Culture

If you asked people which group of animals is the most abundant on earth, hardly anyone would know the right answer. Ants? Fish? No, and not humans either. The answer is nematodes, also known as roundworms. Four out of five animals on earth belong to this group, and the reason hardly anyone is aware of the fact is that they live underground, invisible to us. Together with thousands of other soil organisms, they quietly, discreetly and constantly perform enormously important services for the world above them.

The soil is one of the most species-rich habitats in existence. Living under one square meter of healthy soil you can find up to 1.5 kilograms of organisms: among others, roundworms, earthworms, springtails, mites and insect larvae. There is also a multitude of microorganisms including bacteria, protists and fungi. They eat and transform living and dead animal and plant material into nutrients which become the basis for growth and new life. Without soil organisms, no plants would be able to grow and no humans could live.

It is therefore all the more astonishing that soils have so far hardly featured in international strategies for protecting biodiversity. The authors of the new article in Science see this as a big problem: "If we do not protect soils for the next generations, aboveground biodiversity and food production cannot be guaranteed either". Their appeal goes out to the 196 nations who are currently negotiating a new strategy to protect biodiversity within the framework of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

Healthy soils are becoming increasingly rare. They suffer the burden of intensive cultivation with heavy machinery, fertilisers and pesticides, are compacted, built over or are lost due to wind and water erosion. Global warming is putting them under additional pressure. According to the German Heinrich Böll Foundation, around 24 billion tons of fertile soil are lost worldwide every year. As a result, the soils' wide variety of services such as water purification and protection against plant diseases gradually decline. In addition, soils are the most important carbon reservoir on earth and therefore help slow global climate warming.

Call for greater consideration of soil biodiversity in global biodiversity protection strategies

According to the researchers, these services are given far too little attention in the political debate. "Up to now, soil conservation has been mostly reduced to the impacts related to soil erosion and its importance for agriculture," said first author Dr Carlos Guerra (iDiv, MLU). "It's about time that soil conservation policies consider the protection of soil organisms and ecosystem functions more than just for food production and other productive systems. Soil biodiversity monitoring and conservation can support the achievement and tracking of many sustainability goals, targeting areas such as climate, food and biodiversity protection."

"Protection measures have so far mainly focused on life above ground, for example in the designation of protected areas", said senior author Dr Diana Wall from Colorado State University. However, since these do not necessarily benefit underground biodiversity, the specific needs of the biotic communities in the soil have to be taken into account.

Establishing global monitoring network Soil BON

In order to be able to decide which regions of the world are particularly in need of protection, and which protective measures are appropriate, sufficient information must be available on the status and trends of biodiversity in soils. Since this has not been the case so far, the researchers launched the Soil BON monitoring network. "We want to move biodiversity in soils into the focus of conservation efforts. To do this, we must provide policymakers with the necessary information to support decision-making," said senior author Prof Nico Eisenhauer, research group leader at iDiv and Leipzig University. "Soil BON will produce and support the production of the relevant data to achieve this goal."

The purpose of Soil BON is to help gather equivalent soil data, comprehensively and over extended periods of time. What is required is an internationally recognised standard which sets out what is to be recorded and how. The researchers propose a holistic system for this: the so-called Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs). EBVs are key parameters for measuring biodiversity. The concept was developed by, among others, iDiv and includes criteria such as soil respiration, nutrient turnover and genetic diversity. Indicators are derived from the EBVs which then serve as a basis for soil status evaluation and subsequent decisions regarding the level and type of protection necessary for the soils.

According to the researchers, their proposed monitoring and indicator system will enable the worldwide condition of soils and their capacity to function to be recorded efficiently and monitored long term. They emphasise that it also serves as an important early warning system; with its help, it will be possible to identify, at an early stage, whether existing nature conservation goals can be achieved with current measures.

Roughly 8,200 years ago, the island of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov in Lake Onega in the Republic of Karelia, Russia, housed a large burial ground where men, women and children of varying ages were buried. Many of the graves contain an abundance of objects and red ochre, signifying the wish to ensure the comfort of the buried also after death. Pendants made of elk incisors were apparently attached to clothing and accessories, such as dresses, coats, cloaks, headdresses and belts. Although no clothing material has been preserved, the location of the elk teeth sheds light on the possible type of these outfits.

A people of grooved elk tooth pendants

A study headed by archaeologist Kristiina Mannermaa, University of Helsinki, aimed to determine who the people buried in outfits decorated with elk tooth ornaments were, and what the pendants meant to them. The study analysed the manufacturing technique of a total of more than 4,000 tooth ornaments, or the way in which the teeth had been processed for attachment or suspension. The results were surprising, as practically all of the teeth had been processed identically by making one or more small grooves at the tip of the root, which made tying the pendants easier. Only in two instances had a small hole been made in the tooth for threading, both of which were found in the grave of the same woman. The tooth pendants found in graves located in the Baltic area and Scandinavia from the same period as the Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov graves are almost exclusively perforated. Perforation is the surest way of fastening the pendant, but making holes in the narrow tip of a tooth is more laborious than grooving.

Archaeological and ethnographic research has shown that humans have been using decorations almost always and everywhere in the world, for several different purposes. To many indigenous peoples in Eurasia, including the Sámi communities, decorations have been and still are an important way of describing a person's identity and origin. They are not only aesthetic details, but also connected to intercommunity communication and the strengthening of intracommunity uniformity. External elements such as ornaments can also influence the names which neighbouring groups use to refer to a community. In fact, Kristiina Mannermaa calls the people found in the burial site the people of grooved elk tooth pendants.

"Even though there are pendants made of beaver and bear teeth in the graves, the share of elk teeth in them is overwhelming," Mannermaa says.

