Culture

Russian paleontologists discovered the skull of a Pleistocene small cave bear with artificial damage in the Imanay Cave (Bashkiria, Russia). A bear aged 9-10 years was killed with a spear during hibernation about 35 thousand years ago. If the assumptions of scientists are confirmed, the find will become the world's first direct evidence of a Paleolithic man hunting for a small cave bear. The description of the skull was published in the Vestnik Archeologii, Anthropologii I Ethnographii.

"The hole in the skull could be either natural or artificial," said senior researcher of the laboratories at the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Ural Federal University Dmitry Gimranov. "In the first case, for example, a stone could fall on the bear's head, or water dripped onto the skull during thousands of years. But this is highly unlikely. Most likely the animal was killed by ancient people."

To establish whether the bear was killed or not, scientists have to find out when the hole was made - during life or after the death of the animal. In the second case, the hole can be evidence of a ritual.

"In the Paleolithic, ritual, sacred practices were widespread," said Dmitry Gimranov. "These are handicrafts made of bones, and drawings on the walls of caves not only mammoths' and much more. Therefore, a hole in the skull could have been made after the death of the bear as a ritual practice. The facts of hunting for bears in general at that time are extremely rare. For example, in Europe, many cave bears' bones of were found. But for millions of finds, only 20-30 bones have traces of felling, which means that the meat was removed from the animal for eating. And there is only one fact of the hunt. European researchers have found a stone tip in the vertebra of a bear. There have been no such finds in Russia before. Moreover, all found with traces of human hands belong to large cave bears."

As Gimranov said, hunting for large mammals was essential for life support of ancient humans. However, hunting for small cave bears was not a specialty of the ancient hunters who left traces of their stay in the Imanay cave. At the same time, Paleo human has such strength that he could pierce the bear skull with a spear at close range with relative ease.

Note

The excavations in the Imanay cave, which is located in the Bashkiria National Park, have been carried out by researchers for three years. During this time, paleontologists have collected more than 10 thousand remains of the Late Pleistocene period. Researchers from Yekaterinburg, Moscow, Ufa take part in this study.

Cave bears inhabited the territory of northern Eurasia in the Late Pleistocene (250-10 thousand years ago). These animals were often found in the faunas of Western Europe, the Russian Caucasus, and the Urals. Finds of cave bear bones are common in caves and sometimes form huge clusters. But the caves were inhabited not only by animals but also by ancient man. Therefore, the joint finding of the bones of a cave bear and artifacts is not uncommon. However, the Pleistocene small cave bear is not a very common type of cave bear. For the first time, its remains were found in Great Britain in 1922. Later, the Russian academician Aleksey Borisyak collected and described more voluminous material in Krasnodar (Russia). He named the new species the Russian cave bear. Subsequently, it became known as the "small cave bear". Both in Russia and the West, "traces" of this species are very rare.

Really large finds are associated with excavations in the 1970s - 1980s in the Kizel Cave in the Perm Region (the finds are stored in St. Petersburg). Ural paleontologists were fortunate enough to discover the Imanay cave, where the bones of a small cave bear turned out to be several times larger than in Kizel Cave. Today, Imanay Cave is the largest deposit of the remains of a small cave bear in the world.

Various forms of complex multicellular organisms have evolved on Earth, ranging from simple Volvox carterii which possess only 2 cell- types to us humans with more than 200 cell types. All originate from a single celled zygote, and their developmental processes depend on switch-like gene regulation. These processes have been studied in great detail within a few model organisms such as the worm C. elegans, and the fruit fly D. melanogaster. It is also known that the key molecules and mechanisms that are involved in the development of multicellular organisms are highly conserved across species.

What is also remarkable is that only a handful of molecules and mechanisms that go into the development of a multicellular organism can generate such a huge diversity of forms and complexity. Recently, researchers from the Center for Soft and Living Matter within the Institute for Basic Science investigated how this is possible using a simple mathematical model. Through this work, they sought to answer two seemingly opposite questions: what are the limits of diversity that can be generated through development, and what common features are shared among all multicellular organisms during their development.

Three processes are common to biological development in all multicellular organisms: cell division, cellular signaling, and gene regulation. As such, this study's model generated millions of these rules and explored them in an unbiased way. The mappings generated by the model represent how one cell type converts into another during the lifetime of the organism. Traditionally, previous cell type maps based on single-cell transcriptomics are biased to be tree-like, with stem cells sitting at the root of the tree, and increasingly more specialized cells appearing downstream along the branches of the tree. However, the cell-type maps produced by the new mathematical model were far from tree-like; it was found that there were many cross-links between different branches of the cell types. These resulted in directed acyclic graphs, and tree lineages were found to be the least prevalent. This means that it is possible for multiple developmental routes to converge on the terminal cell type in the maps generated by the model.

Surprisingly, it was also found that many organisms produced by the mathematical model were endowed with the ability to regenerate lost cells, without any selection imposed by the authors. When a single cell type is isolated from the adult organism, single cell could transform into and replenish all the other cell types. This ability to generate all the cells of the body is called pluripotency, and these cells granted the organisms in the model the ability of whole-body regeneration. Interestingly, most tree-type lineages contained few pluripotent cells, in comparison to other graph types.

While mammals, including humans, are especially bad at regenerating damaged parts, many animals such as worms and hydra, are exceptionally good at this ability. In fact, whole-body regeneration occurs widely across the multicellular animal tree of life, and therefore it has been hypothesized that whole-body regeneration could be an epiphenomenon of biological development itself. The fact that pluripotency occurred in this very simplified model suggests that this trait is indeed likely to emerge due to the process of development itself, and no special extra components are required to put it in place.

