Earth

In 1890, psychologist William James described attention as the spotlight we shine not only on the world around us, but also on the contents of our minds. Most cognitive scientists since then have drawn a sharp distinction between what James termed "sensorial attention" and "intellectual attention," now usually called "attention" and "working memory," but James saw them as two varieties of the same mental process.

New research by Princeton neuroscientists suggests that James was on to something, finding that attention to the outside world and attention to our own thoughts are actually two sides of the same neural coin. What's more, they have observed the coin as it flips inside the brain.

A paper published in Nature on March 31 by Matthew Panichello, a postdoctoral research associate at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and Timothy Buschman, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton, found that attention and working memory share the same neural mechanisms. Importantly, their work also reveals how neural representations of memories are transformed as they direct behavior.

"When we act on sensory inputs we call it 'attention,'" said Buschman. "But there's a similar mechanism that can act on the thoughts we hold in mind."

In a pair of experiments with two rhesus macaque monkeys, the researchers found that neurons in the prefrontal cortices that focus attention on sensory stimuli are the very same ones that focus on an item in working memory. What's more, Panichello and Buschman actually observed the neural representations of those memories realigning in the brain as the monkeys selected which memories to act upon.

In one experiment, each monkey was seated before a computer monitor and a camera that tracked their eye movements. The monitor displayed pairs of randomly selected colored squares, one above the other. Then the squares vanished, requiring the monkey to remember the color and location of the squares. After a brief pause, a symbol appeared, telling the monkey which square they should select from their working memory. Then, after another pause, they reported the color of the selected square by matching it to a color wheel.

To perform the task, each monkey needed to hold both colors in their working memory, select the target color from memory, and then report that color on the color wheel. After each response, the monkey was rewarded with droplets of juice. The closer their report was to the target color, the more droplets they earned.

In a second experiment, to compare the selection of items from working memory to a more classic attention task, the researchers indicated the direction to the monkeys before they saw the colored squares. This allowed the macaques to focus all their attention on the indicated square (and ignore the other one). As expected, the monkeys performed better on this task because they knew in advance which square to attend to and which to ignore.

The researchers recorded neural activity in the prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex and visual cortex. The prefrontal cortex is associated with a variety of executive function processes including attention, working memory, planning and inhibition. In this study, the researchers discovered that the same neurons in the prefrontal cortex that directed attention were also used to select an item from the monkey's working memory.

This wasn't true everywhere in the brain. In an area in the visual cortex associated with color recognition and in an area in the parietal lobe associated with visual and spatial analysis, the processes of attending to sensory input and selecting the target color from working memory involved distinct neural mechanisms.

"Attention allows you to focus your resources on a particular stimulus, while a similar selection process happens with items in working memory," said Buschman. "Our results show the prefrontal cortex uses one representation to control both attention and working memory."

The same neural recordings also showed how selecting an item changes memories so that they are either hidden away in working memory or used to make a response. This involves dynamically rotating the memory representation in the prefrontal cortex.

This can be likened to holding a piece of paper with text on it. If you hold the paper edge-on to your face, you can't read it. This concealment, Buschman explained, prevents the brain from triggering the wrong response, or triggering a response too early.

"The brain is holding information in a way that the network can't see it," he said. Then, when it came time to respond at the end of the trial, the memory representation rotated. Just as rotating the paper allows you to read and act upon the text, rotating the neural representation allows the brain to direct behavior.

"This dynamic transformation just blew me away," said Buschman. "It shows how the brain can manipulate items in working memory to guide your action."

"It is an important paper," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientist Earl Miller, who was not involved in this research. "Attention and working memory have often been discussed as being two sides of the same coin, but that has mainly been lip service. This paper shows how true this is and also shows us the 'coin' -- the coding and control mechanisms that they share."