Typically, only one or at the most a couple of different groove types were prevalent in individual graves. This indicates that the pendants found in a specific grave or cluster were the result of routine serial production of sorts carried out in a fairly short period of time. The most common groove types were firm as well as quick and easy to make.

"Interestingly, the grooves were not always made on the broadest side of the tooth, which would be the easiest option. In many graves, the grooves are on the thin side of the tooth where the unstable position of the tooth makes them harder to do. The artisan may have resorted to this method in order to tie them in a specific position," researcher Riitta Rainio notes.

The highest number of elk teeth were found in the graves of young adult women and men, the lowest in those of children and elderly people. In other words, elk tooth ornaments were in one way or another linked to age, possibly specifically to the peak reproductive years.

Elk was the most important animal in the ideology and beliefs of the prehistorical hunter-gatherers of the Eurasian forest zone, and their limited availability made elk teeth a valuable material to ancient hunters. Elks were not brought down very often, and not all members of the community contributed to hunting. It may be that a single individual was given all of the incisors of a caught elk. Elks have a total of eight incisors, six permanent ones in the lower jaw and two permanent canines in the shape of incisors. At times, corresponding deciduous teeth were also processed into ornaments. The largest ornaments required the teeth of at least 8 to 18 elks.

When three galaxies collide, what happens to the huge black holes at the centers of each? A new study using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and several other telescopes reveals new information about how many black holes are furiously growing after these galactic smash ups.

Astronomers want to learn more about galactic collisions because the subsequent mergers are a key way that galaxies and the giant black holes in their cores grow over cosmic time.

"There have been many studies of what happens to supermassive black holes when two galaxies merge," said Adi Foord of Stanford University, who led the study. "Ours is one of the first to systematically look at what happens to black holes when three galaxies come together."

She and her colleagues identified triple galaxy merger systems by cross-matching the archives - containing data that is now publicly available - of NASA's WISE mission and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to the Chandra archive. Using this method they found seven triple galaxy mergers located between 370 million and one billion light years from Earth.

Using specialized software Foord developed for her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the team went through Chandra data targeting these systems to detect X-ray sources marking the location of growing supermassive black holes. As material falls toward a black hole, it gets heated to millions of degrees and produces X-rays.

Chandra, with its sharp X-ray vision, is ideal for detecting growing supermassive black holes in mergers. The associated X-ray sources are challenging to detect because they are usually close together in images and are often faint. Foord's software was developed specifically to find such sources. Data from other telescopes was then used to rule out other possible origins of the X-ray emission unrelated to supermassive black holes.

The results from Foord and the team show that out of seven triple galaxy mergers there is one with a single growing supermassive black hole, four with double growing supermassive black holes, and one that is a triple. The final triple merger they studied seems to have struck out with no X-ray emission detected from the supermassive black holes. In the systems with multiple black holes, the separations between them range between about 10,000 and 30,000 light years.

"Why do we care about the hitting percentage of these black holes?" said co-author Jessie Runnoe of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. "Because these statistics can tell us more about how black holes and the galaxies they inhabit grow."

Once they found evidence for bright X-ray sources as candidates for growing supermassive black holes in the Chandra data, the researchers incorporated archival data from other telescopes. Like a second umpire conferring about the original call, these data backed up the idea that multiple black holes were present in the merged galaxies.

To make these calls the authors studied infrared data from the WISE mission, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, and the Two Micron All Sky Telescope to see how quickly stars are forming in the different galaxies in their survey. This allowed them to estimate how many of the detected X-rays are likely to come from X-ray emitting systems containing massive stars, rather than a growing supermassive black hole. Because such star systems are young they are more common when stars are forming more quickly. Foord and her colleagues used this technique to conclude that one of the X-ray sources they found is likely from a collection of X-ray emitting star systems.

The Chandra and WISE data show that the system with growing supermassive black holes has the largest amount of dust and gas. This matches theoretical computer simulations of mergers that suggest higher levels of gas near black holes are more likely to trigger rapid growth of the black holes.

Studies of triple mergers can help scientists understand whether pairs of supermassive black holes can approach so close to each other that they make ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves. The energy lost by these waves will inevitably cause the black holes to merge.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo array in Europe have shown astronomers that stellar-mass black holes create gravitational waves and merge, but it is not known if supermassive black holes do.

"There is a "nightmare scenario" where supermassive black holes cannot lose enough energy to come close together and make gravitational waves" said co-author Michael Koss of Eureka Scientific in Oakland, California. "If this is the case then projects like LISA and pulsar timing arrays won't have any supermassive black hole mergers to detect".

However, gravitational interactions from a third supermassive black hole may prevent this stalling process. Studies of supermassive black holes in systems where three galaxies are merging are therefore important for understanding whether the nightmare scenario might apply.

The system with three growing supermassive black holes had previously been reported by Ryan Pfeifle of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia in a Chandra press release and an October 2019 paper in The Astrophysical Journal (preprint here), and a team led by Xin Lui of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in a December 2019 paper in The Astrophysical Journal (preprint here). This latest result helps put that discovery into context of other triple mergers of galaxies.

Foord presented the new study at the 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which is being held virtually from January 11-15, 2021. Two papers describing this work have recently been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and preprints are available here and here.

Scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute for Research have shown that microRNA biomarkers related to Alzheimer's disease play a role in brain damage caused by traumatic brain injury.

TBI or brain trauma results from blows to the head, leading to chronic disruption of the brain and a cascade of long-term health conditions. Patients who suffer from TBI are at much higher risk of developing neurodegenerative disease or dementia, particularly Alzheimer's disease. The mechanism behind this relationship remains understudied, making the development effective therapeutics challenging.

MiRNAs are small pieces of genetic material that play a critical role in normal gene expression. Yet, studies have also linked abnormal miRNA levels, or dysregulation, to a range of diseases including neurodegenerative disorders and cell death after TBI, making them a subject of great interest to researchers who hope to use them as biomarkers and novel targets of drug therapies.

