Brain

China's clean air policies have substantially reduced PM2.5 air pollution in recent years. Yet >99% of Chinese population is still exposed to PM2.5 concentrations in excess of the World Health Organization (WHO) Air Quality Guidelines of 10 μg/m3. Climate actions targeting to reduce fossil fuel consumption also have substantial air quality benefits. The announcement of ambitious climate commitment to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 may fuel the power to long-term air quality improvement in China.

Combining Global/China's climate mitigation pathways (i.e. global 2°C- and 1.5°C-pathways, NDC pledges, and carbon neutrality goals) and local clean air policies, Chinese energy system, anthropogenic emissions and PM2.5 air quality pathways from 2015 to 2060 are assessed. If the government improves the source treatment--promote the renewable energy fraction, push the production peaks of high consumption industries (e.g., iron, steel, cement), accelerate the phasing out of scattered coal; meanwhile continue to promote the in-depth end-of-pipe control in high-polluted industries, diesel-fueled vehicles and engines, and VOC-related industries, China would meet the NDC climate target in 2030, as well as mitigate the national population-weighted PM2.5 concentrations to ~28 μg/m3, achieving the national air quality standards.

However, the benefits of end-of-pipe control reductions are mostly exhausted by 2030, and reducing PM2.5 exposure of the majority of the Chinese population to below 10 μg/m3 by 2060 will likely require more ambitious climate mitigation efforts such as China's carbon neutrality goals and global 1.5°C-pathways. As the solution, by 2060, China will complete the transformation of low-carbon energy, with the dominate role of renewable energy (i.e. the renewable energy power generation would account for more than 70%, the fraction of coal would be less than 15% in industry sector, electricity and hydrogen vehicles would account higher than 60%). Such in-depth energy transition would lower China's carbon emissions by 90%. As a result, the average annual exposure level of PM2.5 will be around 8 μg/m3, lower than the WHO guideline and the air pollution problem has been fundamentally solved.

Cheng et al. proposes practical strategies to address both air pollution and GHGs emissions in the near-term, in which co-control measures focusing on co-emitted sources (i.e. fossil fuel consumption), co-management mechanism on PM2.5 and O3 pollution, and co-development plan on low carbon economy and clean energy transition are prioritized. China's future clean air pathways should transform from end-of-pipe control to energy and economic system optimization. Meanwhile, China should proactively promote the air quality standards to gradually integrate with the relevant WHO standards 10 μg/m3 as a new long-term goal, to accelerate the implementation of carbon neutrality strategy.

An international research group involving the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology of Plants (IBMCP), a joint centre of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), has discovered that a genetic mechanism, called CHLORAD, which is involved in the ageing of plant leaves, also plays a decisive role in the tomato ripening process. Thus, tomatoes with an activated CHLORAD system turn red more quickly, and accumulate more lycopene, a compound beneficial to health. The results, which have been published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Plants, will lead to better quality tomatoes.

The ripening of most fleshy fruits gives them attractive colours and smells, which is a trick of the plant to spread its seeds more widely and colonise new territories. In tomatoes, ripening changes their colour from green to orange and red. The green is due to the presence of chlorophyll (the photosynthesis pigment) in the chloroplasts of the immature fruits. When they ripen, the chloroplasts (the organs in charge of photosynthesis) lose that chlorophyll and produce large quantities of other pigments, called carotenoids.

Tomato carotenoids are orange (due to beta-carotene) and red (due to lycopene), which causes the fruit to change colour when ripe. In addition, these carotenoids form aromas that contribute to the characteristic smell of ripe tomatoes. For all this to happen, the chloroplasts need to be transformed into a new type of carotenoid storage compartment, called a chromoplast.

Until recently, it was not known how the tomato plant controls the transformation of chloroplasts into chromoplasts. Now, a research group from the University of Oxford (UK) in collaboration with the Valencian Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology of Plants (IBMCP) has unravelled part of this mystery, in an article published in the journal Nature Plants.

The key to this work comes from Arabidopsis, a plant used as a study model that does not develop chromoplasts naturally, but does transform its chloroplasts during a process -known as leaf senescence- in which the leaves age, lose their chlorophyll and stop photosynthesising. During this process, a molecular mechanism called CHLORAD removes complexes in the outer layer of chloroplasts that import proteins needed for photosynthesis.

Tomatoes that turn red sooner

Researchers have found that the CHLORAD system also works during tomato ripening. When activated, it prevents the import of photosynthetic proteins, but promotes the incorporation of other proteins necessary for the production and storage of carotenoids during the transformation of chloroplasts into chromoplasts. Thus, fruits with an activated CHLORAD system turn red sooner and accumulate more of the health-promoting carotenoid lycopene, while fruits with a deficient CHLORAD system take longer to ripen.

"In addition to better understanding how chloroplasts are transformed into chromoplasts, we now know that this process not only regulates fruit pigmentation, but also affects many other aspects linked to ripening that influence the firmness or the aroma of tomatoes," says Manuel Rodríguez Concepción, a CSIC researcher at the IBMCP who is participating in this study. The challenge now is to understand the connections between these mechanisms in order to produce tomatoes of a higher commercial and nutritional quality without sacrificing their characteristic colour, aroma and flavour.

Researchers from the University of Surrey have revealed a new method that enables common laboratory scanning electron microscopes to see graphene growing over a microchip surface in real time.

This discovery, published in ACS Applied Nano Materials, could create a path to control the growth of graphene in production factories and lead to the reliable production of graphene layers.

Dispensing with the use of expensive bespoke systems, the new technique not only produces graphene sheets reliably but also allows to use fast-acting catalysts that reduce growth times from several hours to only a few minutes.

With the use of video imagining, the team from Surrey's Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) have shown graphene growing over an iron catalyst, using a silicon nitride membrane produced within a silicon chip. The membrane is only a few tens of nanometres thin, and heating and cooling can be rapidly controlled by means of modulating an electrical signal that is sent to the iron layer. This acts both as a catalyst and as an electrical resistor to supply the heat.

The imaging uses Fermi-level contrast to visualise doping levels of graphene. This contrast mechanism can be used to identify the point of electrical contact between neighbouring graphene flakes. This imaging reveals also that physical contact alone between flakes is not sufficient to form electronic contact, which suggests additional bonding is required before electrons are able to jump from flake to flake.

