Earth

Conditions in the tropical ocean affect weather patterns worldwide. The most well-known examples are El Niño or La Niña events, but scientists believe other key elements of the tropical climate remain undiscovered.

In a study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists from the University of Washington and NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory use remotely-piloted sailboats to gather data on cold air pools, or pockets of cooler air that form below tropical storm clouds.

"Atmospheric cold pools are cold air masses that flow outward beneath intense thunderstorms and alter the surrounding environment," said lead author Samantha Wills, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies. "They are a key source of variability in surface temperature, wind and moisture over the ocean."

The paper is one of the first tropical Pacific studies to rely on data from Saildrones, wind-propelled sailing drones with a tall, hard wing and solar-powered scientific instruments. Co-authors on the NOAA-funded study are Dongxiao Zhang at CICOES and Meghan Cronin at NOAA.

Atmospheric cold pools produce dramatic changes in air temperature and wind speed near the surface of the tropical ocean. The pockets of cooler air form when rain evaporates below thunderstorm clouds. These relatively dense air masses, ranging between 6 to 125 miles (10 to 200 kilometers) across, lead to downdrafts that, upon hitting the ocean surface, produce temperature fronts and strong winds that affect their surroundings. How this affects the larger atmospheric circulation is unclear.

"Results from previous studies suggest that cold pools are important for triggering and organizing storm activity over tropical ocean regions," Wills said.

To understand the possible role of cold pools in larger tropical climate cycles, scientists need detailed measurements of these events, but it is hard to witness an event as it happens. The new study used uncrewed surface vehicles, or USVs, to observe the phenomena.

Over three multi-month missions between 2017 and 2019, 10 USVs covered over 85,000 miles (137,000 kilometers) and made measurements of more than 300 cold pool events, defined as temperature drops of at least 1.5 degrees Celsius in 10 minutes. In one case, a fleet of four vehicles separated by several miles captured the minute-by-minute evolution of an event and revealed how the cold pool propagated across the region.

"This technology is exciting as it allows us to collect observations over hard-to-reach, under-sampled ocean regions for extended periods of time," Wills said.

The paper includes observations of air temperature, wind speed, humidity, air pressure, sea surface temperature and ocean salinity during cold pool events. The authors use the data to better describe these phenomena, including how much and how quickly air temperatures drops, how long it takes the wind to reach peak speeds, and how sea surface temperature changes nearby. Results can be used to evaluate mathematical models of tropical convection and explore more questions, like how the gusts created by the temperature difference affect the transfer of heat between the air and ocean.

In a critical next step toward room-temperature superconductivity at ambient pressure, Paul Chu, Founding Director and Chief Scientist at the Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston (TcSUH), Liangzi Deng, research assistant professor of physics at TcSUH, and their colleagues at TcSUH conceived and developed a pressure-quench (PQ) technique that retains the pressure-enhanced and/or -induced high transition temperature (Tc) phase even after the removal of the applied pressure that generates this phase.

Pengcheng Dai, professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and his group, and Yanming Ma, Dean of the College of Physics at Jilin University, and his group contributed toward successfully demonstrating the possibility of the pressure-quench technique in a model high temperature superconductor, iron selenide (FeSe). The results were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

"We derived the pressure-quench method from the formation of the man-made diamond by Francis Bundy from graphite in 1955 and other metastable compounds," said Chu. "Graphite turns into a diamond when subjected to high pressure at high temperatures. Subsequent rapid pressure quench, or removal of pressure, leaves the diamond phase intact without pressure."

Chu and his team applied this same concept to a superconducting material with promising results.

"Iron selenide is considered a simple high-temperature superconductor with a transition temperature (Tc) for transitioning to a superconductive state at 9 Kelvin (K) at ambient pressure," said Chu.

"When we applied pressure, the Tc increased to ~ 40 K, more than quadrupling that at ambient, enabling us to unambiguously distinguish the superconducting PQ phase from the original un-PQ phase. We then tried to retain the high-pressure enhanced superconducting phase after removing pressure using the PQ method, and it turns out we can."

Dr. Chu and colleagues' achievement brings scientists a step closer to realizing the dream of room-temperature superconductivity at ambient pressure, recently reported in hydrides only under extremely high pressure.

Superconductivity is a phenomenon discovered in 1911 by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes by cooling mercury below its transition Tc of 4.2 K, attainable with the aid of liquid helium, which is rare and expensive. The phenomenon is profound because of superconductor's ability to exhibit zero resistance when electricity moves through a superconducting wire and its expulsion of magnetic field generated by a magnet. Subsequently, its vast potential in the energy and transportation sectors was immediately recognized.

To operate a superconducting device, one needs to cool it to below its Tc, which requires energy. The higher the Tc, the less energy needed. Therefore, raising the Tc with the ultimate goal of room temperature of 300 K has been the driving force for scientists in superconductivity research since its discovery.

In defiance of the then-prevailing belief that Tc could not exceed the 30's K, Paul Chu , and colleagues discovered superconductivity in a new family of compounds at 93 K in 1987, achievable by the mere use of the inexpensive, cost-effective industrial coolant of liquid nitrogen. The Tc has continuously been raised since to 164 K by Chu et al. and other subsequent groups of scientists. Recently a Tc of 287 K was achieved by Dias et al. of Rochester University in carbon-hydrogen-sulfide under 267 gigapascal (GPa).

