Earth

Do freshwater snails make good tennis players? One of them certainly has the name for it.

Enter Travunijana djokovici, a new species of aquatic snail named after famous Serbian ten­nis player Novak Djokovic.

Slovak biospeleologist Jozef Grego and Montenegrin zoologist Vladimir Pesic of the University of Montenegro discovered the new snail in a karstic spring near Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, during a field trip in April 2019. Their scientific article, published in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal Subterranean Biology, says they named it after Djokovic "to acknowledge his inspiring enthusiasm and energy."

"To discover some of the world's rarest animals that inhabit the unique underground habitats of the Dinaric karst, to reach inaccessible cave and spring habitats and for the restless work during processing of the collected material, you need Novak's energy and enthusiasm," the researchers explain.

T. djokovici has a milky-white shell in the shape of an elongated cone and is adapted to live in the underground habitats of the Dinaric karst. It is part of Hydrobiidae, a very diverse family of small to tiny snails - also known as mud snails - inhabiting fresh or brackish water, including caves and subterranean habitats.

This is the first member of the genus Travunijana so far to be discovered in the Skadar Lake basin, and the only one found outside of the Trebisnjica river basin in Herzegovina, which points to the enigmatic distributional range of these snails across the Dinaric underground habitats. Where they came from, and how, remains a mystery.

Because of its small area of occupancy, T. djokovici is assessed as Vulnerable, according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Subterranean ecosystems, the authors of the new species emphasise, are extremely vulnerable to human-driven environmental changes, and, being obscure, they're often overlooked during conservation efforts.

WASHINGTON (April 15, 2021) — Clusters of a virus known to cause stomach flu are resistant to detergent and ultraviolet disinfection, according to new research co-led by Danmeng Shuai, Ph.D., an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the George Washington University and Nihal Altan-Bonnet, Ph.D., a senior investigator and the head of the Laboratory of Host-Pathogen Dynamics at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health. The findings suggest the need to revisit current disinfection, sanitation and hygiene practices aimed at protecting people from noroviruses.

Noroviruses are the leading cause of gastroenteritis around the world, with over 21 million cases each year in the United States alone.

In 2018, Altan-Bonnet’s team found that noroviruses can be transmitted to humans via membrane-enclosed packets that contain more than one virus. In the past, scientists thought that viruses spread through exposure to individual virus particles, but the 2018 study—and others—showed how membrane-enclosed clusters arrive at a human cell and release an army of viruses all at once.

For the new study, Shuai, Altan-Bonnet and the study’s first author Mengyang Zhang, a doctoral student co-advised through a GW/NIH Graduate Partnerships Program, looked at the behavior of these protected virus clusters in the environment. They found that the virus clusters could survive attempts to disinfect with detergent solutions or even UV light. Water treatment plants use UV light to kill noroviruses and other pathogens.

“These membrane-cloaked viruses are tricky,” Shuai said. “Past research shows they can evade the body’s immune system and that they are highly infectious. Our study shows these membrane enclosed viruses are also able to dodge efforts to kill them with standard disinfectants.”

Altan-Bonnet added, “We have to consider these viral clusters cloaked in vesicle membranes as unique infectious agents in the public health arena. When it comes to virulence — and now with this study, disinfection and sanitation — the sum is much more than its parts. And these clusters are endowed with properties that are absent from other types of viral particles.”

According to the researchers, future studies must be done to find out if certain kinds of cleaning solutions or higher dosages of UV light would degrade the protective membrane and/or kill the viruses inside. Ultimately, the research could be used to devise more effective disinfection methods that could be used to clean surfaces at home, in restaurants and in places where norovirus can spread and cause outbreaks, like cruise ships.

“Our study’s findings represent a step towards recommendations for pathogen control in the environment, and public health protection,” Altan-Bonnet said.

Research led by the University of Kent's Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE) has found that the personification of animals in recent wildlife documentaries leads to significant misinformation and creates problems for public understanding of wider conservation.

In a research paper published by People and Nature, Professor Keith Somerville (DICE), Dr Amy Dickman, Dr Paul Johnson (both from the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, University of Oxford), and Professor Adam Hart (University of Gloucestershire) argue that the portrayal of charismatic animals in nature films, while entertaining, risks the propagation of misconceptions about nature and conservation.

A common theme recognised through analysis was the portrayal of animals and their behaviour as though they have similar minds, motivations and personalities as people (anthropomorphism). Further to this, false jeopardy, where normal situations in animals' lives are presented as though they are unusual and far more dangerous than they really are, was commonly used to create suspense.

Nature documentaries are ever popular for informing people's knowledge of the natural world, and influencing their understanding of wildlife, species and habitats. Yet, with conservation increasingly relying on public support, the researchers stress the importance of people being presented with factually correct information through nature documentaries.

Professor Somerville said: 'Natural history documentaries are the closest many will get to seeing featured animals and their behaviour in the wild. They are a significant source of information to highlight wildlife, conservation, and environmental issues. Therefore, it is critical that rather than framing 'stories' as soap operas to gain emotive impact, more focus is given to showing the true problems that exist in the natural world today.'

Honey is humankind's oldest sweetener - and for thousands of years it was also the only one. Indirect clues about the significance of bees and bee products are provided by prehistoric petroglyphs on various continents, created between 8,000 and 40,000 years ago. Ancient Egyptian reliefs indicate the practice of beekeeping as early as 2600 year BCE. But for sub-Saharan Africa, direct archaeological evidence has been lacking until now. The analysis of the chemical residues of food in potsherds has fundamentally altered the picture. Archaeologists at Goethe University in cooperation with chemists at the University of Bristol were able to identify beeswax residues in 3500 year-old potsherds of the Nok culture.