Professor Ravi Silva, Director of ATI and Head of the Nano-Electronics Centre at the University of Surrey, commented: "Graphene, the wonder material of the 21st century, has had much written about its unique and remarkable properties over the last decade. It will be widely used if it can be handled expertly and placed easily in applications. To do this, there need to be routes of observing graphene and precisely placing it on devices. In the research paper, one such route -- using a standard electron microscope found in most well-resourced laboratories-- is exemplified. We hope this work will encourage many more applications and discoveries of graphene for practical use."

Dr Jose Anguita, Cleanroom Manager at ATI at the University of Surrey, commented: "Being able to see and control the graphene we are producing in real-time edges us a significant step closer to mass commercialisation and production of graphene for electronic devices."

The plant Aristolochia microstoma uses a unique trick: its flowers emit a fetid-musty scent that seems to mimic the smell of decomposing insects. Flies from the genus Megaselia (family Phoridae) likely get attracted to this smell while searching for insect corpses to mate over and lay their eggs in. When they enter a flower, they are imprisoned and first pollinate the female organs, before being covered with pollen by the male organs. The flower then releases them unharmed.

"Here we show that the flowers of A. microstoma emit an unusual mix of volatiles that includes alkylpyrazines, which are otherwise rarely produced by flowering plants. Our results suggest that this is the first known case of a flower that tricks pollinators by smelling like dead and rotting insects rather than vertebrate carrion," says corresponding author Prof Stefan Dötterl, the head of plant ecology group and the Botanical Gardens at the Paris-Lodron University of Salzburg, Austria. The study is published in the open access journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

Between 4-6% of flowering plants use a 'deceptive pollination strategy': they use odor, color, and touch to advertize a reward to pollinators, such as nectar, pollen, or mating and breeding sites, but don't actually give any. The deception works because pollinators are poor at distinguishing between the reward and the mimic. Deceptive pollination is typical of many orchids, but has also independently evolved in other plants, including in the genus Aristolochia (family Aristolochiaceae or birthworths).

"Aristolochia contains over 550 species around the world, especially in the tropics and subtropics. They are mostly woody vines and herbaceous perennials with striking, complex flowers that temporarily imprison their visitors to get pollinated," says Prof Christoph Neinhuis, coauthor of the study, who cultivates one of the largest Aristolochia collections worldwide at TU Dresden Botanical Garden, Germany.

When pollinators enter an Aristolochia flower, they are guided by hairs downwards to a small chamber which holds the sexual organs. Trapped inside, they deposit any pollen they carry onto the female organs, before the stamens ripen and release more pollen. When the hairs that block the entrance to the chamber wither, the pollinators can escape, and a new cycle can begin.

"Many Aristolochia species are known to attract flies with floral scents, for example mimicking the smell of carrion or feces of mammals, decaying plants, or fungi," says first author Thomas Rupp, a PhD student at the Paris-Lodron University of Salzburg. "But our curiosity was piqued by A. microstoma, a species known only from Greece: unlike other Aristolochia with their showy flowers, A. microstoma has inconspicuous brownish flowers that lie horizontally, partly buried or close to the ground among leaf litter or rocks. The flowers release an unpleasant, carrion-like smell, noticeable to people at a short distance."

Rupp and colleagues sampled A. microstoma plants from three sites in Greece: one West of Athens and two on the Peloponnese. From 1457 flowers (of which 72% were in the first, female phase) they collected a total of 248 arthropods, ranging from flies from four families to centipedes and springtails. Only female and male Megaselia flies - M. scalaris and members of the M. angusta/longicostalis cluster of closely related species, as determined through DNA barcoding and from morphology - were found carrying pollen inside its flowers, indicating that they are the normal pollinators.

The authors then used gas chromatography with mass spectrometry (GC/MS) to analyze the flowers' scent 'bouquet'. They found 16 compounds, including strong-smelling nitrogen- and sulfur-bearing volatile molecules. Among the main 'ingredients' were oligosulfides, produced by many plant species whose pollinators are carrion flies or bats: a fetid scent characteristic of decomposing meat. But surprisingly, another was 2,5-dimethylpyrazine (8-47% of total composition), a musty scent typical of cooked rice or roasted peanuts - known in nature to occur in the carapace of decomposing beetles and well as in the urine of rodents. Very few plants are known to produce this compound, strongly suggesting that A. microstoma mimics an unusual fake 'reward' to attract specialist pollinators.

"Earlier studies had suggested that A. microstoma might be pollinated by leaf litter-dwelling insects such as ants, because of the orientation and position of the flowers. But here we show that this isn't correct: instead, the main pollinators are Megaselia 'coffin flies'. As their name suggests, these flies feed on carrion, on which they lay their eggs and which serves as food for the larvae, which is why they are often used as evidence in forensic medicine," says Dötterl.

"We show A. microstoma flowers emit a simple but highly unusual mix of scents that includes 2,5-dimethylpyrazine, a molecule that occurs neither in vertebrate carcasses nor in feces, but does occur in dead beetles. We conclude that A. microstoma likely uses a strategy that has never been reported before: its flowers mimic the smell of invertebrate carrion to attract and imprison pollinators. The peculiar orientation of the flowers close to the ground may also help, as pollinating coffin flies search for breeding sites or food close to the ground, in leaf litter or between rocks," concludes coauthor Prof Stefan Wanke from TU Dresden, Germany.

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Passports are a tangible way of showing where one has traveled, as the stamps provide a chronological order that traces an individual's journey across international borders. When an object's origins are not readily apparent, a variety of sources can be relied upon to learn more, which might include labels, sales receipts, foreign translations, oral histories, GPS coordinates and itemized personal possessions.

That documentation is an example of provenance, or the origins of an object and where it has traveled throughout history. Sarah Buchanan, an assistant professor in the University of Missouri's College of Education, is an archivist, a professional who assesses, collects and preserves various artifacts and archives them to better understand their origin and cultural heritage.

With a three-year grant, Buchanan is investigating ways to conduct provenance research more efficiently, inclusively and transparently, both on MU's campus and abroad. In a recently published study, Buchanan collaborated with Sara Mohr, a doctoral student at Brown University who reads and translates Assyrian, to create an online bibliography and corresponding map of ancient tablets located in universities throughout the United States, including six tablets inside MU's Ellis Library.

The tablets were written in cuneiform, the first writing system ever used by humans. It was first developed by the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia around 3,200 B.C.E in modern-day Iraq. Written on clay tablets, the writing system was used to document things like trade, business and religious activities at ancient temples.