In addition to these results, it is anticipated that the framework of this model can be used to study many more aspects of development. This generative model is simple and modular, and it can be easily expanded to explore important processes which were not included in the present study, such as the effect of the spatial arrangement of cells and the effect of cell death. The researchers further described some possible real-life experiments to test some of the predictions made by their mathematical model. It is hoped that the framework of this model will prove useful for uncovering new features of development, which may have a wide range of implications in developmental biology and regenerative medicine.

During his time at EPFL under the Erasmus program, Romain van Wassenhove came up with an idea for a connector that could be used to make modular structures out of sustainable bamboo rather than wood, plastic or metal. "I wanted to focus my Master's on a topic that had meaning to me and that would lead to a concrete application," he says. "Working with bamboo was something I already had in mind while I was studying in Brussels." His connectors can be 3D-printed in biosourced plastic and are customizable to the type of material used for the structure.

Van Wassenhove got the idea for his connector during a class at EPFL on composite materials and developed the concept further through his Master's project, co-directed at EPFL by Senior Scientist Anastasios Vassilopoulos and by associate professor Lars De Laet at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). In September 2020, soon after graduating, he obtained research funds - through an EPFL Ignition Grant - to enhance the design and operation of his connector and test it on an initial application involving bamboo structures. Today van Wassenhove's invention is EU patent-protected, and his research has just been published in Composite Structures, a leading journal for composite materials and their applications.

In association with his project, called B'Novus, van Wassenhove has created an online program where users can design stylish, modular bamboo furniture assembled with the help of his connector. The program could be particularly useful to individuals and the organizers of events and temporary exhibitions, for example. After customers create their design and place their order, van Wassenhove generates cutting files for the bamboo sections. He then sends those files, along with the 3D printing plans for the connectors, to a local manufacturer - he uses manufacturers located as close as possible to his customers, so as to minimize the environmental impact.

Many hurdles to overcome

Quite a few hurdles still lie on van Wassenhove's path. First of all, Europe's bamboo industry is in its infancy. "Bamboo is still seen as 'poor man's wood,' associated with patio furniture, exotic vacations and eco-friendly lifestyles," says van Wassenhove. He also points out that Europe lacks the manufacturing know-how to cut bamboo properly. But bamboo has many sustainability advantages over wood, its direct competitor: because bamboo grows so quickly, it's up to four times more productive than trees; it can fixate up to 30% more CO2 than leafy trees; its mechanical properties make it surprisingly solid; and, thanks to van Wassenhove's connectors, it can be used without too much fabrication work required.

The remaining hurdles haven't discouraged the young entrepreneur. "My goal is to bring bamboo to European industry, as part of the transition to a more sustainable economy," he says. He already sees applications for bamboo in construction, such as by using concrete-filled bamboo stems in buildings' structural elements.

Space, the next frontier

In addition to potentially revolutionizing Europe's construction industry, Van Wassenhove's B'Novus connectors may be bound for space. Three Master's students at ENAC are using his parametric design to develop a five-meter-high meteorological tower as part of the Asclepios project, a student-run cross-disciplinary initiative to conduct experiments under the same conditions as on the Moon and Mars. It's modeled after a utility pole and consists of lightweight, composite materials - rather than bamboo - that can be easily assembled.

Scientists from the University of Graz (Austria), Skoltech and their colleagues from the US and Germany have developed a new neural network that can reliably detect coronal holes from space-based observations. This application paves the way for more reliable space weather predictions and provides valuable information for the study of the solar activity cycle. The paper was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Much like our life on Earth depends on the light of the Sun, our electronic "life" depends on the activity of our closest star and its interactions with Earth's magnetic field. For the human eye, the Sun appears almost constant, but the Sun is very active, frequently showing eruptions and causing geomagnetic storms on Earth. For this reason, the outer solar atmosphere, the solar corona, is constantly being monitored by satellite-based telescopes.

In these observations, one of the prominent features are extended dark regions called coronal holes. They appear dark because plasma particles can escape along the magnetic field from the solar surface into interplanetary space, leaving a 'hole' in the corona. The escaping particles form high-speed solar wind streams that can eventually hit Earth, causing geomagnetic storms. The appearance and location of these holes on the Sun varies in dependence of the solar activity, giving us also important information on the long-term evolution of the Sun.

"The detection of coronal holes is a difficult task for conventional algorithms and is also challenging for human observers, because there are also other dark regions in the solar atmosphere, like filaments, that can be easily confused with a coronal hole," says Robert Jarolim, a research scientist at the University of Graz and the lead author of the study.

In their paper, the authors describe a convolutional neural network called CHRONNOS (Coronal Hole RecOgnition Neural Network Over multi-Spectral-data) that they developed to detect coronal holes. "Artificial intelligence allows us to identify coronal holes based on their intensity, shape, and magnetic field properties, which are the same criteria as a human observer takes into account," Jarolim says.

"The solar atmosphere appears very different when observed at different wavelengths. We used images recorded at different extreme ultraviolet (EUV) wavelengths along with magnetic field maps as input to our neural network, which enables the network to find relations in the multi-channel representation," Astrid Veronig, professor at the University of Graz and co-author of the publication, adds.

The authors trained their model with about 1700 images in the 2010-2017 time range and showed that the method is consistent for all solar activity levels. The neural network was evaluated by comparing the results to 261 manually identified coronal holes, matching human labels in 98% of the cases. In addition, the authors examined the detection of coronal holes based on magnetic field maps, that appear vastly different than EUV observations. For a human, the coronal holes cannot be identified from these images alone, but the AI learned to perceive the images differently and was able to identify coronal holes.

"This is a promising result for future ground-based coronal hole detection, where we cannot directly observe coronal holes as dark regions as in space-based extreme ultraviolet and soft X-ray observations, but where the solar magnetic field is measured on a regular basis," says Tatiana Podladchikova, assistant professor at the Skoltech Space Center and a co-author of the paper.

"And whatever storms may rage, we wish everyone a good weather in space", concluded Podladchikova.

