Earth

Military spouses can struggle to find and maintain employment and face severe restrictions on their social lives because of their partners' working patterns.

New research from Lancaster University and the University of Manchester, published in the European Journal of Marketing, studied the wives of British Army personnel.

Dr Helen Bruce and Dr Emma Banister found a husband's occupation placed constraints on both partners, and created challenges in particular for the wives when it came to gaining and retaining full-time employment, accessing often basic amenities, and enjoying social and leisure pursuits - which might include participating in choirs, the subject of the forthcoming Military Wives movie. To help them cope, they can come together to create communities with other wives and partners in similar situations.

As a result of their spouses' regular relocation through work, partners are often unable to find permanent employment and pursue their own career goals, and it is difficult for them to enjoy their leisure time due to factors such as a lack of childcare options or established family or social networks.

Lead author Dr Bruce, of Lancaster University Management School, said: "Frequent relocation of their husbands due to work hinders career development and disrupts social and familial networks. Such issues can lead to difficulties for wives and partners in achieving their immediate and long-term goals, thus having a detrimental impact on their overall wellbeing.

"Where work schedules are unpredictable and change at short notice, issues are intensified - the booking of holidays a long time in advance, for example, can become near-impossible.

"Partners can be forced to leave jobs when husbands are relocated, limiting household income as it can become difficult for them to find other employment - some employers may be reluctant to bring in workers if there is no guarantee of how long they will be able to remain in post. If work is available, there are often constraints on what types of employment it encompasses, with careers often sacrificed."

Dr Bruce and Dr Banister interviewed army wives in focus groups and individually, gaining insight into how marrying partners in roles where there can be regular disruption to living circumstances, or changes in work patterns, can impact them. There are more than 100,000 spouses and partners in the British Armed Forces who face regular relocation as their spouses are required to move to meet the needs of the service. Among them, approximately three-quarters have children, while around two-thirds of army families live in Service Family Accommodation - located close to the serving person's place of work but in often-inconvenient places for the purposes of employment outside the Armed Forces, for access to leisure and social activities, and far from retail facilities.

Women with children often find themselves away from traditional support networks of family, leaving them to take on childcare duties by themselves. This, in turns, impacts on employment potential for the mothers.

Dr Bruce added: "The wives and partners we spoke to described how hard it can be for them to participate in social and leisure activities, with the lack of support when it comes to childcare and the short notice with which their husbands' work schedules can change making it extremely difficult to make plans either as a couple or individually. This can lead to the wives feeling a sense of social isolation.

"Both partners in any relationship have important roles to play at home with their families, yet some jobs allow for little flexibility for workers, for instance, to be available at certain times to take care of their children."

The researchers found wives and partners often come together to help each other cope with the situations they find themselves in, developing collective as well as individual coping strategies and support both practically and emotionally.

Support is based on common experiences and challenges, but these communities can fall apart when members are relocated due to changes in their husbands' work, meaning they are vulnerable to being temporary in nature.

Dr Banister, of Alliance Manchester Business School, said: "These groups comprise people who have shared experiences, but who have their own individual strategies for coping with the issues they encounter. The benefits of the groups include their knowledge building and exchange, learning from experience, and the ability to collaborate in problem-solving.

"The camaraderie and emotional support from these groups are meaningful sources of coping. The community support is empathetic and offers solutions to daily challenges such as transporting children to school, going shopping miles from home and finding childcare to allow for nights out."

However, wives and partners whose lifestyles differ from those of other community members - be it through working full-time, having children of a different age, or living in different areas - can find they are excluded from the support networks.

"Our data suggests that wives and partners in employment were less likely to be involved in these communities, relying solely on independent coping, as were those who were older, had married later in life, or had older, more self-sufficient, children," added Dr Banister.

The researchers believe overarching changes can be made to help wives and partners affected by their husbands' work.

"For the army wives we spoke to, a reduction in the unpredictability of their husbands' role - for example, in terms of working schedules and relocation, could lessen the impact on them," said Dr Bruce. "However, the overall purpose of the UK Armed Forces, and their need to respond quickly to a range of events, provides a significant challenge to such changes.

"Options to help this group would include providing low-cost transport and childcare options to support wives and partners in their employment and social activities."

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- By 2030, global warming alone could push Chicago to generate 12% more electricity per person each month of the summer.

Any less than that, and the city would be risking a power shortage that may require drastic measures to avoid rolling blackouts, according to projections from a model designed by Purdue University researchers.

That estimated increase is larger than previous projections because it takes into account how consumers use electricity and water at the same time. The model also considers a wider range of climate features that affect this mixed use, such as humidity and wind speed, making predictions more accurate.

Consumers use both electricity and water when running a dishwasher, heating water or landscaping. Cities also use water to generate electricity, and electricity to treat and distribute water.

For a windy city like Chicago, wind speed matters when estimating electricity and water use. Temperature might play a larger role in the Southwest where droughts occur.

"Usually electricity and water utilities work in silos. But if we want to accurately capture climate-sensitive demand, we need to look at electricity and water together," said Roshanak "Roshi" Nateghi, a Purdue assistant professor of industrial engineering and environmental and ecological engineering.

Nateghi's team partnered with Rohini Kumar, a postdoctoral researcher at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ in Leipzig, Germany, to develop the model.

In a study publishing on March 5 in the journal Climatic Change, the collaborative team applied this model to five other cities in the U.S. Midwest: Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Madison and Minneapolis.

As a whole, the model projected that the Midwest will be using 19% more electricity and 7% more water. And that's just during the summer.

The researchers started with the Midwest because the region typically experiences distinct seasons, but the model could be applied to any region.

While the model's projections don't yet take into account population growth or technological shifts, such as increased electric vehicle use, a common baseline model that utilities currently use to predict climate impact considers only how temperature and precipitation affect electricity and water use.

The model developed by Nateghi's lab considers those variables, as well as relative humidity, wind speed and large-scale climate phenomena, such as El Niño, which often leads to more mild winters in the Midwest.

"Adding in these other variables makes the model more representative of future climate-change scenarios," said Renee Obringer, the first author on this study and a Ph.D. candidate in environmental and ecological engineering at Purdue.

The model uses artificial intelligence to make predictions on climate change impact. As a learning algorithm, the model is fed years of data from a region's utilities and weather services and then trained to predict changes in electricity and water use given certain climate-change scenarios.

