Culture

RICHLAND, Wash.--As the Clean Energy Transformation Act drives Washington state toward carbon-free electricity, a new energy landscape is taking shape. Alongside renewable energy sources, a new report finds small modular reactors are poised to play an integral role in the state's emerging clean energy future.

The technology could help fill a power source gap soon to be left by carbon-emitting resources like coal and natural gas, which will be phased out in coming years, according to a report composed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"Nuclear energy is a reliable source of baseload electricity," said PNNL's manager for nuclear power systems Ali Zbib, who coauthored the report, "and our findings show that advanced small modular reactors could be economically competitive in a future carbon-free electricity sector. They're well-suited to play an important role in an energy market that requires more flexibility."

The report detailed how the new reactors could satisfy the Pacific Northwest's dynamic electricity demand, assessed the region's electricity market and explored the viability of deploying the reactors at three locations: at the Hanford Site, utilizing infrastructure from Energy Northwest's partially completed power plants; at the slated to be closed, coal-fired Centralia Big Hanaford power plant in Western Washington; and on the Idaho National Laboratory site, where Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems plans to build the first NuScale light-water reactor.

The findings outline advantages of building at each site, from a trained workforce residing in Eastern Washington to infrastructure in place at the Centralia plant. The report focused on two designs: NuScale's small modular reactor and GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy's BWRX-300.

"Nuclear energy can help to decarbonize every sector of the economy," said Jacopo Buongiorno, TEPCO professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of the report. "The state of Washington is uniquely positioned to kick off this process by demonstrating the leading small modular reactor technologies well before the end of the decade, and that's exciting."

A changing energy landscape

The Clean Energy Transformation Act was enacted in 2019, mandating that Washington's power sources must generate electricity without emitting greenhouse gases by 2045. The law seeks carbon neutrality by 2030, with coal eliminated by 2025 and penalties for carbon-emitting sources imposed as soon as 2030.

Phasing out coal and natural gas, which supplied roughly 17 percent of Washington's overall fuel mix in 2018, will reduce power generation capacity by roughly five gigawatts--nearly equivalent to the output of four large nuclear power plants.

More power will likely be needed in the future, said Zbib, as the state continues to electrify different sectors of its economy, including the transportation sector, and as the region's population grows. Renewables in the form of wind and solar stand to fill some of the load. A complementary source of flexible power will be needed, however, to meet demand.

Small but significant

Enter small modular reactors, which are designed for flexible electricity generation. The designs discussed within the report employ water as a coolant, while other advanced designs employ gas or liquid metal coolants. The emissions-free technology has yet to be deployed in the United States, but designs have matured, including the two analyzed in this report.

Part of a larger investment spent over several years, the U.S. Department of Energy announced last year that two companies--X-energy and TerraPower--will receive $80 million each in initial funding to build advanced reactor demonstration plants that feature small modular reactors.

The size and modularity of the reactors offer unique advantages, according to the report. Smaller cores, less radiological material and layered safety barriers built into small modular reactors result in evacuation zones miles smaller than those of conventional reactors.

Components of small modular reactors can be manufactured and assembled off-site, too, then shipped and installed on-site, cutting construction costs and trimming project timelines, said Zbib.

GEH's design allows for multiple plants within a single site. NuScale's design is scalable, in that modules can be incrementally added--up to a dozen per site. A four-module plant could meet demand for small regions, capable of powering nearly 200,000 homes, while a twelve-module reactor can power a large city.

The need for flexibility

Advanced small modular reactors are flexible--they can continuously operate at full power to provide baseload energy or can follow power swings on the grid. They could play a key role within a clean electricity generation system that includes nuclear, renewables and battery storage.

The report's energy market assessment found that Washington's electricity demand can significantly fluctuate on a monthly, daily and even five-minute basis. The average daily demand in February 2019, for example, varied by more than 2,100 megawatts, roughly equal to twice the output of Energy Northwest's Columbia Generating Station, the only commercial nuclear power plant in the Pacific Northwest.

Swings in electricity generated by some sources can drive the need for a power source that quickly adjusts, as well. The report details one 2009 case in which 700 megawatts of power surged onto the Bonneville Power Administration grid from five short minutes of strong winds. Utilities must ramp down output from flexible sources during such surges.

Taking one or more power modules offline, in the case of the NuScale power plant design, or adjusting reactor power could allow operators to quickly adjust to swings.

Exploring locations

Building a plant at the Hanford Site, according to the report, could help cut costs in several ways. Much of the licensing and assessments that determine whether an area is fit for a nuclear power plant are already completed. Seismic risks and analyses of other vulnerabilities were carried out when the partially complete plants were built in the 1980s.

Nearly $140 million could be saved by using standing structures, according to a study described within the report, and the project schedule could be shortened, resulting in additional cost savings. And with Columbia Generating Station nearby, a trained workforce familiar with nuclear reactors offers another advantage.

The report finds that building at the Centralia plant, which will close all coal-fired boilers by 2025, has its own merits. Existing infrastructure can be harnessed, the facility is already connected to the grid and a new plant could replace jobs lost from the closure.

Building on the west side of the Cascade Mountains could reduce both transmission congestion and the need for transmission infrastructure to supply power to nearby high-demand areas like Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia.

With subsidies for clean energy and penalties for carbon-emitting resources in place, the report contends that plants at either location could provide competitively priced electricity.

"Decarbonizing the electric grid is essential in combating climate change," said Zbib. While wind and solar will play a critical role, he added, phasing out carbon-emitting resources sparks the need for flexible, non-carbon-emitting sources. "Nuclear energy can be an integral part of a clean energy portfolio that will allow the state of Washington to meet its clean energy objectives."

Modern genetic research often works with what are known as reference genomes. Such a genome comprises data from DNA sequences that scientists have assembled as a representative example of the genetic makeup of a species.