What's as long a basketball court, taller than a b-double and has just stomped into the record books as Australia's largest dinosaur? It's time to meet Australotitan cooperensis - a new species of giant sauropod dinosaur from Eromanga, southwest Queensland.

Australotitan, "the southern titan", has been scientifically described and named by Queensland Museum and Eromanga Natural History Museum palaeontologists.

It is estimated to have reached a height of 5-6.5 metres at the hip and 25- 30 metres in length and sits within the top 10-15 largest dinosaurs world-wide, representing Australia's entry into the largest species to have ever walked the Earth.

The fossilised skeleton was originally nicknamed 'Cooper' after Cooper Creek, when first discovered in 2007 by the Eromanga Natural History Museum. It now represents the largest species of dinosaur ever found in Australia.

The scientific publication marks a seventeen-year long culmination of the joint effort between Queensland Museum and Eromanga Natural History Museum palaeontologists, fossil preparators, geologists, and countless volunteers.

"Australotitan adds to the growing list of uniquely Australian dinosaur species discovered in Outback Queensland, and just as importantly showcases a totally new area for dinosaur discovery in Australia," Dr Hocknull said.

"To make sure Australotitan was a different species, we needed to compare its bones to the bones of other species from Queensland and globally. This was a very long and painstaking task."

Dinosaur bones are enormous, heavy and fragile, and are kept in museums 100s-1000s of kilometres apart, making scientific study very difficult. For the first time, the team used new digital technology to 3-D scan each bone of Australotitan and compare them to the bones of its closest relatives. These scans will form part of the museum's digital collection that is powered by Project DIG, a partnership between Queensland Museum Network and BHP.

"The 3-D scans we created allowed me to carry around 1000s of kilos dinosaur bones in a 7kg laptop. Better yet, we can now share these scans and knowledge online with the world," Dr Hocknull said.

The study found that Australotitan was closely related to three other Australian sauropods that lived during the Cretaceous Period (92-96 million years ago).

"We compared the three species found to the north, near Winton, to our new Eromanga giant and it looks like Australia's largest dinosaurs were all part of one big happy family.

"We found that Australotitan was the largest in the family, followed by Wintonotitan with big hips and long legs, whilst the two smaller sauropods, Diamantinasaurus and Savannasaurus were shorter in stature and heavily-set." Dr Hocknull said along with the description of Australotitan, the study has also revealed a swathe of new discoveries in the area awaiting full scientific study.

"Over the last 17-years numerous dinosaur, skeletons have been found, including one with an almost complete tail. The discovery of a rock-shelf, almost 100 metres long, represents a sauropod pathway, where the dinosaurs walked along trampling mud and bones into the soft ground," Dr Hocknull said.
"Discoveries like this are just the tip of the iceberg. Our ultimate goal is to find the evidence that tells the changing story of Queensland, hundreds of millions of years in the making. A grand story all scientists, museums and tourists can get behind."

Minister for Arts Leeanne Enoch said the exciting new discovery helps to cement Queensland as Australia's dinosaur capital.

"Discoveries like Australotitan tell the story of a time when dinosaurs roamed Queensland," Minister Enoch said.

"Queensland Museum experts have been on the ground, sharing their knowledge with regional museums and helping to preserve and better understand the diverse paleontological hi story of our state.

"These unique outback discoveries are supporting Queensland as we deliver our economic recovery plan creating local jobs in regional and cultural tourism."
Robyn Mackenzie, General Manager of Eromanga Natural History Museum said it's an exciting culmination of a major amount of work.

"Finding Cooper has changed the course of our lives and led to the establishment of the Eromanga Natural History Museum," Ms Mackenzie said.

"Working with Queensland Museum to formally describe Cooper has helped put our little town of Eromanga in Quilpie Shire South West Qld on the map. Australotitan is just the start, we have many more discoveries awaiting full scientific study.

"It's amazing to think from the first bones discovered by our son, the first digs with the Queensland Museum, through to the development of a not-for-profit museum that runs annual dinosaur digs, all have helped us to get to this point, it's a real privilege."

Queensland Museum Network CEO Dr Jim Thompson said this represented the first dinosaur discovery in this corner of south-west Queensland.

"In the early 2000s Australia was at the beginning of a dinosaur-rush,with a number of significant new species of dinosaurs and megafauna being discovered in the past 20 years. Australia is one of the last frontiers for dinosaur discovery and Queensland is quickly cementing itself as the palaeo- capital of the nation - there is still plenty more to discover," Dr Thompson said.

"I am proud that Queensland Museum palaeontologists have been part of many of these amazing discoveries and are leaders in their fields."

The new paper was published recently in PeerJ - the Journal of Life and Environmental Sciences

An international team of scientists led from the Centre for Astrobiology (CAB, CSIC-INTA), with participation from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has used the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) to study a representative sample of galaxies, both disc and spheroidal, in a deep sky zone in the constellation of the Great Bear to characterize the properties of the stellar populations of galactic bulges. The researchers have been able to determine the mode of formation and development of these galactic structures. The results of this study were recently published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The researchers focused their study on massive disc and spheroidal galaxies, using imaging data from the Hubble Space Telescope and spectroscopic data from the SHARDS (Survey for High-z Absorption Red and Dead Sources) project, a programme of observations over the complete GOODS-N (Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey - North) region through 25 different filters taken with the OSIRIS instrument on the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), the largest optical and infrared telescope in the world, at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma, Canary Islands).

Analysis of the data allowed the researchers to discover something unexpected: the bulges of the disc galaxies were formed in two waves. One third of the bulges in disc galaxies were formed at redshift 6.2, which corresponds to an early epoch in the Universe, when it was only 5% of its present age, around 900 million years old. "These bulges are the relics of the first structures formed in the Universe, which we have found hidden in local disc galaxies", explains Luca Costantin, a researcher at the CAB within a programme of Attracting Talent of the Community of Madrid, and the first author on the paper.