In short, the advancement of Tc to room temperature is indeed within reach. But for future scientific and technological development of hydrides, characterization of materials and fabrication of devices at ambient pressures is necessary.

"Our method allows us to make the material superconducting with higher Tc without pressure. It even allows us to retain at ambient the non-superconducting phase that exists only in FeSe above 8 GPa. There is no reason that the technique cannot be equally applied to the hydrides that have shown signs of superconductivity with a Tc approaching room temperature."

The achievement inches the academic community closer toward room-temperature superconductivity (RTS) without pressure, which would mean ubiquitous practical applications for superconductors from the medical field, through power transmission and storage to transportation, with impacts whenever electricity is used.

Superconductivity as a means to improve power generation, storage and transmission is not a new idea, but it requires further research and development to become widespread before room temperature superconductivity becomes a reality. The capacity for zero electrical resistance means energy can be generated, transmitted and stored with no loss - an enormous low-cost advantage. However, current technology demands that the superconducting device be kept at severely low temperatures to retain its unique state, which still requires additional energy as an overhead cost, not to mention the potential hazard of the accidental failure of the cooling system. Hence, an RTS superconductor with no extra pressure to sustain its beneficial properties is a necessity to move forward with more practical applications.

The properties of superconductivity are also paving the way for a competitor to the famous bullet train seen throughout East Asia: a maglev train. Short for "magnetic levitation," the first maglev train built in Shanghai in 2004 successfully broadened usage in Japan and South Korea and is under consideration for commercial operation in the US. At top speeds of 375 miles per hour, cross country flights see a quick competitor in the maglev train. A room temperature superconductor could help Elon Musk realize his dream of a "hyperloop" to travel at a speed of 1000 miles per hour.

This successful implementation of the PQ technique on room temperature superconductors discussed in Chu and Deng's paper is critical in making superconductors possible for ubiquitous practical applications.

Now the riddle of RTS at ambient pressure is even closer to being solved.

Remember Napster? The peer-to-peer file sharing company, popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, depended on users sharing their music files. To promote cooperation, such software "could mislead its users," says Bryce Morsky, a postdoc in Penn's School of Arts & Sciences.

Some file-sharing companies falsely asserted that all of their users were sharing. Or, they displayed the mean number of files shared per user, hiding the fact that some users were sharing a great deal and many others were not. Related online forums promoted the idea that sharing was both ethical and the norm. These tactics were effective in getting users to share because they tapped into innate human social norms of fairness.

That got Morsky thinking. "Commonly in the literature on cooperation, you need reciprocity to get cooperation, and you need to know the reputations of those you're interacting with," he says. "But Napster users were anonymous, and so there should have been widespread 'cheating'--people taking files without sharing--and yet cooperation still occurred. Evidently, obscuring the degree of cheating worked for Napster, but is this true more generally and is it sustainable?"

In a new paper in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences, Morsky and Erol Akçay, an associate professor in the School of Arts & Sciences' Department of Biology, looked at this scenario: Could a cooperative community form and stabilize if the community's behaviors were masked? And would things change if the community members' true behaviors were eventually revealed?

Using a mathematical model to simulate the creation and maintenance of a community, their findings show, as in the example of Napster, that a degree of deceit or obfuscation does not impede and, indeed, can promote the formation of a cooperative community.

The researchers' modeling relied on an assumption that has been upheld time and time again, that humans are conditionally cooperative. "They will cooperate when others cooperate," Akçay says.

But the threshold of when someone will start cooperating differs from individual to individual. Some people will cooperate even when nobody else is, while others require most of the community to cooperate before they will do so too. Depending on the number of people with different cooperation thresholds, a community can wind up with either very high or very low levels of cooperation. "Our goal was to figure out, How can obfuscation act as a catalyst to get us to a highly cooperative community?" says Morsky.

To model this, the researchers envisioned a theoretical community in which individuals would join in a "naïve" state, believing that everyone else in the community is cooperating. As a result, most of them, too, begin cooperating.

At some point, however, the formerly naïve individuals become savvy and learn the true rate of cooperation in the community. Depending on their threshold of conditional cooperation, they may continue to cooperate, cheat, or get discouraged and leave the community.

In the model, when the researchers decreased the learning rate--or kept the true rate of cooperation in the group a secret for longer--they found that cooperation levels grew high, and savvy individuals quickly left the population. "And because those savvy individuals are the ones that don't cooperate as readily, that leaves only the individuals who are cooperating, so the average rate of cooperation gets very high," says Akçay.

Cooperative behavior could also come to dominate provided there was a steady inflow of naïve individuals into the population.

Akçay and Morsky note that their findings stand out from past research on cooperation.

"Typically when we and others have considered how to maintain cooperation, it's been thought that it's important to punish cheaters and to make that public to encourage others to cooperate," Morsky says. "But our study suggests that a side effect of public punishment is that it reveals how much or how little people are cooperating, so conditional cooperators may stop cooperating. You might be better off hiding the cheaters."

To continue exploring conditional cooperation, the researchers hope to follow with experiments with human participants as well as further modeling to reveal the tipping points for moving a group to either cooperate or not and how these tipping points could be changed by interventions. "You can see how conditional cooperation factors into behavior during this pandemic, for example," Akçay says. "If you think a lot of people are being careful (for example, wearing masks and social distancing), you might as well, but if the expectation is that not many people are being careful you may choose not to. Mask wearing is easy to observe, but other behaviors are harder, and that affects how the dynamics of these behaviors might unfold.