"We identified cuneiform tablets at Brown University that complement the six we have here at Mizzou, and when we look at all of them together, we have a fuller, more compelling story about the societal context of their creation," Buchanan said. "If we only look at ours, it is like reading a page of a book that is half cut out. Their combination shows how powerful digitizing these artifacts can be, as it allows us to analyze two tablets side by side online that are otherwise thousands of miles apart."

The importance of provenance extends well beyond cuneiform tablets. Buchanan's research also includes studying rare books and manuscripts, audio recordings, Native American and indigenous collections, artwork, photos, and videos.

"Provenance shapes the stories that are told about objects and their owners," Buchanan said. "Artifacts and archives are a form of our history. They shed light on our cultural heritage that roots us as humans in where we have been and where we are going."

Museums can use provenance to assess the authenticity of collections on display. In Washington, D.C., officials from the Museum of the Bible accepted donated antiquities, including alleged fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls-- ancient Jewish manuscripts with significant religious ties to the Hebrew Bible and Judaism-- that turned out to be fake.

After suspicions that the fragments were created recently, an investigation by independent researchers, which was funded by the museum itself, confirmed in November 2019 that all of the displayed fragments were modern forgeries.

"Unfortunate situations like this show why provenance research is so important, as there is a real accountability issue when artifacts, photographs or artwork are found to be doctored or forged," Buchanan said. "This work will help give a wider range of artifacts a clearer provenance so that we can be sure when pieces are exhibited in museums, that they truly are what we say they are and can be attributed back to a specific time and place."

Provenance can also help play a role in repatriation, or the return of a valued item to its place of origin. In 2018, Bowling Green State University announced that ancient mosaics housed in the university's Wolfe Center for the Arts purchased in good faith with the belief that they were excavated from ancient Antioch had actually been looted in the 1960s from Zeugma and later sold on the black market.

After years of talks between the university and the Turkish government, the 12 mosaics were returned to Turkey, where they are now on display at the Zeugma Mosaic Museum, the largest mosaic museum in the world.

"As archivists, we are tasked with determining how, where and when these historic objects traveled across land and time," Buchanan said. "Traditionally, institutions tend to display only items that have clear provenance. As we refine our methods of researching provenance, we will be able to narrate a greater number and variety of previously unstudied artifacts and share them with new audiences."

Because America's history is closely intertwined with immigration and the oppression of minority groups, provenance research can help archivists tell more complete stories -- the good, the bad and the ugly -- surrounding artifacts with murky history.

"Provenance can help us confront our history when it comes to topics like war, colonialism and land acknowledgments," Buchanan said. "By uncovering a greater number of artifacts, we can properly tell more stories so that more cultures are represented, particularly the cultures of traditionally marginalized groups like Native Americans."

Through conversations with Native American tribes, Buchanan has learned the power of collaboration and civil discourse in facilitating more inclusive storytelling.

"There is always the potential for repatriation," Buchanan said. "However, we have also learned that several Native American tribes are open to particular artifacts remaining here at Mizzou's Museum of Anthropology, where climate controls and procedures are in place to properly care for the artifacts."

As a professor in the College of Education's School of Information Science & Learning Technologies, Buchanan teaches graduate students in the archival studies emphasis of MU's Master of Library and Information Science program.

In 2018, she supervised graduate students in the program as they inventoried and digitized audio recordings with KOPN, a community radio station in Columbia, Missouri. The recordings cover interviews with political figures such as Angela Davis, and social topics such as the feminist movement in the 1970s. The collection of recordings was recently featured by GBH, the NPR radio affiliate in Boston, and the Library of Congress in March for Women's History Month.

"This grant will help us get tools into the hands of archivists so we can be more responsive to our communities and make our collections meaningful to their work." Buchanan said.

As technology has advanced, the value of provenance in documenting ownership of rare items has transferred to the digital world online. Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, have become increasingly popular and raised more than a few eyebrows in mainstream media. They are digital tokens attached to online items such as videos, photos or artwork that document their authenticity and original ownership, a clear way to show that they have not been altered or faked.

"I am passionate about teaching the next generation of archivists," Buchanan said. "Studying cuneiform in America is just the tip of the iceberg. The more we learn going forward, the better we can tell stories about a wide variety of items' origin in a clear and compelling way."

Editor's note: "A Bibliography of Cuneiform Tablet Editions in United States Colleges and Universities through 2020" was recently published in the Journal of Open Humanities Data. Funding for the study and Buchanan's Early Career Development grant was provided by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The cuneiform tablets located in Ellis Library can be viewed and read further here.

Problems for eigenmodes of a two-layered dielectric microcavity have become widespread thanks to the research of A.I. Nosich, E.I. Smotrova, S.V. Boriskina and others since the beginning of the 21st century. The KFU team first tackled this topic in 2014; undergraduates started working under the guidance of Evgeny Karchevsky, Professor of the Department of Applied Mathematics of the Institute of Computational Mathematics and Information Technology.

In this paper, the researchers discuss a model of a 2D active microcavity with a piercing hole and the possibility of a compromise between high directionality of radiation and low threshold gain. The analysis performed is based on the lasing eigenvalue problem (LEP) formalism. This LEP is a boundary value problem for the system of Maxwell equations with boundary and radiation conditions, adapted to study the threshold modes of open resonators with active regions. In LEP, each eigenvalue is a pair of two real numbers: the emission frequency and the threshold gain in the active region. This combination fits perfectly with the experimental results, which show that each mode has its own defined threshold, and that it is directly related to the field diagram and the location of the active region. When analyzing cavities of complex shape, we use the analytical regularization method in the form of a set of Müller boundary integral equations and reduce LEP to a nonlinear eigenvalue problem for a set of Fredholm integral equations of the second kind. To find a solution, a fast and accurate Galerkin method designed for this task is used. This method makes it possible to study symmetric and asymmetric modes separately, at the threshold of radiation that is not damped in time. The numerical results show that the directionality of the radiation of the operating modes in a given frequency range, together with their threshold gain values, is controlled by the size and location of the air hole in the resonator. In the developed code to study solutions of symmetric and asymmetric modes, the sine and cosine functions in the Galerkin scheme are used instead of exponentials. This makes the code resistant to jumps between mode families when numerically searching for eigenvalues and allows much smaller matrix equations to be used for computations with the order of machine precision. These modifications form the basis of this work. In addition, since the boundaries of the cavity and the hole are circles, this approach allows one to obtain explicit formulas for the matrix elements instead of double integrals. Thanks to all this, the algorithm is extremely fast and accurate. This makes it possible to perform an elementary optimization of the microlaser geometry, which ensures high directionality of the mode radiation while maintaining a low threshold value of the gain in the active region. This code is a promising engineering tool for microring lasers.