"Our goal is not to overwrite the word 'attention,'" said Buschman. Instead, he hopes that findings from decades of research on attention can be generalized to shed light on other forms of executive function. "Attention has been well-studied as the cognitive control of sensory inputs. Our results begin to broaden these concepts to other behaviors."

A team of University of Colorado School of Medicine researchers recently published a paper offering new insight into the role that oxygen deprivation, or hypoxia, plays in cancer development. CU Cancer Center member Joaquin Espinosa, PhD, is the senior researcher on the paper, which he hopes will help lead to more targeted treatments for cancer. 

For their paper published this month in the journal Nature Communications, Espinosa and the rest of the team — Zdenek Andrysik, PhD; Heather Bender, PhD; and Matthew Galbraith, PhD — used state-of-the-art genomics technologies to map the response of cancer cells to hypoxia with unprecedented detail, leading to novel discoveries about how hypoxia-inducible factors (HIFs) affect cancer cells and tumor growth. 

The great hypoxia debate 

The cellular adaptation to hypoxia is one of the fundamental aspects of cancer biology, especially in solid tumors. 

“Most tumors cannot growth unless they figure out a way to induce formation of new blood vessels to supply them with oxygen and other nutrients,” Galbraith explains. “So, what happens inside of solid tumors is they undergo intermittent periods of low oxygen between rounds of new blood vessel formation.”  

Past research has primarily focused on the long-term effect of hypoxia on tumor growth, generally characterizing it as oncogenic, or cancer promoting. However, other studies indicated that the factors that sense hypoxia, known as hypoxia inducible factors, or HIFs, can act as suppressors of tumor growth in some settings. In order to advance the field beyond this controversy, Espinosa and colleagues investigated the immediate acute response to hypoxia.

“We employed a cutting-edge genomics technology that nobody had employed in this field before that allowed us to see what happens to cancer cells within minutes of depriving them of oxygen,” Espinosa says.  

This technology enabled them to identify hundreds of hypoxia-inducible genes activated shortly upon oxygen deprivation, the ‘first responders’ in this important cellular response. Then, they employed computational biology approaches on large, publicly available datasets to infer the function of these hypoxia-inducible genes on hundreds of cancer cell lines grown in the lab and hundreds of tumor samples from cancer patients.

What they found was that when a cell is deprived of oxygen, its first reaction is to stop growing in order to preserve its existing nutrients and oxygen. That means at this point, hypoxia causes a tumor-suppressive reaction, mostly by preventing synthesis of new proteins. It is only after longer periods of hypoxia that tumors start to grow and metastasize as the cells invade neighboring tissues in search of oxygen.   

“There's been a lot of debate about whether these hypoxia-inducible factors promote tumor growth or prevent tumor growth,” Espinosa says. “The conclusion we came to is that everyone was right to a degree. Hypoxia-inducible factors can suppress tumor growth by preventing protein synthesis early on, but they can also advance tumor growth at later stages by promoting the ability of cancer cells to invade neighboring tissues. It depends on when you're looking at it.” 

Importantly, the mechanisms of tumor suppression and promotion elicited by HIFs are amenable to pharmacological intervention. Tumor suppression is mediated by inhibition of an enzyme known as mTOR, which in turn can be inhibited by available drugs often used in cancer therapies. “mTOR inhibitors could mimic the tumor suppressive effects of HIFs,” Galbraith explains.

The mechanism of tumor promotion, on the other hand, has to do with the cells’ need for oxygen after an extended period of hypoxia. Usually, our cells are held together and in place by a structure called the extracellular matrix. However, after being deprived of oxygen for a longer amount of time, the HIFs switch on a set of enzymes that can degrade the extracellular matrix, allowing the cancer cells to escape the oxygen-deprived tumor. This results in the cancer cells entering the bloodstream and spreading to previously healthy tissues. 

“These results emphasize the importance of developing inhibitors of hypoxia-inducible enzymes that degrade collagen and other components of the extracellular matrix,” Espinosa says.