"This is a problem that humans have had to solve over and over again," he says. "Some amount of cooperation is required to have a society be worthwhile."

The average body size of humans has fluctuated significantly over the last million years and is strongly linked to temperature.

Colder, harsher climates drove the evolution of larger body sizes, while warmer climates led to smaller bodies.

Brain size also changed dramatically but did not evolve in tandem with body size.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers, led by the Universities of Cambridge and Tübingen, has gathered measurements of body and brain size for over 300 fossils from the genus Homo found across the globe. By combining this data with a reconstruction of the world's regional climates over the last million years, they have pinpointed the specific climate experienced by each fossil when it was a living human.

The study reveals that the average body size of humans has fluctuated significantly over the last million years, with larger bodies evolving in colder regions. Larger size is thought to act as a buffer against colder temperatures: less heat is lost from a body when its mass is large relative to its surface area. The results are published today in the journal Nature Communications.

Our species, Homo sapiens, emerged around 300,000 years ago in Africa. The genus Homo has existed for much longer, and includes the Neanderthals and other extinct, related species such as Homo habilis and Homo erectus.

A defining trait of the evolution of our genus is a trend of increasing body and brain size; compared to earlier species such as Homo habilis, we are 50% heavier and our brains are three times larger. But the drivers behind such changes remain highly debated.

"Our study indicates that climate - particularly temperature - has been the main driver of changes in body size for the past million years," said Professor Andrea Manica, a researcher in the University of Cambridge's Department of Zoology who led the study.

He added: "We can see from people living today that those in warmer climates tend to be smaller, and those living in colder climates tend to be bigger. We now know that the same climatic influences have been at work for the last million years."

The researchers also looked at the effect of environmental factors on brain size in the genus Homo, but correlations were generally weak. Brain size tended to be larger when Homo was living in habitats with less vegetation, like open steppes and grasslands, but also in ecologically more stable areas. In combination with archaeological data, the results suggest that people living in these habitats hunted large animals as food - a complex task that might have driven the evolution of larger brains.

"We found that different factors determine brain size and body size - they're not under the same evolutionary pressures. The environment has a much greater influence on our body size than our brain size," said Dr Manuel Will at the University of Tubingen, Germany, first author of the study.

He added: "There is an indirect environmental influence on brain size in more stable and open areas: the amount of nutrients gained from the environment had to be sufficient to allow for the maintenance and growth of our large and particularly energy-demanding brains."

This research also suggests that non-environmental factors were more important for driving larger brains than climate, prime candidates being the added cognitive challenges of increasingly complex social lives, more diverse diets, and more sophisticated technology.

The researchers say there is good evidence that human body and brain size continue to evolve. The human physique is still adapting to different temperatures, with on average larger-bodied people living in colder climates today. Brain size in our species appears to have been shrinking since the beginning of the Holocene (around 11,650 years ago). The increasing dependence on technology, such as an outsourcing of complex tasks to computers, may cause brains to shrink even more over the next few thousand years.

"It's fun to speculate about what will happen to body and brain sizes in the future, but we should be careful not to extrapolate too much based on the last million years because so many factors can change," said Manica.

A new analysis called an evidence and gap map has mapped what we know about improving the functional ability of older adults living at home or in nursing homes, retirement homes, or other long-term care facilities.

A total of 548 studies were included in the map, which is published in Campbell Systematic Reviews. The most common interventions studied were home-based rehabilitation for older adults and home-based health services for disease prevention, mostly delivered by visiting healthcare professionals.

Investigators found substantial evidence for interventions to promote functional ability--especially related to basic needs and mobility--in older adults at home, but few studies have looked at impacts on social participation, financial security, ability to maintain relationships, and communication. There were very few studies done in low and middle income countries.

"This Campbell Collaboration evidence and gap map on enabling functional ability at home for older adults helps people find relevant studies and systematic reviews to support evidence-informed decisions for ageing safely and well in place," said corresponding author Vivian Welch, PhD, MSc, a scientist at Bruyère Research Institute, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa, and Editor-in-Chief of the Campbell Collaboration. "This evidence map is one of the cornerstones of the baseline report for the United Nations Decade of Healthy Ageing, 2021-2030."

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- A million years ago, dry seasons became more frequent and forests retreated before the encroaching savanna. Meanwhile, clustered around a nearby lake, our ancient ancestors fashioned stone tools.

During the long press of years, mud and sediment in that East African lake turned to stone, trapping pollen and microscopic organisms in its lattice. Today, researchers like Kennie Leet analyze samples of these ancient sediments, known as sediment cores, to create a picture of the environment early humans called home.

A doctoral student in geological sciences, Leet is the first author on "Labyrinth patterns in Magadi (Kenya) cherts: Evidence for early formation from siliceous gels," published in a recent issue of Geology, the leading journal in the field. Co-authors include Distinguished Professor of Geological Sciences and Environmental Studies Tim Lowenstein, her advisor, as well as Robin Renaut of Canada's University of Saskatchewan, R. Bernhart Owen of Hong Kong Baptist University and Andrew Cohen of the University of Arizona.

Leet's research is part of the National Science Foundation-funded Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project (HSPDP), which looks at how the climate may have impacted hominin evolution in the East African rift. Overall, the project looks at the last 5 million years; Leet's portion of the project considers the last million.