In their publication in the Frontiers in Neuroscience, researchers evaluated more than 800 miRNAs in TBI models, showing that TBI caused coordinated miRNA dysregulation followed by increased amounts of the beta-site amyloid cleaving enzyme, or BACE1, and loss of amyloid precursor protein. BACE-1 cleaves APP to generate amyloid beta peptides, a hallmark of neurodegenerative disease pathology and brain cells loss, which are the focus of several clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease.

"The coordination of miRNAs, BACE1 and APP may serve as collective biomarkers reflecting the harm caused by TBI that is relevant to development of neurodegenerative disease," said Dr. Bharani Thangavelu and Dr. Bernard S. Wilfred, lead authors within Brain Trauma Neuroprotection Branch at WRAIR's Center for Military Psychiatry and Neuroscience.

"MiRNAs are increasingly recognized as mediators of injury. It is quite remarkable that BACE1 and APP are hubs for the miRNA affected by TBI. This work infers that there may be underlying common features of TBI and AD that have not been seen before without a genetic variant, which is more frequently studied, for models that explore the connections between TBI and neurodegenerative disease," remarked Dr. Angela M Boutte, section chief of molecular biology and proteomics within the BTN Branch.

Future research is planned to characterize the direct role of these miRNAs and their relationship to BACE1 within TBI.

Astronomers have curated the most complete list of nearby brown dwarfs to date thanks to discoveries made by thousands of volunteers participating in the Backyard Worlds citizen science project. The list and 3D map of 525 brown dwarfs -- including 38 reported for the first time -- incorporate observations from a host of astronomical instruments including several NOIRLab facilities. The results confirm that the Sun's neighborhood appears surprisingly diverse relative to other parts of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Mapping out our own small pocket of the Universe is a time-honored quest within astronomy, and the results announced today have added to this long-running effort by cataloging the locations of more than 500 cool brown dwarfs in the vicinity of the Sun. An international team of astronomers -- assisted by the legions of volunteer citizen scientists in the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 collaboration -- have announced an unprecedented census of 525 cool brown dwarfs within 65 light-years of the Sun, including 38 new discoveries. By determining the distances to all the objects in the census, astronomers have been able to build a 3D map of the distribution of cool brown dwarfs in the Sun's local neighborhood.

This breakthrough relied on novel datasets published by the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, which blend huge quantities of astronomical data from a variety of sources: archival images from the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) and the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), which are Programs of NSF's NOIRLab, plus critical sky maps from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). These powerful survey datasets were combined with new distance measurements from the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope to create the best three-dimensional map of the Sun's local neighborhood to date.

Brown dwarfs are sometimes referred to as "failed stars." They are thought to form the way stars do, but they do not become massive enough to trigger nuclear fusion in their cores. Their faintness and relatively small sizes make them difficult to identify without careful analysis of data from sensitive telescopes -- meaning that many have gone undiscovered until now. However, by finding and studying brown dwarfs, astronomers can learn more about star formation and also about planets around other stars.

"Brown dwarfs are the low-mass byproducts of the process that forms stars, yet the least massive of them have many characteristics in common with exoplanets," says J. Davy Kirkpatrick, California Institute of Technology scientist and lead author of the research paper. "They're exoplanet laboratories, but since they are usually by themselves and lack the complications caused by a blinding host sun, they're much easier to study."

To help identify elusive brown dwarfs in massive datasets, astronomers enlisted the help of the Backyard Worlds collaboration, a worldwide network of more than 100,000 citizen scientists.[1] Astro Data Lab at NOIRLab's Community Science and Data Center (CSDC) was instrumental in providing these volunteers with data, allowing citizen scientists to easily hunt through the astronomical archives in search of brown dwarf candidates. The Backyards Worlds project announced the discovery of almost 100 nearby cool brown dwarfs in August last year, and today's announcement is a continuation of their work.

"The Backyard Worlds project shows that the general public can play an important role in cutting-edge astronomy," commented NOIRLab scientist Aaron Meisner, co-author of this study and co-founder of Backyard Worlds. "Volunteers ranging from high school students to retired engineers are helping uncover groundbreaking discoveries lurking in existing telescope data."

One of the most intriguing results of this study is that it provides more evidence that the Sun's immediate neighborhood (within roughly 7 light-years) is rather unusual. While most stars in the Milky Way are red dwarfs, earlier results revealed that the Sun's closest neighbors are much more diverse, with different types of objects, from Sun-like stars to Jupiter-like brown dwarfs, appearing in roughly equal numbers.[2] The new results add to this disparity by turning up no more extremely cold brown dwarfs like our close-by neighbor WISE 0855, the coldest known brown dwarf, even though the team expected to find at least several more within 65 light-years of the Sun, given the new study's sensitivity.

This result hints at the possibility that yet more cold brown dwarfs have so far eluded detection. "Thanks to the efforts of volunteers around the world, we have a better idea than ever of the objects in our cosmic backyard," concluded Meisner. "But we suspect that more of the Sun's cold and close neighbors still await discovery within our vast data archives."

NEW YORK (January 14) -- A new study co-authored by researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society's (WCS) Global Conservation Program and the University of British Columbia (UBC) Faculty of Forestry introduces a classification called Resistance-Resilience-Transformation (RRT) that enables the assessment of whether and to what extent a management shift toward transformative action is occurring in conservation. The team applied this classification to 104 climate adaptation projects funded by the WCS Climate Adaptation Fund over the past decade and found differential responses toward transformation over time and across ecosystems, with more transformative actions applied in forested ecosystems.

