Culture

A new study examines how color evolved in one of the flashiest groups of parrots--Australasian lorikeets--finding that different plumage patches on the birds evolved independently through time. The study, published this week in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology, helps explain why it's possible for the birds' faces and front sides to display a dazzling variety of colors--from vibrant ultraviolet blue only visible to other birds to deep crimson and black--while their wings and backs tend to be the same color: green.

"All birds need to balance being attractive to potential mates while having some kind of camouflage against potential predators," said Brian Smith, an associate curator in the American Museum of Natural History's Department of Ornithology and one of the co-authors of the new study. "So how do lorikeets, which have a very extreme appearance, get so colorful without being predated by lizards or hawks?"

To help answer this question, Smith and Jon Merwin, a Museum research assistant who began the project as a student at Columbia University, took visible-light and UV-light photos of 98 historic Museum specimens of Australasian lorikeets--those that live in New Guinea, Australia, and surrounding archipelagos--representing nearly all of the diversity in the group. Many birds can see in the ultraviolet spectrum, to which most humans are blind, so the researchers used a special program that translates color into "bird vision." They collected data from 35 plumage patches on the birds across the face, head, back, wings, breast, and lower abdomen. Those color data were modeled within the tree of life for lorikeets to test whether different patches of the birds are more likely to evolve under certain scenarios.

They found that the plumage patches that are most likely to be involved in predation avoidance are greatly conserved across long evolutionary timescales while the patches that are likely involved in mate recognition or courtship evolved rapidly. The probable explanation is that when looking for a mate, it may help each species to have different colors on the front, so they can find their own kind. But while being hunted from above, it's beneficial for the birds to blend in with the trees, so their backs may be adapted for camouflage and their colorful fronts for easy recognition.

In general, the researchers identified three plumage groupings that have evolved together through time: the face and head, the back and wings, and the breast region and lower abdomen. This so-called mosaic evolution--where subsets of traits evolve independently of others--underlies the extraordinary diversification of plumage colors seen in lorikeets today.

"The range of colors exhibited by lorikeets adds up to a third of the colors birds can theoretically observe," Merwin said. "We were able to capture variation in this study that isn't even visible to the human eye. The idea that you can take color data from Museum specimens, infer patterns, and gain a larger understanding of how these birds evolved is really amazing."

Color evolution is a burgeoning topic in avian biology, with previous research conducted on birds of paradise and hummingbirds, and with a number of other studies in progress. Smith and Merwin plan to tackle the greater parrot group (Psittaciformes) next. Their lorikeet study will be featured in the Museum's new exhibition The Nature of Color, opening to the public on March 9, 2020.

A new study exposes the fallacy of relying on pronunciation as a measure of linguistic proficiency. The study, 'Revisiting phonetic integration in bilingual borrowing', by Shana Poplack, Suzanne Robillard, Nathalie Dion (all from the University of Ottawa), and John. C. Paolillo (University of Indiana Bloomington) will be published in March 2020 issue of the scholarly journal Language. A pre-print version of the article may be found at https://www.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/Poplack.pdf.

The study's authors set out to investigate the relationship between the structure of language mixing and its phonetic realization (the way it's pronounced). From a massive 3.5 million-word corpus of the spontaneous speech of a random sample of 120 French-English bilinguals in Canada's national capital region, they pinpointed the speakers with the greatest proclivity for language mixing. They homed in on how those speakers pronounced certain consonants that exist in English, but not in French - the "th" sound in words like THough and THanks, the "h" in Horn, the "r" in factoRies, and the "p", "t" and "k" sounds in contexts where they are normally pronounced with a burst of air in English (like Pholluted).

Since only speakers who were found to be capable of producing these sounds in both languages were included in the study, the assumption was that they would pronounce the words in the French fashion when actually bringing them into the language (i.e. what linguists call borrowing), but leave them pronounced as in English when code-switching - as in, spontaneously cherry-picking longer stretches of English.

Instead, they discovered that the phonetic form language mixing takes is much more chaotic. Code-switches to English regularly failed to force English-style pronunciation, while borrowings from English - including those attested for centuries in French-language dictionaries (like bar) - often still were pronounced English-style rather than in the French one. For example, these speakers do not always pronounce bar with a French-style r. This result, coupled with the salience of accent and the preponderance of word borrowings (in contrast to code-switches, which are relatively rare), all conspire to exaggerate the actual frequency of code-switching in bilingual speech, and reinforce the stereotype that bilinguals don't speak any language properly.

The results of this research provide evidence that the way someone sounds when they're speaking a language is no reflection on their mastery of word formation or sentence structure - the grammar. By exposing the fallacy of relying on pronunciation as a measure of linguistic proficiency, this research reminds us that a person's "accent" is a poor indicator of how they speak a language.

New research shows that experiencing chronic job insecurity can change your personality for the worse.