These scenarios are when the earth's temperature increases by 1.5 or 2.0 degrees Celsius above its mean temperature during the pre-industrial period, approximately 1881-1910.

Climate scientists have predicted that global warming could cross the 1.5 C threshold by 2030 and the 2.0 C threshold by 2055.

This means that for Chicago, the best case scenario is that electricity use increases by 12% and water use increases by 4% if global warming crosses a 1.5 C threshold. But if a 2.0 C threshold is reached, then the worst case scenario is a 20% increase in electricity use and a 6% increase in water use.

"Such scenarios are fundamental for understanding the joint response of electricity and water uses to future changes in climatic conditions as to understand to what degree our current management and technological strategies need to adapt to the future changes." Kumar said.

The researchers found that on average for each city analyzed in this study, there could be a 10%-20% increase in electricity and 2%-5% increase in water during the summer due to a warming climate.

"A baseline model only looking at temperature and precipitation is used over and over again to develop policies. In the future, there could be significant shortages in water and electricity supply because these models have been significantly underestimating what the actual demand would be," Obringer said.

While there's always room for more accuracy, the researchers believe that the level of accuracy achieved by this model should warrant its use now by utilities and city planners to form more effective policies.

"This model provides a much better sense of potential risk for variability and change," Nateghi said.

Chemotherapy halves the risk of a rare form of kidney cancer coming back after surgery, the largest ever trial conducted in the disease worldwide has found.

Patients given chemotherapy within three months of surgery saw the risk of their cancer coming back or spreading reduced and were much more likely to live cancer free for three years or more.

The new results are set to change clinical practice around the world - with chemotherapy being recommended after surgery for all suitable patients with a rare tumour of the urinary system that is large or just starting to spread.

Cancer of the ureter and renal pelvis - starting in the tubes leading from the kidney to the bladder - is relatively rare, with nearly 1,000 people being diagnosed with the disease in the UK each year.

The disease is often diagnosed at a late stage, with over half of patients dying from it, so more effective treatment options are desperately needed.

The POUT trial, led by researchers at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and the Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, involved 261 people with cancer of the ureter and renal pelvis.

The trial assessed the benefit of giving people four cycles of a combination of two chemotherapies compared with the current standard of treatment, where patients are actively monitored to spot signs of their cancer coming back after having surgery.

The study was published in the prestigious journal The Lancet Oncology today (Thursday), and was funded by Cancer Research UK.

The researchers found that treating patients with platinum-based chemotherapy after surgery reduced the risk of dying or of ureter and renal pelvis cancer returning by 55 per cent.

They found that 71 per cent of patients given chemotherapy survived for three years or more after joining the trial without their disease coming back, compared with 46 per cent of patients who were on surveillance.

As expected, more people experienced serious side-effects in the chemotherapy group compared with patients under surveillance - around 44 per cent, similar to the rates of side-effects seen in other groups of patients treated with these drugs.

The combination treatment of gemcitabine with platinum chemotherapy used in the study is a low-cost, generic treatment option and is already routinely used on the NHS in a range of other cancers.

The researchers are now working to incorporate the trial results into international clinical practice guidelines, so that chemotherapy after surgery will become the new standard of care.

Next, the team plan to study the benefit of adding immunotherapy or targeted treatment to chemotherapy in this form of the disease.

Professor Emma Hall, Professor of Oncology Clinical Trials at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, who co-ordinated the study, said:

"Our clinical trial has found a considerable benefit of giving chemotherapy to people with cancers that start in the tube leading from the kidney to the bladder - cutting the risk of dying or the disease coming back after surgery by more than half.

"Giving chemotherapy after surgery could give people with this rare form of cancer years more to spend quality time with their families. The results of our study are set to change clinical practice in the UK and internationally, and I'm hopeful that patients will start benefiting very soon.

"Running clinical trials in patients with rare cancers comes with its challenges, including finding enough people to take part - so it's fantastic to see such clear evidence of patient benefit from this study. It shows how important it is to run studies like this to improve treatment options for patients with rarer forms of cancer."

Dr Alison Birtle, Consultant Clinical Oncologist at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and the trial's Chief Investigator, said:

"We are very grateful that our participants and the entire uro-oncology community in the UK got behind this study. It is the first to show that there is a real chance for people with upper urinary tract cancer to stay free of their disease for much longer. This type of cancer has always been forgotten and to be able to deliver this, a study that everyone said was impossible, to benefit patients is a privilege."

Retired Eddie Marchant, 74, from Hinckley, Leicestershire, was diagnosed with this type of kidney cancer in 2014 after he noticed blood in his urine.

Doctors successfully treated him with surgery, removing his stage 3 tumour.

The former Royal Artillery non-commissioned officer, who served for 18 years in the Forces, was then invited to join the POUT trial, looking at whether giving chemotherapy after surgery improves outcomes.

He has been cancer free since and said:

"I feel very fortunate to have been invited on to the trial and have had clear scans ever since my treatment.

"I've been able to get on with my life, going on holiday, speed walking to keep fit and enjoying playing and singing some of my favourite Buddy Holly and Eagles tunes."

Dr Rachel Shaw, Research Information Manager at Cancer Research UK, said:

"Thanks to this practice-changing trial, we now have more insight into the best way to treat this rare type of kidney cancer. We hope to see this adopted as the standard treatment in the near future, giving patients the best chance of beating the disease.

"Understanding how to treat rare types of cancer can be harder than it is for more common cancers. However, at Cancer Research UK, we're dedicated to improving treatments for all forms of the disease, no matter how many people are affected."

In a study of epilepsy patients, researchers at the National Institutes of Health monitored the electrical activity of thousands of individual brain cells, called neurons, as patients took memory tests. They found that the firing patterns of the cells that occurred when patients learned a word pair were replayed fractions of a second before they successfully remembered the pair. The study was part of an NIH Clinical Center trial for patients with drug-resistant epilepsy whose seizures cannot be controlled with drugs.

"Memory plays a crucial role in our lives. Just as musical notes are recorded as grooves on a record, it appears that our brains store memories in neural firing patterns that can be replayed over and over again," said Kareem Zaghloul, M.D., Ph.D., a neurosurgeon-researcher at the NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and senior author of the study published in Science.