The RRT classification addresses a continuum from actively resisting changes - in order to maintain current or historical conditions--through accelerating ecological transitions through approaches such as translocating species to new areas. Results show a shift from more resistance-type actions to transformative ones in recent years. Most transformation-oriented projects involved translocation of trees or other plants, commonly in forest ecosystems, with exceptions including, for example, translocating seabird species to habitat where they may be more likely to survive. Other ecosystems with more transformative projects occurred in coastal aquatic and urban/suburban ecosystems.

Unprecedented environmental changes such as increased frequency and severity of heatwaves, droughts, storms, heavy rainfalls, and wildfires, have degraded ecosystems, disturbed the economy, and led to the loss of lives and livelihoods. Conventional conservation strategies may be ineffective in dealing with changing environmental conditions: wildfires could decimate protected old-growth forests and endangered species, and coastal conservation easements could become inundated by rising seas. Novel conservation actions aimed specifically at helping ecosystems adapt to the mounting impacts of climate change contrast with approaches that aim to maintain current or historical conditions. Transformative actions, such as species translocation, were once more controversial than they are today; they are now increasingly highlighted as necessary components of conservation in an effort to implement projects that are more robust to future climates. However, few studies have systematically examined on-the-ground conservation adaptation projects to assess the extent to which such transformational adaptation actions are being implemented, through what approaches, and in what ecosystems.

This study, published in Nature Communications Biology, assessed projects implemented within the United States but the authors see broader applications. "Our classification could be applied to a suite of conservation projects across the world to determine if a global shift in practice is occurring," said co-author Lauren Oakes, a Conservation Scientist at WCS and Adjunct Professor at Stanford University. Guillaume Peterson St-Laurent, the lead author and a postdoc at the University of British Columbia, says the team is interested in creating an online platform for tracking projects assessed with the new classification around the globe. "We hope to be working with international teams in the not-so-distant future as we envision this new tool could be applied to many different ecological scenarios," says Peterson St-Laurent.

The interdisciplinary research team was supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and the study was conducted in partnership with the IUCN Species Survival Commission's Climate Change Specialist Group.

Precautionary actions aimed at resistance or resilience--such as protecting intact ecosystems--are incredibly valuable in the suite of responses needed to address current and future climate change. But the authors suggest that degraded ecosystems or working landscapes may require more transformative actions and the public support to do so, in an effort to meet the shifting goals in a changing climate. This research provides evidence of a paradigm shift, as practitioners and funders move more in this critical direction.

A wide breadth of behaviors surrounding oral sex may affect the risk of oral HPV infection and of a virus-associated head and neck cancer that can be spread through this route, a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center suggests. These findings add nuance to the connection between oral sex and oropharyngeal cancer -- tumors that occur in the mouth and throat -- and could help inform research and public health efforts aimed at preventing this disease.

The findings were reported Jan. 11 in the journal Cancer.

In the early 1980s, researchers realized that nearly all cervical cancer is caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV), a DNA virus from the Papillomaviridae family. Although about 90% of HPV infections cause no symptoms and resolve within two years, a minority of people retain the virus, which can damage DNA and trigger malignancies. Nearly two decades after uncovering this link, scientists discovered that a growing number of oropharyngeal cancers are also caused by HPV. Now, the majority of oropharyngeal cancers are HPV-related.

Early research suggested that the higher a person's number of oral sex partners over a lifetime, the greater their risk of HPV-related oropharyngeal cancer. However, says Virginia Drake, M.D., first author of the study and a surgical resident at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, little was known about what other risk factors might contribute to this disease.

"Although we know that HPV-related oropharyngeal cancer is strongly associated with oral sex and the number of oral sex partners," she says, "we haven't really looked at what other behaviors might contribute to this disease."

To answer this question, Drake and her colleagues worked with data from 163 patients with HPV-associated oropharyngeal cancer who were enrolled in the Papillomavirus Role in Oral Cancer Viral Etiology (PROVE) study and 345 healthy people with demographic characteristics similar to those of the study participants. The study ran from 2013 to 2018 at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, the University of California San Francisco Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Tisch Cancer Institute at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Each of these volunteers -- patients with cancer and healthy controls -- took the same detailed behavioral survey on lifetime and recent sexual behaviors, including number of partners, age of sexual initiation, type and order of sexual acts, partner dynamics and extramarital sex. They also submitted a blood sample to test for antibodies to strains of HPV and tumor samples from the patients with cancer to confirm presence of the virus.

When the researchers compared data from the patients who had cancer with data from the healthy controls, they found several key differences. For example, although the researchers confirmed that a higher number of lifetime oral sex partners increased the risk of HPV-related oropharyngeal cancer, they also found higher risk was linked to an earlier age of having oral sex (under 18), higher oral sex "intensity" (more sex partners over a shorter time) and having oral sex before other kinds of sex.

The research team, which included Gypsyamber D'Souza, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology and international health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health with a joint appointment in oncology and otolaryngology-head and neck surgery, also found that relationship dynamics and partner behavior can affect risk. For example, a higher number of casual sex partners, extramarital sex and suspicion that a partner had extramarital sex also significantly raised the risk of HPV-associated oropharyngeal cancer, by more than 1.6 times. Having a sexual partner who was at least 10 years older when the study participant was younger than age 23 was also associated with diagnosis of disease.

Those with cancer universally tested positive for serum antibodies to HPV oncogenes. And risk of HPV-related oropharyngeal cancer was significantly higher for volunteers who were positive for more distinct HPV strains.

Together, Drake explains, these findings add context to which behaviors might affect the risk of this disease. They also could inform future research on how HPV-related oropharyngeal cancers develop -- regarding questions such as whether people have a more robust immune response to HPV, and therefore a lower risk of cancer, if their first HPV exposure is to genital HPV (before they are exposed to oral HPV) or if they are exposed at older ages.