The study, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, found those exposed to job insecurity over more than four years became less emotionally stable, less agreeable, and less conscientious.

Report co-author Dr Lena Wang from RMIT University's School of Management said the study built on a growing evidence base about the negative consequences of job insecurity.

"Traditionally, we've thought about the short-term consequences of job insecurity - that it hurts your well-being, physical health, sense of self-esteem," Wang said.

"But now we are looking at how that actually changes who you are as a person over time, a long-term consequence that you may not even be aware of."

The study used nationally representative data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey in relation to answers about job security and personality for 1,046 employees over a nine-year period.

It applied a well-established personality framework known as the Big Five, which categorises human personality into five broad traits: emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion and openness.

The study results showed that long-term job insecurity negatively affected the first three traits, which relate to a person's tendency to reliably achieve goals, get along with others, and cope with stress.

Wang said the results went against some assumptions about job insecurity.

"Some might believe that insecure work increases productivity because workers will work harder to keep their jobs, but our research suggests this may not be the case if job insecurity persists," Wang said.

"We found that those chronically exposed to job insecurity are in fact more likely to withdraw their effort and shy away from building strong, positive working relationships, which can undermine their productivity in the long run."

Previous research has shown that insecure work - including labour hire practices, contract and casual work, and underemployment - is on the rise in Australia and globally.

The HILDA data drew on responses from employees from a broad cross-section of professions and jobs, who were asked about how secure they perceived their jobs to be.

Study lead author Professor Chia-Huei Wu from Leeds University Business School said types of job insecurity might include short-term contracts or casual work, jobs threatened by automation, and positions that could be in line for a redundancy.

Importantly, said Wu, there are ways that employers can support workers who are feeling worried about their jobs.

"This is as much about perceived job insecurity as actual insecure contracts," Wu said.

"Some people simply feel daunted by the changing nature of their roles or fear they'll be replaced by automation.

"But while some existing jobs can be replaced by automation, new jobs will be created.

"So employers have the ability to reduce that perception, for example by investing in professional development, skills and training, or by giving career guidance."

The paper, 'Effects of chronic job insecurity on Big Five personality change' was written by researchers from the University of Leeds (UK), RMIT University and Curtin University.

The latest image published February 20, 2020 from the international Gemini Observatory showcases the striking planetary nebula CVMP 1. This object is the result of the death throes of a giant star and is a glorious but relatively short-lived astronomical spectacle. As the progenitor star of this planetary nebula slowly cools, this celestial hourglass will run out of time and will slowly fade from view over many thousands of years.

Located roughly 6500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Circinus (The Compass) this astronomical beauty formed during the final death throes of a massive star. CVMP 1 is a planetary nebula; it emerged when an old red giant star blew off its outer layers in the form of a tempestuous stellar wind [1]. As this cast-aside stellar atmosphere sped outwards into interstellar space, the hot, exposed core of the progenitor star began to energize the ejected gases and cause them to glow. This formed the beautiful hourglass shape captured in this observation from the international Gemini Observatory, a facility of NSF's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory.

Planetary nebulae like CVMP 1 are formed by only certain stars -- those with a mass somewhere between 0.8 and 8 times that of our own Sun [2]. Less massive stars will gently fizzle out, transitioning into white dwarfs at the end of their long lives, whereas more massive stars live fast and die young, ending their lives in gargantuan explosions known as supernovae. For stars lying between these extremes, however, the final stretch of their lives results in a striking astronomical display such as the one seen in this image. Unfortunately, the spectacle provided by a planetary nebula is as brief as it is glorious; these objects typically persist for only 10,000 years -- a tiny stretch of time compared to the lifespan of most stars, which lasts billions of years.

These short-lived planetary nebulae come in myriad shapes and sizes, and several particularly striking forms are well known, such as the Helix Nebula which is captured in this image from 2003 which combined OIR Lab facilities at Kitt Peak National Observatory with the Hubble Space Telescope. The great diversity of shapes stems from the diversity of progenitor star systems, whose characteristics can greatly influence the ensuing planetary nebula. The presence of companion stars, orbiting planets, or even the rotation of the original red giant star can help determine the shape of a planetary nebula, but we don't yet have a detailed understanding of the processes sculpting these beautiful astronomical fireworks displays.

But CVMP 1 is intriguing for more than just its aesthetic value. Astronomers have found that the gases making up the hourglass are highly enriched with helium and nitrogen, and that CVMP 1 is one of the largest planetary nebulae known. These clues together suggest that CVMP 1 is highly evolved, making it an ideal object to help astronomers understand the later lives of planetary nebulae.