She particularly focuses on the origin of the chert found in Kenya's Lake Magadi. A fine-grained rock that forms from siliceous material, chert is "cryptocrystalline," composed of crystals so small that they can't even be seen by high-powered microscopes, much less the naked eye.

Scientists believe that chert forms on the earth's surface and thus contains information about the environment at the time of its formation, she explained. Because of this quality, they can use chert to calculate the time period for particular climactic events, such as droughts -- not unusual in East Africa, where the climate oscillates between wet and dry periods.

Opening a window into the distant past, the chert points to an even larger trend.

"One of the surprising things we found was that there has been a progressive drying trend for the last million years in East Africa. It's just been progressively getting drier and drier," she said. "But in that, we still have the oscillation between wet and dry."

In the Geology article, she explores a labyrinth pattern she found in the rocks of this period. Patterns are common in nature, and this specific one is formed by drying, she explained.

"It tells us that all of the chert formation and solidification occurred near the surface, where there was exposure to air," she said. "Because this happened before the sediments were buried and compacted, there is other supporting evidence, such as really beautifully preserved plant fragments and single-celled organisms called diatoms."

The time period coincides with the region's transition from trees and forests to grasslands, which biologists and microbiologists on the team are able to track through pollen preserved in the sediment core. During that period, the early humans of Lake Magadi were also creating stone tools in new ways. Researchers wonder: Were these ancient communities moving about and trading more, prompted by drought?

Interestingly, the trend has reversed over the last decade, with the region becoming wetter. In fact, one of the places she stayed during a visit to Kenya in 2019 is now underwater, she said.

INDIANAPOLIS -- The vast majority of electronic health record (EHR) alerts attempting to reduce the prescribing of high-risk medications linked to dementia in older adults went unread in a study led by research scientists from Regenstrief Institute, Purdue University and Indiana University School of Medicine. The goal of the intervention was to facilitate the deprescribing of anticholinergics through both provider and patient-based alerts, however, engagement with the alerts was so low, the study team was unable to conclude if this approach could be an effective method.

Anticholinergics are drugs which affect the brain by blocking acetylcholine, a nervous system neurotransmitter that influences memory, alertness and planning skills. They are linked to dementia and prescribed for many conditions common in older adults including depression, urinary incontinence, irritable bowel syndrome and Parkinson's disease. These medications are used by approximately one in four older adults each year, and nearly half of older adults have used this type of medication at least once in a five-year period.

Many medical groups have come out in support of deprescribing anticholinergics, but it is challenging to execute in an already busy primary care environment.

"Deprescribing is very complex and rarely prioritized over common medical problems during visits with primary care providers," said study lead author Noll Campbell, PharmD, M.S., research scientist at the IU Center for Aging Research at Regenstrief and assistant professor of pharmacy at Purdue University College of Pharmacy. "In this study, we used principles of behavioral economics in the design of EHR nudges directed at both providers and patients to promote the deprescribing of high-risk anticholinergic medications. However, very few of the alerts were viewed by either recipient, so we are now evaluating how we can change or improve this approach."

In this study, an alert let the provider know that the patient had high-risk anticholinergic medications prescribed in the medical record and offered alternatives to those medications. Alerts also prompted staff to play a video providing education about the medicines and modeling a discussion that led to a change in prescription for patients who were prescribed one of the target medications.

The research team conducted the cluster randomized trial in Eskenazi Health clinics and compared the medication records to the previous year to see if there were any changes. They found there were no significant differences in deprescribing between the control group and the intervention group.

During the course of the study, 85 percent of alerts to providers and 95 percent of alerts to medical assistants went unread, so study authors cannot conclude that priming patients and providers for the discussion is not a feasible strategy, only that the methods used in this study were not successful in reaching the target recipients.

"One option going forward is to experiment with different design approaches in EMR-based nudges," said Dr. Campbell. "Alternatively, a shift towards human-based interventions that can manage the complexity of deprescribing activities may be more effective at deprescribing high-risk anticholinergic medications. While we pursue the goal of understanding clinical implications, we are also cognizant of the scalability of interventions if there is clinical benefit realized by reducing these high-risk medications."

Dr. Campbell and his colleagues at Regenstrief are currently conducting a clinical trial designed to determine if stopping anticholinergic medications results in sustained improvements in cognition. This trial involves clinical pharmacists working with physicians and patients to switch to safer medicines.

Another study at the IU Center for Aging Research at Regenstrief is testing an app called BrainSafe, which provides information on anticholinergics to patients with the goal of leading them to initiate a deprescribing conversation.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a patch that plants can "wear" to monitor continuously for plant diseases or other stresses, such as crop damage or extreme heat.

"We've created a wearable sensor that monitors plant stress and disease in a noninvasive way by measuring the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by plants," says Qingshan Wei, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work. Wei is an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State.

Current methods of testing for plant stress or disease involve taking plant tissue samples and conducting an assay in a lab. However, this only gives growers one measurement, and there is a time lag between when growers take a sample and when they get the test results.

Plants emit different combinations of VOCs under different circumstances. By targeting VOCs that are relevant to specific diseases or plant stress, the sensors can alert users to specific problems.

"Our technology monitors VOC emissions from the plant continuously, without harming the plant," Wei says. "The prototype we've demonstrated stores this monitoring data, but future versions will transmit the data wirelessly. What we've developed allows growers to identify problems in the field - they wouldn't have to wait to receive test results from a lab."