To create the reference genome, researchers generally use DNA sequences from a single or a few individuals, which can poorly represent the complete genomic diversity of individuals or sub-populations. The result is that a reference does not always correspond exactly to the set of genes of a specific individual.

Until a few years ago, it was very laborious, expensive and time-consuming to generate such reference genomes. For this reason, researchers concentrated on human genomes and the most important biological model organisms, such as the roundworm C. elegans.

However, as researchers now have access to fast sequencing machines, sophisticated algorithms that assemble DNA sequence readouts into complete chromosomes, and much greater computing power, creating reference genomes for other species has become increasingly practical. If researchers are to better understand evolution and other fundamental questions of biology, they need high-quality reference genomes for as many species as possible.

This includes livestock. For domestic cattle (Bos taurus), only a single reference genome was available until recently: from a Hereford cow called Dominette. Researchers had previously compared other DNA sequences of cattle against this reference to detect genetic variations and define corresponding genotypes. However, as it did not contain any genetic variants by which individuals differ, the previous reference did not reflect the diversity of the species.

Gap filled

A research team led by Hubert Pausch, Assistant Professor of Animal Genomics at ETH Zurich, has now filled this gap: with the genomes of three further breeds of domestic cattle, including the Brown Swiss (Original Schweizer Braunvieh), two closely related (sub-)species such as the zebu and the yak, and the existing reference genome for domestic cattle, the researchers have created a "pangenome". The study detailing these findings has just been published in the scientific journal PNAS.

This cattle pangenome integrates sequences contained in the six individual reference genomes. "This means we can reveal very precisely which sequences are missing, for example, in the Hereford based reference genome, but are present in, say, our Brown Swiss genome or the genomes of other cattle breeds and species," Pausch says.

New genes and functionalities discovered

In this way, the ETH researchers discovered numerous DNA sequences and even whole genes that were missing in the previous reference genome of the Hereford cow. In a further step, the researchers investigated the transcripts of these genes (messenger RNA molecules), which allowed them to classify some of the newly discovered sequences as functionally and biologically relevant. Many of the genes they discovered are connected with immune functions: in animals that had contact with pathogenic bacteria, these genes were stronger or less active than in animals that had no contact with the pathogens.

This project was made possible by a new sequencing technology that has been available at the Functional Genomics Center Zurich for a year now. With this new technology, the researchers are able to precisely read out long DNA sections, reducing the complexity of the computing process needed to correctly assemble the analysed sections. "The new technology simplifies the genome assembly process. Now we can create reference genomes quickly and precisely from scratch," Pausch says. In addition, such analyses also cost less, meaning that researchers can now generate genomes in reference quality from many individuals of a species.

The ETH researchers are collaborating closely with the Bovine Pangenome Consortium, which wants to create a reference genome of at least one animal from every cattle breed worldwide. It also plans to analyse the genetic makeup of wild relatives of domestic cattle in this way.

More targeted breeding possible

The consortium and ETH professor Pausch hope that the reference genome collection will help them make useful discoveries such as genetic variants that are no longer present in domesticated animals, but that their wild relatives still possess. This would provide clues as to which genetic characteristics were lost as a result of domestication.

"Things get really exciting when we compare our indigenous cattle with the zebu or with breeds that are adapted to other climate conditions," Pausch explains. This lets researchers find out which genetic variants make animals in tropical environments more heat tolerant. The next step could be to deliberately use crossbreeding to introduce these variants into other cattle breeds or precisely introduce them through genome editing. However, that is still a long way off. For the present, researchers can benefit from the greater speed and precision that the new cattle pangenome brings to the process of detecting the genes and DNA variants that differ between cattle breeds.

Many eye diseases are associated with a restricted blood supply, known as ischaemia, which can lead to blindness. The role of the protein tenascin-C, an extracellular matrix component, in retinal ischaemia was investigated in mice by researchers from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB). They showed that tenascin-C plays a crucial role in damaging the cells responsible for vision following ischaemia. The results were published online by the team in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience on 20 May 2021.

As part of the research, the team around Dr. Susanne Wiemann and Dr. Jacqueline Reinhard from the Department of Cell Morphology and Molecular Neurobiology at RUB collaborated with Professor Stephanie Joachim's research group from the Experimental Eye Research Institute at the University Eye Clinic in Bochum.

Tenascin-C after retinal ischaemia

Ischaemia occurs due to an interruption in the supply of blood and nutrients to the retina - similar to a stroke. This causes the cells responsible for vision to die, which can lead to impaired vision or even blindness. The research team showed in mice that retinal cells express increased levels of tenascin-C at a very early stage following ischaemia. The quantity of the protein then gradually reduces again as the damage to the retina progresses. "Tenascin-C could therefore be a biomarker for the early detection of ischaemic eye conditions," says Jacqueline Reinhard.

Improved retinal function in mice without tenascin-C following ischaemia

The researchers also conducted electroretinogram analyses, allowing them to measure the electrical signal flow of the retina after a light stimulus. They thus showed that retinal ischaemia impairs the function of certain cell types in the retina: both the rod-photoreceptors and the bipolar cells, which are involved in downstream visual processing.

In genetically modified mice, who were unable to form tenascin-C, the cells responsible for vision in the retina functioned considerably better following ischaemic damage than those in control animals, who had tenascin-C. In addition, fewer photoreceptors died without tenascin-C after ischaemia.

Possible changes between the neuron contact points

The researchers also demonstrated elevated levels of the vesicular glutamate transporter vGlut1 in the ischaemic retina. "These could be linked to impaired synaptic signal transmission between the cells and contribute to cell death as a result of retinal ischaemia. Tenascin-C could be an important modulator here," assumes Jacqueline Reinhard. "Based on this knowledge, future therapy approaches could be developed to improve the treatment of ischaemia."