But in contrast, almost two thirds of the bulges observed show a mean value of redshift of around 1.3, which means that they were formed much more recently, corresponding to an age of four thousand million years, or almost 35% of the age of the Universe.

A peculiar characteristic which permits the distinction between the two waves is that the central bulges of the first wave, the older bulges, are more compact and dense than those formed in the second, more recent wave. In addition, the data from the spheroidal galaxies in the sample show a mean redshift value of 1.1, which suggests that they formed in the same general time as the bulges of the second wave.

For Jairo Méndez Abreu, a researcher at the University of Granada (UGR) and a co-author of the article, who was formerly a Severo Ochoa postdoctoral researcher at the IAC, "the idea behind the technique used to observe the stars in the central bulge is fairly simple, but it has not been possible to apply it until the recent development of methods which have allowed us to separate the light from the stars in the central bulge from those in the disc, to be specific the GASP2D and C2D algorithms, which we have developed recently and which have enabled us to achieve unprecedented accuracy".

Another important result of the study is that the two waves of bulge formation differ not only in terms of the ages of their stars, but also in terms of their star formation rates. The data indicate that the stars in the bulges of the first wave formed quickly, on timescales of typically 200 million year. On the contrary, a significant fraction of the stars in the bulges of the second wave required formation times five times longer, some thousand million years.

"We have found that the Universe has two ways of forming the central zones of galaxies like our own: starting early and performing very quickly, or taking time to start, but finally forming a large number of stars in what we know as the bulge", comments Pablo G. Pérez González, a researcher at the CAB, and Principal Investigator of the SHARDS project, which gave essential data for this study. In the words of Antonio Cabrera, the Head of Science Operations at the GTC, "SHARDS is a perfect example of what is possible due to the combination of the huge collecting capacity of the GTC and the extraordinary conditions at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, to produce 180 hours of data with such excellent image quality, essential for the detection of the objects analysed here".

As described by Paola Dimauro, a researcher at the National Observatory of Brazil and a co-author of this article, "this study has allowed us to explore the morphological evolution and the history of the assembly of the structural components of the galaxies, analagous to archaeological studies, analysing the information encoded in the millions of stars of each galaxy. The interesting point was to find that not all the structures were formed at the same time, or in the same way".

The results of this study have allowed the observers to establish a curious parallel between the formation and the evolution through time of the disc galaxies studies and the creation and development of a large city during the centuries. Just as we find that some large cities have historic centres, which are older and house the oldest buildings in cluttered narrow streets, the results of this work suggest that some of the centres of massive disc galaxies harbour some of the oldest spheroids formed in the Universe, which have continued to acquire material, forming discs more slowly, the new city outskirts in our analogy.

Ancient chickens lived significantly longer than their modern equivalents because they were seen as sacred - not food - archaeologists have found.

Experts have developed the first reliable method of finding the age of fowl who lived thousands of years ago. Their research shows they lived to advanced ages, and were kept for ritual sacrifice or cockfighting rather than meat or egg production.

Chickens today live for a few weeks (in the UK poultry birds live for between 33 and 81 days), but during the Iron Age, Roman and Saxon period they lived up to the age of two, three or even four years old.

Calculating the age of bird remains is hard because techniques used for mammals, such as bone fusion and tooth wear, are not available. Researchers have devised a new method based on size of the tarsometatarsal spur which develops on the leg of adult cockerels.

The new method was tested on modern birds of known-age and then applied to ancient specimens. This has allowed the experts to reconstruct the demographics of domestic fowl from Iron Age to Early Modern sites in Britain to reveal changes in relationships between humans and fowl.

Of the 123 Iron Age, Roman and Saxon bones analysed, over 50 per cent were of chickens aged over two years, and around 25 per cent over three years.

Dr Sean Doherty, from the University of Exeter, who led the study, said: "Domestic fowl were introduced in the Iron Age and likely held a special status, where they were viewed as sacred rather than as food. Most chicken bones show no evidence for butchery, and were buried as complete skeletons rather than with other food waste"

"The study confirms the special status of these rare and highly prized birds, showing that from the Iron Age to Saxon period they were surviving well past sexual maturity. Most lived beyond a year, with many reaching the age of two, three and four years old. The age of which cockerels then started to die at becomes younger after this period."

Experts carried out analysis on modern leg bones from domestic fowl and red jungle fowl of known age and sex from multiple collections. This revealed that the bony spur only develops in older birds.

Of the 69 cockerels aged below 1 year, only 14 (20 per cent) had developed a spur. The only age in which all cockerels had a spur was those aged over 6 years. Consequently, there is the potential for archaeologists to misidentify young cockerels without a spur as hens.

Once fully developed, the spur increases in size and its length in relation to the length of the leg can be used to estimate age.

The researchers also took measurements from 1,368 domestic fowl leg bones from British sites dating from the Iron Age to modern period to reconstruct the age when they had died and their sex. This suggested during the Iron Age and Roman period there were significantly more cockerels than hens, likely due to the popularity of cockfighting in this period.

On Friday, 11 June, Europe's men's football teams will start the European Championship a year later than planned. The favourite this time is France with a probability of winning of 14.8 per cent. This is what an international team of researchers consisting of Andreas Groll and Franziska Popp (both TU Dortmund, Germany), Gunther Schauberger (TU Munich, Germany), Christophe Ley and Hans Van Eetvelde (both Ghent University, Belgium), Achim Zeileis (University of Innsbruck, Austria) and Lars Hvattum (Molde University College, Norway) has shown with the help of machine learning. Their forecast combines several statistical models for the teams' strengths with information about the team structure (such as market value, number of Champions League players, club match performance of individual players) as well as socio-economic factors of the country of origin (population and gross domestic product).