The rectangular patches are 30 millimeters long and consist of a flexible material containing graphene-based sensors and flexible silver nanowires. The sensors are coated with various chemical ligands that respond to the presence of specific VOCs, allowing the system to detect and measure VOCs in gases emitted by the plant's leaves.

The researchers tested a prototype of the device on tomato plants. The prototype was set up to monitor for two types of stress: physical damage to the plant and infection by P. infestans, the pathogen that causes late blight disease in tomatoes. The system detected VOC changes associated with the physical damage within one to three hours, depending on how close the damage was to the site of the patch.

Detecting the presence of P. infestans took longer. The technology didn't pick up changes in VOC emissions until three to four days after researchers inoculated the tomato plants.

"This is not markedly faster than the appearance of visual symptoms of late blight disease," Wei says. "However, the monitoring system means growers don't have to rely on detecting minute visual symptoms. Continuous monitoring would allow growers to identify plant diseases as quickly as possible, helping them limit the spread of the disease."

"Our prototypes can already detect 13 different plant VOCs with high accuracy, allowing users to develop a customized sensor array that focuses on the stresses and diseases that a grower thinks are most relevant," says Yong Zhu, co-corresponding author of the paper and Andrew A. Adams Distinguished Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at NC State.

"It's also important to note that the materials are fairly low cost," Zhu says. "If the manufacturing was scaled up, we think this technology would be affordable. We're trying to develop a practical solution to a real-world problem, and we know cost is an important consideration."

The researchers are currently working to develop a next-generation patch that can monitor for temperature, humidity and other environmental variables as well as VOCs. And while the prototypes were battery-powered and stored the data on-site, the researchers plan for future versions to be solar powered and capable of wireless data transfer.

Some exceptionally gifted people have marked human history and culture. Leonardo, Mozart, and Einstein are some famous examples of this phenomenon.

Is talent in a given field a uniquely human phenomenon? We do not know whether gifted bees or elephants exist, just to name a few species, but now there is evidence that talent in a specific field exists, in at least one non-human species: the dog.

A new study, just published in Scientific Reports, found that, while the vast majority of dogs struggle to learn object labels (such as the names of their toys), when tested in strictly controlled conditions, a handful of gifted word learner dogs learn multiple toy names, apparently effortlessly.

A team of researchers of the Family Dog Project at the Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, exposed 40 dogs to an intensive, three-month-long training program aimed at teaching them the name of at least two dog toys - which is the minimum amount necessary to be able to assess whether dogs can tell the items apart based on their names. The training protocol included daily playful interactions between the dog and the owner, during which the owner repeated the name of the toy several times, and weekly sessions including also a dog trainer.

Video abstract of the study: https://youtu.be/WF6ZpjdH2Sc

"At first, we hypothesized that developmental factors, such as neuroplasticity during puppyhood, would have played a role in making puppies learn object names at a faster rate, compared to adult dogs. Thus, we recruited for this study puppies and adults", reports Dr. Claudia Fugazza, leading researcher of this project. "We were surprised to find that, despite the intensive training, most dogs, irrespective of their age, did not show any evidence of learning. Even more surprisingly, 7 adult dogs showed an exceptional learning capacity: they did not only learn the two toy names but, within the time of the study, they learned between 11 and 37 other novel toy names", continues the researcher.

Among these 7 dogs, 6 already possessed a vocabulary of toy names when the study began; The seventh dog, named Oliva, did not previously know toy names, but learned 21 in only two months, keeping the pace with the other 6 gifted word learner peers. This may suggest that the exceptional capacity to learn object names does not necessarily presuppose prior experience.

"All the 7 dogs that showed this exceptional talent are Border collies, a breed meant to cooperate with humans for herding purposes" reports Shany Dror, co-author of the study, "but it is important to keep in mind that, within the many dogs that did not show any evidence of learning, there were also 18 Border collies".

Moreover, in the literature, some dogs of other breeds are reported to have acquired vocabulary knowledge. For example, a previous study found this capacity in a Yorkshire terrier. Although it may increase the chances, being a Border collie is not necessary, nor enough to be a "gifted word learner dog".

"We are intrigued by this extreme inter-individual variation in a cognitive trait (the capacity to learn object labels) and we think that this is just the beginning of a journey that will lead us to better understand the roots of talent - i.e., why some individuals - humans or other species - are gifted in a given field" concludes Dr. Adam Miklósi, head of the Department of Ethology and coauthor of the study, who thinks that dogs, thanks to their evolution and development in the human environment, constitute the ideal model species to take up the challenge to study the origins of talent and variation across individuals in cognitive capacities.

Once again, the dog, our best friend, may teach us some lessons about ourselves as well.

To recruit more of these rare, gifted word learner dogs for their studies, the researchers of the Eötvös Loránd University have also launched the Genius Dog Challenge http://geniusdogchallenge.com a project that already became viral in the social media, like YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDvr5quzSS8xmOPOHzMokjA

New York, NY (July 6, 2021) - Mount Sinai researchers have uncovered the complex cellular mechanisms of Ebola virus, which could help explain its severe toll on humans and identify potential pathways to treatment and prevention. In a study published in mBio, the team reported how a protein of the Ebola virus, VP24, interacts with the double-layered membrane of the cell nucleus (known as the nuclear envelope), leading to significant damage to cells along with virus replication and the propagation of disease.