The Nok culture in central Nigeria dates between 1500 BCE and the beginning of the Common Era and is known particularly for its elaborate terracotta sculptures. These sculptures represent the oldest figurative art in Africa. Until a few years ago, the social context in which these sculptures had been created was completely unknown. In a project funded by the German Research Foundation, Goethe University scientists have been studying the Nok culture in all its archaeological facets for over twelve years. In addition to settlement pattern, chronology and meaning of the terracotta sculptures, the research also focussed on environment, subsistence and diet.

Did the people of the Nok Culture have domesticated animals or were they hunters? Archaeologists typically use animal bones from excavations to answer these questions. But what to do if the soil is so acidic that bones are not preserved, as is the case in the Nok region?

The analysis of molecular food residues in pottery opens up new possibilities. This is because the processing of plant and animal products in clay pots releases stable chemical compounds, especially fatty acids (lipids). These can be preserved in the pores of the vessel walls for thousands of years, and can be detected with the assistance of gas chromatography.

To the researchers' great surprise, they found numerous other components besides the remains of wild animals, significantly expanding the previously known spectrum of animals and plants used. There is one creature in particular that they had not expected: the honeybee. A third of the examined shards contained high-molecular lipids, typical for beeswax.

It is not possible to reconstruct from the lipids which bee products were used by the people of the Nok culture. Most probably they separated the honey from the waxy combs by heating them in the pots. But it is also conceivable that honey was processed together with other raw materials from animals or plants, or that they made mead. The wax itself could have served technical or medical purposes. Another possibility is the use of clay pots as beehives, as is practised to this day in traditional African societies.

"We began this study with our colleagues in Bristol because we wanted to know if the Nok people had domesticated animals," explains Professor Peter Breunig from Goethe University, who is the director of the archaeological Nok project. "That honey was part of their daily menu was completely unexpected, and unique in the early history of Africa until now."

Dr Julie Dunne from the University of Bristol, first author of the study says: "This is a remarkable example for how biomolecular information from prehistoric pottery in combination with ethnographic data provides insight into the use of honey 3500 years ago."

Professor Richard Evershed, Head of the Institute for Organic Chemistry at the University of Bristol and co-author of the study points out that the special relationship between humans and honeybees was already known in antiquity. "But the discovery of beeswax residues in Nok pottery allows a very unique insight into this relationship, when all other sources of evidence are lacking."

Professor Katharina Neumann, who is in charge of archaeobotany in the Nok project at Goethe University says: "Plant and animal residues from archaeological excavations reflect only a small section of what prehistoric people ate. The chemical residues make previously invisible components of the prehistoric diet visible." The first direct evidence of beeswax opens up fascinating perspectives for the archaeology of Africa. Neumann: "We assume that the use of honey in Africa has a very long tradition. The oldest pottery on the continent is about 11,000 years old. Does it perhaps also contain beeswax residues? Archives around the world store thousands of ceramic shards from archaeological excavations that are just waiting to reveal their secrets through gas chromatography and paint a picture of the daily life and diet of prehistoric people."

Geneva, 15th April 2021 - When it was shown launching out of the sea to snatch birds from the air in the first episode of the BBC's Blue Planet II, the Seychelles giant trevally, or 'karang ledan' as it is called in Creole, became world-famous. Typically eating fish, not birds, this reef predator is critical for maintaining healthy balanced ecosystems. 'The giant trevally is a popular, sought-after prize fish in Seychelles, particularly in the big-game sportfishing industry. Seychelles has a reputation for being one of the best trevally destinations in the world. The species is also caught in the handline fishery,' explains Helena Sims, the Save Our Seas Foundation's Seychelles ambassador. Sims, with more than a decade of conservation experience, is part of the initiative determining which 30% of Seychelles waters should become marine protected areas (MPAs).

'Although the giant trevally is very popular and sought after, not much was known about its population dynamics in Seychelles until recently. For Seychelles, it is important to study the range of targeted species to better understand how to manage and conserve them effectively,' Sims explains. New research by the Save Our Seas Foundation D'Arros Research Centre (SOSF-DRC) has revealed that to protect giant trevally throughout their lifespan, the nursery areas of this iconic predator, which are critical habitats for the survival of the next generation, should be conserved. In addition, the larger areas these fish move through and frequently use as adults should be taken into account when conservation planning is undertaken.

To find out where giant trevally went, and when and why, individuals were tagged with acoustic tags in 2019 and tracked across the Amirantes, a group of outer islands in Seychelles. Some were tracked for more than three years. This revealed that juveniles stayed around St Joseph Atoll, but that the extent of the area they frequently used quickly increased as they grew bigger. By the time they were adults, they were using the whole Amirantes Bank. Although small and large adults utilised similar areas, large adults occasionally travelled longer distances, probably driven by their need to find more food to eat as they grew, in order to meet their increasing energy requirements. Both the reduced risk of predation on account of their increased size and the onset of sexual maturity appear to be linked to them using a larger area and a wider diversity of habitats. This study showed that the area giant trevally frequently used was larger than had been reported from other tropical islands and atolls around the world.