Dr. Zaghloul's team has been recording electrical currents of drug-resistant epilepsy patients temporarily living with surgically implanted electrodes designed to monitor brain activity in the hopes of identifying the source of a patient's seizures. This period also provides an opportunity to study neural activity during memory. In this study, his team examined the activity used to store memories of our past experiences, which scientists call episodic memories.

In 1957, the case of an epilepsy patient H.M. provided a breakthrough in memory research. H.M could not remember new experiences after part of his brain was surgically removed to stop his seizures. Since then, research has pointed to the idea that episodic memories are stored, or encoded, as neural activity patterns that our brains replay when triggered by such things as the whiff of a familiar scent or the riff of a catchy tune. But exactly how this happens was unknown.

Over the past two decades, rodent studies have suggested that the brain may store memories in unique neuronal firing sequences. After joining Dr. Zaghloul's lab, Alex P. Vaz, B.S., an M.D., Ph.D. student at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, and the leader of this study decided to test this idea in humans.

"We thought that if we looked carefully at the data we had been collecting from patients we might be able to find a link between memory and neuronal firing patterns in humans that is similar to that seen in rodents," said Vaz, a bioengineer who specializes in deciphering the meaning of electrical signals generated by the body.

To do this they analyzed the firing patterns of individual neurons located in the anterior temporal lobe, a brain language center. Currents were recorded as patients sat in front of a screen and were asked to learn word pairs such as "cake" and "fox." The researchers discovered that unique firing patterns of individual neurons were associated with learning each new word pattern. Later, when a patient was shown one of the words, such as "cake," a very similar firing pattern was replayed just milliseconds before the patient correctly recalled the paired word "fox."

"These results suggest that our brains may use distinct sequences of neural spiking activity to store memories and then replay them when we remember a past experience," said Dr. Zaghloul.

Last year, his team showed that electrical waves, called ripples, may emerge in the brain just split seconds before we remember something correctly. In this study, the team discovered a link between the ripples recorded in the anterior temporal lobe and the spiking patterns seen during learning and memory. They also showed that ripples recorded in another area called the medial temporal lobe slightly preceded the replay of firing patterns seen in the anterior temporal lobe during learning.

"Our results support the idea that memories involve coordinated replay of neuronal firing patterns throughout the brain," said Dr. Zaghloul. "Studying how we form and retrieve memories may not only help us understand ourselves but also how neuronal circuits break down in memory disorders."

Collaboration is everything - also in the quantum world. To build powerful quantum computers in the future, it will be necessary to connect several smaller computers to form a kind of cluster or local network (LAN). Since those computers work with quantum mechanical superposition states, which contain the logical values "0" and "1" at the same time, the links between them should also be "quantum links".

The longest such link to date based on microwaves, at five metres long, was recently built in the laboratory of Andreas Wallraff, professor at the Quantum Device Lab at ETH Zurich. The researchers were scheduled to present their results on it at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver. Because of the current epidemic situation this conference was cancelled at short notice. Instead, the scientists now report their results in a virtual substitute conference.

Important for future quantum-LANs

"That's really a milestone for us", Wallraff explains, "since now we can show that quantum-LANs are possible in principle. In the next 10 to 20 years, quantum computers will probably increasingly rely on them." Currently there are computers with a few dozen quantum bits or qubits, but several hundreds of thousands of them are almost impossible to accommodate in existing devices. One reason for this is that qubits based on superconducting electrical oscillators, such as those used in the quantum chips in Wallraff's lab (and also by IBM and Google), need to be cooled down to temperatures close to the absolute zero of -273,15 degrees Celsius. This supresses thermal perturbations that would cause the quantum states to lose their superposition property - this is known as decoherence - and hence errors in the quantum calculations to occur.

Extreme cold against decoherence

"The challenge was to connect two of those superconducting quantum chips in such a way as to be able to exchange superposition states between them with minimal decoherence", says Philipp Kurpiers, a former PhD student in Wallraff's group. This happens by means of microwave photons that are emitted by one superconducting oscillator and received by another. In between, they fly through a waveguide, which is a metal cavity a few centimetres in width, which also needs to be strongly cooled so that the quantum states of the photons are not influenced.

Each of the quantum chips is cooled down over several days in a cryostat (an extremely powerful refrigerator), using compressed and also liquid helium, to a few hundredths of a degree above absolute zero. To that end, the five-metre waveguide that creates the quantum link was equipped with a shell consisting of several layers of copper sheet. Each of those sheets acts as a heat shield for the different temperature stages of the cryostat: -223 degrees, -269 degrees, -272 degrees and finally -273,1 degrees. Altogether, those heat shields alone weigh around a quarter of a tonne.

No "table-top" experiment

"So, this is definitely not a "table-top" experiment anymore that one can put together on a small workbench", Wallraff says. "A lot of development work has gone into this, and ETH is an ideal place for building such an ambitious apparatus. It's a kind of mini-CERN that we first had to build over several years in order to be able to do interesting things with it now." Apart from the three PhD students who carried out the experiments, several engineers and technicians, also in the workshops at ETH and at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), were involved in producing and constructing the quantum link.

Entangled states and "Bell tests"

The physicists at ETH not only showed that the quantum link can be sufficiently cooled down, but also that it can actually be used to reliably transmit quantum information between two quantum chips. To demonstrate this, they created an entangled state between the two chips via the quantum link. Such entangled states, in which measuring one qubit instantaneously influences the result of a measurement on the other qubit, can also be used for tests in basic quantum research. In those "Bell tests", the qubits must be far enough apart from each other, so that any information transfer at the speed of light can be ruled out.

While Wallraff and his collaborators are performing experiments with the new link, they have already started working on even longer quantum links. Already a year ago they were able to sufficiently cool down a ten-metre link, but without doing any quantum experiments with it. Now they are working on a 30-metre quantum link, for which a room at ETH has been specially prepared.

The news in brief:

1) Red Sea corals and especially corals of the Gulf of Aqaba in the northern Red Sea may be one of the last reefs to survive the century. Scientists estimate 70 to 90 percent of all coral reefs will disappear by mid-century, primarily as a result of climate change and pollution.

2) In the Frontiers in Marine Science paper, an exceptionally broad scientific perspective is shared in a call to action to save the Red Sea's coral reef, with authors who have studied it while based in Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Australia and the United States.

3) The Red Sea's reef runs along 4,000 Km of coastline and is an important source of income and food for a rapidly growing population of more than 28 million.