"The Ebola virus is extremely skilled at dodging the body's immune defenses, and in our study we characterize an important way in which that evasion occurs through disruption of the nuclear envelope, mediated by the VP24 protein," says co-senior author Adolfo García-Sastre, PhD, Professor of Microbiology, and Director of the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "That disruption is quite dramatic and replicates rare, genetic diseases known as laminopathies, which can result in severe muscular, cardiovascular, and neuronal complications."

After first appearing in 1976 in Africa, the Ebola virus has triggered a number of outbreaks on that continent, the most serious from 2014 to 2016 in West Africa, with a 50 percent mortality rate among its victims. The virus, which causes severe hemorrhagic fever, is transmitted to people from wild animals and spreads through human-to-human transmission.

In their laboratory work--much of it conducted with research partners from CIMUS at the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, Germany--investigators identified the cellular membrane components that interact with VP24 to prompt nuclear membrane disruption. These components are emerin and the inner membrane constituents lamin A/C and lamin B. Specifically, the VP24 protein decreases interaction of lamin A/C and emerin, compromising the integrity of the nuclear membrane, which, in turn, results in leakage of DNA and the loss of function by the body's disease-fighting cells.

The researchers further showed that VP24 disrupts signaling pathways that are meant to activate the immune system's defenses against viral invaders like Ebola. The biological consequence of this is even greater interference with the normal physiology of cells, including antiviral immunity.

"We believe our discovery of the novel activities of the Ebola VP24 protein and the severe damage it causes to infected cells will help to promote further research into effective ways to treat and prevent the spread of deadly viruses, perhaps through a new inhibitor," says Dr. García-Sastre, who has spent the past 25 years focused on the molecular biology of rare and common viruses. "Indeed, that research will hopefully identify even more precisely the molecular mechanisms by which viruses like Ebola invade the body and find ways to cleverly avoid its immune defenses."

Scientists at KAIST have fabricated a laser system that generates highly interactive quantum particles at room temperature. Their findings, published in the journal Nature Photonics, could lead to a single microcavity laser system that requires lower threshold energy as its energy loss increases.

The system, developed by KAIST physicist Yong-Hoon Cho and colleagues, involves shining light through a single hexagonal-shaped microcavity treated with a loss-modulated silicon nitride substrate. The system design leads to the generation of a polariton laser at room temperature, which is exciting because this usually requires cryogenic temperatures.

The researchers found another unique and counter-intuitive feature of this design. Normally, energy is lost during laser operation. But in this system, as energy loss increased, the amount of energy needed to induce lasing decreased. Exploiting this phenomenon could lead to the development of high efficiency, low threshold lasers for future quantum optical devices.

"This system applies a concept of quantum physics known as parity-time reversal symmetry," explains Professor Cho. "This is an important platform that allows energy loss to be used as gain. It can be used to reduce laser threshold energy for classical optical devices and sensors, as well as quantum devices and controlling the direction of light."

The key is the design and materials. The hexagonal microcavity divides light particles into two different modes: one that passes through the upward-facing triangle of the hexagon and another that passes through its downward-facing triangle. Both modes of light particles have the same energy and path but don't interact with each other.

However, the light particles do interact with other particles called excitons, provided by the hexagonal microcavity, which is made of semiconductors. This interaction leads to the generation of new quantum particles called polaritons that then interact with each other to generate the polariton laser. By controlling the degree of loss between the microcavity and the semiconductor substrate, an intriguing phenomenon arises, with the threshold energy becoming smaller as energy loss increases.

Palo Alto, CA--Dehydrated plant seeds can lay dormant for long periods--over 1,000 years in some species--before the availability of water can trigger germination. This protects the embryonic plant inside from a variety of environmental stresses until conditions are favorable for growth and survival. However, the mechanism by which the baby plant senses water and reactivates cellular activity has remained a mystery until now.

New work jointly led by Carnegie's Yanniv Dorone and Sue Rhee and Stanford University's Steven Boeynaems and Aaron Gitler discovered a protein that plays a critical "go, or no-go" role in this process--halting germination if the soil's hydrological conditions are less than ideal or allowing it to proceed if the chances of survival are good. Their findings have major implications for understanding plant ecology in a warming world and for the possibility of designing drought-resistant crops that can survive climate change and fight world hunger.

Their work is published in Cell.

Dorone, Rhee, Boeynaems, Gitler, and their colleagues--including Carnegie's Benjamin Jin, Shannon Hateley, Flavia Bossi, Elena Lazarus, and Moises Exposito-Alonso--used molecular, physiological, and ecological research techniques to reveal a previously uncharacterized protein that they named FLOE1.

"Despite the extraordinary toughness of many seeds, plants are still at their most vulnerable during this stage of their lives, because germination must be precisely timed to ensure the greatest chance of survival. Once germination starts, the plant cannot go back into its hibernation state--the genie can't be put back in the bottle," Dorone explained. "So, a protein like FLOE1 is crucial to a plant's ability to walk the tightrope between too soon and too late."

The key to FLOE1's capabilities is a recently discovered biophysical phenomenon that's a hot research topic right now called phase separation. This mechanism allows cells to dynamically compartmentalize biomolecules into membrane-less assemblies, rather than cordoning them off in a cellular organelle surrounded by a membrane.

"Think of an organelle as an office building where components of the cell are assigned to complete their physiological jobs; whereas, these phase-separation-enabled assemblies are more like a maker faire or hackathon, where proteins can come together to accomplish a task and then disburse when it's complete," Rhee said. "We found that FLOE1's ability to very quickly initiate this type of temporary gathering is crucial to its functionality."