Included in the vast fallout stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists are paying closer attention to microbial infections and how life forms defend against attacks from pathogens.

Research led by University of California San Diego scientists has shed new light on the complex dynamics involved in how organisms sense that an infection is taking place.

UC San Diego Assistant Project Scientist Eillen Tecle in Professor Emily Troemel's laboratory (Division of Biological Sciences) led research focusing on how cells that are not part of the conventional immune system respond to infections when pathogens attack. Scientists have conducted extensive research on so-called "professional" immune cells that are defensive specialists. Much less is known about how "non-professional" cells handle such threats.

Tecle, Troemel and their colleagues at Pennsylvania State University focused their research on roundworms (Caenorhabditis elegans), animals that lack dedicated immune cells, to help decipher details of such dynamics.

As described in the journal PLOS Pathogens, the researchers conducted experiments involving roundworms under attack by viruses and microsporidia, which are natural pathogens of worms and humans. The results indicate that roundworms may sense changes in their metabolism in order to unleash protective defenses, even if they don't directly sense the pathogen incursion.

In their study, the researchers examined how hosts may respond when pathogens such as viruses and microsporidia steal key compounds from C. elegans cells known as nucleotides. Pathogens like these are required to pilfer such components from their hosts in order to survive. The study's results focused on biological pathways related to the breakdown of chemical compounds known as purine nucleotides. This purine metabolism pathway is key to the cells' ability to sense alterations as a way to induce an immune response.

"We hypothesize that the host has ways to surveil what's going on inside of its cells in an active process," said Tecle. "Our results suggest that the host has developed ways to sense the theft of purine metabolites. It seems that when these key cellular building blocks are stolen by the pathogen, the host senses this theft to mount an immune response to the pathogen."

This research may shed light on why purine-related compound mutations have been found to underlie many human diseases, including adenosine deaminase deficiency, which damages the immune system, and Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, which involves neurological and behavioral abnormalities. While these mutations result in various disorders in humans, they may persist in the human population to provide some protection against infections, for example during viral pandemics.

"Particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, it's so important that we continue to study these questions of immunity in lots of different systems to build new tools so that we can learn how to prevent and treat infections," said Troemel.

Alzheimer's disease - also called dementia - where memory and cognitive functions gradually decline due to deformation and death of neurons, and Parkinson's disease that causes tremors in hands and arms impeding normal movement are major neurodegenerative diseases. Recently, a research team at POSTECH has identified the structure of the agent that causes Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases to occur together.

A research team led by Professor Joon Won Park and Ph.D. candidate Eun Ji Shin of the Department of Chemistry at POSTECH investigated the surface structure of hetero-oligomers found in the overlap of Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, using an atomic force microscopy (AFM) to reveal their structural identity. This study was featured as the front cover paper in the latest issue of Nano Letters.

It is known that the pathological overlap of Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease is associated with the formation of hetero-oligomers derived from amyloid-beta and alpha-synuclein. However, it was difficult to study the treatment due to technical limitations in observing their structure.

To this, the researchers used the AFM to observe the surface characteristic of the hetero-oligomer nano-aggregates derived from amyloid-beta, known as the biomarker of Alzheimer's disease, and alpha-synuclein, known as the biomarker of Parkinson's disease, at the single-molecule level.

When the research team investigated with four AFM tips immobilized with antibodies that recognize N-terminus or C-terminus of each peptide, it was confirmed that all aggregates were hetero-oligomers. In addition, in the case of hetero-oligomer, it was confirmed that the probability of recognizing the end of the peptide is higher than that of the homo-oligomer.

This result indicates that the end of each peptide has a bigger tendency to be located on the surface of hetero-oligomers than homo-oligomers, or that the ends of the peptides located on the surface have more degrees of freedom. That is, it can be confirmed that the aggregation between peptides is more loosely packed in the hetero-oligomer than in the homo-oligomer.

This study is the first study to observe the structure of protein disordered nano-aggregates, which has never been identified before, using the quadruple mapping with four AFM tips. It serves as experimental grounds to verify the hypothesis of hetero-oligomer aggregation. It can also be used in studies related to the overlapping phenomena of various neurodegenerative diseases other than Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

"Until now, there was no adequate method to analyze the nano-aggregates, making it impossible to elucidate the structural identity of heterogeneous aggregates," explained Professor Joon Won Park. "As the analysis method developed in this study is applicable to other amyloid protein aggregates, it will help to identify the cause of diseases such as Alzheimer's or the mad cow disease."

A new study from the University of Kent, Toulouse Business School, ESSCA School of Management (Paris) and ESADE Business School (Spain) has revealed the three primary risks and benefits perceived by consumers towards autonomous vehicles (self-driving cars).

The increased development of autonomous vehicles worldwide inspired the researchers to uncover how consumers feel towards the growing market, particularly in areas that dissuade them from purchasing, to understand the challenges of marketing the product. The following perceptions, gained through qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys, are key to consumer decision making around autonomous vehicles.

The three key perceived risks for autonomous vehicles, according to surveyed consumers, can be classified as:

1. Performance (safety) risks of the vehicles' Artificial Intelligence and sensor systems

2. Loss of competencies by the driving public (primarily the ability to drive and use roads)

3. Privacy security breaches, similar to a personal computer or online account being hacked.

These concerns, particularly regarding road and passenger safety, have long been present in how automotive companies have marketed their products. Marketers' have advertised the continued improvements to the product's technology, in a bid to ease safety concerns. However, the concerns for loss of driving skills and privacy breaches are still of major concern and will need addressing as these products become more widespread.