In this study 'it took some giant trevally a surprisingly long time - on average 18 months but sometimes over 30 - to use the full extent of their home range,' says Dr Ryan Daly, a former director of the SOSF-DRC. 'This emphasises the need to follow, track and monitor threatened species in the marine environment for long enough to appreciate the full extent of their home range and thus to understand how spatial protection like MPAs is going to be effective.' Daly led the study, which was published as 'Ontogenic shifts in home range size of a top predatory reef-associated fish (Caranx ignobilis): Implications for conservation' in Marine Ecology Progress Series on 15 April 2021. Daly suggests that further conservation planning in the region could take into account the findings of this study.

The Save Our Seas Foundation (SOSF) commends the marine protection measures Seychelles is putting in place. 'The giant trevally is a beautiful fish and an important predator. I am delighted that our work from the D'Arros Research Centre is helping us learn more about its behaviour and providing insight to help its conservation,' comments the SOSF's Founder, His Excellency Abdulmohsen Abdulmalik Al-Sheikh. The entire Amirantes Bank, including St Joseph Atoll, has already been demarcated as part of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty by the Seychelles government, which is a Zone 2 protected area. Within this area, fishing by foreign vessels is not allowed (with regulations to be finalised later this year for implementation).

This is part of the Marine Spatial Plan Initiative by the Seychelles government, which announced a series of 13 new MPAs in March 2020. Daly recommends that St Joseph Atoll's Zone 2 status should not allow fishing of giant trevally because the area protects the next generation. If fishing is to be allowed at St Joseph Atoll, he advises that it should only be catch-and-release. He suggests the areas that the adults commonly use and occasionally move through, as revealed by this study, should also be considered when further conservation planning is carried out in the region. Daly explains that it will be important to find a balance between harvesting giant trevally as a food source and high-value giant trevally catch-and-release fishing. He encourages high-value catch-and-release fishing of giant trevally, but stresses that regardless of the balance chosen, it is important to protect nursery areas like St Joseph Atoll so that giant trevally fishing is sustainable.

If global warming continues unchecked, summer monsoon rainfall in India will become stronger and more erratic. This is the central finding of an analysis by a team of German researchers that compared more than 30 state-of-the-art climate models from all around the world. The study predicts more extremely wet years in the future - with potentially grave consequences for more than one billion people's well-being, economy, food systems and agriculture.

"We have found robust evidence for an exponential dependence: For every degree Celsius of warming, monsoon rainfalls will likely increase by about 5%," says lead author Anja Katzenberger from the Potsdam-Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Germany (LMU). "Hereby we were also able to confirm previous studies but find that global warming is increasing monsoon rainfall in India even more than previously thought. It is dominating monsoon dynamics in the 21st century."

Too much rainfall can harm plants

More rainfall is not necessarily a good thing for the farming sector in India and its neighboring countries. As co-author Julia Pongratz from LMU explains: "Crops need water especially in the initial growing period, but too much rainfall during other growing states can harm plants - including rice on which the majority of India's population is depending for sustenance. This makes the Indian economy and food system highly sensitive to volatile monsoon patterns."

A look into the past underlines that human behavior is behind the intensification of rainfall. Starting in the 1950s, human-made forcings have begun to overtake slow natural changes occurring over many millennia. At first, high sun-light blocking aerosol loadings led to subdued warming and thus a decline in rainfall, but since then, from 1980 onwards, greenhouse gas-induced warming has become the deciding driver for stronger and more erratic Monsoon seasons.

A threat to the well-being of the Indian subcontinent

"We see more and more that climate change is about unpredictable weather extremes and their serious consequences," comments group leader and co-author Anders Levermann from PIK and Columbia University, New York/USA on the findings of the study published in the journal Earth System Dynamics. "Because what is really on the line is the socio-economic well-being of the Indian subcontinent. A more chaotic monsoon season poses a threat to the agriculture and economy in the region and should be a wakeup call for policy makers to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions worldwide."

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Female nurses are roughly twice as likely to commit suicide than the general female population and 70% more likely than female physicians, according to a University of Michigan study examining suicide among physicians and nurses.

"It's much higher than I expected," said study lead author Matthew Davis, associate professor at the U-M School of Nursing. "The takeaway for me is we've focused so much on physician welfare that, historically, we haven't paid enough attention to this huge workforce that, based on our data, is at much higher risk."

There are roughly 3 million nurses working in the United States, making it the country's largest health care workforce--85% of whom are women.

Davis says the extraordinary demands that COVID-19 has placed on women--from homeschooling to finding child care--exacerbates the stress these nurses experience. The current study did not include data from the pandemic, which means these numbers could be even higher now, he says.

Nurses and physicians face many similar risk factors for suicide, but in nurses those risk factors are potentially exacerbated by long hours and less automony, said co-author Christopher Friese, the Elizabeth Tone Hosmer Professor of Nursing and professor of health management and policy at the U-M School of Public Health.

"I'm worried about two key issues in today's workplace," said Friese, who has more than 20 years experience in nursing. "First, health care systems are placing increased demands on nurses, physicians and other health care workers. Even before COVID, nurses reported substantial workplace stressors, including reduced staffing, increased complexity of care and additional bureaucratic tasks. Nurses have been working nonstop caring for seriously ill patients and facing their own exposure to this virus.

"Second, the nurses I work with routinely face tougher challenges at home that place added stress on them, such as caregiving for children or parents. You put the workplace and home stressors together and it's no surprise that nurses are struggling. I worry that without concerted action, things may get worse before they get better."