Astronomical measurements have revealed the characteristics of CVMP 1's central star. By measuring the light emitted from the gas in the planetary nebula, astronomers infer that the temperature of the central star is at least 130,000 degrees C (230,000 degrees F). Despite this scorching temperature, the star is doomed to steadily cool over thousands of years. Eventually, the light it emits will have too little energy to ionize gas in the planetary nebula, causing the striking hourglass shown in this image to fade from view.

The international Gemini Observatory, comprises telescopes in the northern and southern hemispheres, which together can access the entire night sky. Similar to many large observatories, a small fraction of the observing time of the Gemini telescopes is set aside for the creation of color images that can share the beauty of the Universe with the public. Objects are chosen for their aesthetic appeal -- such as this striking celestial hourglass.

University of Maryland School of Medicine's (UMSOM) Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS) researchers have created the first catalog of genes that comprise the community of microbes, which inhabit the human vagina. The catalog, called human vaginal non-redundant gene catalog (VIRGO), was recently released as a public resource that can be used by researchers to facilitate a more in-depth understanding of the role of vaginal microorganisms in women's health and to potentially develop future treatments for certain gynecologic conditions.

An IGS study describing the development of VIRGO and demonstrating its utility in research was published today in Nature Communications.

"The value of VIRGO is that it functions as both a central repository and a highly scalable tool for fast, accurate characterization of vaginal microbiomes," said study lead author Bing Ma, PhD, Research Associate in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS) at UMSOM. "VIRGO is particularly useful for users with limited computational skills, who want to analyze a large volume of sequencing data and with access to limited computing infrastructure."

The community of microbes (microbiota) that inhabit the human vagina play critical roles in health and diseases, but current knowledge of the genetic and functional diversity of microbiomes is still limited. Scientists know that optimal vaginal microbiomes are most often dominated by one or more species of Lactobacillus, including Lactobacillus crispatus, L. gasseri and L. jensenii. Research suggests that these beneficial bacteria produce large amounts of lactic acid leading to an acidic environment that protects against harmful infections. Researchers are aiming to learn more, however, about how these bacteria contribute to a woman's health and disease.

VIRGO could facilitate that goal with close to 1 million genes in the catalogue, each annotated with the name of the bacterium that carries it and with its function, affording a composition and functional characterization of vaginal microbiomes. The researchers estimate that VIRGO contains over 95 percent of all the genes found in vaginal microbiomes. VIRGO is thus comprehensive and the study team showed it is applicable to populations from North America, Africa and Asia. Ultimately, VIRGO and its associated analytical framework will facilitate and standardize the analysis and interpretation of large meta-genomic and meta-transcriptomics datasets. VIRGO and its associated files are freely available for free at this website.

The resource was constructed using a combination of metagenomes sequenced at IGS and urogenital bacterial isolate genomes in part downloaded from public repositories. Sequencing was performed through Maryland Genomics, which is part of the IGS and composed of the Genomic Resource Center (GRC), Informatic Resource Center (IRC) and the Microbiome Service Laboratory (MSL). Innovative analytical strategies were applied to develop VIRGO, leveraging the computational infrastructure and expertise of the IGS Microbiome group.

"VIRGO will facilitate the analysis of data now common to microbiome studies and provide comprehensive insight into microbial membership, function, and ecological perspective of the vaginal microbiome," said Michael France, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS) at UMSOM, and co-author on the study.

The team demonstrated the power of VIRGO in analyzing over 1,500 vaginal metagenomes. In doing so, the research team discovered that vaginal bacteria are more genetically diverse than originally thought, meaning that women each carry their own personalized version of these bacteria. More importantly, they found that optimal vaginal microbiota dominated by Lactobacillus species are actually made of several strains of the same species. Each strain brings a unique function to the community, and the combination of these strains is what define the strength of the protective properties of the optimal vaginal microbiota.

"This finding is a paradigm changing discovery, as it moves the field away from the idea that a single strain of Lactobacillus is responsible for an optimal microbiome," said Jacques Ravel, PhD, Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, Associate Director and Senior Scientist at the Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS) at UMSOM.

While the IGS researchers will continue to update and expand VIRGO, they will further their understanding of the role played by the vaginal microbiome in conditions such as bacterial vaginosis, sexually transmitted infections and adverse obstetrics outcomes including preterm birth. Their research is funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH), National Institute for Nursing Research (NINR), National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

"Important efforts are underway by UMSOM faculty to translate our growing understanding of human-associated microbial communities into clinical biomarkers and treatments," said UMSOM Dean E. Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA, who is also Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, University of Maryland and the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor. "This groundbreaking research provides powerful, publicly available tools to researchers who are addressing key health issues for women."

New Curtin University-led research has found that the smallest type of killer whale has 28 different complex calls, comprising a combination of burst-pulse sounds and whistles, which they use to communicate with family members about the changing landscape and habitat.

The research, published in Royal Society Open Science, analysed data collected in 2012 and 2013 to better understand the call repertoire of Ross Sea killer whales, also known as Type C, which are found in the McMurdo Sound in Antarctica.