"Our biggest goal was to add context to what we already know about these cancers and gain a better understanding of the complex nature of this disease," Drake says. "This contemporary look into HPV-related oropharyngeal risk factors allows us to do just that."

The higher a person's income, the more likely they were to protect themselves at the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, Johns Hopkins University economists find.

When it comes to adopting behaviors including social distancing and mask wearing, the team detected a striking link to their financial well-being. People who made around $230,000 a year were as much as 54% more likely to increase these types of self-protective behaviors compared to people making about $13,000.

"We need to understand these differences because we can wring our hands, and we can blame and shame, but in a way it doesn't matter," said Nick Papageorge, the Broadus Mitchell Associate Professor of Economics. "Policymakers just need to recognize who is going to socially distance, for how long, why and under what circumstances to give us accurate predictions of how the disease will spread and help us establish policies that will be useful."

The findings, that could contribute to more accurate predictions of how the disease will spread, appear in the latest Journal of Population Economics.

As part of a six-country survey, 1,000 people in the United States, from Texas, Florida, California and New York, were asked a series of questions in April 2020 to determine if and how their behavior had changed as Covid-19 cases were beginning to spike across the country. The resulting data includes information on income, gender and race along with unique variables relevant to the pandemic, such as work arrangements and housing quality.

The team, which included economics graduate student Matthew Zahn, found that while almost everyone changed their behavior in some way to try to stay safe, people making the most money made the most changes. The highest earners were 13% more likely to change their behaviors, 32% more likely to increase social distancing and 30% more likely to increase hand washing and mask wearing.

But the team found it was also much easier for people with more money to take extra safety measures.

Higher-income individuals were more likely to report being able to work from home and more likely to have transitioned to telework instead of losing their job. The researchers found the ability to telework emerged as a huge predictor of whether someone would social distance. Compared to somebody who continued to work, people able to telework were 24% more likely to social distance.

"The whole messaging of this pandemic is you're stuck at home teleworking, that must be really tough so here are some recipes for sourdough starter, and here's what you should catch up on Netflix," Papageorge said. "But what about the people who aren't teleworking? What are they going to do?"

The team found lower-income respondents faced increased chances of job and income losses due to the pandemic and limited access to remote work. They were also more likely to live in homes with no access to the outdoors - access to outdoor space was a very strong predictor of social distancing, the researchers found. People with access to open air at home were 20% more likely to social distance.

All of these burdens ensured those earning the least would have a harder time adopting social-distancing behaviors, which could have prolonged the pandemic, the team found. Social distancing was simply more practical, comfortable and feasible for people with more income.

"It's not shocking that if you don't live in a comfortable house you're going to be leaving your house more often. But the point we want to push is that if I'm a policy maker maybe I really need to think about opening city parks in a dense neighborhood during a pandemic. Maybe that's something that's worth the risk. This is why we want to understand these details - they can eventually suggest policies," Papageorge said.

The data showed that women were 23% more likely than men to social distance. Surprisingly, the researchers did not find any meaningful patterns between pre-existing health conditions and people's self-protective actions.

The team is now expanding this research with even more extensive surveys that look into how events such as the Black Lives Matter protests affected behavior during the pandemic, the pandemic's possible effects on addictive behaviors and, more broadly, how to build tools to better understand the unequal burdens the pandemic.

ATLANTA--Compared to standard machine learning models, deep learning models are largely superior at discerning patterns and discriminative features in brain imaging, despite being more complex in their architecture, according to a new study in Nature Communications led by Georgia State University.

Advanced biomedical technologies such as structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI and fMRI) or genomic sequencing have produced an enormous volume of data about the human body. By extracting patterns from this information, scientists can glean new insights into health and disease. This is a challenging task, however, given the complexity of the data and the fact that the relationships among types of data are poorly understood.

Deep learning, built on advanced neural networks, can characterize these relationships by combining and analyzing data from many sources. At the Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS), Georgia State researchers are using deep learning to learn more about how mental illness and other disorders affect the brain.

Although deep learning models have been used to solve problems and answer questions in a number of different fields, some experts remain skeptical. Recent critical commentaries have unfavorably compared deep learning with standard machine learning approaches for analyzing brain imaging data.

However, as demonstrated in the study, these conclusions are often based on pre-processed input that deprive deep learning of its main advantage--the ability to learn from the data with little to no preprocessing. Anees Abrol, research scientist at TReNDS and the lead author on the paper, compared representative models from classical machine learning and deep learning, and found that if trained properly, the deep-learning methods have the potential to offer substantially better results, generating superior representations for characterizing the human brain.

"We compared these models side-by-side, observing statistical protocols so everything is apples to apples. And we show that deep learning models perform better, as expected," said co-author Sergey Plis, director of machine learning at TReNDS and associate professor of computer science.

Plis said there are some cases where standard machine learning can outperform deep learning. For example, diagnostic algorithms that plug in single-number measurements such as a patient's body temperature or whether the patient smokes cigarettes would work better using classical machine learning approaches.

"If your application involves analyzing images or if it involves a large array of data that can't really be distilled into a simple measurement without losing information, deep learning can help," Plis said.. "These models are made for really complex problems that require bringing in a lot of experience and intuition."

The downside of deep learning models is they are "data hungry" at the outset and must be trained on lots of information. But once these models are trained, said co-author Vince Calhoun, director of TReNDS and Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, they are just as effective at analyzing reams of complex data as they are at answering simple questions.

"Interestingly, in our study we looked at sample sizes from 100 to 10,000 and in all cases the deep learning approaches were doing better," he said.

Another advantage is that scientists can reverse analyze deep-learning models to understand how they are reaching conclusions about the data. As the published study shows, the trained deep learning models learn to identify meaningful brain biomarkers.

"These models are learning on their own, so we can uncover the defining characteristics that they're looking into that allows them to be accurate," Abrol said. "We can check the data points a model is analyzing and then compare it to the literature to see what the model has found outside of where we told it to look."