Study co-author Julie Bynum, the Margaret Terpenning Collegiate Professor of Internal Medicine and professor of geriatric and palliative medicine at Michigan Medicine, says she has been struck by the widespread use of this data to better understand women's health.

"But until our recent paper, it has not been used to understand the health of these women--as nurses--who are central to a well-functioning health care workforce," she said. "As the population ages, the need for both bedside nurses and nurses who take on roles as advanced practitioners will become ever more crucial."

Among male nurses, the risk of suicide is no higher than the general male population, the study found. But the researchers were surprised by the high number of suicides among female nurses compared to physicians, and they found no difference in the suicide rates of physicians and the general public, which differs from previous studies.

There are a couple possible reasons for this, they say: It could be that the physician studies aren't capturing the entire picture--most are small, single-state studies and dated. Or, perhaps, wellness programs targeting physicians have worked. Finally, medical examiners may be undercoding this cause of death for physician colleagues.

Friese says one major impediment to seeking help is the stigma that people fear for their livelihoods.

"Employers need to make it easy for nurses, doctors and other health care workers who are struggling to access the help they need," he said.

The study findings illuminate the need for high-quality wellness programs for nurses: Nurses are 90% more likely to experience on-the-job problems and 20-30% more likely to be depressed than the general population.

More than half of all suicides among the general population are the result of gunshot wounds. Among nurses, however, overdose is more common. And both nurses and physicians are more likely to have antidepressants, benzodiazepines, barbiturates and opiates in their system, which suggests a need for greater behavioral health awareness among health care professionals, the researchers say.

"The reason we looked at this is because people who work in health care have easier access to medications and know how to use them to overdose, which also increases their risk," Davis said. "Simply not having a way to do it may be enough of a deterrent to suicide."

Davis and colleagues believe the study, scheduled to appear online April 14 in JAMA Psychiatry, is the most comprehensive to data on suicide among nurses. They analyzed mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control from 2007 to 2018, identifying 2,374 suicides among nurses, 857 among physicians and 156,141 in the general population. Among its limitations, the study used pre-collected data and many of its measures relied on interpretation of medical examiner reports.

Bruising caused by physical abuse is the most common injury to be overlooked or misdiagnosed as non-abusive before an abuse-related fatality or near-fatality in a young child. A refined and validated bruising clinical decision rule (BCDR), called TEN-4-FACESp, which specifies body regions on which bruising is likely due to abuse for infants and young children, may improve earlier recognition of cases that should be further evaluated for child abuse. Findings were published in the journal JAMA Network Open.

"Bruising on a young child is often dismissed as a minor injury, but depending on where the bruise appears, it can be an early sign of child abuse," said lead author Mary Clyde Pierce, MD, a pediatric emergency medicine physician and the Research Director for the Division of Child Abuse Pediatrics at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, and Professor of Pediatrics and Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "We need to look at bruising in terms of risk. Our new screening tool helps clinicians identify high-risk cases that warrant evaluation for child abuse. This is critical, since abuse tends to escalate and earlier recognition can save children's lives."

According to the study findings, the bruising screening tool TEN-4-FACESp reliably signals high risk for abuse when bruising appears on any of the following regions. "TEN" stands for torso, ear, and neck. "FACES" specifies facial features - frenulum (skin between upper lip and the gum, lower lip and the gum, and under the tongue), angle of jaw, cheeks (fleshy), eyelids, and subconjunctivae (red bruise on white part of the eye). The "p" is for patterned bruising, when, for example, bite marks or the shape of the hand is visible on the child's skin. The "4" represents any bruising anywhere to an infant 4.99 months of age or younger. Importantly, the rule only applies to children with bruising who are younger than 4 years of age. This screening tool is a refined version of TEN-4, previously developed by Dr. Pierce.

This multi-center study was made possible through a grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). In the study, Dr. Pierce and colleagues screened for bruising in over 21,000 children younger than 4 years of age at five pediatric emergency departments. They enrolled 2,161 patients with bruising. Researchers found that the TEN-4-FACESp screening tool had a sensitivity of 95 percent and specificity of 87 percent, which means that it distinguished potential abuse from non-abuse with high level of accuracy.

"It was very important to us to make sure that the screening tool captures potential abuse without over-capturing innocent cases of children with bruising caused by accidental or incidental injury," said Dr. Pierce. "We are excited that it proved to be highly reliable, and it is simple enough to be applied during any clinical encounter. A skin exam in infants and young children is essential."

The evidence behind the TEN-4-FACESp BCDR will soon be available as an app developed by Dr. Pierce and co-author Kim Kaczor, expected to launch by October 2021. The app will present a rotatable 3-D image of a child's body. When a clinician clicks on an area of a patient's bruise, a summary of study results will appear that allows comparison of the clinicians patient with the actual data from this large scale study with the goal of helping the user decide whether the bruise is a red flag for abuse. The app is in no way meant to supplant judgment but to provide evidence-based guidance to inform decision making.

Dr. Pierce cautions that TEN-4-FACESp is not negative for abuse in children without bruising. It is simply not relevant in those circumstances and other methods of identifying abuse would be needed.

A team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol, with colleagues from Goethe University, Frankfurt, has found the first evidence for ancient honey hunting, locked inside pottery fragments from prehistoric West Africa, dating back some 3,500 years ago.