Lead author PhD candidate Rebecca Wellard, from Curtin's Centre for Marine Science and Technology (CMST), said the remoteness of the Ross Sea can make it difficult to monitor and record the movements of killer whales, but it is essential to better understand their behaviour and acoustic repertoire.

"In Antarctic waters, there are five different types of killer whales, with Type C being the smallest, growing up to 6.1 metres in comparison to Type A males who can grow up to almost 10 metres long," Ms Wellard said.

"By using passive acoustic monitoring, our team was able to analyse recordings from nine separate encounters with approximately 392 Type C killer whales, including adults, sub adults and calves.

"We were able to identify that the calls of the Type C killer whale are multi-component, meaning that many calls transition from burst-pulse sounds to whistles. We also found that 39 per cent of the call types started with a series of 'broadband pulses'."

Ms Wellard explained that the most common killer whale behaviours observed in the study were travelling and foraging under the ice and socialising at the surface, which could explain the increase in call rate.

"During the calls, often two of the sounds occurred at the same time, also known as biphonation. These types of calls could be used to locate where other members of the pod may be. Due to the shifting and changing habitat in McMurdo Sound, calves could also be using biophonic calls to communicate with family members about available breathing holes," Ms Wellard said.

"Our findings provide an initial step towards comparing and distinguishing Type C killer whale acoustics with those of other killer whale populations in the Southern Hemisphere."

Planetary scientists at Curtin University have shed some light on the tumultuous early days of the largely preserved protoplanet Asteroid 4 Vesta, the second largest asteroid in our Solar System.

Research lead Professor Fred Jourdan, from Curtin University's school of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said Vesta is of tremendous interest to scientists trying to understand more about what planets are made of, and how they evolved.

"Vesta is the only largely intact asteroid which shows complete differentiation with a metallic core, a silicate mantle and a thin basaltic crust, and it's also very small, with a diameter of only about 525 kilometres," Professor Jourdan said.

"In a sense it's like a baby planet, and therefore it is easier for scientists to understand it than say, a fully developed, large, rocky planet."

To give you an idea of its size, you could squeeze at least three Vesta-size asteroids side by side in the state of New South Wales, Australia.

Vesta was visited by the NASA Dawn spacecraft in 2011, when it was observed that the asteroid had a more complex geological history than previously thought. With the aim of hoping to understand more about the asteroid, the Curtin research team analysed well-preserved samples of volcanic meteorites found in Antarctica that were identified as having fallen to Earth from Vesta.

"Using an argon-argon dating technique, we obtained a series of very precise ages for the meteorites, which gave us four very important pieces of new information about timelines on Vesta," Professor Jourdan said.

"Firstly, the data showed that Vesta was volcanically active for at least 30 million years after its original formation, which happened 4,565 million years ago. While this may seem short, it is in fact significantly longer than what most other numerical models predicted, and was unexpected for such a small asteroid.

"Considering that all the heat-providing radioactive elements such as aluminium 26 would have completely decayed by that time, our research suggests pockets of magmas must have survived on Vesta, and were potentially related to a slow-cooling partial magma ocean located inside the asteroid's crust."

Co-researcher Dr Trudi Kennedy, also from Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the research also showed the timeframes when very large impacts from asteroids striking Vesta were carving out craters of ten or more kilometres deep from the asteroid's volcanically active crust.

"To put this into perspective, imagine a large asteroid smashing into the main volcanic island of Hawaii and excavating a crater 15 kilometres deep - that gives you an idea of what tumultuous activity was happening on Vesta in the early days of our Solar System," Dr Kennedy said.

Scientists further explored the data to understand what was happening deeper in the asteroid by calculating how long it took for Vesta's deep crustal layer to cool down. Some of these rocks were located too deep in the crust to be affected by asteroid impacts, and yet, being relatively close to the mantle, they were strongly affected by the natural heat gradient of the protoplanet and were metamorphosed as a result.

"What makes this interesting is that our data further confirms the suggestion that the first flows of erupted lava on Vesta were buried deep into its crust by more recent lava flows, essentially layering them on top of each other. They were then 'cooked' by the heat of the protoplanet's mantle, modifying the rocks," Dr Kennedy said.

The team also concluded that the meteorites they analysed were excavated from Vesta during a large impact, possibly 3.5 billion years ago, and were agglomerated deep into a rubble pile asteroid, where they were protected from any subsequent impacts.

A rubble pile asteroid is formed when a group of ejected rocks assemble under their own gravity, creating an asteroid that is essentially a pile of rocks clumped together.

"This is very exciting for us because our new data brings lots of new information about the first 50 million years or so of Vesta's early history, which any future models will now have to take in to account," Dr Kennedy said.