STONY BROOK, NY, March 5, 2020 - An international group of researchers led by Karine Kleinhaus, MD, of the Stony Brook University School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS), calls upon UNESCO to declare the Red Sea's 4000km of coral reef as a Marine World Heritage Site and recommends additional measures critical for the reef's survival. Published in Frontiers in Marine Science, the article cites that while Rapid Ocean warming due to climate change is predicted to decimate 70 to 90 percent of the world's coral reefs by mid-century, the coral reef ecosystem in the Red Sea's Gulf of Aqaba is strikingly resilient to rising sea temperatures.

Corals in the Gulf of Aqaba, at the northernmost portion of the Red Sea, withstand water temperature irregularities that cause severe bleaching or mortality in most hard corals elsewhere. This uniquely resilient reef employs biological mechanisms which are likely to be important for coral survival as the planet's oceans warm. But while the Gulf of Aqaba could potentially be one of the planet's largest marine refuges from climate change, its reef will only survive and flourish if serious regional environmental challenges are addressed.

"Corals of the Gulf of Aqaba, in the northern Red Sea, may constitute one of the last reefs to survive the century, so it's crucial that countries coordinate on Gulf-wide research and conservation efforts despite regional political tensions," said Dr. Kleinhaus, Visiting Associate Professor at SoMAS. "My co-authors have studied the Red Sea's corals while based in Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Australia, the United States and Switzerland. Their exceptionally broad scientific perspectives and deep expertise underpin our discussion of the value and significance of the Red Sea's coral reef, the threats it faces, and the steps that can be taken now to preserve it."

The authors point out that coral reefs of the Red Sea provide food and a source of livelihood to a rapidly growing population of over 28 million people living along its coastline, and are a uniquely rich potential source of new medicines. However, as towns and cities continue to grow along the Red Sea, these areas generate substantial local pressure on its reefs. Some portions of the reef have already been heavily damaged by uncontrolled tourism, human population expansion, overfishing, and coastal development that has led to pollution and a decline in coastal water quality.

Despite existing environmental stressors and newly emerging threats, there are currently no coordinated scientific research or management efforts that encompass the entire Red Sea reef complex.

The researchers assert that the most urgent objective is to advance immediate protection of the Gulf of Aqaba as a World Heritage Site as part of an initiative involving Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Ideally, they say scientists, conservationists, and policy makers should advocate strongly that UNESCO recognize the Red Sea's entire coral reef as a Marine World Heritage Site. Regional scientists and governments should work together to implement transnational research, monitoring and conservation efforts and seek UN support for a long-term scientific monitoring program. Considering political realities, the authors affirm that regional collaboration can be effectively facilitated by the Transnational Red Sea Center, a neutral organization which was established in March 2019 and is based at the Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

The researchers recommend several additional measures including:

Full regional cooperation under the directive of high levels of government

Informing governments of the monetary value and vast medicinal potential of the reef to each nation

Long-term regional monitoring of the threat to the reefs from new coastal development and the accompanying population expansion

sustainable development of the Red Sea coastline

Our day-to-day lives can be seen as a series of complex motor sequences: morning routines, work or school tasks, actions we take around mealtimes, the rituals and habits woven through our evenings and weekends. They seem almost automatic, with little conscious thought behind them.

In reality, however, they are the result of the myriad decisions and physical adjustments we make along the way, thanks to the continual signal processing in the brain that is guided by information we receive through our senses.

UC Santa Barbara researcher Julie Simpson is interested in the processes that go into these complex motor sequences, specifically how neural signals are translated into our physical behaviors.

"Every day, you get up in the morning and you decide what to do with your day," said Simpson, an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. "There are many things you could do with your limbs, which are driven by motor neurons, which are controlled by commands from your brain." Humans have a wide repertoire of behaviors and often we experience competing drives. How do we choose what to do first?

There are many obvious challenges to mapping out how human brain activity coordinates physical motions, not the least of which is the sheer complexity of the human brain's networks. Fortunately, the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) -- a model organism for which we have the complete genome -- possesses an analogous but far simpler and much more tractable system. Using fruit flies, Simpson and her research team have uncovered neural mechanisms that contribute to complex motor sequences in fly behavior -- specifically those that govern grooming, a universal fruit fly behavior that removes dust from the body with targeted leg movements.

Besides adding to our fundamental understanding of how our brains and bodies work, the findings, published in a paper in the journal Current Biology, could lend insight into pathologies in brain signaling, such as in Parkinson's Disease, or with obsessive-compulsive behaviors.

Through optogenetics -- the use of light to activate specific neurons -- and targeted, competing light, the researchers were able to turn small groups of these neurons off and on in the fruit fly subjects to see which behavior the fly chose to exhibit. In this case, the fly would have to decide which part to clean first when tricked into believing its entire body was covered in dust.

"If you give them everything dirty at once, what do they do?" Simpson said.

Fruit flies, it turns out, generally have a standard -- but not set -- grooming sequence. They use their legs to sweep their heads, then their abdomens, and then their wings, each time lifting and planting and swiping the legs between each sweeping session.

"It's always a higher probability of anterior behaviors, then posterior," Simpson said, "but the exact pattern and exact transition points differ, so it's not an utterly fixed action pattern. They're making probabilistic choices."

The choices the flies make, the lab found, are the result of spatial comparisons of levels of dust on each region. The "dust" is actually red light for optogenetic stimulation, like a mechanosensory virtual reality which allows for finer control over neuron activation.

"We found that spatial comparisons were more important; the flies didn't keep track of sensory input over time," said Neil Zhang, the study's lead author. "They compare between different body parts -- between the head and the abdomen, for example." The head region, it seems, usually wins in competition, perhaps due to the large number of mechanosensory bristles located in the eyes and on the head, which makes that part of the body a cleaning priority.

"Flies in the dark will still clean their eyes first. Blind flies will still clean their eyes first," Simpson said. But "bald-eyed" flies (those without the bristles) will have a weaker drive to go for the eyes first.

The sensory inputs the flies receive -- not just mechanical but also visual, olfactory and via other senses -- are sent to specialized regions in their brains and then to as yet largely unknown neural circuits that coordinate the decisions about what to do and what not to do.

"That kind of computation is made by their nervous system," Zhang said. "The next step is to figure out which neurons, and which circuits are doing that comparison." It's a tall order, even for the relatively simple fruit fly, given the thousands of neurons it possesses. But with genetic tools, wiring diagrams from electron microscopy data, and functional imaging techniques, researchers in this field are off to a good start.