A new map offers hope for targeted treatments 

Espinosa and his team hope that their research will guide the development of future therapies that can better target not only cancer cells themselves, but also target the right processes in cancer cells at the right times. Whereas our previous understanding may have led cancer researchers to try to shut down the hypoxia response altogether, the CU team’s research indicates that it may be preferable to target it only at certain times.  

“People have been trying to target the hypoxia-inducible factors with different therapeutics, but this research would suggest that you may want to exercise some caution about when you apply those therapeutics, given that the HIFs can be tumor suppressive in the early stages of hypoxia,” Galbraith says.  

“Since the hypoxic response can be tumor suppressive in some contexts and oncogenic in other contexts, it's not a good idea to issue a blanket statement that we should always try to shut it down,” Espinosa adds. "Instead, we should be thinking about what aspect of the hypoxic response to target, and that’s the aspect where hypoxia drives invasion and metastasis.” 

The research is also groundbreaking in its detailed mapping of the hypoxic response in cancer cells, which Espinosa says was only possible using new technologies.  

“How do you make new discoveries?” Espinosa asks. “Well, you use new technologies and new instruments, and that's where the Cancer Center is always very supportive, making sure that the Shared Resources have the latest instruments.” 

Espinosa expects to see follow-up studies from researchers using the map his team has created in the future.  

“I would say this is a definitive improvement in the mapping of the early events of hypoxia,” Espinosa says. “And the beauty of that is that once you have a good map of the land, a lot of people can use it.” 

In a longitudinal study published earlier this month in the Journal of the American Dental Association, researchers analyzed untreated decay in a cohort of nearly 7,000 children enrolled in the ForsythKids preventive dentistry program. Over the course of six years, the percentage of children with untreated cavities in the program decreased from 39 to 19 percent, suggesting that school-based prevention programs are effective in combating childhood dental disease.

Tooth decay is the most common chronic early childhood disease in the United States. More than half of children aged 6-8 years old have had a cavity, and kids from low-income families are twice as likely to suffer from untreated tooth decay as their higher-income peers.

To address this critical unmet need, the ForsythKids mobile dental program has provided preventive oral health care to children and teens at schools, community centers, and other sites across Massachusetts since 2003.

Researchers from the Forsyth Institute analyzed data from students at 33 public elementary schools in Massachusetts, all of which are classified as Title I, with high numbers of children from low-income families. The ForsythKids dental team provided comprehensive preventative oral health care twice per year, which includes dental examinations, dental cleanings, sealants, fluoride varnish, toothbrushes, toothpaste, oral hygiene instruction, and referrals to community dentists as needed. ForsythKids provides care at no cost to the patients or participating sites.

School-based dental treatment helps families overcome common barriers to accessing care, says Dr. Helen Nguyen, the Public Health Dentist for the ForsythKids program.

"Parents are often working a day job, a night job, another job in between," Dr. Nguyen says. "If they take time off work to bring their child to the dentist, they could lose money or lose their job."

Many parents are also under the impression that a dental visit is cost-prohibitive, or that their child would need to miss a full day of school to visit a dental office, Dr. Nguyen says, even though many of the schools are within a few blocks of a community health center that offers pediatric dental care.

With schools temporarily closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ForsythKids program has been unable to see most of the children in over a year. Dr. Nguyen worries this has exacerbated the problem of untreated dental decay.

"For about half of these kids, we're their only source of preventive dental care. This could mean that no one has an eye on their dental needs." Dr. Nguyen says. "We know these communities need us."

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Bangladesh's floating gardens, built to grow food during flood seasons, could offer a sustainable solution for parts of the world prone to flooding because of climate change, a new study has found.

The study, published recently in the Journal of Agriculture, Food and Environment, suggests that floating gardens might not only help reduce food insecurity, but could also provide income for rural households in flood-prone parts of Bangladesh.