Dielectric microcavities have been the objects of intensive research in photonics and nano-optics for over 30 years. Laser radiation arising from the propagation of whispering gallery modes along the circumference of the microdisk resonators is not unidirectional. Due to a change in the structure of the laser (microcavity), it is possible to achieve unidirectional radiation with high directivity and low thresholds of its generation, which, in combination with its small size, the possibility of single-frequency generation and temperature stability, provides a wide range of applications. As an example, the authors can offer a quantum dot microcavity, which can be used to implement optical data transmission inside or between integrated circuits.

This topic can be expanded by considering and analyzing microcavities of complex structures. For example, a microcavity with several piercing holes arranged in a certain order (photonic crystal microcavity), or a microcavity with a quantum dot. Such complications will make it possible to generalize the results or to discover new dependencies.

Skoltech researchers and their colleagues from China and Germany have presented a new search algorithm for single-atom-alloy catalysts (SAACs) that found more than 200 yet unreported candidates. Their work provides a recipe for finding best SAACs for various applications. The paper was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Single-atom-alloy catalysts, or SAACs, where single atoms of rare and expensive metals such as platinum are dispersed on an inert metal host, are highly efficient and selective in numerous catalytic reactions, including selective hydrogenations, dehydrogenations, C?C and C?O coupling reactions, NO reduction, and CO oxidation. That is why they are used in industrially important reactions such as hydrogenation of organic molecules for upgrading chemicals to higher value products.

"The efficiency of SAACs in these reactions is attributed to a synergistic effect of alloy components that provide efficient hydrogen molecule dissociation without excessive binding of hydrogen atoms. However, there are not so many known SAACs that are stable and at the same time catalytically active, mostly because their design so far has largely relied on trial and error. Even within binary alloys there are several thousands of possible SAAC with different metal combinations and surface cuts. This makes the trial and error approaches extremely inefficient," Sergey Levchenko, Assistant Professor at the Skoltech Center for Energy Science and Technology, says.

Levchenko and his colleagues were able to identify accurate and reliable machine-learning models based on first-principles calculations for the description of the hydrogen binding energy, dissociation energy, and guest-atom segregation energy for SAACs. This led them to make a much faster (by a factor of one thousand) yet reliable prediction of the catalytic performance of thousands of SAACs.

"The model correctly evaluates performance of experimentally tested SAACs. By scanning more than five thousand SAACs with our model, we have identified over two hundred new SAACs with both improved stability and performance compared to the existing ones," the authors write.

They used artificial intelligence to extract important parameters (descriptors) from computational data that correlate with the catalytic performance of SAACs and at the same time are very fast to calculate. In addition to practical models, the authors also developed a novel machine-learning methodology for identifying combinations of materials' physical properties that result in outstanding catalytic performance, thus extracting physical knowledge and understanding from data.

"The developed methodology can be easily adapted to designing new functional materials for various applications, including electrocatalysis (oxygen reduction and hydrogen evolution reactions), fuel cells, reforming of methane, and water-gas shift reaction," Levchenko notes.

The continued growth of wireless and cellular data traffic relies heavily on light waves. Microwave photonics is the field of technology that is dedicated to the distribution and processing of electrical information signals using optical means. Compared with traditional solutions based on electronics alone, microwave photonic systems can handle massive amounts of data. Therefore, microwave photonics has become increasingly important as part of 5G cellular networks and beyond. A primary task of microwave photonics is the realization of narrowband filters: the selection of specific data, at specific frequencies, out of immense volumes that are carried over light.

Many microwave photonic systems are built of discrete, separate components and long optical fiber paths. However, the cost, size, power consumption and production volume requirements of advanced networks call for a new generation of microwave photonic systems that are realized on a chip. Integrated microwave photonic filters, particularly in silicon, are highly sought after. There is, however, a fundamental challenge: Narrowband filters require that signals are delayed for comparatively long durations as part of their processing.

"Since the speed of light is so fast," says Prof. Avi Zadok from Bar-Ilan University, Israel, "we run out of chip space before the necessary delays are accommodated. The required delays may reach over 100 nanoseconds. Such delays may appear to be short considering daily experience, however the optical paths that support them are over ten meters long! We cannot possibly fit such long paths as part of a silicon chip. Even if we could somehow fold over that many meters in a certain layout, the extent of optical power losses to go along with it would be prohibitive."

These long delays require a different type of wave, one that travels much more slowly. In a study recently published in the journal Optica, Zadok and his team from the Faculty of Engineering and Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials at Bar-Ilan University, and collaborators from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tower Semiconductors, suggest a solution. They brought together light and ultrasonic waves to realize ultra-narrow filters of microwave signals, in silicon integrated circuits. The concept allows large freedom for filters design.

Bar-Ilan University doctoral student Moshe Katzman explains: "We've learned how to convert the information of interest from the form of light waves to ultrasonic, surface acoustic waves, and then back to optics. The surface acoustic waves travel at a speed that is 100,000 slower. We can accommodate the delays that we need as part of our silicon chip, within less than a millimeter, and with losses that are very reasonable."

Acoustic waves have served for the processing of information for sixty years, however their chip-level integration alongside light waves has proven tricky. Moshe Katzman continues: "Over the last decade we have seen landmark demonstrations of how light and ultrasound waves can be brought together on a chip device, to make up excellent microwave photonic filters. However, the platforms used were more specialized. Part of the appeal of the solution is in its simplicity. The fabrication of devices is based on routine protocols of silicon waveguides. We are not doing anything fancy here." The realized filters are very narrowband: the spectral width of the filters passbands is only 5 MHz.

In order to realize narrowband filters, the information-carrying surface acoustic waves is imprinted upon the output light wave multiple times. Doctoral student Maayan Priel elaborates: "The acoustic signal crosses the light path up to 12 times, depending on choice of layout. Each such event imprints a replica of our signal of interest on the optical wave. Due to the slow acoustic speed, these events are separated by long delays. Their overall summation is what makes the filters work." As part of their research, the team reports complete control over each replica, towards the realization of arbitrary filter responses. Maayan Priel concludes: "The freedom to design the response of the filters is making the most out of the integrated, microwave-photonic platform."