These behavioral experiments are a key clue. "Now we have a better idea of what circuits we should look for because of the behavioral evidence for the importance of the spatial comparisons," Simpson said.

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Tapping into 35 years of satellite imagery, researchers at Oregon State University have dramatically enlarged the database regarding how climate change is affecting kelps, near-shore seaweeds that provide food and shelter for fish and protect coastlines from wave damage.

And the Landsat pictures paved the way to some surprising findings: A summer of warm water isn't automatically bad news for kelps, and large winter waves aren't either.

The study was published in Ecology.

"Kelps are fundamentally cold-water species, thus climate change is a problem for them, and worldwide we're losing a lot of them," said the study's corresponding author, Sara Hamilton, a marine biologist pursuing her Ph.D. at OSU. "We're beginning to see evidence of that happening here on the Pacific coast of North America, especially Northern California."

The Landsat program is a joint effort of NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey that has been collecting Earth surface data since 1975 but only recently has been used for kelp monitoring.

The OSU research was the first to use Landsat data to study bull kelp, large seaweeds that grow in "forests" that form canopies in shallow ocean water. There are about 30 genera of them, and while they look like plants, they're actually heterokonts, related to algae.

"Taking technology from other fields and bringing it into the marine sciences to improve our work is really exciting," Hamilton said. "A 35-year dataset in marine biology is really hard to find. It's usually hard to do marine work - it's expensive, you need highly trained divers, and it's dangerous. But we need long-term data to understand climate change and how it impacts populations. This was an exponential increase in the amount of information available about kelp forests in Oregon."

In 2014, a marine heat wave led to a boom in purple sea urchins whose grazing has been pummeling populations of Nereocystis luetkeana, commonly known as bull kelp, off the Northern California shore ever since.

"But we actually didn't find evidence of loss in bull kelp populations post-2014 in Oregon even though we are right across the border," Hamilton said. "Our findings challenge the picture that's been making the rounds in the news and points to the need for more research, because we really don't understand kelp very well."

Off the Oregon coast, most kelp grows in the southern one-third of the state, the majority of it spread among five distinct reefs.

Kelp data teased from decades of Landsat imagery show that canopy area can vary dramatically from year to year, and that long-term population trends vary from reef to reef. One reef, the Rogue, near Gold Beach, showed a greater population in 2018, the last year of the analysis, than at any point in the last 35 years.

"For the years we surveyed, three of the five reefs remained within historically normal population levels," Hamilton said. "Another one has had low populations for the past 15 years, and the fifth has shifted to somewhat smaller, less variable populations over the last two decades."

Past, extensive research on a perennial kelp species, Macrocystis pyrifera, has suggested that high waves in winter have a negative impact on kelp population, but the current study suggested the opposite for bull kelp, an annual.

"An association between bigger waves and more kelp is 100 percent outside the basic idea of what influences kelp," Hamilton said. "Our study shows that if you change one species, change one geographic area, you get a whole new set of factors emerging."

Hamilton takes pains to point out that while kelp forests can be dazzlingly beautiful, that's not the main reason marine biologists are interested in them.

"We don't study them because they're pretty and we like diving in them, even though they are pretty and we do like diving in them," she said. "Kelp forests are important to the ecosystem and to the human communities living on coastlines."

Kelp forests provide ecosystem services and services to people living nearby, including nursery habitat for juvenile rockfish, urchin fisheries and kelp fisheries.

"People should have access to basic environmental resources that are important to them, and we need to know how these resources are changing and how those changes impact people, often vulnerable people," Hamilton added.

Myocardial blood flow (MBF) and myocardial flow reserve (MFR) have been identified as accurate indicators for graft failure after cardiac transplantation, according to a new study published in The Journal of Nuclear Medicine. Utilizing positron emission tomography (PET) myocardial perfusion imaging to quantify MBF and MRF, researchers were able to successfully detect patients with cardiac allograft vasculopathy (CAV), the most serious condition facing transplant patients late after their surgery. In addition, researchers found that MFR had a significantly higher accuracy when predicting the overall prognosis for cardiac transplant patients.

Heart transplantation is a definitive therapy for patients with end-stage heart failure and has a median post-transplant survival of more than 13 years. As long-term survival has increased, the prevalence of cardiac diseases, such as CAV, has also grown. CAV accounts for over one-third of deaths in patients who survive at least five years after their heart transplant. It is also the most common indication for re-transplantation in patients who survive one year.

"MBF and MFR have been shown to be useful for diagnosis and prognosis of CAV in a few single-center studies, however, there is no consensus on which marker--stress MBF or MFR--should be applied for these purposes," said Robert J.H. Miller, MD, FRCPC, clinical assistant professor at the University of Calgary in Canada. "In this study, we compared the utility of MBF and MFR, using previously derived thresholds, to provide the external validation required to guide broader clinical implementation."

Ninety-nine cardiac transplant patients who underwent 82Rb PET myocardial perfusion imaging over a five-year period in a single center were included in the study. Quantitative and semi-quantitative analyses were performed and imaging parameters were compared among study participants who died (26 patients) and those who survived (73 patients). Researchers then examined the diagnostic and prognostic accuracy for MBR and MFR in detecting significant CAV.

Results from the study demonstrated that stress MBF, uncorrected MFR and corrected MFR were equivalent in identifying patients with significant CAV. In terms of prognosis, researchers found that uncorrected MFR offered superior discrimination for mortality of all causes compared to stress MBF. Further, the study found that preserved MFR (defined as greater than or equal to 2.0) identified low-risk patients, while the presence of multiple abnormal parameters identified patients at the highest risk.

"PET with routine measures of MBF and MFR has a clear role in patients following cardiac transplantation. This study provides practical information for centers implementing PET for CAV surveillance and will help guide them in implementing these important measurements" noted Miller.

Some of the first animals on Earth were connected by networks of thread-like filaments, the earliest evidence yet found of life being connected in this way.

Scientists from the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford discovered the fossilised threads - some as long as four metres - connecting organisms known as rangeomorphs, which dominated Earth's oceans half a billion years ago.

The team found these filament networks - which may have been used for nutrition, communication or reproduction -in seven species across nearly 40 different fossil sites in Newfoundland, Canada. Their results are reported in the journal Current Biology.