The researchers envision that deep learning models are capable of extracting explanations and representations not already known to the field and act as an aid in growing our knowledge of how the human brain functions. They conclude that although more research is needed to find and address weaknesses of deep-learning models, from a mathematical point of view, it's clear these models outperform standard machine learning models in many settings.

"Deep learning's promise perhaps still outweighs its current usefulness to neuroimaging, but we are seeing a lot of real potential for these techniques," Plis said.

While new research from West Virginia University economists finds that presidential inaugurations have gained popularity as must-see tourist events in recent years, major security threats will keep visitors away for the inauguration of President-Elect Joe Biden.

Published in "Tourism Economics," the study, by Joshua Hall, chair and professor of economics, and economic doctoral student Clay Collins, examined the impact of the inaugurations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump on hotel occupancy in the Washington, D.C.-area.

Daily occupancy rates around the inaugurations were four-to-six times higher than the next largest event in the sample. The research team also concluded that inaugurations tend to serve as multiple-day tourist events, with hotel occupancy rates seeing positive leads and lags.

"We got the idea to look at this because of the public debate over the size of the Trump inaugural compared to the Obama one," Hall said. "While we couldn't answer that question given the data, that got us thinking about how important inaugurations are as tourist events."

The available hotel data dated back to 2010, therefore the researchers could only focus on the second Obama inaugural (2012) and the Trump one (2016). One of the complicating factors of accurately comparing the two is that the Trump inaugural also attracted scores of protestors to the area. The Women's March on Washington was also held a day after the Trump event.

Nonetheless, the economists found relatively little difference in the scale of the impact on hotel occupancy overall. One difference is that the Obama inauguration saw greater increases prior to the swearing-in ceremony, while the Trump event saw upticks after inauguration day.

Both inaugurations accounted for large increases in hotel occupancy, considerably more than any tourism-related sporting or cultural event.

Throughout his various studies, Hall has found that unique, one-off events, such as concerts or music festivals, typically serve as greater economic boosters than sporting contests, which tend to attract only local residents.

"Regular events like baseball games may draw a few people from out of the area, but most are locals," Hall said. "You need something that is a once every couple - in this case, four-- years event to get people to consider traveling.

"My sense is that interest in attending inaugurals has come from lower relative costs of attendance over time, both because of improved roads and lower airplane costs, along with rising real incomes. It is far easier to get to get to Washington, D.C. from Morgantown since the completion of Interstate 68, for example."

But, any economic impact from the hotel and tourism industries will be minimal, if any, this time around.

The FBI and Washington, D.C. officials have warned of threats ahead of Inauguration Day, Wednesday (Jan. 20), after the recent deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol. The Presidential Inaugural Committee has asked Americans to stay home and celebrate virtually. In-person attendance is limited to Congress.

As National Guard units took up residence inside the Capitol, Airbnb announced it is blocking and canceling reservations in Washington, D.C. during inauguration.

"This year will definitely be very different," Hall said. "It will not involve the multi-day celebrations of past inaugurals."

To achieve full occupancy, hotels used to rely exclusively on experience, concentration and human abilities. Then came online booking, which made the reservation collection process faster, but did not solve the risk of turning down long stays because of rooms previously booked for short stays.

To avoid overbooking (accepting more reservations than there is room for) in some cases online sales are blocked before hotels are completely booked. The solution that the University of Trento has just discovered could change the life of hotels by increasing the number of occupied rooms and, therefore, in the revenue of hotel owners.

For an average Italian hotel (50 rooms), an annual increase in turnover of between 5 and 10% is estimated.

The most compact way to combine supply and demand was found by the RoomTetris algorithm, which takes its name from the computer game that inspired it, Tetris.

The software was developed by the Lion Laboratory (Learning and Intelligent OptimizatioN) of the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Trento. The research team, led by Roberto Battiti and Mauro Brunato, collaborated with Filippo Battiti's local start-up Ciaomanager Srl which provided first-hand knowledge of everyday hotel management.

After the patent application, the procedure has also been the subject of an article in the international "Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Technology" (RoomTetris: an optimal procedure for committing rooms to reservations in hotels; Vol. 11 No. 4, 2020 pp. 589-602; DOI 10.1108/JHTT-08-2019-0108).

"It is a new and revolutionary method to manage the accommodation of guests in hotel rooms" comments Roberto Battiti. "We made the unexpected and surprising discovery of an excellent algorithm for assigning guests to rooms: there is no better way to do it and there is a mathematical theorem to prove it."

In short, RoomTetris finds the best solution, the ideal combination between demand and supply, optimizing room occupancy. A tile-matching game that no human mind, no matter how experienced and skilled, could do better, with the seriousness and scientific rigor of a mathematical demonstration. Battiti is proud as a researcher but also satisfied for giving some hope to a sector that, more than others, has been heavily hit by the pandemic's consequences.

"The intuition of the RoomTetris algorithm - he says - derives from the Tetris game, which is well-known among scientists and video game enthusiasts around the world. Coloured tiles of different shapes fall in the playing field and players must place them so that they do not build up, therefore they have to fit the blocks in the best way possible in the free cells".

He continues: "If the average profit of a hotel is 10-15% of the turnover, the increased room availability generated by the algorithm in the high season can increase it by a further 5-10% (depending on the average occupancy rate and the duration of the stay). With little effort (which is actually made by powerful computers in the cloud) there are certainly cases where the profitability can even double. I bet that within a few years almost all hotels will use our optimal algorithm, and that many hotel management habits will therefore change radically".

In practice, with RoomTetris hotels will no longer allocate rooms at the time of booking, but when guests arrive at the hotel, providing the optimal solution for a higher occupancy rate and increased profitability. Tests to measure the improvements in the occupancy rate compared to the traditional allocation of rooms were carried out through a hotel simulator in different areas, and including real hotels throughout Italy, from Trentino to Sicily, from Sardinia to Puglia.