The three perceived benefits to consumers were:

1. Freeing of time (spent instead of driving)

2. Removing the issue of human error (accidents caused by human drivers)

3. Outperforming human capacity, such as improved route and traffic prediction, handling speed.

Ben Lowe, Professor of Marketing at the University of Kent and co-author of the study said: 'The results of this study illustrate the perceived benefits of autonomous vehicles for consumers and how marketers can appeal to consumers in this growing market. However, we will now see how the manufacturers respond to concerns of these key perceived risks as they are major factors in the decision making of consumers, with the safety of the vehicles' performance the greatest priority. Our methods used in this study will help clarify for manufacturers and marketers that, second to the issue of online account security, they will now have to address concerns that their product is reducing the autonomy of the consumer.'

There is growing evidence that house design can decrease the force of malaria infection.

The world's most deadly assassin is Africa's malaria mosquito: Anopheles gambiae. In 2019, the World Health Organisation estimated that malaria killed 386,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa, mainly children.

Whilst we think of the home as a sanctuary, in Africa, around 80% of the malaria bites occur indoors at night. Preventing mosquitoes from getting indoors is a simple way of protecting people from this often lethal disease.

As most mosquitoes fly low to the ground, a team of researchers led by Durham University wondered whether if, by raising a house, malaria mosquitoes would struggle to find the occupants.

The findings are published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Using four experimental houses, the researchers found that the number of female An. gambiae mosquitoes collected in the huts declined with increasing height, decreasing progressively as the hut's floor moved further from the ground.

Huts with floors 3 metres above the ground had 84 % fewer mosquitoes than those on the ground. Interestingly, if this reduction correlates to a similar reduction in malaria transmission, it would be comparable to that of an insecticide-treated net that can reduce malaria transmission by 40-90 %.

Research lead author Professor Steve Lindsay, from the Durham University Department of Biosciences, said: "Working with a team of architects and builders from the Royal Danish Academy - Architecture, Design and Conservation, we constructed four experimental houses in The Gambia, each of which could be raised or lowered. Each week, one hut was on the ground, whilst the bottoms of the other huts were at 1m, 2m and 3m.

"Each night two men slept under separate mosquito nets in each hut and mosquitoes were collected indoors using a light trap. We changed the height of each house weekly so that, at the end of the 40 night experiment, each hut had been at each of the four heights for 10 nights.

"After analysing the results, we found that increasing the height of a hut progressively reduced the number of mosquitoes entering the hut and we think there are two reasons for this.

"First, malaria mosquitoes have evolved to find humans on the ground. Second, at higher heights, the carbon dioxide odour plumes coming out of the huts are rapidly dispersed by the wind, so mosquitoes find it more difficult to find a person to bite.

Study lead, Durham University PhD Student Ms Majo Carrasco-Tenezaca said: "These findings have real-world implications for the growing population of sub-Saharan Africa where An. gambiae s.l. is the major vector of malaria and places where high temperatures reduce the use of bed nets.

"Raising houses off the ground, like any intervention, is not evolutionary proof, and over time, mosquitoes may adapt and feed higher off the ground than before.

"Nonetheless, we recommend elevating houses off the ground since they are likely to reduce mosquito biting and keep the occupants cooler at night, and therefore more likely to sleep under an insecticide-treated net at night."

The United Nations has projected that the population of sub-Saharan Africa will more than double between 2019 and 2050, and the region will become the world's most populated by 2062.

Coincident with the increasing growth rate, there has been an unprecedented improvement in the housing stock in sub-Saharan Africa. With an additional 1.05 billion people by 2050, there has never been a better time to make houses healthier for people.

Fishery and aquaculture have given rise to an enormous uniformity in the diversity of bivalves along the more than 18,000 kilometer long Chinese coast, biologist He-Bo Peng and colleagues report in this month's issue of Diversity and Distributions.

Climate zones

Peng and colleagues sampled bivalves at 21 sites along the Chinese coast from the city of Dongliaodao in the tropical south, to the mudflats of Yalu Jiang, more than 2000 km further north and ice-covered for several months in winter. "At 19 out of these 21 sites, commercially exploited species dominated", Peng saw. "In the naturally occurring species, we still recognized the natural gradient with highest diversity in the tropics and lowest diversity in the north. However, the same commercially exploited species were found in all regions, regardless the climatic conditions. Also, the commercial species dominated almost all mudflat communities."

Shrimp fisheries

One of the dominant species nowadays is Potamocorbula laevis. Peng: "At some locations, this bivalve represented 95% of the biomass." This is not necessarily due to the culturing of this bivalve. "The intensive fishing for shrimps has almost eradicated a natural enemy of the small fragile juveniles of this bivalve. Possibly, this lack of predators has now favored P. laevis."

Blessing in disguise

The eradication of the south to north biodiversity gradient and the dominance of commercially exploited bivalve species may be a blessing in disguise for migratory birds along the Chinese coast. Peng: "At sites where there's a lot of p. laevis now, migratory birds like red and great knots find a lot of food as they refuel during their migrations between Australia and the tundra areas of northeast Russia. But the more general point raised by this study is the immensity of the role of human activities in determining coastline biodiversity. Where once there was a strong climate gradient in biodiversity, aquaculture and fisheries have favored uniformity now."

Continuous sampling

"This extensive research along more than 18,000 km of Chinese coast builds on the Dutch tradition of studying mudflat ecosystems", Theunis Piersma, researcher at NIOZ and promotor of PhD-student Peng as professor of global flyway ecology at the University of Groningen, says. "Sampling programs like SIBES in the Dutch Wadden Sea taught us the value of widespread and continuous sampling. In this study He-Bo Peng once again shows the value of documenting benthos at very large spatial scales, with sampling strategies developed in the Wadden Sea."

The Manchester Arena terrorist bomb attack in 2017 exposed flaws in the response of emergency services that could be addressed with a new three-phase approach, research by the University of Bath School of Management shows.

Current government guidelines outline a two-phase structure of 'response and recovery', which researchers discovered hampered effective communication between agencies, created over-reliance on centralised Police decision-making, and inhibited other services' ability to take initiative earlier in an emergency.