When a dormant seed senses moisture in its proximity, FLOE1 almost instantaneously assembles in the cell to test the waters, so to speak, and determine whether the conditions are good for the seed to reactivate and start growing. Because the FLOE1 aggregation is temporary and reversible, it can act as a go or no-go signal, halting germination if water availability is determined to be less than optimal, or allowing it to proceed if the environment has enough water to support successful growth.

"We believe that this is the first study that provides information on how seeds can directly perceive their hydration state and act upon it," Rhee added.

The authors say that their discovery could lay the groundwork for engineering crops that are able to harness FLOE1's abilities in order to withstand the detrimental effects of climate change. This type of enhancement will be increasingly important to combat hunger around the world.

Although their work was conducted using the experimental mustard green Arabidopsis thaliana, Dorone, Rhee, Boeynaems, and Gitler found found that FLOE1 is present throughout the plant kingdom, even in plants that precede the evolution of seeds, meaning it could play many additional roles in plant cellular physiology, which could have additional bioengineering potential.

"What's more, FLOE1 is the first known protein to reversibly phase separate over hydration-dehydration cycles, but it's likely that similar processes occur in other organisms that have desiccated periods of dormancy, including human pathogens," Dorone concluded.

Physicists of Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have taken spectacular pictures that allow the ignition process of plasma under water to be viewed and tracked in real time. Dr. Katharina Grosse has provided the first data sets with ultra-high temporal resolution, supporting a new hypothesis on the ignition of these plasmas: In the nanosecond range, there is not enough time to form a gas environment. Electrons generated by field effects lead to the propagation of the plasma. The nanosecond plasma ignites directly in the liquid, regardless of the polarity of the voltage. The report from the Collaborative Research Centre 1316 "Transient Atmospheric Pressure Plasmas: from Plasma to Liquids to Solids" has been published in the Journal of Applied Physics and Rubin, the RUB's science magazine.

Making plasma development visible

In order to analyse how plasma ignites over short time spans and how this ignition works in the liquid, physicist Grosse applies a high voltage for ten nanoseconds to a hair-thin electrode immersed in water. The strong electric field thus generated causes the plasma to ignite. Using high-speed optical spectroscopy in combination with modelling of the fluid dynamics, the Bochum-based researcher is able to predict the power, pressure and temperature in these underwater plasmas. She thus elucidates the ignition process and the plasma development in the nanosecond range

According to her observations, the conditions in the water are extreme at the time of ignition. For a short time, pressures of many thousand bar are created, which is equivalent to or even exceeds the pressure at the deepest point in the Pacific Ocean, as well as temperatures of many thousand degrees similar to the surface temperature of the sun.

Tunnel effects under water

The measurements challenge the prevalent theory. So far, it has been assumed that a high negative pressure difference forms at the tip of the electrode, which leads to the formation of very small cracks in the liquid with expansions in the range of nanometres, in which the plasma can then spread. "It was assumed that an electron avalanche forms in the cracks under water, making the ignition of the plasma possible," says Achim von Keudell, who holds the Chair of Experimental Physics II. However, the images taken by the Bochum-based research team suggest that the plasma is "ignited locally within the liquid", explains Grosse.

In her attempt to explain this phenomenon, the physicist uses the quantum-mechanical tunnel effect. This describes the fact that particles are able to cross an energy barrier that they should not be able to cross according to the laws of conventional physics, because they don't have enough energy to do so. "If you look at the recordings of the plasma ignition, everything indicates that individual electrons tunnel through the energy barrier of the water molecules to the electrode, where they ignite the plasma locally, precisely where the electric field is highest," says Grosse. This theory has a lot going for it and is the subject of much discussion among experts.

Water is split into its components

The ignition process under water is as fascinating as the results of the chemical reaction are promising for practical applications. The emission spectra show that, at nanosecond pulses, the water molecules no longer have the opportunity to compensate for the pressure of the plasma. The plasma ignition breaks them down into their components, namely atomic hydrogen and oxygen. The latter reacts readily with surfaces. And this is precisely where the great potential lies, explains physicist Grosse: "The released oxygen can potentially re-oxidise catalytic surfaces in electrochemical cells so that they are regenerated and once again fully develop their catalytic activity."

Environmental education provision needs greater investment and innovation if future generations are to be able to respond fully to the climate emergency, experts have said.

The deepening environmental crisis will continue to worsen if there is not significant support and investment in environmental and science education, researchers have warned. Reforms would help young people to address the complex, interlinked and dynamic issues of our contemporary situation.

The experts argue Governments and other organisations must direct more funding to education innovation in response to consistent warnings from scientists about trends in the deteriorating state of ecosystems, biodiversity and climate, amongst other environmental issues.

Writing in Environmental Education Research, Alan Reid, from Monash University, Justin Dillon, from the University of Exeter, Jo-Anne Ferreira, from the University of Southern Queensland and Nicole Ardoin from Stanford University, who are senior editors of the journal, say environmental education is a "cornerstone for the social and environmental changes" needed in the future.

Environmental and science education helps people to identify fake information and ideologies, and understand and respond appropriately to warnings about the climate emergency.