Honeybees are an iconic species, being the world's most important pollinator of food crops. Honeybee hive products, including beeswax, honey and pollen, used both for food and medicinal purposes, support livelihoods and provide sources of income for local communities across much of Africa, through both beekeeping and wild harvest.

Today, honey is collected from wild bee nests in many African countries. In the West African tropical rain forest, hunting for wild honey, found in natural hollows in tree trunks and on the underside of thick branches, is a common subsistence activity.

It is not known how long humans have been exploiting bee products. Honey would certainly have been a rare source of sweetener for ancient people and was probably highly sought after. However, there is very little surviving evidence for ancient human exploitation of the honeybee, except for palaeolithic rock art which shows bees and honeycombs, spanning the period 40,000 to 8,000 years ago, the majority of which is found in Africa.

Historical and ethnographic literature from across Africa also suggests that bee products, honey and larvae, were important both as a food source and in the making of honey-based drinks, such as beer and wine.

The Bristol team were carrying out chemical analysis of more than 450 prehistoric potsherds from the Central Nigerian Nok culture to investigate what foods they were cooking in their pots. The Nok people are known for their remarkable large-scale terracotta figurines and early iron production in West Africa, around the first millennium BC. Acidic soils at Nok archaeological sites meant that organic remains such as animal bones and plants did not survive very well so what Nok people were eating was somewhat of a mystery.

To the team's great surprise, their findings, published today in the journal Nature Communications, revealed that around one third of the pottery vessels used by the ancient Nok people were used to process or store beeswax. The presence of beeswax in ancient pottery is identified through a complex series of lipids, the fats, oils and waxes of the natural world. The beeswax is probably present as a consequence either of the processing (melting) of wax combs through gentle heating, leading to its absorption within the vessel walls, or, alternatively, beeswax is assumed to act as a proxy for the cooking or storage of honey itself.

Honey is often an important food source for hunter-gatherers and there are several groups in Africa, such as the Efe foragers of the Ituri Forest, Eastern Zaire, who have historically relied on honey as their main source of food, collecting all parts of the hive, including honey, pollen and bee larvae, from tree hollows which can be up to 30 m from the ground, using smoke to distract the stinging bees.

Honey may also have been used as a preservative to store other products. Among the Okiek people of Kenya, who rely on the trapping and hunting of a wide variety of game, smoked meat is preserved with honey, being kept for up to three years, A number of the Nok pots contained chemical evidence for the presence of both beeswax and meat products.

As well as using honey as a food source, it may have been used to make honey-based drinks, wine, beer and non-alcoholic beverages, which are commonplace across Africa today, although it should be noted that the chemical identification of ancient fermentation is notoriously difficult. The writings of ancient explorers provide insights into the antiquity of these practices. For example, Ibn Battuta, the Muslim Berber scholar and explorer, whilst visiting Mauritania in 1352, tells of a sour drink made from ground millet mixed with honey and sour milk. A further account of the preparation of wine from honey is found in a record of a Portuguese visit to the west coast of Africa (1506-1510).

Honey and beeswax may also have been used for medicinal, cosmetic and technological purposes. Beeswax has also variously been used from prehistoric times as a sealant or waterproofing agent on Early Neolithic collared flasks in northern Europe, as a lamp illuminant in Minoan Crete and mixed with tallow, possibly for making candles, in medieval vessels at West Cotton, Northamptonshire.
Lead author, Dr Julie Dunne from the University of Bristol's School of Chemistry, said: "This is a remarkable example of how biomolecular information extracted from prehistoric pottery, combined with ethnographic data, has provided the first insights into ancient honey hunting in West Africa, 3,500 years ago."

Professor Richard Evershed FRS who heads up Bristol's Organic Geochemistry Unit and is a co-author of the study, added: "The association of prehistoric people with the honey bee is a recurring theme across the ancient world, however, the discovery of the chemical components of beeswax in the pottery of the Nok people provides a unique window on this relationship, when all other sources of evidence are lacking."

Professor Peter Breunig from Goethe University who is the archaeological director of the Nok project and co-author of the study, said: "We originally started the study of chemical residues in pottery sherds because of the lack of animal bones at Nok sites, hoping to find evidence for meat processing in the pots. That the Nok people exploited honey 3,500 years ago, was completely unexpected and is unique in West African prehistory."

Professor Katharina Neumann from Goethe University, Frankfurt, who is the archaeobotanical director of the Nok project and co-author of the study, added: "Plant and animal remains from archaeological sites usually reveal only a small part of what prehistoric people had been eating. Chemical residues of beeswax in potsherds opens up completely new perspectives for the history of resource exploitation and ancient diet."

Reconfigurable materials can do amazing things. Flat sheets transform into a face. An extruded cube transforms into dozens of different shapes. But there's one thing a reconfigurable material has yet to be able to change: its underlying topology. A reconfigurable material with 100 cells will always have 100 cells, even if those cells are stretched or squashed.

Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a method to change a cellular material's fundamental topology at the microscale. The research is published in Nature.

"Creating cellular structures capable of dynamically changing their topology will open new opportunities in developing active materials with information encryption, selective particle trapping, as well as tunable mechanical, chemical and acoustic properties," said Joanna Aizenberg, the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science at SEAS and Professor of Chemistry & Chemical Biology and senior author of the paper.

The researchers harnessed the same physics that clumps our hair together when it gets wet -- capillary force. Capillary force works well on soft, compliant material, like our hair, but struggles with stiff cellular structures that require the bending, stretching or folding of walls, especially around strong, connected nodes. Capillary force is also temporary, with materials tending to return to their original configuration after drying.