"The success of RoomTetris, which is the first optimal room allocation algorithm for the hotel industry, suggests that the room allocation process can be managed by this algorithm at check-in, ensuring the best possible performance, at global level", concludes Battiti.

MADISON, Wis. -- As a new, apparently more transmissible version of the virus that causes COVID-19 has appeared in several countries, new research finds that the transmissibility of viral strains and the population density of a region will play big roles in how vaccination campaigns can help towns and cities return to more normal activities.

The findings suggest that directing vaccines toward densely populated counties would help to interrupt transmission of the disease. Current vaccination distribution plans don't take density into account.

Tony Ives at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Claudio Bozzuto of the independent data research company Wildlife Analysis GmbH studied the spread of COVID-19 in the U.S. at the start of the pandemic, before people changed their behavior to avoid the disease. This let them uncover factors that may affect the transmission of COVID-19 when masking and physical distancing start to wane and behavior once again resembles the pre-pandemic normal.

"We wanted to get at two things: the first was to try and understand what the dynamics were very early in the pandemic. If we need a vaccination program in place that lets people act normally, then we need to understand the state under those conditions," says Ives, a professor of integrative biology at UW-Madison. "The second was trying to get at a fairly small spatial scale of counties instead of states."

Parsing out county-by-county data from 39 states through May 23, 2020, Ives and Bozzuto found that the higher a county's population density, the more readily SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, spread from person to person. This county-level spread is ultimately quantified in the basic reproduction number of the virus, a measure of the average number of people an infected person goes on to infect.

The researchers also found compelling evidence that viral strain matters. Ives and Bozzuto saw that the regions hosting a greater proportion of strains containing a mutation called G614 experienced greater viral spread, a finding supported by other research showing that this strain could be transmitted more readily.

While the G614 mutant is unrelated to B.1.1.7, a strain first identified in the United Kingdom that appears to be spreading more easily right now, the new study reflects the importance that viral strain can play in a local area's overall disease spread.

"We found a clear pattern in the spread rate due to different strains," says Bozzuto. "Our approach was novel because we went directly to the community level to ask, 'Can we see any patterns in the data without making assumptions about individual behavior, including strain-related transmissibility and pathogenicity?'"

To track the rate of viral spread, Ives and Bozzuto worked with the number of people who died of COVID-19 last spring. When testing was limited at the beginning of the pandemic, deaths much more accurately tracked COVID-19 transmission. As long as a relatively constant proportion of infected people die from the disease, data on how deaths increase over time will be directly proportional to the overall rate of spread.

Population density predicted a considerable amount of the difference in the rate of viral spread from county to county during the time period the researchers studied. Counties with low or moderate density did not have high rates of infection spread, though lower transmission rates do not necessarily protect a region from eventually seeing high case counts.

Location explained an even greater fraction of the spread in the researchers' model. Regions within a few hundred miles of one another had similar transmission rates. This regional similarity might have been caused in part by similar public health responses in neighboring counties.

But Ives and Bozzuto also found evidence that regional differences in viral strains explained why neighboring counties looked similar. For example, the low proportion of G614 mutants in the Northwest and Southeast was associated with lower transmission rates.

The researchers investigated several other factors -- such as prevalence of obesity and diabetes, socioeconomic status, and political affiliation -- and found that none of them contributed significantly to the rate of spread of COVID-19 at the very start of the epidemic. Although these factors may affect how susceptible individuals and populations are to complications from the disease, they didn't appear to affect the transmission of the virus from person to person.

The new findings were published in the journal Communications Biology on Jan. 5. Ives and Bozzuto say their work can help public health officials decide where vaccines would do the most good.

"Vaccination programs should consider potential spread rate in different areas. The main driver that will be important is density," says Ives. "From an epidemiological perspective, we would argue that metropolitan areas should be targeted because the level of vaccination or acquired immunity has to be higher than in largely rural areas."

A new University of Saskatchewan (USask) study has found that stretching is superior to brisk walking for reducing blood pressure in people with high blood pressure or who are at risk of developing elevated blood pressure levels.

Walking has long been the prescription of choice for physicians trying to help their patients bring down their blood pressure. High blood pressure (hypertension) is a leading risk factor for cardiovascular disease and among the top preventable risk factors affecting overall mortality.

This new finding, published December 18, 2020 in the Journal of Physical Activity and Health, shows that stretching should be part of a well-rounded treatment plan for people wrestling with hypertension.

"Everyone thinks that stretching is just about stretching your muscles," said kinesiology professor Dr. Phil Chilibeck (PhD), a co-author of the study. "But when you stretch your muscles, you're also stretching all the blood vessels that feed into the muscle, including all the arteries. If you reduce the stiffness in your arteries, there's less resistance to blood flow," he said, noting that resistance to blood flow increases blood pressure.

While previous studies have shown stretching can reduce blood pressure, the USask research is the first to pit walking against stretching in a head-to-head comparison in the same group of study participants.

Chilibeck and colleagues randomly assigned 40 older men and women (mean age 61) to two groups for the eight-week study period: one did a whole-body stretching routine for 30 minutes a day, five days a week, and the other group walked briskly for the same amount of time and frequency. All participants had elevated blood pressure, or stage 1 hypertension, at the start of the study.

Before and after the study, Chilibeck and colleagues measured participants' blood pressure while they were sitting, lying down, and over 24 hours using a portable monitor--widely considered the gold standard for accurate blood pressure measurement. Stretching resulted in bigger reductions in blood pressure across all three types of measurement. The walkers did, however, lose more body fat off their waist in the eight-week study.