"To better prepare responders for emergencies we recommend a three?phase structure of 'response/resolve/recovery' is introduced in place of the current guidelines that outline a two?phase structure of response and recovery. Introducing the 'resolve' phase would allow and encourage other emergency services to act earlier and more effectively," said Dr Olivia Brown of the University of Bath.

Brown and her co-researchers from Lancaster University studied communication and coordination between emergency services during the response to a simulated terrorist incident. They worked with 30 commanders from 11 agencies, including the Police, Fire and Rescue, Ambulance, Military and local and central government.

They studied three phases: 1 - when the incident was ongoing; 2 - 48 hours after the incident; and 3 - three weeks after the incident.

Brown said communications were dominated by the Police in the first phase - a typical and sensible approach in the immediate aftermath of an incident where there remained a threat to life. However, they discovered that even after that threat had been resolved, other agencies became overly reliant on the Police to maintain the communication network, hampering the emergency response. And the Police struggled to act on important information from their emergency service partners.

"Our findings suggest that the Police were so focused on delivering the overall strategy of the response that they failed to attend to important information provided by other agencies and to manage the information flow across the network. This ultimately disrupted coordination and caused delay and uncertainty," she said.

Brown said a similar phenomenon was noted in the report reviewing the Manchester Arena attack, in which the demands placed on the Police commander to implement decisions and deal with the immediate aftermath of the explosion contributed to their lack of communication with the Fire Service located at a different site. This poor communication contributed to a two-hour delay in the deployment of the Fire Service to the site of the incident, which meant that their skills and expertise could be not be utilised until later on in the response.

Brown said decentralized communication structures should be introduced in the early phases of an emergency to improve decision?making across several specialised and diverse teams. Other agencies needed to be empowered to intervene on their own initiative once Police had addressed any immediate threat to life.

"Take the response to a terrorist incident as an example - the Police are tasked with mitigating any further threat, cordoning off the scene and collecting evidence, whereas the Ambulance service must quickly begin accessing and triaging casualties. An effective response to the incident cannot be achieved by one agency alone and instead rests on the ability of teams to work cohesively under immense pressure," she said.

Brown said the study showed that, as the incident evolved, the involvement of other agencies increased and communication became less centralised. That resulted in improved coordination, more joint decision-making, less uncertainty and a better use of the diverse expertise of all agencies.

Brown said their research showed the three-phase structure of 'response/resolve/recovery' more accurately described the behaviours of responders during emergencies than the existing 'response/recovery' structure outlined in government guidelines.

"Changing procedural guidelines to a three-phase structure may empower other agencies to get involved in decision making before the response transitions into the recovery phase," she said.

Brown suggested 'boundary spanners' - specially assigned team members tasked with managing the flow of communications across teams and having a comprehensive view of an emergency incident from its very beginning - may be one solution to the communication issue.

Skeletal muscle is the largest organ in the body that accounts for 30 to 40% of body weight and is responsible for multiple functions such as energy metabolism and heat production. However, skeletal muscle mass is reduced in some diabetics, and that muscle loss correlates with mortality. It has been reported that the differentiation of myoblasts, which are the muscle precursor cells, is reduced in diabetic patients, and this is thought to be one of the underlying causes of muscle loss.

Assistant Professor Tomohide Takaya of Shinshu University recently reported that oligo DNA derived from the genome sequence of lactic acid bacteria promotes differentiation into skeletal muscle by binding to the target protein nucleolin in myoblasts. This "muscle-forming oligo DNA" (myoDN) has potential for use in nucleic acid drugs for various muscle diseases. In this study, the group examined whether myoDN improves the differentiation of myoblasts, which is exacerbated by diabetes.

Myoblasts collected from healthy subjects, patients with type 1 diabetes, and patients with type 2 diabetes were used for this experiment. Compared to healthy subjects, diabetic myoblasts had a reduced ability to differentiate into skeletal muscle. Remarkably, administration of myoDN improved skeletal muscle differentiation exacerbated by diabetes. The group also found that glucose and fatty acids, which are increased in the blood of diabetic patients, induce an inflammatory response in myoblasts, and myoDN suppresses these inflammatory responses.

It is thought that myoDN is a nucleic acid molecule that is effective in reducing muscle mass associated with diabetics. Currently, there is no effective therapeutic agent for muscle wasting, and the action of myoDN, which promotes skeletal muscle differentiation, is unique. myoDN is effective for healthy subjects with various backgrounds and type 1 and type 2 patients. On the other hand, analysis using multiple myoblasts revealed that there are individual differences in the effects of myoDN, and issues for clinical application were also clarified.

In the future, it will be necessary to expand the scope and test in order to clarify the cause of individual differences. Diseases other than diabetes such as cancer and heart failure also cause muscle wasting. The group hopes to verify whether myoDN promotes skeletal muscle differentiation in these diseases as well. The ultimate goal is to apply myoDN as an effective nucleic acid drug for muscle wasting associated with various diseases.

GEOLOGY There has long been controversy about whether the world's highest region, Tibet, has grown taller during the recent geological past. New results from the University of Copenhagen indicate that the 'Roof of the World' appears to have risen by up to 600 meters and the answer was found in underwater lava. The knowledge sheds new light on Earth's evolution.

Tibet is referred to as the Roof of the World for good reason. With an average altitude of 4,500 meters above sea level and the world's two highest peaks, Mount Everest and K2, the vast Himalayan mountain range towers higher than anywhere else on Earth.

But the Tibetan plateau's height has been the subject of academic controversy for many years. Some researchers believe that the area has been as high as it is today for most of its existence, while others believe that the area has increased in height over the past 20 - 30 million years. It is a riddle that until recently has stood and flickered unanswered in the wind.

