start fresh and become any cell type as the embryo grows and develops.

By introducing a step during the reprogramming process that briefly mimics this reset process, we made iPS cells that are more like embryonic stem cells than conventional iPS cells.

More effective epigenetic memory erasure in iPS cells will enhance their medical potential. It will allow the iPS cells to behave as “blank slates” like embryonic stem cells, making them more likely to transform into any desired cell type.

If iPS cells can forget their past identities, they can more reliably become any type of cell and help create specific cells needed for therapies, like new insulin-producing cells for someone with diabetes, or neuronal cells for someone with Parkinson’s. It could also reduce the risk of unexpected behaviors or complications when iPS cells are used in medical treatments.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: NIH

Our planet is doomed. In a few billion years, the sun will exhaust its hydrogen fuel and swell into a red giant — a star so big it will scorch, blacken and swallow up the inner planets. While red giants are bad news for planets, they’re good news for astrophysicists. Their hearts hold the keys to understanding a range of stellar bodies, from fledgling protostars to zombie white dwarfs…

Source

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Within nature, the compatibility of animals' feeding mechanisms with their food sources determines the breadth of available resources and how successfully the animals will feed. Those who feed on the nectar of flowers, such as honey bees (Apis mellifera), encounter a range of corolla depths and sugar concentrations. The nectar of flowers comprises the prime source of energy and water for honey bees, who are dominant pollinators throughout the world.

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Within nature, the compatibility of animals' feeding mechanisms with their food sources determines the breadth of available resources and how successfully the animals will feed. Those who feed on the nectar of flowers, such as honey bees (Apis mellifera), encounter a range of corolla depths and sugar concentrations. The nectar of flowers comprises the prime source of energy and water for honey bees, who are dominant pollinators throughout the world.

New research has improved the accuracy of the parameters governing the expansion of the universe. More accurate parameters will help astronomers determine how the universe grew to its current state and how it will evolve in the future.