People who are walking to reduce their high blood pressure should continue to do so, but also add in some stretching sessions, according to Chilibeck.

"I don't want people to come away from our research thinking they shouldn't be doing some form of aerobic activity. Things like walking, biking, or cross- country skiing all have a positive effect on body fat, cholesterol levels, and blood sugar."

While the study protocol had participants stretching for 30 minutes at a time, Chilibeck suspects the same benefits can be achieved by doing a shorter routine that emphasizes the larger muscle groups in the legs, particularly the quadriceps and hamstrings. Yoga produces similar reductions in blood pressure, he said.

The beauty of stretching, said Chilibeck, is that it's so easy to incorporate into a person's daily routine. You're not at the mercy of the weather and it's easy on your joints--a big plus for people with osteoarthritis. And it doesn't require a big commitment of time, another barrier to exercise for many people. "When you're relaxing in the evening, instead of just sitting on the couch, you can get down on the floor and stretch while you're watching TV," he said.

Chilibeck and colleagues are now seeking funding to do a larger study involving more participants. They'd like to expand the scope beyond blood pressure measurement to explore some of the physiological reasons behind why stretching reduces blood pressure--such as arterial stiffness and changes in the body's nervous system resulting from stretching.

On a beach on a remote island in eastern Papua New Guinea, a country located in the southwestern Pacific to the north of Australia, garnet sand reveals an important geologic discovery. Similar to messages in bottles that have traveled across the oceans, sediments derived from the erosion of rocks carry information from another time and place. In this case the grains of garnet sand reveal a story of traveling from the surface to deep into the Earth (~75 miles), and then returning to the surface before ending up on a beach as sand grains. Over the course of this geologic journey, the rock type changed as some minerals were changed, and other materials were included (trapped) within the newly formed garnets. The story is preserved in garnet compositions, as well as in their trapped inclusions: solids (e.g., very rare minerals such as coesite - a high pressure form of quartz), liquids (e.g., water) and gases (e.g., CO2).

Suzanne Baldwin, Thonis Family Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences, has led many field expeditions to Papua New Guinea. Her team's latest results on this tectonically active region have just been published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

By reading the rock record researchers revealed the recycling pathway from the surface to deep within the upper mantle and then back to the surface as a result of tectonic and sedimentary processes. The compositions of that sand also hold various key components that reveal how quickly this recycling happened. In this case, transit through the rock cycle happened in less than ~10 million years. This may seem like a long time, but for these geologic processes, it is actually remarkably short.

The garnet sands are just the latest piece of the puzzle to understand the geologic evolution of this region. It is the only location on Earth where active exhumation of high- and ultrahigh- pressure metamorphic rocks is occurring during the same rock cycle that produced these metamorphic rocks. The international group of researchers, including Joseph Gonzalez '19 Ph.D. from Syracuse University (now a European Research Council postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pavia, Italy), Ph.D. student Jan Schönig and Professor Hilmar von Eynatten from the University Göttingen in Germany, and Professor Hugh Davies (formerly from the University of Papua New Guinea, now at The Australian National University), revealed how the trapped inclusions in garnet sand can be used to determine rock recycling processes within active plate boundary zones.

At active plate boundaries, like the one the team studied in eastern Papua New Guinea, converging tectonic plates slide toward each other with one plate moving underneath the other to form a subduction zone. During this process, rocks are subducted deep into the Earth. Over time, forces on the plate boundaries may change and rocks can be exhumed to the surface through a process known as lithospheric deformation. The trapped inclusions preserve a record of crustal subduction and rapid exhumation linking upper mantle and surface processes on these short geologic timescales. By applying their approach to both modern sediments and sedimentary rocks, researchers can now reveal the tempo of rock recycling processes throughout Earth's history.

An antibacterial peptide that turns on and off

The researchers solved the 3D molecular structure of an antibacterial peptide named uperin 3.5, which is secreted on the skin of the Australian toadlet (Uperoleia mjobergii) as part of its immune system. They found that the peptide self-assembles into a unique fibrous structure, which via a sophisticated structural adaptation mechanism can change its form in the presence of bacteria to protect the toadlet from infections. This provides unique atomic-level evidence explaining a regulation mechanism of an antimicrobial peptide.

The antibacterial fibrils on the toadlet's skin have a structure that is reminiscent of amyloid fibrils, which are a hallmark of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Although amyloid fibrils have been considered pathogenic for decades, it has recently been discovered that certain amyloid fibrils can benefit the organisms that produce them, from human to microbes. For example, certain bacteria produce such fibrils to fight human immune cells.

The findings suggest that the antibacterial peptide secreted on the toadlet's skin self-assembles into a "dormant" configuration in the form of highly stable amyloid fibrils, which scientists describe as a cross-β conformation. These fibrils serve as a reservoir of potential attacker molecules that can be activated when bacteria are present. Once the peptide encounters the bacterial membrane, it changes its molecular configuration to a less compact cross-α form, and transforms into a deadly weapon. "This is a sophisticated protective mechanism of the toadlet, induced by the attacking bacteria themselves," says structural biologist Meytal Landau, the lead author of this study. "This is a unique example of an evolutionary design of switchable supramolecular structures to control activity."

Potential for future medical applications

Antimicrobial peptides are found in all kingdoms of life, and thus are hypothesised to be commonly used as weapons in nature, occasionally effective in killing not only bacteria, but also cancer cells. Moreover, the unique amyloid-like properties of the toadlet's antibacterial peptide, discovered in this study, shed light on potential physiological properties of amyloid fibrils associated with neurodegenerative and systemic disorders.

The researchers hope that their discovery will lead to medical and technological applications, e.g. development of synthetic antimicrobial peptides that would be activated only in the presence of bacteria. Synthetic peptides of this kind could also serve as a stable coating for medical devices or implants, or even in industrial equipment that requires sterile conditions.