In order to develop a long-lasting yet reversible method to transform the topology of stiff cellular microstructures, the researchers developed a two-tiered dynamic strategy. They began with a stiff, polymeric cellular microstructure with a triangular lattice topology, and exposed it to droplets of a volatile solvent chosen to swell and soften the polymer at the molecular scale. This made the material temporarily more flexible and in this flexible state, the capillary forces imposed by the evaporating liquid drew the edges of the triangles together, changing their connections with one another and transforming them into hexagons. Then, as the solvent rapidly evaporated, the material dried and was trapped in its new configuration, regaining its stiffness. The whole process took a matter of seconds.

"When you think about applications, it's really important not to lose a material's mechanical properties after the transformation process," said Shucong Li, a graduate student in the Aizenberg Lab and co-first author of the paper. "Here, we showed that we can start with a stiff material and end with a stiff material through the process of temporarily softening it at the reconfiguration stage."

The new topology of the material is so durable it can withstand heat or be submerged in some liquids for days without disassembling. Its robustness actually posed a problem for the researchers who had hoped to make the transformation reversible.

To return to the original topology, the researchers developed a technique that combines two liquids. The first temporarily swells the lattice, which peels apart the adhered walls of the hexagons and allows the lattice to return to its original triangular structure. The second, less volatile liquid delays the emergence of capillary forces until the first liquid has evaporated and the material has regained its stiffness. In this way, the structures can be assembled and disassembled repeatedly and trapped in any in-between configuration.

"In order to extend our approach to arbitrary lattices, it was important to develop a generalized theoretical model that connects cellular geometries, material stiffness and capillary forces," said Bolei Deng, co-first author of the paper and graduate student in the lab of Katia Bertoldi, the William and Ami Kuan Danoff Professor of Applied Mechanics at SEAS.

Guided by this model, the researchers demonstrated programmed reversible topological transformations of various lattice geometries and responsive materials, including turning a lattice of circles into squares.

The researchers explored various applications for the study. For example, the team encoded patterns and designs into the material by making tiny, invisible tweaks to the geometry of the triangular lattice.

"You can imagine this being used for information encryption in the future, because you can't see the pattern in the material when it's in its unassembled state," said Li.

The researchers also demonstrated highly local transformation, assembling and disassembling regions of the lattice with a tiny drop of liquid. This method could be used to tune the friction and wetting properties of a material, change its acoustic properties and mechanical resilience, and even trap particles and gas bubbles.

"Our strategy could be applied to a range of applications," said Bertoldi, who is also a co-author of the paper. "We can apply this method to different materials, including responsive materials, different geometries and different scales, even the nanoscale where topology plays a key role in designing tunable photonic meta-surfaces. The design space for this is huge."

A wide range of objects, from biological cells to integrated circuits, are tomographically imaged to identify their interior structures. Volumetric reconstruction of the objects' interiors is of practical implications, for instance, quantitative phase imaging of the cells and failure analysis of the circuits to validate their designs. Limiting the tomographic angular range is often desirable to reduce the time of radiation exposure and avoid any devastating effects upon the samples, or even unavoidable due to the structure of objects like in the case of tomosynthesis for mammography. However, tomographic reconstruction from limited angular views is not always welcome in an algorithmic sense, as it inevitably introduces artifacts and ambiguities to the reconstructions and thus, decreases overall reconstruction fidelity.

In a new paper published in Light: Science & Applications, a team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led by Professor George Barbastathis in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has developed a dynamical machine learning approach to tackle this important problem, which takes a radically different path from most conventional inverse algorithms. They demonstrate the new method's performance in two problems, limited-angle tomography under weak and strong scattering conditions. Depending on the degree of scattering due to the objects, the complexity of the problem is determined. It is often the case that hard X-rays are employed to image most materials, including biological tissues that the rays can be well approximated as straight lines without a large deviation because the materials weakly scatter the light. The next level of complexity arises when the light is more strongly scattered with objects with complex structures. The MIT team says their approach exploits "machine learning for a generic 3D refractive index reconstruction independent of the type of scattering."

"Our motivation is that, as the angle of illumination is changed, the light goes through the same scattering volume, but the scattering events, weak or strong, follow a different sequence. At the same time, the raw image obtained from a new angle of illumination adds information to the tomographic problem, but that information is constrained by the previously obtained patterns. We interpret this as similar to a dynamical system, where the output is constrained by the history of earlier inputs as time evolves and new inputs arrive," they added.

Recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture was their choice to implement their idea viewing the problem of limited-angle tomography as a dynamical system as the RNNs are often used to process data with dynamics. Here, the MIT team regards their raw images also as a sequence as the images are obtained one after the other. They say "our RNN architecture processes the raw images recurrently so that each raw image from a new angle improves over the reconstructions obtained from the previous angles."

"The new method's performance in the two problems that we tackled, tomography under weak (Radon) and strong scattering, indicates its promise for a number of other equally or more challenging inverse problems. Thus, we anticipate this publication to have significant impact beyond the immediate context that we are addressing here," they noted.

Common ragweed is an annual plant native to parts of the United States and southern Canada. It's an invasive species that has spread to Europe. An important agricultural weed, this plant is particularly well-adapted to living at roadsides, and there are several theories why.