With the help of new analyses of the Indian Ocean seabed and calculations of the movement of Earth's tectonic plates, a researcher from the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management at the University of Copenhagen has contributed new answers to the disagreement.

"By looking at older data of Tibet's emergence and combining it with new geological data from the Indian Ocean, we are pretty certain that there was a major geological change in Tibet about 15-18 million years ago, one that caused the wide area to rise between 300 and 600 meters," explains Associate Professor Giampiero Iaffaldano, the study's main author.

A slow, head on collision between the India subcontinent and Eurasia

The change is due to a head on collision between what are today India and China. India was originally located much further south, but the tectonic plate upon which India lies gradually moved northwards over millions of years and closer to China, until they finally collided to form Tibet.

Using plant fossils and geochemical analyses of rocks found in the mountainous region, some scientific researchers have been quite sure that Tibet looked the way it does today as far back as 20-30 million years ago and that its altitude has not changed over time.

Other researchers have believed that the prolonged and decelerating collision between India and China was caused by Tibet shooting upwards as much as two kilometers over a few million years. But according to Associate Professor Giampiero Iaffaldano, the answer is found somewhere in between.

"What the study contributes to, is actually a combination of the two previous hypotheses, different data sets and conclusions. What I've done is take a closer look at the speed of the India-China collision using Indian Ocean geological data that has only recently become available to the public," he says.

Finding an answer at the bottom of the Indian Ocean

Continuously through time, hot stones and other material are spat from Earth's interior onto the ocean floor. They have much to reveal about the movements of Earth's tectonic plates. Encoded within these lavas are records of Earth's magnetic polarity - the direction of Earth's north and south poles.

Polarity has reversed several times in Earth's history, meaning that North has become South and vice-versa. And, scientific researchers know roughly when these flips occurred. As such, they can trace tectonic plates to specific places and times during Earth's history using their magnetization along a so-called geomagnetic timescale.

"A closer look at this type of data held the answer to the question of whether Tibet has gotten higher or not. It has proven tremendously useful to calculate the speed of India's collision with China from geomagnetic data. More and more of such data, often originally collected for purposes other than fundamental scientific research and thereby not publicly available, is now being released and used by scientists," explains Giampiero Iaffaldano and adds:

"This new knowledge about Tibet is important for better understanding of Earth's evolution and the metods used could turn out usefull in future studies."

When do bees sting and how do they organise their collective defence behaviour against predators? An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Universities of Constance and Innsbruck has provided new insights into these questions. Their study, published in BMC Biology, combined behavioural experiments with an innovative theoretical modelling approach based on "Projective Simulation". It shows that individual bees decide whether to sting - or not - based on the presence and concentration of an alarm pheromone. The scientists suggest that each bee has a likelihood of stinging that is not constant, but shows at least two internal thresholds for the concentration of the pheromone: one to start stinging and one to stop stinging. The computational modelling also revealed how several environmental factors, such as the rate of predator attacks and predator diversity, likely drove the evolution of the honeybees' pheromone-based communication in their defensive behaviour.

High concentrations of alarm pheromone as a stop signal

When a honeybee colony is attacked by a predator or seriously disturbed by a human who - accidentally or intentionally - got too close to the hive, the bees of the colony launch a coordinated counterattack to defend the colony and to scare off the trespasser. An important stimulus for them to start chasing and stinging the intruder is the presence of an alarm pheromone, which the bees carry on their stinger. In the event of an attack, the pheromone is dispersed either actively - by guard bees - or automatically upon stinging - by recruited soldiers. Thus, it carries information not only about the presence of an attacker, but also about the extent of the colony's counterattack. "The more bees have stung the intruder, the more alarm pheromone has been released with each sting and the higher its local concentration," clarifies Dr Morgane Nouvian, a biologist from Konstanz and joint-lead author of the study together with Andrea López-Incera from Innsbruck.

To understand how individual bees from the hive may use this information to make the ultimate decision to sting for the good of the colony and possibly die as a result, the scientists observed individual stinging responses of Western Honeybees (Apis mellifera) from three colonies. Using different concentrations of natural and synthetic alarm pheromones and a dummy predator, they revealed that the aggressiveness towards the dummy - measured as the stinging likelihood - initially increases with the concentration of the alarm pheromones until it reaches a peak. However, at high concentrations, the aggressiveness drops back to a low level.

This is the first time decreasing aggressiveness at high pheromone concentrations has been demonstrated under controlled experimental conditions. "One possible function of this 'stopping' effect of high concentrations of the alarm pheromone could be to avoid over-stinging and unnecessary sacrifice when attacking an already defeated intruder," Nouvian suggests.

The "superorganism" as an evolutionary unit

In social insects, be they honeybees or other social species such as army ants, individuals often coordinate their actions for the benefit and survival of the colony. For this reason, evolutionary selection processes in these insects acts on the group rather than the individual level. "Normally, if an organism dies, it cannot pass on its genes to the next generation anymore. In a bee colony, however, it is the queen that is responsible for reproduction. If another bee dies defending the hive but saves the queen in the process, the colony will continue to reproduce," Nouvian exemplifies. Because the bee colony functions as a single 'superorganism,' the behaviours of the belonging individuals can only be understood through the collective outcome to which they contribute.

To further analyse their experimental results and address this peculiarity of the evolution of collective behaviours, the scientists used computational modelling based on so-called Projective Simulation, an approach originally developed by co-author Professor Hans Briegel and his colleagues from Innsbruck. In their agent-based model, each agent or "bee" has a very limited set of percepts - the concentration of the alarm pheromone and a signal that the predator is leaving - and actions - to sting or not to sting - relevant to the defence behaviour. "Our idea was to build a model that is realistic, yet minimal," explains Professor Thomas Müller, professor of philosophy at the University of Konstanz and co-author of the study. He continues: "We simulated a collective of these agents, which were called upon one after the other to perceive the current level of alarm pheromone at any given time. When a bee stings in response, the pheromone's concentration increases and the next bee's response depends on this new pheromone level."