"It also raises the point that if volcanism could last longer than previously thought on the protoplanet, then maybe volcanism on the early Earth itself might have been more energetic than we currently think."

The size of neutrons cannot be measured directly: it can only be determined from experiments involving other particles. While such calculations have so far been made in a very indirect way using old measurements with heavy atoms, a team at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) has taken a different approach. By combining their very accurate calculations with recent measurements on light nuclei, the researchers have arrived at a more direct methodology.

Their results, which differ significantly from previous ones, are described by the researchers headed by Professor Evgeny Epelbaum in the journal Physical Review Letters from 25. February 2020.

Neutrons and protons, jointly referred to as nucleons, form atomic nuclei and are therefore among the most common particles in our universe. The nucleons themselves consist of strongly interacting quarks and gluons and have a complex internal structure, the precise understanding of which is the subject of active research. One of the fundamental properties of nucleons is their size as determined by charge distribution. "Inside, there are positive and negative charge regions which, when taken together, result in zero total charge for the neutron," explains Evgeny Epelbaum. "The neutron's radius can be thought of as the spatial extension of the charge distribution. It thus determines the size of the neutrons."

A very indirect method

To date, determinations of this quantity were based on scattering experiments with extremely low-energy neutrons on an electron shell of heavy atoms such as bismuth. "Researchers would direct such a neutron beam at a target of heavy isotopes carrying many electrons and determine how many neutrons passed through," says Bochum-based physicist Dr. Arseniy Filin. This allowed one to extract the size of the neutrons. "This is a very indirect method," points out the physicist.

In their current project, the group has for the first time determined the neutron charge radius from the lightest atomic nuclei. In a theoretical study, they have succeeded in calculating the deuteron radius with high accuracy. The deuteron is one of the simplest atomic nuclei and consists of one proton and one neutron. Since the two nucleons in the deuteron are relatively far apart, the deuteron turns out to be much larger than its two constituents. "Our accurate prediction of the deuteron radius, combined with high-precision spectroscopic measurements of the deuteron-proton radius difference, yielded a value for the neutron radius that is about 1.7 standard deviations off the previous determinations," concludes Dr. Vadim Baru from the Helmholtz Institute for Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn. Accordingly, the previously assumed value for the size of a neutron is to be corrected.

Quantum physics describes the inner world of individual atoms, a world very different from our everyday experience. One of the many strange yet fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics is the role of the observer - measuring the state of a quantum system causes it to change. Despite the importance of the measurement process within the theory, it still holds unanswered questions: Does a quantum state collapse instantly during a measurement? If not, how much time does the measurement process take and what is the quantum state of the system at any intermediate step?

A collaboration of researchers from Sweden, Germany and Spain has answered these questions using a single atom - a strontium ion trapped in an electric field. The measurement on the ion lasts only a millionth of a second. By producing a "film" consisting of pictures taken at different times of the measurement they showed that the change of the state happens gradually under the measurement influence.

Atoms follow the laws of quantum mechanics which often contradict our normal expectations. The internal quantum state of an atom is formed by the state of the electrons circling around the atomic core. The electron can circle around the core in an orbit close or further away. Quantum mechanics, however, also allows so called superposition states, where the electron occupies both orbits at once, but each orbit only with some probability.

"Every time when we measure the orbit of the electron, the answer of the measurement will be that the electron was either in a lower or higher orbit, never something in between. This is true even when the initial quantum state was a superposition of both possibilities. The measurement in a sense forces the electron to decide in which of the two states it is", says Fabian Pokorny, researcher at the Department of Physics, Stockholm University.

The "film" displays the evolution during the measurement process. The individual pictures show tomography data where the height of the bars reveal the degree of superposition that is still preserved. During the measurement some of the superpositions are lost - and this loss happens gradually - while others are preserved as they should be for an ideal quantum measurement.

"These findings shed new light onto the inner workings of nature and are consistent with the predictions of modern quantum physics", says Markus Hennrich, group leader of the team in Stockholm.

These results are also important beyond fundamental quantum theory. Quantum measurement are an essential part of quantum computers. The group at Stockholm University is working on computers based on trapped ions, where the measurements are used to read out the result at the end of a quantum calculation.

Functional metrics in ecology -indicators based on the biological features of the organisms, in this case, water invertebrates- could help researchers to detect the impacts of human origins in temporary rivers, according to a new study carried out by experts from the Research Group Freshwater Ecology, Hydrology and Management (FEHM) of the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences of the Faculty of Biology of the University of Barcelona and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio).

The study also counts on other participating experts from the Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water Research (IDAEA-CSIC), the University of the Balearic Islands and the University of Parma (Italy).

The new study, published in Journal of Applied Ecology, presents a series of functional metrics that can contribute to the improvement of the assessment and management of temporary rivers. Some of these can even be applied regardless of the intermittence of the water flow. Moreover, these functional metrics seem to be more precise in the detection of environmental degradation of the ecosystem compared to the ones so far used, which will be more and more important regarding the context of climate change.