Its rapid expansion in Europe can't be explained by its natural dispersal rate, which is limited to distances of around 1 meter. Rather, there are other factors in play, human-mediated, that support its invasion success - along roads, for example, it spreads mainly thanks to agricultural machineries, soil movements, roadside maintenance and road traffic.

Studying common ragweed's distribution patterns is important, because its allergenic pollen affects human health, mainly in southeast Central Europe, Italy and France. Finding out where it thrives, and why, can help with the management and control of its populations.

This is why scientists Andreas Lemke, Sascha Buchholz, Ingo Kowarik and Moritz von der Lippe of the Technical University of Berlin and Uwe Starfinger of the Julius Kühn Institute set out to explore the drivers of roadside invasions by common ragweed. Mapping 300 km of roadsides in a known ragweed hotspot in Germany's state of Brandenburg, they recorded plant densities at roadsides along different types of road corridors and subject to different intensities of traffic over a period of five years. They then explored the effect of traffic density and habitat type, and their interactions, on the dynamics of these populations. Their research is published in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal NeoBiota.

Surprisingly, high-traffic road cells displayed a consistently high population growth rate even in shaded and less disturbed road sections - meaning that shading alone would not be enough to control ragweed invasions in these sections. Population growth proceeded even on roadsides with less suitable habitat conditions - but only along high-traffic roads, and declined with reduced traffic intensity. This indicates that seed dispersal by vehicles and by road maintenance can compensate, at least partly, for less favorable habitat conditions. Disturbed low-traffic road cells showed constantly high population growth, highlighting the importance of disturbance events in road corridors as a driver for common ragweed invasions.

These findings have practical implications for habitat and population management of ragweed invasions along road networks. Reducing the established roadside populations and their seed bank in critical parts of the road network, introducing an adjusted mowing regime and establishing a dense vegetation layer can locally weaken, suppress or eradicate roadside ragweed populations.

Ethiopia may produce less specialty coffee and more rather bland tasting varieties in the future. This is the result of a new study by an international team of researchers that looked at the peculiar effects climate change has on Africa's largest coffee producing nation. Their results are relevant both for the country's millions of smallholder farmers, who earn more on specialty coffee than on ordinary coffee, as well as for baristas and coffee aficionados around the world.

"Climate change has conflicting impacts on coffee production in Ethiopia. The area that is suitable for average quality coffee might actually increase gradually until the 2090s, according to our computer simulations," says lead author Abel Chemura from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). "Yet more is not necessarily better. Because on the flipside, the suitable area for high quality specialty coffee types which are valued for their floral, fruity and spicy notes, will likely shrink if climate change continues unchecked. This is an issue not just for coffee lovers, but for local agricultural value creation."

The suitable areas for specialty coffee are shrinking

Under various scenarios the researchers looked at how a total of 19 climatic factors will affect the cultivation of five distinct specialty coffee types in the future, including mean temperature, annual rainfall levels, and seasonality. For example, if it gets warmer, the coffee cherry matures faster than the development of the bean, which in turn leads to coffee that is lower in quality. Increased rainfall, on the other hand, favors coffee production in general but may be not necessarily beneficial for individual specialty coffee types.

Thus, while the researchers project that the area suitable for four out of five specialty coffee types will decline, some are hit harder than others. For example, the renowned Yirgacheffe type, one of the world's oldest and most sought after coffee types cultivated in Ethiopia's southwest, under the worst case scenario, could lose more than 40% of its suitable area by the end of the 21st century.

A blow to Ethiopia's economy

This would not only affect coffee drinkers worldwide, especially those who grind their own beans or prefer sophisticated blends - it would also have consequences for Ethiopia's economy. "If one or more coffee regions lose their specialty status due to climate change this has potentially grave ramifications for the smallholder farmers in the region," says co-author Christoph Gornott from PIK and the University of Kassel, Germany. "If they were forced to switch to growing conventional, less palatable and bitter coffee types, they would all of the sudden compete with industrial production systems elsewhere that are more efficient. For the country, in which coffee exports account for roughly a third of all agricultural exports, this could prove fatal."

However, there may be ways to stop this trend. "As distinct specialty coffee types are strongly influenced by different local climatic, spatial and soil-related factors, what is needed are adaptation measures that are tailored to each specific region," adds Christoph Gornott. "Our study underscores the importance of localized adaptation planning and responses. We show how climate change has very concrete effects on the availability and taste of one of the world's most beloved beverages and, more importantly, on economic opportunities in local communities of the global South."

While a slow resting heart rate is generally considered a good thing, investigators have some of the first evidence that if that rate decreases rapidly as children move into young adulthood, it's an indicator that cardiovascular disease may be in their future.

Medical College of Georgia investigators report a significant association between a faster decrease in resting heart rate from childhood to adulthood and a larger left ventricle, the heart's major pumping chamber, over a 21-year period in hundreds of individuals who were healthy at the start.

The faster decrease in heart rate also was associated with a higher level of pressure inside the blood vessels of the body, which the heart has to pump against to get blood and oxygen out, they write in the journal Acta Cardiologica. The associations were generally stronger in Blacks.

"An unexplained drop over time is not a good thing," says Dr. Gaston Kapuku, cardiovascular researcher at MCG's Georgia Prevention Institute and the study's corresponding author.

Looking at the resting heart rate at one moment in time, as opposed to how it trends from childhood to adulthood, is not a good thing either, Kapuku says.