Towards the end of the Ediacaran period, between 571 and 541 million years ago, the first diverse communities of large and complex organisms began to appear: prior to this, almost all life on Earth had been microscopic in size.

Fern-like rangeomorphs were some of the most successful life forms during this period, growing up to two metres in height and colonising large areas of the sea floor. Rangeomorphs may have been some of the first animals to exist, although their strange anatomies have puzzled palaeontologists for years; these organisms do not appear to have had mouths, organs or means of moving. One suggestion is that they absorbed nutrients from the water around them.

Since rangeomorphs could not move and are preserved where they lived, it is possible to analyse whole populations from the fossil record. Earlier studies of rangeomorphs have looked at how these organisms managed to reproduce and be so successful in their time.

"These organisms seem to have been able to quickly colonise the sea floor, and we often see one dominant species on these fossil beds," said Dr Alex Liu from Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences, and the paper's first author. "How this happens ecologically has been a longstanding question - these filaments may explain how they were able to do that."

Most of the filaments were between two and 40 centimetres in length, although some were as long as four metres. Since they are so thin however, the filaments are only visible in places where the fossil preservation is exceptionally good, which is one of the reasons they were not identified sooner. The fossils for this study were found on five sites in eastern Newfoundland, one of the world's richest sources of Ediacaran fossils.

It's possible that the filaments were used as a form of clonal reproduction, like modern strawberries, but since the organisms in the network were the same size, the filaments may have had other functions. For example, the filaments may have provided stability against strong ocean currents. Another possibility is that they enabled organisms to share nutrients, a prehistoric version of the 'wood wide web' observed in modern-day trees. What is known however, is that some reconsideration of how Ediacaran organisms lived may be in order.

"We've always looked at these organisms as individuals, but we've now found that several individual members of the same species can be linked by these filaments, like a real-life social network," said Liu. "We may now need to reassess earlier studies into how these organisms interacted, and particularly how they competed for space and resources on the ocean floor. The most unexpected thing for me is the realisation that these things are connected. I've been looking at them for over a decade, and this has been a real surprise."

"It's incredible the level of detail that can be preserved on these ancient sea floors; some of these filaments are only a tenth of a millimetre wide," said co-author Dr Frankie Dunn from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. "Just like if you went down the beach today, with these fossils, it's a case of the more you look, the more you see."

Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers have created a computer program for scientists at no charge that lets users readily quantify the structural and functional changes in the blood flow networks feeding tumors.

The researchers published a link to download the new program, called HemoSYS, and an accompanying manual with instructions on how to use it, on Feb. 11 in Scientific Reports.

"Compared to blood flow in healthy tissues, tumor blood flow is abnormal, and these abnormalities can be captured with new imaging methods. Therefore, we created a freely available toolkit called HemoSYS that enables scientists to quantify these abnormalities from imaging data acquired from tumors in live animals", says Arvind Pathak, Ph.D., associate professor of radiology and biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a member of the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Studying the architecture of blood vessels and their flow dynamics in tumors could provide insights into cancer progression and metastasis, says Janaka Senarathna, Ph.D., a research fellow in Pathak's lab and lead author of the paper. This approach could accelerate development of new therapies that target a tumor's blood vessels in order to limit its supply of nutrients and oxygen. HemoSYS could also lead to more effective delivery of already available drugs by mapping blood flow fluctuations in the vessels feeding the tumor.

A tumor's blood vessels are its lifeline for survival and growth, providing it with nutrients as well as an avenue for tumor cells to spread to other parts of the body. However, these vessels often grow irregularly and create abnormal blood flow patterns, making them a huge hurdle to effective delivery of therapeutics.

"The abnormal blood flow makes it difficult to predict how effective therapies will be, and if insufficient drug is delivered to the tumor, cancers may recur or develop resistance to treatment or advance harmful side effects," says Pathak.

The Johns Hopkins investigators caution that the research tool is not directly applicable to human tumors yet. But, says Pathak, "As our ability to obtain high-resolution images in the clinic improves, we hope that this tool can be adapted to provide a noninvasive way to analyze the blood flow fluctuations in an individual patient's cancer and help to customize their therapy."

To develop HemoSYS, the Pathak Lab recruited biomedical engineers and biophysicists to develop accurate, efficient ways to quantify "multivariable" data comprised of tumor blood flow, blood volume and oxygenation images. A different type of light source was used to collect each of these data variables from tumors implanted in animals.

"Typically, a research lab studying these blood vessel systems would need to have extensive expertise in image processing to quantify the relationships between these measurements," says Pathak. "HemoSYS allows researchers without any programming expertise to conduct their analyses on these multivariable imaging data."

The HemoSYS program employs fundamental engineering principles to analyze and integrate different kinds of data collected from various imaging methods.

This data enables scientists to rigorously map the entire "hemodynamic landscape" of the tumor being studied, says Pathak. The result is a colorful yet informative visualization that shows the relationships among blood flow, oxygenation and tumor cells in vivid reds, blues and greens.

"The system lets researchers see that there may be an area in the tumor of low oxygen supply caused by poor blood flow, or see that an area is low on oxygen even though it's exhibiting elevated blood volume," says Pathak.

Scientists and clinicians can download the toolkit at pathaklab.org/Hemosys. Pathak and his team have also made a customizable version for those who want to adapt HemoSYS for their own experiments or for data acquired with other imaging methods such as MRI, ultrasound and dynamic CT.

For wildlife, cities can present new opportunities as well as threats. Researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) and the Luxembourg National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) analysed genetic material of red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) inhabiting Berlin and its surroundings. They identified two genetically distinct, adjacent "urban" and "rural" fox populations and revealed that physical barriers such as rivers or man-made structures reduce the exchange between these populations but also differences in human activity in these landscapes play a major role. The researchers suggest that avoidance of sites of human activity may drive foxes into costly trade-offs as they prefer to disperse along potentially dangerous transportation infrastructures. The study was recently published in the scientific journal "Molecular Ecology".

The red fox is a physically highly mobile and ecologically opportunistic omnivore, successfully adjusting to very different and dynamic environments. Cities are an attractive novel habitat for red foxes as they offer an abundance of food with an apparently reduced predation risk. Red foxes were first recorded in Berlin in the 1950s, and by the 1990s they were distributed across the entire city. Using the example of urban Berlin and neighbouring rural Brandenburg, the scientists analysed the genetic make-up of red foxes inhabiting the urban and adjacent rural areas based on material collected from more than 370 red foxes from both areas. They identified two genetically distinct clusters, broadly coinciding with the areas of urban conurbation and the adjacent rural countryside.