Improvement of the management and protection of temporary rivers

About 50% of the water network in the world consists of temporary or intermittent rivers, that is, rivers with a variable surface flow which changes in space and time creating three aquatic phases: flowing and disconnected pool aquatic phases, and completely dry phase. This can occur in the riverheads, in low parts and over the whole river. As a result, biological communities of these rivers also change over the aquatic phases, finding different groups of organisms that adapt to the environmental conditions they find.

The variability of the flow of this type of river makes it hard for the researchers to make an accurate diagnosis in accordance with the objectives form the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD), since the existing valorization tools are not adapted to this case. In the Mediterranean climate areas, many rivers can be temporary but we can also find some with human activity or anthropic impact- such as water extraction for agriculture purposes, hydrological alterations, geomorphological impacts, pollutants, invasive species, etc. Apart from this context, we need to add the effects of climate change, which show a significant increase of these rivers in certain areas of the world.

However, the assessment tools to determine the ecological state through biological indicators were designed, mostly, "to be applied to permanent and seasonal rivers, and this means they cannot always be applied to temporary rivers", notes researcher Maria Soria, first author of the article and member of IRBio and FEHM research group, who is conducting her doctoral thesis under the supervision of the lecturer Núria Bonada (UB) and Núria Cid (INRAE, France).

This study is framed within the European project LIFE+ TRivers, launched by a consortium formed by the Research Group FEHM from the Faculty of Biology of the University of Barcelona, the Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water (IDAEA-CSIC), the Catalan Water Agency (ACA) and the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation (CHX). Its objective is to study the hydrology and ecology of temporary rivers, and create new tools to improve its management and decision-taking in the field of management regarding the Water Framework Directive.

Temporary rivers: beyond traditional metrics

As part of the study, the experts assessed the ability of a set of biomonitoring metrics to detect anthropic impacts both in perennial and temporary rivers. In the experimental design, researchers conducted analyses that included both aquatic phases: flowing and disconnecting pool water phases. In particular, the team analyzed the response of several metrics based on water macroinvertebrates over the gradient of natural intermittence of flow and anthropic impacts.

The final objective of the study was to find out the combined effect of both perturbations -natural as a result of temporality and anthropic too- in two sets of metrics: the ones currently used by the water biomonitoring and which are based on the taxonomic richness and biological indexes (IBMWP, IMMiT and IASPT), and functional metrics, which use as a reference the biological traits of macroinvertebrates.

According to the conclusions, when traditional metrics are applied, the natural intermittence of water flow can confuse the evaluation process of the biological quality of rivers. Therefore, it is necessary to recalibrate these metrics if we wish to detect anthropic impacts in temporary rivers. As an exception, IBMWP -used when the water flows- seems to be efficient to detect anthropic impacts in perennial and temporary rivers. "However, there are studies that observed how this index could differ between dry and wet years, that is, the space and temporary hydrological variability of temporary rivers could provide untrusted results, especially in less predictable seasonal climates", note the authors of the study.

As stated in the study, the functional metrics can detect anthropic impacts in permanent and temporary rivers when the water flows and, in addition, some of them can be applied when the river has disconnected pools. In particular, one of the functional metrics with the highest potentiality is functional redundancy -it would be the number of taxons that contribute in a similar way to the ecosystem function- of the community of invertebrates.

This study, thus, opens new perspectives to the application of functional metrics in daily protocols of river sampling.

Imperial College London researchers have invented a new health tracking sensor for pets and people that monitors vital signs through fur or clothing.

The new type of sensor, which can detect vital signs like heart and breathing rates through fur and up to four layers of clothing, could help make everyday wearables for pets and livestock a reality.

They could help owners keep track of their pets' health, and help vets monitor animals during surgery without the need for shaving.

They could even help improve the work of sniffer dogs used to detect bombs and missing persons.

In people, they could provide a new way to measure vital signs that can provide measurements over clothing without direct contact with the skin.

Lead author Dr Firat Guder, of Imperial's Department of Bioengineering, said: "Wearables are expected to play a major role in monitoring health and detecting diseases early. Our stretchy, flexible invention heralds a whole new type of sensor that can track the health of animals and humans alike over fur or clothing."

The research on this new class of sensors is published today in Advanced Functional Materials.

Watery, squishy stethoscope

Unlike in humans, for whom there are many fitness tracking devices, there aren't currently many 'wearable' options for pets and other animals. The researchers suggest that one reason for this is that current trackers cannot monitor vital signs through fur.

The new Imperial-developed device is made of a silicone-water composite material which houses a microphone that picks up sound waves, like a watery, squishy stethoscope. It is flexible and stretchy enough that it tightly moulds to the shape of the fur, clothing, or body part it is placed on, squeezing out any sound-sucking air bubbles and preventing them from re-forming.