100,000 simulations

With the predicted values from the researchers' model, the entire European Championship was simulated 100,000 times: match by match, following the tournament draw and all UEFA rules. This results in probabilities of all teams advancing to the different tournament rounds and ultimately winning the European Championship. The favourite this time is France with a probability of winning of 14.8 per cent, followed by England (13.5) and Spain (12.3). Of course, the tournament is not over - this is also shown by the relatively narrow gaps in the win probabilities at the top, plus of course the already low probability even of the top nations. "It is in the nature of forecasts that they can also be wrong - otherwise football tournaments would be very boring. We provide probabilities, not certainties, and a probability of winning of 15 per cent also means a probability of 85 per cent of the team not winning the tournament," says Achim Zeileis. So far, however, the predictions have been quite successful: Achim Zeileis' Innsbruck model, which is based on adjusted odds from the betting providers, was able to correctly predict the EURO final in 2008, as well as the World and European Champions Spain in 2010 and 2012, among others. This year, it will be used as part of a more comprehensive combined model developed by the teams led by Andreas Groll (TU Dortmund), Gunther Schauberger (TU Munich) and Christophe Ley (Ghent University), which surpassed the forecasting quality of the betting providers at the 2018 World Cup.

Germany in the tournament

It is no secret that the German national team has been drawn into a particularly challenging group this year: "There are three very strong teams in Group F, including the current world champion France and the European Champion Portugal, both also finalists at EURO 2016, plus Germany," explains Andreas Groll: "Compared to the top teams in the other groups, the probability of making it to knockout stage is lower in this group. But those who do make it have a very good chance of advancing further." The forecast sees a probability of 85.3 per cent for both Germany and Portugal to make it to the round of 16; for France, the probability is slightly higher at 89.7 per cent. Germany's probability of becoming European Champion is 10.1 per cent, well below that of the favourites and exactly on a par with Portugal.

Machine learning

The researchers' calculation is based on four sources of information: A statistical model for the strength of each team based on all international matches of the past eight years (Ghent University), another statistical model for the strength of the teams based on the betting odds of 19 international bookmakers (University of Innsbruck), further information about the teams, for example market value, and their countries of origin, such as population size (TU Dortmund and TU Munich), as well as detailed ratings of the individual players and their individual performances both in their home clubs and national teams (Molde University College). The fifth source or "partner" is a machine learning model that combines the other four sources and optimises them step by step. The researchers trained the model on historical data, as Andreas Groll explains: "We fed the model with the current data for the past four European Championships, i.e., between 2004 and 2016, and compared it with the actual outcomes of all matches in the respective tournaments - so the weighting of the individual sources of information for the current tournament will ideally be very precise." In any case, we will find out how well the model performed by the evening of 11 July at the latest.

UPTON, NY--What happens when very short pulses of laser light strike a magnetic material? A large international collaboration led by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory set out to answer this very question. As they just reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the laser suppressed magnetic order across the entire material for several picoseconds, or trillionths of a second. Understanding how magnetic correlations change on ultrafast timescales is the first step in being able to control magnetism in application-oriented ways. For example, with such control, we may be able to more quickly write data to memory devices or enhance superconductivity (the phenomenon in which a material conducts electricity without energy loss), which often competes with other states like magnetism.

The material studied was strontium iridium oxide (Sr3Ir2O7), an antiferromagnet with a bilayer crystal structure and a large magnetic anisotropy. In an antiferromagnet, the magnetic moments, or electron spins, align in opposite directions to neighboring spins. Anisotropy means the spins need to pay an energetic cost to rotate in any random direction; they really want to sit pointing upwards or downwards in the crystal structure. The X-ray Scattering Group of Brookhaven Lab's Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science (CMPMS) Division has previously studied this material (and a single-layer sister compound, Sr2IrO4), so they entered this study with a good understanding of its equilibrium state.

"The very short laser pulses disturb the system, destroying its magnetic order," said first author Daniel Mazzone, former group member and now an instrument scientist at the Continuous Angle Multiple Energy Analysis (CAMEA) spectrometer at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. "In this study, we were interested in seeing how the system relaxes back to its normal state. We knew the relaxation occurs on a very fast timescale, and to take a picture of something that moves very fast, we need very short pulses of illumination. With an x-ray free-electron laser source, we can generate pulses short enough to see the movement of atoms and molecules. Such sources only exist at five places around the world--in the United States, Japan, Korea, Germany, and Switzerland."

In this study, the team ran experiments at two of the five facilities. At the SPring-8 Angstrom Compact free-electron Laser (SACLA) in Japan, they conducted time-resolved resonant elastic x-ray scattering (tr-REXS). At the x-ray pump-probe instrument of the Linac Coherent Light Source--a DOE Office of Science User Facility at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory--the scientists performed time-resolved resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (tr-RIXS). In both scattering techniques, x-rays (probe) strike the material almost immediately after the laser pulse (pump). By measuring the energy and angle of scattered particles of light (photons), scientists can determine the material's electronic structure and thus magnetic configuration. In this case, the x-ray energy was tuned to be sensitive to the electrons around iridium atoms, which drive magnetism in this material. While tr-REXS can reveal the degree of long-range magnetic order, tr-RIXS can provide a picture of local magnetic interactions.

"In order to observe the detailed behavior of spins, we need to measure the energy change of the x-rays with very high precision," explained co-corresponding author Mark Dean, a physicist in the CMPMS Division X-ray Scattering Group. "To do so, we built and installed a motorized x-ray spectrometer at SLAC."

Their data revealed how magnetic interactions are suppressed not just locally but everywhere. This suppression persists for picoseconds before the magnetic order returns to its initial antiferromagnetic state.

"The bilayer system does not have energetically low-cost ways to deform the magnetic state," explained Dean. "It gets stuck in this bottleneck where the magnetism is out of equilibrium and is not recovering, at least not as quickly as in the monolayer system."