They add that consensus on our environmental predicaments is not simply a matter for scientists, however. It must be supported by those in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, and wider society. Only then will contemporary calls by organisations such as UNEP and UNESCO that 'environmental education be a core component of all education systems at all levels by 2025', have a chance of gaining the multilateral and multileveled support the situation so urgently requires.

The academics highlight international surveys that show many governments continue to fail to support and invest enough in environmental and sustainability education across pre-school, school, college and university settings.

Professor Ferreira said: "The research base is clear about the superiority of whole-school approaches to quick curriculum fixes for addressing topics such as the climate emergency. The existential risk aspects also mean we need to look at investment and innovation in lifelong learning and non-school based provision, alongside examining the focus of current initial teacher education and continuing professional development."

Professor Reid said: "The popularity of outdoor education centres and activities are testament to the broader base of interest in environment and nature, as well as when arts, media and civil society addresses the climate crisis. Flagship environmental and science communication documentaries by the likes of David Attenborough examining the causes and effects of the climate emergency whet many people's appetites for understanding more from credible sources. Sir David's own learning journey in coming to understand the urgency of the situation underscores the rich learning opportunities available to us all, particularly in the run up to COP26 in Glasgow."

He added: "Ensuring any form of environmental education is relevant, coherent, fit for purpose, funded appropriately, and available to current and future generations within and beyond the curriculum will be crucial to addressing sound and pertinent warnings from scientists."

Professor Dillon said: "Global leaders should be discussing how to reimagine, recreate and restore environmental education to reduce the consequences of the environmental crisis. Countries should embed environmental and science education throughout society in ways that make sense locally."

Professor Ardoin said: "Only by investing in education--and especially environmental and sustainability education--will it be possible to radically alter the course we are currently on, and thus demonstrate to ourselves and future generations that sufficient heed was given to our warnings."

There are some large shield volcanoes in the world's oceans where the lava is usually not ejected from the crater in violent explosions, but flows slowly out of the ground from long fissures. In the recent eruption of the Sierra Negra volcano in the Galapagos Islands, which lie just under a thousand kilometres off South America in the Pacific Ocean, one of these fissures was fed through a curved pathway in June 2018. This 15 kilometre-long pathway, including the kink, was created by the interaction of three different forces in the subsurface, Timothy Davis and Eleonora Rivalta from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, together with Marco Bagnardi and Paul Lundgren from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, now explain based on computer models in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Even before the eruption, the geoscientists in California had seen in radar satellite data that the surface of the flank of the 1140-metre-high Sierra Negra volcano had bulged to a height of about two metres: this bulge, about five kilometres wide, stretched from the crater rim about ten kilometres in a west-northwest direction and turned at a right angle to the north-northeast near the coast. Timothy Davis and his team then found out what this structure and its perplexing bend were all about with the help of computer models.

Driving Force 1: Hotspot beneath the Galapagos Islands

As with many other volcanoes in the middle of the world's oceans, a "hotspot" is hidden beneath the Galapagos Islands. For at least 20 million years, hot rock has been rising slowly from deep within the Earth's interior, like a solid, but difficult-to-form plasticine. Like a blowtorch, this hotspot, up to 200 kilometres wide, melts its way through the solid crust of the Earth. This hot magma is a little lighter than the solid rock around it, so it keeps rising until it collects in a large cavity about two kilometres below the crater of the Sierra Negra volcano. "With a diameter of around six kilometres and a thickness of no more than one kilometre, this magma chamber resembles an oversized pancake of molten rock," Timothy Davis describes this structure.

Driving Force 2: the Weight of the Volcano Rock

In the almost 13 years since the last eruption in October 2005, more and more magma has flowed into the chamber from below. There, the pressure rose and lifted the crater floor up to 5.20 metres. However, the enormous force of the gathering magma masses sought another way out. Deep underground, the viscous rock slowly crawled in a west-northwest direction. Another force plays an important role here: the enormous weight of the volcano's rock masses presses from above on the magma flow that is just forming. As the shield volcano becomes flatter and flatter towards the outside, the pressure there also decreases. As the molten rock is pressed in the direction with lower pressure, it slowly swells outwards in a magma flow that is four kilometres wide but only about two metres high.

Driving Force 3: Buoyancy

Near the coastline, the flattening shield volcano presses ever more weakly on the now almost ten-kilometre-long magma corridor deep below the surface. There, a third force gains the upper hand. The magma is much lighter than the rock around the passage and was previously only prevented from swelling by the overlying weight of the shield volcano. Near the coastline, however, this buoyancy becomes stronger than the pressure of the rock from above. On top of that, the magma slope there tilts about ten degrees into the depths. Together, these forces change the direction in which the viscous rock is pressed and the magma slope bends towards the north-northeast.

The rock cracks, the volcano erupts

Still, the magma swelling under the crater continues to increase the pressure until the upward-pressing molten mass begins to crack the rock around the magma passage. At no more than walking speed, this magma-filled crack (dyke) is travelling deep underground towards the coastline. "The magma rising from the crack reaches the surface after a few days and continues to flow there as lava, which solidifies after some time," Timothy Davis explains the subsequent course of the volcanic eruption.

Important prerequisite for prediction and hazard minimization

For the first time, the geophysicist was able to simulate such a tortuous magma propagation pathway feeding an eruption and determine the forces that control this. Timothy Davis and Eleonora Rivalta, together with their colleagues in California, have thus laid important foundations for research into such fissure eruptions. And they have taken a decisive step towards predicting such eruptions and thus reducing the dangers they pose.