First author Yasin Cotur, of Imperial's Department of Bioengineering, said: "The sensor works like a watery stethoscope, filling any gaps between it and its subject so that no air bubbles get in and dampen the sound."

The sound is converted to a digital signal which is then transmitted to a nearby portable computer so that people can track an animal's physiology in real-time.

When the researchers tested their device on five humans and one dog, they found that it works through up to four layers of clothes, and that the sensor works best when the clothing or fur sits right up against the skin.

Dogs with jobs

As well as health tracking, the researchers say the sensors could help turn findings from sniffer dogs into measurable data.

Sniffer dogs are trained to exhibit behaviours like sitting or barking when they detect a target object such as an explosive device or person stuck inside rubble following an earthquake.

When dogs 'alert' to target objects, such as bombs, their heart and breathing rates increase because they are excited to be rewarded for correctly identifying their target.

However, 'alerting' behaviour can be difficult to quantitively measure.

The researchers say their new sensor could establish baselines of normal heart and breathing rates from which to quantify the level of excitement for each dog. This would be measured by how much their vital signs diverge from the norm.

By measuring how excited the dogs are, an inbuilt algorithm might even be able to tell the strength of the dog's reaction to the smell it detects and work out how 'sure' the dog is of finding the desired object.

Animal AI

The sensors have been tested only on dogs and humans so far, but the researchers will next try to adapt them for use on other types of pets, as well as horses and livestock.

Yasin said: "The next step is to validate our system further with animals, primarily focusing on sniffer dogs and then horses and livestock later on."

They are also integrating motion sensors to the system so they can track animals' movements in real time. The software could use an artificial intelligent algorithm to indicate when pets are standing, sitting, or lying, as well as which direction they are facing and how their vital signs diverge from the norm. This could hook up to a smartphone app that will tell owners how, and where, their pets are in real time.

Dr. Won-chul Cho of Hydrogen Research Department of the Korea Institute of Energy Research (President Jong-nam Kim) has developed a separator membrane that significantly reduces gas crossover while exhibiting high performance comparable to the commercial separator for alkaline water electrolyzer. The research has been published in the International Journal of Energy Research, the world's leading authority on nuclear power energy.

Water electrolysis is a technology for producing hydrogen and oxygen using electrochemical reactions. The technology has been actively conducted worldwide to control the peak load and frequency of power systems due to rapid expansion of renewable energy sources.

The commercial porous separator exhibits a satisfactory performance of high bubble point and low ionic resistance but high gas crossover, resulting in a limited dynamic range of the electrolyzer.

The researchers succeeded in developing a separator membrane with a reduced average pore size of around 70 nm and high surface wettability, contributing to helping alkaline electrolyzer systems be operated in more controllable loads.

The development of a separator with suppressed gas crossover while maintaining low ohmic resistance is mainly attributed to the homogeneous distribution of the hydrophilic zirconia particles over the polymer matrix.

Senior Researcher Won-chul Cho at Korea Institute of Energy Research who is the main author of the paper said, "Membrane exhibits high performance and chemical stability and can be manufactured on a commercial scale. Therefore, it will soon be applicable to commercial electrolyzers."

Hydrogen Research Department in Korea Institute of Energy Research is leading main R&D projects for alkaline and PEM electrolyzers in Korea.

A research team has described five new cases of a rare disease -known as KAT6A syndrome- of which there are only eighty dominant cases worldwide. This neurological and developmental disorder, caused by alterations in the lysine acetyltransferase 6A gene (KAT6A), involves intellectual disability, language impairment, low muscle tone, cardiovascular malformation and eye defects, among other affectations.

The study, published in the journal Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases, is led by a team co-led by the researchers Daniel Grinberg and Susanna Balcells and Roser Urreizti, from the Human Molecular Genetics Group of the Faculty of Biology of the University of Barcelona and the Rare Diseases Networking Biomedical Research Centre (CIBERER), and the experts Estrella López-Martín and Eva Bermejo-Sánchez, from the Institute of Rare Diseases Research (IIER) from Carlos III Health Institute (ISCIII).

KAT6A syndrome: news symptoms related to a rare disease

The research team confirmed in five new patients some of the features of the clinical picture related to the pathology, apart from describing new symptoms and affectations in the development of the disease. In particular, the authors overserved new symptoms such as cryptorchidism (testicular atrophy), syndactyly (fused fingers) and trigonocephaly (deformation in the frontal part of the cranium), apart from the emergence of recurrent infections.

The experts from the Human Molecular Genetics Group of the UB, also members of the Institute of Biomedicine of the University of Barcelona (IBUB) and the Research Institute Sant Joan de Déu (IRSJD), contributed to specifying the role of genetic mutations that were seen in this minority disease. Despite the syndrome was first related to truncating mutations, the new study describes a variant of the disease without cardiac affectations that is related to missense mutations.