Blocked blood vessels in the brains of stroke patients prevent oxygen-rich blood from getting to cells, causing severe damage. Plants and some microbes produce oxygen through photosynthesis. What if there was a way to make photosynthesis happen in the brains of patients? Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Nano Letters have done just that in cells and in mice, using blue-green algae and special nanoparticles, in a proof-of-concept demonstration.

Strokes result in the deaths of 5 million people worldwide every year, according to the World Health Organization. Millions more survive, but they often experience disabilities, such as difficulties with speech, swallowing or memory. The most common cause is a blood vessel blockage in the brain, and the best way to prevent permanent brain damage from this type of stroke is to dissolve or surgically remove the blockage as soon as possible. However, those options only work within a narrow time window after the stroke happens and can be risky. Blue-green algae, such as Synechococcus elongatus, have been studied previously to treat the lack of oxygen in heart tissue and tumors using photosynthesis. But the visible light needed to trigger the microbes can't penetrate the skull, and although near-infrared light can pass through, it is insufficient to directly power photosynthesis. "Up-conversion" nanoparticles, often used for imaging, can absorb near-infrared photons and emit visible light. So, Lin Wang, Zheng Wang, Guobin Wang and colleagues at Huazhong University of Science and Technology wanted to see if they could develop a new approach that could someday be used for stroke patients by combining these parts -- S. elongatus, nanoparticles and near-infrared light -- in a new "nano-photosynthetic" system.

The researchers paired S. elongatus with neodymium up-conversion nanoparticles that transform tissue-penetrating near-infrared light to a visible wavelength that the microbes can use to photosynthesize. In a cell study, they found that the nano-photosynthesis approach reduced the number of neurons that died after oxygen and glucose deprivation. They then injected the microbes and nanoparticles into mice with blocked cerebral arteries and exposed the mice to near-infrared light. The therapy reduced the number of dying neurons, improved the animals' motor function and even helped new blood vessels to start growing. Although this treatment is still in the animal testing stage, it has promise to advance someday toward human clinical trials, the researchers say.

China's Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO)--one of the country's key national science and technology infrastructure facilities--has found a dozen ultra-high-energy (UHE) cosmic accelerators within the Milky Way. It has also detected photons with energies exceeding 1 peta-electron-volt (quadrillion electron-volts or PeV), including one at 1.4 PeV. The latter is the highest energy photon ever observed.

These findings overturn the traditional understanding of the Milky Way and open up an era of UHE gamma astronomy. These observations will prompt people to rethink the mechanism by which high-energy particles are generated and propagated in the Milky Way, and will encourage people to explore more deeply violent celestial phenomena and their physical processes as well as test basic physical laws under extreme conditions.

These discoveries are published in the journal Nature on May 17. The LHAASO International Collaboration, which is led by the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, completed this study.

The LHAASO Observatory is still under construction. The cosmic accelerators--known as PeVatrons since they accelerate particles to the PeV range--and PeV photons were discovered using the first half of the detection array, which was finished at the end of 2019 and operated for 11 months in 2020.

Photons with energies exceeding 1 PeV were detected in a very active star-forming region in the constellation Cygnus. LHAASO also detected 12 stable gamma ray sources with energies up to about 1 PeV and significances of the photon signals seven standard deviations greater than the surrounding background. These sources are located at positions in our galaxy that can be measured with an accuracy better than 0.3°. They are the brightest Milky Way gamma ray sources in LHAASO's field of view.

Although the accumulated data from the first 11 months of operation only allowed people to observe those sources, all of them emit so-called UHE photons, i.e., gamma rays above 0.1 PeV. The results show that the Milky Way is full of PeVatrons, while the largest accelerator on Earth (LHC at CERN) can only accelerate particles to 0.01 PeV. Scientists have already determined that cosmic ray accelerators in the Milky Way have an energy limit. Until now, the predicted limit was around 0.1 PeV, thus leading to a natural cut-off of the gamma-ray spectrum above that.

But LHAASO's discovery has increased this "limit," since the spectra of most sources are not truncated. These findings launch an era for UHE gamma astronomic observation. They show that non-thermal radiation celestials, such as young massive star clusters, supernova remnants, pulsar wind nebulas and so on--represented by Cygnus star-forming regions and the Crab nebula--are the best candidates for finding UHE cosmic rays in the Milky Way.

Through UHE gamma astronomy, a century-old mystery---the origin of cosmic rays--may soon be solved. LHAASO will prompt scientists to rethink the mechanisms of high energy cosmic ray acceleration and propagation in the Milky Way. It will also allow scientists to explore extreme astrophysical phenomena and their corresponding processes, thus enabling examination of the basic laws of physics under extreme conditions.

Extended Materials:

LHAASO and Its Core Scientific Goals

LHAASO is a major national scientific and technological infrastructure facility focusing on cosmic ray observation and research. It is located 4,410 meters above sea level on Mt. Haizi in Daocheng County, Sichuan Province. When construction is completed in 2021, LHAASO's particle detector arrays will comprise 5,195 electromagnetic particle detectors and 1,188 Muon detectors located in the square-kilometer complex array (KM2A), a 78,000 m2 water Cherenkov detector array (WCDA), and 18 wide-field-of-view Cherenkov telescopes (WFCTA). Using these four detection techniques, LHAASO will be able to measure cosmic rays omnidirectionally with multiple variables simultaneously. The arrays will cover an area of about 1.36 km2.

LHAASO's core scientific goal is to explore the origin of high-energy cosmic rays and study related physics such as the evolution of the universe, the motion and interaction of high-energy astronomical celestials, and the nature of dark matter. LHAASO will extensively survey the universe (especially the Milky Way) for gamma ray sources. It will precisely measure their energy spectra over a broad range--from less than 1 TeV (trillion electron-volts or tera-electron-volts) to more than 1 PeV. It will also measure the components of diffused cosmic rays and their spectra at even higher energies, thus revealing the laws of the generation, acceleration and propagation of cosmic rays, as part of the exploration of new physics frontiers.