A second important aspect of the model is that it includes a learning component: Neither the responses of individual bees nor the rules of interaction between them are predetermined. Instead, they "evolve" over many cycles of the simulation or, in other words, over many generations of the collective. "If the decisions of the individual agents are beneficial to the collective under certain environmental pressures, they are positively reinforced. This increases the likelihood that the next generation of agents will act similarly under identical conditions," Müller clarifies. Taken together, the agent-based approach with reinforcement learning at the group-level allowed modelling of the observed defensive behaviour of honeybees from the perspective of both, the individual bees and the collective.

Putting the model to the test

Using the model and different parameter combinations, predictions could be made about the possible influence of environmental pressures on the defensive behaviour of bees. For example, the simulations suggest that colonies adapt to the strongest predator they encounter. This means that colonies that primarily encounter weak predators, such as mice or toads, are less likely to sting at high pheromone concentrations than colonies that more frequently encounter strong and difficult-to-deter predators, such as bears. "For the survival of the colony, it makes perfect sense to be able to cope with the worst predator around, even if that means over-stinging some of the weaker predators," Nouvian describes.

The scientists also applied their model to the case of the notoriously aggressive "African bee", a subspecies of the Western honeybee. It has previously been suggested that the highly aggressive behaviour of this subspecies evolved in response to higher predation rates in the tropics and to highly specialised, hard-to-deter predators, such as honey badgers. Indeed, the simulation predicted that bee populations suffering from a high predation rate and predators that take a high number of stings before stopping their attack develop stronger defence responses than those that do not.

What's next?

"We were quite happy to see that our model supports the current hypotheses on how the higher aggressiveness of 'African bees' might have evolved. One of the next steps will be to collect empirical data from real bees in Africa to verify the results," Nouvian gives an outlook. Another step for the future is to model a more diverse population of bees. As mentioned before, there are at least two different types of bees involved in the defence attack of a real hive: guards and recruits. "In the current model, each bee in the collective followed the same decision-making process. Training a model with two different types of agents and comparing it with experimental data will be very interesting," Müller adds. In general, the modelling approach is highly versatile and can be applied to other tasks and species, providing a valuable new tool for studying the evolution of collective behaviour.

A long-standing theory assumes that terrestrial plants could only have developed by entering into a symbiosis with fungi, whereby the two organisms exchange resources in a mutually beneficial way. A new study by an international group of scientists has now confirmed this theory. By studying a liverwort species (a bryophyte related to mosses), the scientists succeeded in demonstrating that a lipid transfer takes place between the plant and the fungus similar to that already known to exist in plants with stems and roots - so called vascular plants. The study was led by French researchers from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and the Université de Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier, in collaboration with the Institut national de la recherche agronomique (INRA) and has been published in Science on 21 May. Professor Dr Marcel Bucher from the Institute for Plant Sciences and the CEPLAS Cluster of Excellence on Plant Science in Cologne participated in the study and contributed essential genetic information at the beginning and experimental results on the molecular mechanism underlying the symbiotic exchange of lipids throughout the collaboration.

About 450 million years ago, the first plants left the freshwater to live on land. To do this, they had to adapt to the aridity and nutrient scarcity of the land. In the 1980s, the study of fossils led to the hypothesis that a plant-fungus alliance has been at the origin of plant vegetation. Previous studies have shown the existence of genes that are essential for the proper functioning of this symbiosis, particularly in vascular plants. In the present study, the scientists focused on a bryophyte resembling a succulent plant, for which such genes had not yet been studied: Marchantia paleacea. Validating this forty-year-old hypothesis allows the scientists to understand a stage that was crucial to the development of life on Earth.

By adapting the use of CRISPR, a molecular tool that allows DNA to be cleaved precisely, the team modified a gene predicted as 'symbiotic'. As in vascular plants, the interruption of lipid exchange between the plant and the fungus leads to symbiosis failure in the liverwort. 'The beauty of the work lies in the use of different complementary molecular genetic approaches which have shown that this "symbiotic gene" encodes a key regulator, a so-called transcription factor, which directly regulates the expression of other symbiosis genes, among them genes required for "feeding" the fungus,' Marcel Bucher remarked. These are involved in lipid metabolism and transport in cells in M. paleacea, leading to the transfer of valuable carbon derived from the photosynthetic plant host in the form of fatty acids as a building material and energy source to the fungal symbiotic partner.

The results of the study show that the common ancestor of liverworts and vascular plants, which colonised dry land, must therefore have exchanged lipids with the fungus, as do the plants of today. Thus, 450 million years later, one of the secrets of life's first steps on land has finally been elucidated.

A recent study finds that the vast majority of Black adolescents have experienced racism, that they experience anticipatory stress about experiencing racism again, and that their racial identity can influence that stress in a variety of ways.

"We know that racism is stressful," says Elan Hope, corresponding author of the study and an associate professor of psychology at North Carolina State University. "Part of that stress is anticipatory - waiting for the next racist thing to happen. But not everyone experiences this stress the same way. We wanted to know how racial identity may influence the way teens experience this stress. Can racial identity buffer them from this type of stress? Can it make it worse? The answer is complicated."

To that end, the researchers conducted an in-depth survey of 442 Black adolescents between the ages of 14 and 17. The survey included questions about each participant's experiences with racism; various aspects of their racial identity; and questions aimed at understanding the extent to which they experienced anticipatory racism-related stress.

The researchers focused on three aspects of racial identity: centrality, private regard and public regard. Centrality is how important being Black is to a study participant's sense of self. Private regard is how the participant feels about Black people in general. Public regard is how the participant thinks other people feel about Black people in general.