The investigators looked at the resting heart rate up to 15 times over 21 years in 759 participants in the Augusta Heart Study, a longitudinal study designed to evaluate the development of risk factors for cardiovascular disease as children, with starting ages of 5-16 , grew into adulthood.

Enrollees included a near equal mix of Blacks and whites, and had a minimum of three resting heart rate measures taken over the course, and more than half had eight measures or more. Investigators also collected other longitudinal data like height and weight, body mass index, blood pressure and cardiac output.

Echocardiograms of the left ventricle also were available for 546 of the study participants over time. Like most muscles, the left ventricle tends to get bigger in response to working harder, like continuously pumping against higher blood pressure, but unlike other muscles, bigger does not translate to a stronger heart.

"Your heart gets bigger so that in one beat, it pumps out more volume," until it doesn't, Kapuku notes. After years of working too hard for too long, the extra work and enlarged heart mass can result in congestive heart failure, which also affects Blacks disproportionately.

That means that unless it can be explained by extreme aerobic activity, significant drops in heart rate over time likely indicate a population at increased cardiovascular risk who may benefit from medications or a pacemaker to help normalize the rate, the investigators say. Exercise might also help intervene in these individuals, Kapuku notes.

A wide range of resting heart rates, 50 to 90 beats per minute, are considered normal. And both slight increases and decreases in resting heart rate have been reported as normal as we move from young to older.

But little is known about the clinical significance of heart rate trajectory patterns from childhood to young adulthood, Kapuku says.

The autonomic nervous system is in charge of body responses, like an increase in heart rate, that occur without us thinking about it. The branch known as the sympathetic nervous system enables healthy heart rate variability, so you can rapidly increase your blood pressure and heart rate to flee from danger. Another branch, the parasympathetic nervous system, controls basic body functions when you are at rest, and tends to have more influence as we gain experience in life and become less excitable.

There is an established "heart rate variability conundrum" in Blacks, which is the irony that a heart that is responsive to demand is considered a good thing, and Blacks tend to have greater heart rate variability, but more heart problems, Kapuku says.

"You should have a wide normal range of action," Kapuku says, yet, as with many cardiovascular studies, young Blacks seem most at risk, and understanding why is something they are digging into, he says.

The association they have now found between a rapidly slowing resting heart rate, higher peripheral resistance and a larger ventricular mass is another "cardiovascular conundrum" that needs more exploration, they write.

The investigators had more than 6,230 resting heart rates to assess, and they categorized them into the high-decreasing group, moderate-decreasing group and low-decreasing group. Thirty percent started with a low resting heart rate, which decreased relatively rapidly as they moved into young adulthood; 45.6% started with a moderate resting heart rate and experienced a moderate decrease; and just over 24% started with a high resting heart rate and maintained a low decrease. Over time the heart rates decreased 24.1, 19.1 and 17.4 beats per minute, respectively.

Echocardiography was used to measure the left ventricle in 546 of the participants.

When investigators compared resting heart rate trajectories with the left ventricular mass, they were surprised to find the fastest increases in left ventricular mass correlated with the fastest decreases in resting heart rate independent of other factors like age and sex. Black participants were more likely to have the fastest decreases in resting heart rate, and biggest increases in the size of the left ventricle.

Rapid heart rate declines also were associated with higher total peripheral resistance -- the resistance of blood vessels to blood flow, which the left ventricle must pump against.

According to a Finnish study, the structure and function of the brain areas involved in emotions and their regulation are altered in both psychopathic criminal offenders and otherwise well-functioning individuals who have personality traits associated with psychopathy.

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterised by persistent antisocial behaviour, impaired empathy, and bold, disinhibited and egotistical traits. However, similar antisocial traits are also common, yet less pronounced, with people who are well-off psychologically and socially. It is possible that the characteristics related to psychopathy form a continuum where only the extreme characteristics lead to violent and criminal behaviour.

The collaborative study of Turku PET Centre, Karolinska Institutet, and Psychiatric Hospital for Prisoners in Finland examined the brain structure and function in psychopathic prisoners and healthy volunteers. Brain structure was measured with magnetic resonance imaging. The participants also viewed violent and non-violent films while their brain activity was monitored with functional magnetic resonance imaging.

-In psychopathic criminal offenders, the density of the brain areas involved in cognitive control and emotion regulation was compromised. When viewing violent films, these areas showed stronger reactions in psychopaths. In a large sample of healthy control participants, psychopathy-related traits were associated in similar changes in brain structure and function: The more psychopathic characteristics a person had, the more their brain resembled the brains of psychopathic criminals, explains Professor Lauri Nummenmaa from Turku PET Centre at the University of Turku, Finland.

- Structural and functional changes in the brain were focused in the areas involved in emotions and their regulation. The changes in the activity and structure of these areas can explain the callousness and impulsiveness associated with psychopathy, says Professor Jari Tiihonen from the Karolinska Institutet.

- The results show that the degree of psychopathic characteristics varies also in the general population. Having a little bit of psychopathy-related traits does not cause problems, but for about one percent of the population, psychopathy is so strong that it may lead to criminal and violent behaviour, notes Chief Psychiatrist and Docent Hannu Lauerma from the Psychiatric Hospital for Prisoners in Finland.

- Studying prisoners is difficult, but provides critical information about the neurobiology of violence and aggression. Conducting this type of a study would not have been possible without the help from the staff at Turku Prison, emphasises Nummenmaa.

The findings help to understand the biological mechanisms behind violence, and enable to plan new and more effective treatments to aggression and antisocial behaviour.