The researchers also studied the factors limiting the gene flow between both populations. Landscape barriers such as large rivers and water bodies prevented foxes to some extent from mixing but were insufficient to explain maintenance of genetic differentiation and population structure. "The boundary between adjacent urban and rural areas, which is particularly characterized by increased human activity as well as denser housing, was a key factor", Sophia Kimmig, lead author of the study explains. The results of the study showed that Berlin foxes should be considered to be living on an "urban island" because of differences in behavioural responses of "city" and "country" foxes to human activity: Foxes from the city population are bolder than their relatives from the countryside, who are reluctant to cross the border into the city. Although "Berlin" foxes are more courageous in that they cope better with human activities ("city life"), they still prefer to use accident-prone motorways and railway lines - areas of little human pedestrian activity - to disperse within the city than taking potentially safer but busier public paths.

People have hunted foxes for times immemorial. Even nowadays, fox hunting remains a legalised "recreational" activity in several countries. The scientists argue that this may have exerted sufficient selection pressures on foxes to be wary of people, encouraging a preference for avoiding people and sites of centres of human activity. Such a risk management might explain why "country" foxes only rarely venture across the rural-urban boundary, and why urban foxes chose to face the real risk of being hit by a train or a car and avoid sites of increased human activity.

The study is based on the results obtained in the Digital Mammography (DM) DREAM Challenge, an international competition led by IBM where researchers from the Instituto de Física Corpuscular (IFIC, CSIC-UV) have participated along with scientists from the UPV's Institute of Telecommunications and Multimedia Applications (iTEAM).

The team of researchers from IFIC and the iTEAM UPV was the only Spanish group that reached the end of the challenge. To do so, they developed a prediction algorithm based on convolutional neuron networks, an Artificial Intelligence technique that simulates the neurons of the visual cortex and allows classifying images, as well as self-learning of the system. Principles related to interpreting x-rays were also applied, where the group has several patents. The Valencian team's results, along with the rest of the finalists, are now published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA Network Open).

"Participating in this challenge has allowed our group to collaborate in Artificial Intelligence projects with clinical groups of the Comunidad Valenciana," stated Alberto Albiol, tenured professor at UPV and member of the iTEAM group. "This has opened opportunities for us to apply the Machine Learning techniques, as they are proposed in the article," he added.

For example, the work carried out by Valencian researchers is being carried out in Artemisa, the new computing platform for Artificial Intelligence at the Instituto de Física Corpuscular funded by the European Union and the Generalitat Valenciana within the FEDER operating program of the Comunitat Valenciana for 2014-2020 for the acquisition of R+D+i infrastructures and equipment.

"Designing strategies to reduce operating costs of health care is one of the objectives of sustainably applying Artificial Intelligence," pointed out Francisco Albiol, researcher of the IFIC and participant in the study. "The challenges cover from the algorithm part to jointly designing evidence-based strategies along with the medical sector. Artificial Intelligence applied at a large scale is one of the most promising technologies to make health care sustainable," he noted.

The goal of the Digital Mammography (DM) DREAM Challenge is to involve a broad international scientific community (over 1,200 researchers from around the world) to evaluate whether or not Artificial Intelligence algorithms can be equal to or improve the interpretations of the mammograms carried out by radiologists.

"This DREAM Challenge allowed carrying out a rigorous and adequate evaluation of dozens of advanced deep learning algorithms in two independent databases," explained Justin Guinney, vice president of Computational Oncology at Sage Bionetworks and president of DREAM Challenges.

A half million fewer mammograms per year in the US

Led by IBM Research, Sage Bionetworks and Kaiser Permanente Washington Research Institute, the Digital Mammography DREAM Challenge concluded that, no algorithm by itself surpassed the radiologists, a combination of methods added to the evaluations of experts improved the accuracy of the exams. Kaiser Permanente Washington (KPW) and the Karolinska Institute (KI) of Sweden provided hundreds of thousands of unidentified mammograms and clinical data.

"Our study suggests that a combination of algorithms of Artificial Intelligence and the interpretations of the radiologists could result in a half million women per year not having to undergo unnecessary diagnostic tests in the United States alone," stated Gustavo Stolovitzky, the director of the IBM program dedicated to Translational Systems Biology and Nanotechnology in the Thomas J. Watson Research Center and founder of DREAM Challenges.

To guarantee the privacy of data and prevent the participants from downloading mammograms with sensitive data, the organizers of the study applied a working system from the model to the data. In the system, participants sent their algorithms to the organizers, who developed a system that applied them directly to the data.

"This focus on sharing data is particularly innovative and essential for preserving the privacy of the data," ensured Diana Buist, of the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute. "In addition, the inclusion of data from different countries, with different practices for carrying out mammograms, indicates important translational differences in the way in which Artificial Intelligence can be used on different populations."

Mammograms are the most used diagnostic technique for the early detection of breast cancer. Though this detection tool is commonly effective, mammograms must be evaluated and interpreted by a radiologist, who uses their human visual perception to identify signs of cancer. Thus, it is estimated that there are 10% false positives in the 40 million women who undergo scheduled mammograms each year in the United States.

"An effective Artificial Intelligence algorithm that can increase the radiologist's ability to reduce repeating unnecessary tests while also detecting clinically significant cancers would help increase mammograms' detection value.

As the power of extreme weather events increase with climate change, a team of scientists warn that lakes around the world may dramatically change, threatening ecosystem health and water quality.

And the international team reports that our limited understanding of how lakes--especially algae at the base of food webs--may respond to more-extreme storms represents a knowledge gap that increases the risk.

The team of 39 scientists from 20 countries on four continents investigated what is currently known about how lake ecosystems respond to extreme storm events. The scientists found they cannot confidently predict how lakes will respond to the more frequent and intense storms that are expected in a warming world.

"If extreme weather events significantly change carbon, nutrient, or energy cycling in lakes, we better figure it out quickly," said Jason Stockwell, an aquatic ecologist at the University of Vermont who led the new research, "because lakes can flip, like a lightbulb, from one healthy state to an unhealthy one--and it can be hard or impossible to flip them back again."