The researchers also examined four aspects of anticipatory stress: psychological stress; physiological stress; "perseverative cognition" - when you can't stop thinking about something; and "secondary appraisal" - which assesses the extent to which someone effectively evaluates their ability to prevent or reduce harm caused by a racism-related event.

Ninety-four percent of the study participants reported experiencing racism.

"We found that racial identity is a mixed bag when it comes to its relationship with anticipatory stress," Hope says.

For example, the higher study participants scored on private regard, the less psychological stress they reported in anticipation of experiencing racism. But private regard did not appear to have any protective effect against the other aspects of anticipatory stress.

Meanwhile, the higher participants scored on centrality, the more anticipatory stress they reported across the board.

"This is complicated, because while high centrality scores were associated with worse anticipatory stress, previous research makes clear that there are many reasons it is important for Black people to feel good about being Black," Hope says.

Researchers also found that higher public regard is associated with participants having less racism-related anticipatory stress. However, scoring high on public regard can pose challenges of its own. For example, there is some concern that Black teens who score high on public regard may be more likely to blame racist experiences on their personal characteristics, when they've done nothing wrong.

"This doesn't mean that we should lie to kids about the state of racism in the world, but it highlights the value of kids being exposed to environments where people care about Black communities and are committed to anti-racism," Hope says.

"Ultimately, the study highlights that while racial identity can help, there is a limit to what Black adolescents can do to protect themselves from the stresses associated with racism. And that, in turn, underscores the need for us, as a society, to address racism in a meaningful way.

"Racism is pervasive, and the vast majority of our study participants reported experiencing it," Hope says. "Adolescence is a period of development when people begin to come to terms with who they are and how they fit into the world.

"Parents, teachers and caregivers need to be proactive about supporting these youth as they navigate who they are in terms of their race and what that will mean for how they interact with the world."

The Finnish solution to include all types of biodiversity data and the whole data life cycle, from collection to use, in the same data infrastructure is unique. It is also rare for one infrastructure to be able to serve cutting-edge research, public administration, business and the civil society simultaneously.

This solution, the Finnish Biodiversity Information Facility “FinBIF” is described as a best-practice model in biodiversity informatics in a recent paper in the Nature Portfolio journal Scientific Data.

All data types and the whole data life cycle in a one-stop shop

FinBIF, which is coordinated and developed by the Finnish Museum of Natural History Luomus of the University of Helsinki:

digitises natural history specimens and produces digital DNA barcodes

collects born-digital observation records of professionals and amateurs alike

integrates data collated from different sources

distributes the data mass as open data

offers data management services, such as platforms for recording and publishing monitoring data and for reporting observations, to researchers, the environmental administration and the public

Typically, different types of species data and the different stages of the data life cycle, that is, digitisation, collection, integration, distribution, and facilitation of use, are managed by several separate data infrastructures. Scattered solutions are, however, not cost-effective, and they do not facilitate finding and using the services.

FinBIF currently has over 39 million observations of more than 40,000 species in its portal http://www.laji.fi/en. The data mass is compiled from 444 separate datasets. Most of these come from natural history museums, which have formed the core group in developing FinBIF. Part of their data are species observations, but 3.8 million records distributed by FinBIF are based on collection specimens, and 800,000 of these are accompanied by images. Eleven Finnish collection institutions share their data through FinBIF, but there are also significant observational datasets from governmental research institutes and citizen science projects. Recent observations are added through the iNaturalist Finland service and app, which are hosted by FinBIF.

"Ten years ago, we had a vision of an all-inclusive biodiversity data service. After building consensus among all actors in the field and acquiring funding through the national research infrastructure programme, the actual development work began in 2014. A great number of specialists have worked extremely hard to create the current, world-leading system. I am grateful for their efforts and proud of what they have achieved," says Professor Leif Schulman who led the development of FinBIF until last year.

Hun­dreds of thou­sands of users

As an open service, FinBIF has been adopted throughout society. More than 700,000 users have visited the portal at least once, even though it has only been available for just over four years. Registered users, that is, people who enter data into FinBIF or download citable data batches from it, now number over 10,000. At the end of 2019, 13% of these were from research and education institutions, 3% from state or municipal governments, and 4% from private companies, while 80% had used a private email address for registration.

"It is more challenging to monitor outputs of the use, since not all users remember to acknowledge the use of research infrastructures in publications, for instance. Based on our records, we estimate that FinBIF's services have been used for more than 700 published papers," says Dr Aino Juslén who has participated in the development of FinBIF from the start and been the Director of Luomus since the beginning of this year.

An Open Science Am­bas­sador

FinBIF is also a leader in open data distribution. Considerable effort has been put into implementing a data policy that is as open as possible. FinBIF has even received a national award for this work. However, not quite all the data can be openly shared, since the law prohibits the disclosure of occurrence data that could harm the conservation status of endangered species. The discoverability of the data is, nevertheless, important, and this has been a focus at FinBIF. The sensitive data, too, is findable and can be obtained for research upon request by using nationally agreed principles and a data request service.

"It required lengthy negotiations in a cross-sectoral working group to reach a common view on which data have to be restricted and on which grounds and, on the other hand, how officials nevertheless can share exact data among themselves to enable the protection of biodiversity," says Aino Juslén, who acted as chair of the working group.

A unique IT in­fra­struc­ture through agile de­vel­op­ment

The development of the FinBIF system has required repeated trial and error. A prerequisite for its success has been agile development and an in-house development team that has been in continuous interaction with the users of the service.

"It feels like we are now seeing how the solid foundations are paying dividends, since any new services created quickly reach the operative stage when built on the carefully designed base. This is impressive since basically everything we now do requires innovation in the absence of international benchmarks," says Director of the Biodiversity Informatics Unit of Luomus Kari Lahti, who joined FinBIF's development team as a project manager in 2015.