PeVatrons and PeV Photons

The signal of UHE photons around PeVatrons is so weak that just one or two photons at PeV energy can be detected using 1 km2 of detectors per year even when focusing on the Crab Nebula, known as the "standard candle for gamma astronomy." What's worse, those one or two photons are submerged in tens of thousands of ordinary cosmic rays. The 1,188 muon detectors in LHAASO's KM2A are designed to select photon-like signals, making LHAASO the most sensitive UHE gamma ray detector in the world. With its unprecedented sensitivity, in just 11 months, the half-sized KM2A detected one photon around 1 PeV from the Crab Nebula. In addition, KM2A found 12 similar sources in the Milky Way, all of which emit UHE photons and extend their spectra continuously into the vicinity of 1 PeV. Even more important, KM2A has detected a photon with energy of 1.4 PeV--the highest ever recorded. It is clear that LHAASO's scientific discoveries represent a milestone in identifying the origin of cosmic rays. To be specific, LHAASO's scientific breakthroughs fall into the following three areas:

1) Revealing the ubiquity of cosmic accelerators capable of accelerating particles to energies exceeding 1 PeV in the Milky Way. All the gamma ray sources that LHAASO has effectively observed radiate photons in the UHE range above 0.1 PeV, indicating that the energy of the parent particles radiating these gamma rays must exceed 1 PeV. As a matter of convention, these sources must have significances of photon signals five standard deviations greater than the surrounding background. The observed energy spectrum of these gamma rays has not truncated above 0.1 peV, demonstrating that there is no acceleration limit below PeV in the galactic accelerators.

This observation violates the prevailing theoretical model. According to current theory, cosmic rays with energies in the PeV range can produce gamma rays of 0.1 PeV by interacting with surrounding gases in the accelerating region. Detecting gamma rays with energies greater than 0.1 PeV is an important way to find and verify PeV cosmic ray sources. Since previous international mainstream detectors work below this energy level, the existence of PeV cosmic ray accelerators had not been solidly confirmed before. But now LHAASO has revealed a large number of PeV cosmic acceleration sources in the Milky Way, all of which are candidates for being UHE cosmic ray generators. This is a crucial step toward determining the origin of cosmic rays.

2) Beginning an era of "UHE gamma astronomy." In 1989, an experimental group at the Whipple Observatory in Arizona successfully discovered the first object emitting gamma radiation above 0.1 TeV, marking the onset of the era of "very-high-energy" gamma astronomy. Over the next 30 years, more than 200 "very-high-energy" gamma ray sources were discovered. However, the first object emitting UHE gamma radiation was not detected until 2019. Surprisingly, by using a partly complete array for less than a year, LHAASO has already boosted the number of UHE gamma ray sources to 12.

With the completion of LHAASO and the continuous accumulation of data, we can anticipate to find an unexplored "UHE universe" full of surprising phenomena. It is well known that background radiation from the Big Bang is so pervasive it can absorb gamma rays with energies greater than 1 PeV. Even if gamma rays were produced beyond the Milky Way, we wouldn't be able to detect them. This makes LHAASO's observational window so special.

3) Photons with energies greater than 1 PeV were first detected from the Cygnus region and the Crab Nebula. The detection of PeV photons is a milestone in gamma astronomy. It fulfills the dream of the gamma astronomy community and has long been a strong driving force in the development of research instruments in the field. In fact, one of the main reasons for the explosion of gamma astronomy in the 1980s was the challenge of the PeV photon limit. The star-forming region in the direction of Cygnus is the brightest area in the northern territory of the Milky Way, with a large number of massive star clusters. Massive stars live only on the order of one million years, so the clusters contain enormous stars in the process of birth and death, with a complex strong shock environment. They are ideal "particle astrophysics laboratories," i.e., places for accelerating cosmic rays.

The first PeV photons found by LHAASO were from the star-forming region of the constellation Cygnus, making this area the best candidate for exploring the origin of UHE cosmic rays. Therefore, much attention has turned to LHAASO and multi-wavelength observation of this region, which could offer a potential breakthrough in solving the "mystery of the century."

Extensive observational studies of the Crab Nebula over the years have made the celestial body almost the only standard gamma ray source with a clear emission mechanism. Indeed, precise spectrum measurements across 22 orders of magnitude clearly reveal the signature of an electron accelerator. However, the UHE spectra measured by LHAASO, especially photons at PeV energy, seriously challenge this "standard model" of high-energy astrophysics and even the more fundamental theory of electron acceleration.

Technology Innovations

LHAASO has developed and/or improved: 1) clock synchronization technology over long distances that ensures timing synchronization accuracy to the sub-nanosecond level for each detector in the array; 2) multiple parallel event trigger algorithms and their realization, with the help of high-speed front-end signal digitization, high-speed data transmission and large on-site computing clusters; and advanced detection technologies include 3) silicon photo multipliers (SiPM) and 4) ultra-large photocathode micro-channel plate photomultiplier tubes (MCP-PMT). They are being employed at LHAASO on a large scale for the first time. They have greatly improved the spatial resolution of photon measurements and lowered the detection energy threshold. These features allow detectors to achieve unprecedented sensitivity in exploring the deep universe at a wide energy range. LHAASO provides an attractive experimental platform for conducting interdisciplinary research in frontier sciences such as atmosphere, high-altitude environment and space weather. It will also serve as a base for international cooperation on high-level scientific research projects.

History of Cosmic Ray Research in China

Cosmic ray research in China has experienced three stages. LHAASO represents the third generation of high-altitude cosmic ray observatories. High-altitude experiments are a means of making full use of the atmosphere as a detector medium. In this way, scientists can observe cosmic rays on the ground, where the size of the detector can be much larger than in a space-borne detector outside the atmosphere. This is the only way to observe cosmic rays at very high energy.

In 1954, China's first cosmic ray laboratory was built on Mt. Luoxue in Dongchuan, Yunnan Province, at 3,180 meters above sea level. In 1989, the Sino-Japanese cosmic ray experiment ASg was built at an altitude of 4,300 meters above sea level at Yangbajing, Tibet Autonomous Region.

In 2006, the joint Sino-Italian ARGO-YBJ experiment was built at the same site.

In 2009, at the Xiangshan Science Forum in Beijing, Professor CAO Zhen proposed to build a large-scale composite detection array (i.e., LHAASO) in a high-altitude area. The LHAASO project was approved in 2015 and construction began in 2017. By April 2019, construction was 25% complete and scientific operation had begun. By January 2020, an additional 25% had been completed and put into operation. In December of the same year, 75% of the facility had been completed. The entire facility will be completed in 2021. LHAASO has already become one of the world's leading UHE gamma detection facilities, and will operate for a long time. With it, scientists will be able to study the origin of cosmic rays from many aspects.