The new study focused on phytoplankton--microscopic plants commonly known as algae. "Phytoplankton are of particular concern because they are the base of the food web," said Stockwell, "and a critical driver of water quality."

The new study, "Storm Impacts on Phytoplankton Community Dynamics in Lakes," was published in the journal Global Change Biology on 5 March.

STORMS AHEAD

It is well known that extreme weather events damage property, infrastructure, and the environment, including freshwater resources that are critical to human health. However, lakes are especially sensitive to storm events because they experience storms directly and receive storm runoff from throughout their watersheds. Runoff includes sediments, nutrients, microplastics, and much more.

"We have a good idea of how lakes physically respond to storms: the water column mixes, water temperature changes, and sediments can be churned up from the bottom or delivered by rivers and streams to make the lake more turbid," Stockwell said. "But the physical response of the lake is just a part of the story. The biological impact of storms on phytoplankton and other plants and animals is fundamental to how lakes behave--and, as our study reveals, poorly understood."

In a search of thousands of scientific articles from around the world, the scientists found just 31 studies on 18 lakes that connected storms to freshwater lake conditions, and then to phytoplankton. Not only was the information sparse, but the few available findings were inconsistent. It became clear that the scientific community has a poor understanding of how phytoplankton respond to storms, or how their responses may differ by storm types, across different lakes, or even at different times of year.

NEW KNOWLEDGE NEEDED

The scientists call for a collaborative, multi-disciplinary effort by modelers, limnologists, watershed experts and other scientists, through research coordination networks--such as the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON)--to develop and advance a research framework of storm impacts on phytoplankton.

The team of scientists suggest several research directions including integrating watershed and lake physical models with biological models to better predict phytoplankton responses to storm-induced changes to lake conditions. The scientists also recommend continued and expanded long-term lake monitoring programs, coupled with networks of electronic high-frequency sensors, to evaluate short-term changes, emergent patterns, and long-term responses of lakes and water quality to storm events.

Similar research is also required for zooplankton, tiny grazers a little smaller than a rice grain that are essential food for fish. The goal is to better understand the pathways by which storms impact watershed-scale processes and plants and animals in lakes.

"We must quickly learn more--so we can better respond to the very real and pressing threat of climate change on lakes around the world," said Stockwell, director of UVM's Rubenstein Ecosystem Science Laboratory. "Without healthy lakes, we are sunk," he said.

Understanding the impacts of climate change on fish communities is an important piece of navigating the future, but it's difficult to tease out the individual factors at play in natural systems. This makes it hard for researchers to fully understand how climate change will affect the diversity and abundance of fishes in the future.

In a new study, researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) took advantage of the natural oceanographic gradient in the Gulf of California to study the effects of variable oxygen levels and temperatures on demersal fish communities - fish that live on or near the seafloor. They determined that in regions containing very low levels of oxygen (7 μmol/kg of oxygen or less), fish diversity declined dramatically. For comparison, oxygen concentration at the ocean surface is usually between 200 and 300 μmol/kg. This has implications for the future of deep-sea fish communities in the face of climate change.

In the study, published on March 5 in Marine Ecology Progress Series, the researchers conducted surveys in three different regions in the Gulf of California. The gulf's unique seafloor geography provides dramatically different environmental conditions within a relatively short distance. In the north, deep seawater temperatures are relatively warm with high oxygen levels while in the south, the deep sea is colder and extremely oxygen poor.

"It's really rare to find such large differences across such a small spatial scale," said lead author Natalya Gallo, a marine ecologist and postdoctoral research associate at Scripps Oceanography. "This lets us pick apart some of the environmental factors that affect the types of fish communities we see, making this a really great study system."

Researchers used the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Doc Ricketts of MBARI to conduct seafloor video transects in the northern, central, and southern Gulf and found a diversity of fish species across the region. Studying the composition, density, and diversity of demersal fish communities alongside the environmental conditions revealed trends that can help inform our understanding of climate change and better prepare for a sustainable future.

In the study, funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and MBARI, the team examined a number of variables, including oxygen level, temperature, depth, habitat type, food input, and latitude, and their relationships to the characteristics of the demersal fish communities.

"We wanted to use these natural gradients to study how environmental variables correlate with community structure, in an effort to understand climate change risk and vulnerabilities," said Gallo. "We found that once the oxygen concentration crosses a certain threshold (7 umol/kg), we see a very strong negative impact on the diversity of species in an area. We also found that oxygen concentration and temperature interact, with higher temperatures linked to reduced fish densities under low oxygen conditions, and to increasing fish densities under better oxygenated conditions."

"The fact that, when including all of these variables in our model, oxygen and temperature came out as the strongest drivers of community structure, really showcases the importance of these two climate-sensitive environmental variables."

However, Gallo was surprised to find that despite these trends in diversity, the team still saw large numbers of fish under low oxygen conditions. "I thought we'd have regions where we saw basically no fish, due to the low oxygen levels," she said. "It was really remarkable to see high density fish communities in areas with basically no oxygen."

This shows that despite the reduced diversity of species in these low-oxygen zones, some species have adaptations that allow them to survive despite hypoxic conditions.

The research team then coupled the results from the community analyses with future climate model projections for the Gulf of California to determine what long-term trends might be expected in these fish communities.

The results showed that if climate change proceeds as expected under the "business as usual" scenario, within the next 80 years, fish communities in the Northern and Central Gulf are likely to be most impacted due to the combined effects of warming and oxygen loss, and existing oceanographic conditions. This could lead to reductions in the habitats of some fish species, making the communities unstable and vulnerable.

"This work helps us understand how trends in oxygen level and temperature are likely to affect fish communities going forward," said Gallo, whose research was supported by a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship. "We can use these data to understand climate change vulnerability in demersal fish, and similar work in the future will help us better understand the impacts on other kinds of fish species, as well as how and why some fish can survive under such low oxygen conditions."

"This has implications for how we manage deep sea ecosystems as the climate changes," said senior author James Barry, a senior scientist at MBARI. "Right now, we set guidelines for how many fish can be taken by fisheries, based on our understanding of the ecosystem and reproductive rates. But as the ocean is changing, those guidelines might not be sustainable."

"This study, and others like it, tell us what might happen in the future as we drive environmental changes in the ocean," he added. "This allows us to create a framework of understanding so we can make informed decisions about the protection and management of entire ecosystems and the benefits we gain from them."