Four out of the five patients described in this study showed missense substitutions, and the fifth case they observed a missense mutation that did not follow cardiac affectations.

The in silico studies -with informatic simulations- confirmed that the missense mutation generated a partial process of splicing that caused the premature truncating of the protein that gave origin to the pathology.

The new study will contribute to better understand the natural history of this syndrome and expand the clinical phenotype of patients, advances that are essential to delimit the phenotypical characterization and definition of this rare disease. According to the authors, these findings will help to increase the chances to diagnose other affected patients earlier. Other participants in the study are experts from the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM), Hospital de la Fe (Valencia) and the University of Adelaide (Australia).

PDT does not always kill cells deep within a cancerous tumour, allowing tumours to grow back again.

The new compound uses penetrating infrared light to damage cells directly and potentially improve the success rate of PDT

Researchers at the University of Sheffield have synthesized a new compound which could improve the success rate of photodynamic therapy when treating cancer.

The key to photodynamic therapy (PDT) is a compound known as a sensitizer, a light-sensitive medicine given to the patient, which when activated by light produces highly reactive oxygen-based species which kill the cancer cells. However, current PDT treatment has two main drawbacks when it comes to killing tumours.

First, currently used sensitizers are only activated by light energies that do not penetrate tissues, like skin, very deeply. Second, many tumours have low amounts of oxygen, so photoactivated sensitizers cannot generate the toxic compounds which kill cancer cells.

Now scientists at the University of Sheffield have developed a new compound which solves both of these problems in one go. Not only is the new compound activated by infrared or red light which can penetrate deep into the tumour, but it also directly damages DNA within cells without having to rely on oxygen.

Researchers at the University of Sheffield have tested the compound in skin cancer tumour models and observed that it killed cancer cells deep into these model tumours. The next step in the research will look at skin models, testing whether the compound can kill the tumour but leave healthy skin undamaged.

Professor Jim Thomas, from the University of Sheffield's Department of Chemistry, who led the study said: "PDT is potentially a very attractive way to treat diseases such as skin cancer as it only works when the laser light is applied, so the effect can be focused into a specific place on or in the body.

"The sensitizer we have developed can potentially solve the two main problems that prevent PDT from being a commonly used anticancer treatment."

The research, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, was carried out by scientists from the University of Sheffield's Departments of Chemistry and Materials Science and Engineering and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Central Laser Facility.

The group of Dr. Hana Cahová of the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the CAS, in collaboration with scientists from the Institute of Microbiology of the CAS, has discovered an entirely new class of dinucleoside polyphosphate 5'RNA caps in bacteria and described the function of alarmones and their mechanism of function. The discovery was recently published in the journal Nature Communications.

Dinucleoside polyphosphates are small signaling molecules found in all types of organisms. They have been known for more than fifty years and are often called "alarmones", as their concentration in cells increases under stress conditions (alarm). These molecules influence various cellular functions, but the mechanism of their action was as yet unknown. Hana Cahová and her colleagues noticed that the structure of these alarmones was similar to that of RNA and presumed that the alarmones were in fact part of the RNA in the form of so-called caps. Indeed, using mass spectrometry, they detected nine new types of these structures as part of RNA.

"As chemists, we noticed the glaring similarities of these alarmones with the RNA structure, so we were able to discover something that has been hidden from biologists for fifty years," says Hana Cahová, head of the junior research group at IOCB Prague.

The researchers found that these molecules are accepted by RNA polymerases and used as the first building blocks in RNA synthesis. Moreover, they determined that dinucleoside polyphosphate capped RNA can be cleaved by two types of enzymes and thus degraded. Some of the dinucleoside polyphosphate RNA caps were methylated, and the researchers have shown that these methylations protected RNA from cleavage and further degradation.

The amount of dinucleoside polyphosphate capped RNAs significantly increased under starvation conditions. Therefore, the authors propose that these caps protect RNA from degradation under starvation conditions when the cells do not have enough building blocks for creating such macromolecules as RNA. In such situations, the cell cannot flexibly react to the demands of the environment, but it can retain at least some RNA. Once the cell has enough nutrition again, the capped RNA is degraded by a specific enzyme, and the cell can build new RNA to reflect the current situation.

This is the first work showing that the 5' end status of RNA depends on environment and stress. Moreover, the discovery of alarmones in RNA can explain the mechanism of their action. This work also provides the first evidence of small signaling molecules - dinucleoside polyphosphates - acting as parts of the RNA.

The chemical biology group of Dr. Hana Cahová applies chemical methods to biological systems to better understand cellular processes. The team is especially interested in finding new RNA modifications in viruses and bacteria and understanding their role.