"For most applications, such as data storage, you want fast magnetic switching," added Mazzone. "Our research suggests systems where spins can point whichever direction are better for manipulating magnetism."

Next, the team plans to look at related materials and hopes to manipulate magnetism in more targeted ways--for example, changing how strongly two neighboring spins "talk to" each other.

"If we can change the distance between two spins and see how that affects their interaction, that would be really cool," said Mazzone. "With an understanding of how magnetism evolves, we could tweak it, maybe generating new states."

The ability of stem cells to fix impaired functions of host tissues after transplantation has been a lifesaving breakthrough in treating previously incurable conditions. Much like a coin toss, however, the fate of the transplanted stem cells is unpredictable. They may choose self-renewal, grow into a different kind of tissue, or die.

Spermatogonial stem cells follow the same stochastic fate of unpredictability in outcomes. But a group of fertility scientists led by Hiroshima University's Yoshiaki Nakamura discovered a new method that has favorably flipped the odds and successfully reversed male infertility in mice -- showing great promise for future applications in regenerating human sperm after cancer treatment and repopulating threatened and endangered species. Results of their study are published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

"Transplantation of spermatogonial stem cells promises a wealth of applications such as the treatment of infertility in men and the preservation of genetic diversity. Yet, currently, its inefficiency rules out the practical application of this technology," Nakamura, assistant professor at the HU Graduate School of Integrated Sciences for Life, said.

"Our knowledge about the fate behavior of individual spermatogonial stem cells and their progenies following transplantation remains poorly developed, limiting the potential to develop new strategies to increase the currently low transplantation efficiencies," he added.

Taking an up-close look at single-cell resolution, the international team of Japanese and British scientists tracked the fate of transplanted spermatogonial stem cells in mice. They implanted normal mouse sperm stem cells in infertile mice and found that only a tiny fraction repopulates in the long-term as working spermatogonia and the rest change into a different type of cell -- a process called differentiation -- or cease to carry out its function and die.

Using these insights, they developed a new method that can artificially tune the fate of the sperm stem cells to increase the likelihood of repopulation to a level where fertility is restored. They briefly introduced a retinoic acid synthesis inhibitor after transplantation, which temporarily prevented the donor sperm stem cells from undergoing differentiation. The chemical inhibitor helped orchestrate an outcome where the stem cells choose a fate of self-renewal.

"We demonstrated that repopulation efficiency of transplanted spermatogonial stem cells increased by tuning their stochastic fate," Nakamura said, adding that the next step for their research is to confirm if their new strategy will also work for livestock and eventually humans.

"My final objective is to apply spermatogonial stem cell transplantation for the fertility of male individuals with cancer after chemotherapy or the preservation of genetic diversity in farm animals and rare or endangered wild animals," he said.

Normally, the ACE2 enzyme helps regulate our blood pressure. The enzyme sits on the surface of cells, including cells in the lungs, but in connection with COVID-19 it has been found that ACE2 also functions as a gateway for the virus.

"Different viruses have different ways of accessing our cells - as the virus must, of course, get into the cell to be able to replicate, and the coronavirus uses ACE2 to gain access. For this reason, we're investigating what the concentration of ACE2 means for the course of the disease, if you get COVID-19," explains MD and PhD Tue Wenzel Kragstrup from the Department of Biomedicine at Aarhus University. The preliminary results have just been published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

As mentioned, ACE2 is part of the surface of the cells, but ACE2 can also be chopped off and found in the blood, and measurements show that we have widely varying concentrations in our blood.

With the help of comprehensive data from patients treated at Massachusetts General Hospital, Tue Wenzel Kragstrup and his colleagues attempt to uncover whether the concentration of ACE2 can perhaps be used as a biomarker to predict the risk of dying as a result of COVID-19.

"This is the pivotal question," says Tue Wenzel Kragstrup, although he also acknowledges that it cannot yet be answered, among other things, because we currently lack an easily accessible and applicable test for ACE2.

However, this is not the case for another enzyme, ACE1. Here, there is a standard and routinely used test for when doctors e.g. need to diagnose the pulmonary disease sarcoidosis.

"We know that there is a correlation between ACE1 and ACE2," says Tue Wenzel Kragstrup. "If our findings can be recreated by measuring ACE1, this can be used in the clinical work right away."

Tue Wenzel Kragstrup's normal area of research is biomarkers and rheumatological diseases, but when everything closed down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he felt obliged to use his knowledge of biomarkers in particular and, in this way, join the fight against the new disease.

"I discovered that Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, USA, had published a huge amount of data and analyses on their website of 306 patients with COVID-19, together with data and analyses from 78 patients who had tested negative for COVID-19. The information is encrypted so that it's not possible to identify individuals, but the cohort of patients were followed for 28 days, so you can see what happened to them," says Tue Wenzel Kragstrup, who is fascinated by the international collaboration in the fight against COVID-19.

He retrieved the dataset in the form of a "really huge spreadsheet" and then, with the help of biostatisticians and other experts, began analysing the vast amount of data - and it was here that he became aware of the important role ACE2 appears to play.

"We're familiar with a heightened concentration of ACE2 in connection with cardiovascular diseases, but the concentration is not, for example, higher in connection with diabetes, which we can also see in our study. But we now hope that ACE2 can help explain excess mortality from COVID-19," says Tue Wenzel Kragstrup.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Puerto Rico is not ready for another hurricane season, let alone the effects of climate change, according to a new study that shows the island's outstanding capacity to produce record-breaking floods and trigger a large number of landslides.

The latest research, appearing in the journal Hydrology, builds on three prior studies led by hydrologist Carlos Ramos-Scharrón at The University of Texas at Austin, whose team began investigating the devastating impact of tropical cyclones on the island after Hurricane Maria in 2017.