Combining natural salt marsh habitats with conventional dikes may provide a more sustainable and cost-effective alternative for fully engineered flood protection. Researchers of the University of Groningen (UG) and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) studied how salt marsh nature management can be optimized for coastal defence purposes. They found that grazing by both cattle and small herbivores such as geese and hare and artificial mowing can reduce salt marsh erosion, therefore contributing to nature-based coastal defence.

People around the world live in coastal areas that are prone to flooding. Dikes provide traditional flood protection for coastal defence purposes. In addition, salt marshes bordering these traditional barriers may strongly contribute to coastal protection by reducing wave forces on dikes.

Cost-effective

Hence, combining natural salt marsh habitats with conventional dikes may provide a more sustainable and cost-effective alternative for fully engineered flood protection. However, to safeguard this nature-based coastal defence, long-term salt marsh width and stability needs to be assured.

Researchers of the UG and NIOZ, therefore, studied how salt marsh nature management can be optimized for coastal defence purposes. They found that grazing by both cattle and small herbivores such as geese and hare and artificial mowing can reduce salt marsh erosion, therefore contributing to nature-based coastal defence. The results of this study have been published in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

Soil erosion

For this study, 78 soil samples were collected at different sites on the salt marsh of Schiermonnikoog, a barrier island in the Dutch Wadden Sea. At these locations, long-term exclosures were present to exclude grazing by either cows or smaller herbivores such as hare and geese.

Samples from grazed areas were compared with samples from the exclosures and artificially mowed sites. Soil cores were transported to the lab and exposed to artificial waves in controlled tanks. Researchers then measured soil erosion for a total of 38 hours.

Erosion resistance

The main author of the paper, Beatriz Marin-Diaz, explains: 'The sandiest cores eroded most heavily, whereas soils with more clay were more erosion resistant. Cow grazing enhanced this erosion resistance by compacting the soil by trampling. Surprisingly, small herbivores contributed to less erosion by changing the vegetation to plants with high root densities that bind the soil together.' In addition, the researchers found that artificial mowing also contributed to erosion resistance by excluding burying animals from the soil that destabilize the sediment.

Coastal protection

Overall, grazing and artificial mowing can reduce the erosion of fine?grained soils, making salt marshes more resilient to erosion. However, soil compaction by cattle simultaneously lowers the elevation of a marsh. This may impair their ability to keep up with sea-level rise.

Hence, to effectively manage salt marshes for coastal protection, the study recommends moderate or rotational livestock grazing, avoiding high-intensity grazing in sediment?poor systems sensitive to sea?level rise as well as investigating measures to preserve small grazers. This way, salt marshes can be managed effectively to enhance their coastal protection function.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - With pandemic lockdowns still in place last summer, The Ohio State University couldn't host its in-person Summer Success Program to help preschoolers from low-income families prepare for kindergarten.

Staff and teachers quickly pivoted to a fully virtual program, but they were worried: Could this really work with 4- and 5-year-olds who had no previous experience with preschool?

A new study suggested it did.

Researchers found that the reimagined Summer Success at Home program was feasible to operate, was popular with teachers and parents, and had at least modest success in helping the children learn literacy skills, early math skills and emotion understanding.

"The promising evidence is that a virtual problem like this can succeed, despite the challenges," said Rebecca Dore, lead author of the study and senior research associate at Ohio State's Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy.

"We weren't sure at the beginning how well it would work. We never met the families and children in person, and we made everything run remotely."

The study was published online recently in the journal Early Education and Development.

The Schoenbaum Family Center, part of Ohio State's College of Education and Human Ecology, had run the Summer Success Program in person since 2016. It offered four-week sessions for children entering kindergarten in the fall, mostly from low-income families who did not have access to preschool programs.

Previous research had shown that children who participated in these in-person programs made significant gains in their kindergarten readiness skills.

For 2020, the teaching staff and leadership came up with a different type of four-week program. Each of the 91 families enrolled was given storybooks and a computer tablet preloaded with educational videos for parents or caregivers to read and watch with their child.

The program included one or two individualized teacher-child video chats each week and a weekly video or phone meeting between the teacher and parent or caregiver.

Parents were given instructions about how to watch the videos and read the books with their children, including questions to ask them before, during and after reading the books or watching the videos.

The study showed that a virtual program like this was feasible, Dore said. They had no trouble recruiting families to participate and 77% of the families that were recruited finished the program.

One concern was whether 4- and 5-year-olds would be able to participate in video lessons - and the answer was yes.

Teachers rated children's engagement in activities as 2.4 on a scale of 0 to 3 and in 90% of sessions, found the child was engaged for more than half the lesson. In half the sessions, teachers rated the child as being engaged for the whole lesson.

Parents and caregivers gave the program high marks, with average ratings of 4.7 on a 5-point scale.

"The most common comment we got from caregivers was that they wished the program was longer," Dore said.

Children were tested on a variety of measures before and after the program. Results showed there was an upward trend on all the measures, including social-emotional skills, counting, alphabet knowledge and emergent literacy.

Some of the improvements were small, Dore said, and since there was no control group it is not possible to prove the program was responsible for the gains.

"This was a preliminary assessment, and we will need more research," she said.

But the results are especially encouraging because the gains were achieved with much less direct instruction than children would receive during the in-person program, said study co-author Laura Justice, professor of educational studies at Ohio State and executive director of The Crane Center.
"Our results suggest virtual intervention may be successful in promoting kindergarten readiness skills even when children cannot be in preschool or in an in-person summer program," Justice said.

While this program was developed in response to the pandemic, the promising results suggest it may be useful for other circumstances, Dore said.

For example, virtual interventions could be used in rural areas where it is difficult for families to participate in in-person programs or for seriously ill children who are unable to attend in person.

When it comes sharing recipes on social media, what users post, and what they cook may be two entirely different things. That's the conclusion of a recent study from George Mason University's College of Health and Human Services, published in April in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), a leading journal for digital medicine and health research. The study led by Hong Xue, PhD analyzed hundreds of Pinterest Users and Pinterest Influencers, and found users liked and pinned posts that were healthy, featuring more poultry, fish and vegetables, but users more heavily engaged off-line with recipes that were high in fat, sugar, and total calories - indicating that users were more like to actually cook the less healthy recipes.