The first compared the 2017 hurricane as a rainstorm event to more than a century of cyclones that came before it, finding that Maria produced the highest island-wide daily rainfall amount ever recorded (similar to Hurricane Harvey's impact on Houston). The second found that Maria's rainfall triggered one of the highest number of rainfall-induced landslides ever reported worldwide in similarly sized areas. And the third identified landslides as the main source of the sediment infilling the already limited water storage capacity of the island's main reservoirs.

"We need to stop talking about climate change in future tense. It's already here," said Ramos-Scharrón, associate professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. "Climate change projections for the Caribbean suggest longer dry periods interrupted by more intense storms. These storms release large quantities of sediment by landslides, and many of those end up reducing the island's capacity to store water. The combined effect of these climate change projections is for a higher propensity for water scarcity."

The latest paper, which focused on streamflow levels, draws attention to another glaring issue -- Puerto Rico is not prepared to handle the severe flooding sure to come its way. Flood management and the design of vital infrastructure, such as bridges, largely rely on a calculation of the likelihood that an event of a given magnitude is going to occur. For a particular region, that calculation depends on the history of flooding.

In Puerto Rico, the most current method to make such calculations relies on data collected only up to 1994. Since then, Hurricanes Hortense (1996), Georges (1998) and Maria surpassed both 100-year and 500-year flood marks across the island, with Maria surpassing 500-year levels in five locations.

Five other tropical storms matched or surpassed 100- and 500-year levels in some specific locations, particularly near the central-eastern end of Puerto Rico, which is most vulnerable due to the westward trajectory of most tropical cyclones and the island's hilly topography.

"Events with these 100- and 500-year metrics just cannot be that common," Ramos-Scharrón said. "If this is not what climate change is supposed to be, then I do not know what it is. It can creep up on you. Puerto Rico needs to adapt its planning tools to the reality of what the island has experienced and scientists are documenting."

A study examining gender bias and family-owned businesses found daughters were rarely encouraged nor received support to pursue entrepreneurship education while sons mostly did.

Professors James Combs, Peter Jaskiewicz, and Sabine Raul from the Telfer School of Management uncovered new insights about how gender bias - the preference of a gender over the other - affects the succession strategy in multi-generational family firms. Their findings are published in the Journal of Small Business Management.

When nurturing the next generation, entrepreneurial families often prepare their daughters and sons differently for their careers. The researchers noticed a common pattern in the stories shared by the next generation: Sons are often nurtured to become entrepreneurial, whether they are expected to take over the firm one day or to start a venture elsewhere. Daughters, however, receive little to no incentive to develop the leadership skills and entrepreneurial passion required to contribute to the family firm or start their own business.

In conversations with 26 children who were raised in 13 multi-generational family firms - some being centuries old - but not expected to work in the firm, the researchers found that:

Seven of the nine sons (78%), pursued entrepreneurial careers;

Only one among the 15 daughters (7%) gained an entrepreneurial education and engaged in entrepreneurship (7%);

Women were not encouraged to pursue entrepreneurship education, gain business experience, start a new venture;

Men rather than women received financial resources from the family to start their own business

"Even when these female non-successors have opportunities to acquire relevant knowledge and work to start a business, becoming entrepreneurial was still a challenging uphill battle," says Jaskiewicz, who believes the data reveals women do not pursue entrepreneurship outside of the family because they lacked sufficient emotional and financial support from the family.

It's hard to see more than a handful of stars from Princeton University, because the lights from New York City, Princeton and Philadelphia prevent our sky from ever getting pitch black, but stargazers who get into more rural areas can see hundreds of naked-eye stars -- and a few smudgy objects, too.

The biggest smudge is the Milky Way itself, the billions of stars that make up our spiral galaxy, which we see edge-on. The smaller smudges don't mean that you need glasses, but that you're seeing tightly packed groups of stars. One of the best-known of these "clouds" or "clusters" -- groups of stars that travel together -- is the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters. Clusters are stellar nurseries where thousands of stars are born from clouds of gas and dust and then disperse across the Milky Way.

For centuries, scientists have speculated about whether these clusters always form tight clumps like the Pleiades, spread over only a few dozen lightyears.

"We call them 'open clusters' -- the 'open' part refers to the expectation that these things formed in a much denser group that then dispersed," said Luke Bouma, a graduate student in astrophysical sciences at Princeton and the lead author on an upcoming paper published by the American Astronomical Society. "But we never thought we'd be able to find the stars that were lost."

Then, two years ago, a machine-learning algorithm using data from the Gaia satellite identified that many far-flung stars are moving at the same speed and direction and could therefore be part of the same open cluster -- but as more of a stream or a string than a clump.

Now, a team of astrophysicists led by Bouma can confirm that one of these streams of stars, NGC 2516, also known as the Southern Beehive, extends at least 1,600 light-years -- 500 parsecs -- from tip to tip. To an Earth-based stargazer, that would look as big as 40 full moons, side by side, stretching across the sky.

"Gaia data let us trace the process of star cluster formation and dissolution in unprecedented detail -- but to complete the picture, we need independently estimated ages," said Lynne Hillenbrand, a 1989 Princeton alumna and a professor of astronomy at Caltech, who was not involved in this research. "Bouma's paper brings together several different methods to consistently age-date stars at both the core and the outer reaches of this cluster."

"In retrospect, the existence of this large stellar stream is not too surprising," said Bouma, who recently won the prestigious 51 Pegasus b Fellowship. One interpretation could be that a cluster starts as a tight clump that expands through time to form "tidal tails" stretching in front of it and behind it, as it moves through the Milky Way.

"The broader implication is that there are bound to be other enormous open clusters like this," he said. "The visible part of the cluster, where we can easily see the stars close together, may be only a small part of a much, much larger stream."

"I have seen the Southern Beehive many times through a pair of binoculars under the dark skies of Chile," said Gáspár Bakos, a professor of astrophysical sciences and the director of Princeton's program in planets and life, who was a co-author on the paper. "The cluster nicely fits the view of the binoculars, because its apparent size in the sky is something like the tip of my thumb at arm's length. It is curious to know, thanks to Luke's research, that the cluster actually spans an area as big as my entire palm held toward the sky."

Bouma and his colleagues used data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to precisely measure the rotation rates of stars that the Gaia study had assigned to NGC 2516. The researchers demonstrated that many stars with similar masses are all spinning at (or very near) the same rate, confirming that they were born in the same stellar nursery.

Bouma has spent years developing the tools to measure a star's rotation so that he can calculate its age, a technique called gyrochronology (from the Greek words for "spin" and "time"). Our sun, which at the age of 4.6 billion years old is in its sedate middle age, rotates once every 27 days. The stars Bouma measured in NGC 2516 are rotating 10 times faster than our sun, because they are so much younger. Those stars are barely out of their infancy, only about 150 million years old.

"In addition to expanding our knowledge of this and other star clusters, Luke has given us an expanded list of young stars that we can search for planets," said Joshua Winn, Bouma's adviser and co-author and a professor of astrophysical sciences. "Finding planets around young stars will help us understand how planetary systems form and change with time."

"What's so surprising about this work -- what's so exciting -- is that we confirmed that Gaia, because it really precisely measures the positions and the motions of stars, can find these 'needles in the haystack' of the Milky Way," Bouma said. "Gaia can identify all the stars that are moving in the same direction, at the same rate. And we don't have to just trust the machine learning algorithm saying that they're related -- we can verify it with TESS data, using our gyrochronological technique."

This open cluster also has an intriguing connection with Greek mythology, Bouma said. "In the southern night sky, NGC 2516 is near a constellation called the Argo Navis, which was the boat sailed by Jason and the Argonauts to obtain the golden fleece." He added with a smile: "Jason and the Argonauts are sailing on a stream of stars made by the open cluster NGC 2516."

Carbon dioxide emissions in Los Angeles fell 33% in April of 2020 compared with previous years, as roads emptied and economic activity slowed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters. In the Washington, D.C./Baltimore region, emissions of carbon dioxide, or CO2, dropped by 34% during the same period.

The study was led by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Notre Dame.

While the emissions reductions are significant, the method that scientists used to measure them may have the greater long-term impact.

In both locations, scientists had previously installed networks of sensors on rooftops and towers to monitor the concentration of CO2 in the air. They used the data from those sensor networks to estimate the drop in emissions.

This might seem an obvious way to estimate emissions, but this is not how it's usually done. Most cities estimate their emissions by tallying up the effects of activities that cause emissions, such as the number of vehicle miles traveled or the square footage of buildings heated and cooled. These are called "bottom up" methods because they are mostly based on activities on the ground.

This new study demonstrates that "top-down" methods, based on measuring the concentration of CO2 in the air, can produce reliable emissions estimates. Scientists were able to test those methods when emissions suddenly dropped due to COVID-19.

"This was a completely unanticipated experiment, and one we don't ever want to do again," said lead author and JPL data scientist Vineet Yadav. "But our results show that we were able to detect the onset of emissions reductions to within a few days."

Scientists have been developing top-down methods for measuring CO2 emissions for several years. "This study shows that the technology has matured enough to produce reliable results and can be put into operation," said NIST scientist and co-author Kimberly Mueller. That would give cities an important new tool in their efforts to reduce emissions.

Top-down estimates are difficult to achieve because most of the CO2 in the air above cities is not from local emissions. Most of it is there naturally, and some is emitted outside the city's borders and comes in on the wind. The trick is to figure out how much of the CO2 in the air above the city was generated locally.

"My Ph.D. adviser used to describe the atmosphere as a big cup of coffee," said Mueller. "You've added cream, and you're trying to unstir the coffee to see where and when you put the cream in."

To unstir the atmospheric coffee, scientists used data on wind speed, direction and other factors. This allowed them to estimate where within a city the emissions originated and how large they were.

Though difficult to achieve, top-down measurements have several advantages. First, they can provide relatively quick feedback on whether efforts to reduce emissions are working. If a city changes traffic patterns or increases public transit, for instance, top-down estimates can provide data on whether those efforts actually lead to reduced emissions.

In addition, a recent study, also co-authored by Mueller, indicated that U.S. cities often underestimate their emissions when using bottom-up methods alone. Another recent study showed that combining bottom-up with top-down methods increases accuracy. (Both studies were partly funded by NIST.)

"Accurate measurements are key to any strategy for managing greenhouse gas emissions," said James Whetstone, leader of NIST's greenhouse gas measurements group and a co-author of the study. "That's the only way to know if you are making progress toward your goals."

NIST, NASA and other research partners are using the sensor networks in Los Angeles and the Washington, D.C./Baltimore region to develop and test top-down methods as a way of achieving more accurate emissions estimates. This research project focuses on cities in part because cities account for a large and growing share of the world's CO2 emissions.

The 33% and 34% emissions drops in Los Angeles and the D.C./Baltimore region represent reductions relative to the average April emissions of the previous two years. The researchers used three different methods for detecting the change in emissions based on atmospheric measurements, all of which detected the drop occurring at the same time.

"These independent statistical tests on different pieces of the puzzle gave consistent results," said Notre Dame computational scientist and coauthor Subhomoy Ghosh. "This gives us confidence in the findings."

In addition, the methods appeared to work well in both locations, despite very different environmental conditions. In Los Angeles, relatively clean air comes in off the Pacific. D.C. and Baltimore, on the other hand, regularly receive emissions from cities and power plants to the west. Also in D.C. and Baltimore, emissions models have to account for the effects of spring, when plants turn green again and start pulling CO2 from the air. Los Angeles experiences less seasonal variation in uptake by plants.

"These methods were robust enough to work in very different settings," Mueller said. "The fact that these methods worked in both locations mean the results were not a fluke."