"It's an interesting discrepancy between what pinners posted/liked and how users actually consumed the information," Xue said. "Pinners are more likely to post recipes that are socially rewarded with likes and repins. They are more likely to adhere to an elite social norm set by celebrities and influencers promoting healthier, low-calorie, clean eating. But when it comes to the recipes users are more interested in making food high in fat, sugar, and high calories. We see a very different picture. They're commenting on and posting finished dish photos of the less healthy recipes."

The disconnect between popularity and engagement is an important one, Xue noted, because users aren't taking the additional step from interest to action. And that could have significant implications for anyone attempting to increase healthy eating behaviors through social media campaigns. Specifically, the study found:

Engagement (commenting, sharing photos of finished dishes) increased as the amount of fat, sugar, total calories increased in a recipe

Popularity (reposting, liking) of a recipe increased as the number of poultry and
seafood went up in a recipe

Comment mining on recipe posts revealed that users were more likely to comment on the way a recipe tasted

Users were far less likely to comment on a recipe's difficulty level (less than 8 percent) or its health attributes (less than 3 percent).

With 18 percent of the adult U.S. population using Pinterest, and recipe sharing being one of its most popular interest areas, the platform represents an unprecedented opportunity to reinforce healthy eating habits, Xue said, if Pinterest influencers posting recipes used some different strategies.

"If users are engaging with more unhealthy recipes, then perhaps influencers should offer options for lowering the fat in them, as part of those recipes. There's definitely a role for healthcare organizations and fitness experts to provide healthier recipes that are big on flavor, as this appears to be an area where users find the recipes lacking. To change perceptions, public health experts need to make healthy food the treat, and not the other way around. There's tremendous opportunities in social media to influence healthy behavior," he said. "We're only beginning to understand it's potential and pitfalls."

Exposure to light is compulsory for photosynthetic organisms for the conversion of inorganic compounds into organic ones. However, if there is too much solar energy, the photosystems and other cell components could be damaged. Thanks to special protective proteins, the overexcitation is converted into heat - in the process called non-photochemical quenching. The object of the published study, OCP, was one of such defenders. It was first isolated in 1981 from representatives of the ancient group of photosynthetic bacteria, ?yanobacteria. OCP comprises two domains forming a cavity, in which a carotenoid pigment is embedded.

"When light is absorbed by the carotenoid molecule, OCP can change from an inactive orange to an active red form. This process is multi-stage and follows a complex hierarchy of events. We showed the asynchrony of these changes in previous work, but the mechanism of the very first stage of OCP activation, associated with the breakage of hydrogen bonds between the carotenoid and the protein, remained unsolved," - says Dr. Eugene Maksimov, Senior Researcher of the Federal Research Centre of Biotechnology of RAS.

Scientists conducted a comprehensive study using methods of structural biology, biochemistry, spectroscopy, and quantum chemistry. Researchers from the Federal Research Centre for Biotechnology, Russian Academy of Sciences, have created a "super orange" version of OCP with unique spectral and structural properties and determined its crystal structure with the highest spatial resolution among all OCP-related proteins.

The analysis of the obtained data revealed that a charge separation reaction could occur along the hydrogen bond between the carotenoid molecule and one of the amino acid residues of the protein as a result of the absorption of a photon in OCP. In darkness, this hydrogen bond stabilizes the orange OCP state, but upon illumination, it breaks quickly due to the redistribution of the electron density in the carotenoid molecule. As a result, the protein becomes a dipole, which leads to a change in its entire structure. This photochemical reaction has been described for carotenoids for the first time.

"Our discovery will allow controlling the process of OCP activation and its spectral properties. Consequently, this can lead to the creation of new light-controlled systems and "smart" biocompatible materials based on photoactive proteins for optogenetics and functional imaging," - says Dr. Nikolai Sluchanko, Leading Researcher of the Federal Research Center of Biotechnology of RAS.

Scientists have proposed the first steps towards a united global plan to save our oceans, for the sake of human health.

An interdisciplinary European collaboration called the Seas Oceans and Public Health In Europe (SOPHIE) Project, led by the University of Exeter and funded by Horizons 2020, has outlined the initial steps that a wide range of organisations could take to work together to protect the largest connected ecosystem on Earth. In a commentary paper published in the American Journal of Public Health the researchers call for the current UN Ocean Decade to act as a meaningful catalyst for global change, reminding us that ocean health is intricately linked to human health.

The paper highlights 35 first steps for action by different groups and individuals, including individual citizens, healthcare workers, private organisations, researchers and policy-makers.

First author Professor Lora Fleming, of the University of Exeter, said: "The devastating COVID-19 pandemic, climate and other environmental change and the perilous state of our seas have made clear that we share a single planet with a single global ocean. Our moral compass points to addressing the myriad threats and potential opportunities we encounter by protecting and providing for everyone, both rich and poor, while learning to sustain all ecosystems."

The researchers point to our huge reliance on our global ocean as a source of food and economic income internationally, as well as a precious resource that research shows benefits our mental and physical health. However, the consequences of the impact of human activity are severe. Extreme weather events induced by climate and other environmental change result in coastal flooding, exposure to harmful algal blooms, and chemical and microbial pollution. These threats are compounded by sea-level rise, ocean warming, acidification, and deoxygenation associated with global environmental change.

At the same time, the coasts, seas and ocean provide us with food, trade, culture, renewable energy, and many other benefits. In fact, there is now strong evidence that access to healthy coasts can improve and preserve our physical health and mental wellbeing. And a healthy ocean is a major source of potential natural products including medicines and green substitutes for plastics.

The paper suggests a list of possible first steps to a wide range of groups who can influence ocean health, emphasising that holistic collaboration is essential to make an impact. For example:

Large businesses can review their impact on ocean health, share best practice and support community initiatives.

Healthcare professionals could consider "blue prescriptions", integrated with individual and community promotion activities

Tourism operators can share research on the benefits of spending time by the coast on wellbeing, and collect and share their customers' experiences of these benefits.

Individual citizens can take part in ocean-based citizen science or beach cleans and encourage school projects on sustainability.

The paper calls on planners, policy-makers and organisations to understand and share research into the links between ocean and human health, and to integrate this knowledge into policy.

Co-author Professor Sheila JJ Heymans, of the European Marine Board, said: "The UN Ocean Decade is a chance to truly transform the way we interact with the global ocean. Given how critical the link is between the health of people and the health of the ocean and how important the ocean is for humans, achieving the aims of the Ocean Decade should not be left to just the ocean community. By working together with communities, policy makers, business and other stakeholders, we add impetus to finding powerful, effective, new ways to foster a step change in public health."