"We are focused here on adaptive change for people who are victims of climate change, but who did not cause climate change," said Craig Jenkins, a co-author of the study and academy professor emeritus of sociology at The Ohio State University. "There's no ambiguity about it: Bangladesh didn't cause the carbon problem, and yet it is already experiencing the effects of climate change."

Bangladesh's floating gardens began hundreds of years ago. The gardens are made from native plants that float in the rivers - traditionally, water hyacinths - and operate almost like rafts, rising and falling with the waters. Historically, they were used to continue growing food during rainy seasons when rivers filled with water.

The farmers - or their families - layer the plants about three feet deep, creating a version of raised-bed gardens that float in the water. Then, they plant vegetables inside those rafts. As the raft-plants decompose, they release nutrients, which help feed the vegetable plants. Those vegetable plants typically include okra, some gourds, spinach and eggplant. Sometimes, they also include spices like turmeric and ginger.

Floating gardens are also in use in parts of Myanmar, Cambodia and India. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization has named Bangladesh's floating gardens a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System.

But as climate change has affected the volume of water in those rivers - creating extreme highs and floods, along with extreme lows and droughts - floating gardens have become a way for rural farmers to keep producing food during unpredictable weather. Climate change increases weather extremes and the severity of flooding, and droughts as well.

The researchers wanted to understand whether Bangladesh's floating gardens could be a sustainable farming practice as climate change continues to cause floods and droughts, and to see whether the gardens bring better food security to individual households.

"They've got to be able to grow specific crops that can survive with minimal soil," said Jenkins, who is also a research scientist and former director of the Ohio State Mershon Center for International Security Studies. "And in Bangladesh, a lot of small farmers that had typically relied on rice crops are moving away from those because of the effects of climate change and better returns from alternative crops."

For this study, the researchers interviewed farming families who use floating gardens, and found strong evidence that floating gardens provide stability, both in the amount of food available to feed rural populations and in a farming family's income, despite the instability created by a changing climate.

They found that farmers typically use hybrid seeds, which must be repurchased each year, to grow a diverse range of vegetables in the floating gardens. The gardens are also susceptible to pests, so farmers end up spending some money on both pesticides and fertilizers. But even with those expenses, they found, benefits outweighed costs.

Generally, entire families work on the gardens, the researchers found: Women, children and the elderly prepare seedlings and collect aquatic plants to build gardens. Men cultivate the gardens and protect them from raiders. Some families also farm fish in the waters around their floating gardens.

One farmer told the research team that he earns up to four times as much money from the gardens as from traditional rice paddies.

Still, the system could use improvements, the researchers found. Farmers often take out high-interest loans to cover the investment costs of building the beds and stocking them with plants. Lower-interest loans from responsible government or non-governmental organizations could alleviate that burden, they found.

PULLMAN, Wash. -- Nature's strongest material now has some stiff competition. For the first time, researchers have hard evidence that human-made hexagonal diamonds are stiffer than the common cubic diamonds found in nature and often used in jewelry.

Named for their six-sided crystal structure, hexagonal diamonds have been found at some meteorite impact sites, and others have been made briefly in labs, but these were either too small or had too short of an existence to be measured.

Now scientists at Washington State University's Institute for Shock Physics created hexagonal diamonds large enough to measure their stiffness using sound waves. Their findings are detailed in a recent paper in Physical Review B.

"Diamond is a very unique material," said Yogendra Gupta, director of the Institute for Shock Physics and corresponding author on the study. "It is not only the strongest -- it has beautiful optical properties and a very high thermal conductivity. Now we have made the hexagonal form of diamond, produced under shock compression experiments, that is significantly stiffer and stronger than regular gem diamonds."

Researchers have long wanted to create a material stronger than natural diamonds, which could have a variety of uses in industry. While many theorized that hexagonal diamonds would be stronger, the WSU study provides the first experimental evidence that they are.

Lead author Travis Volz, now a post-doctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, focused his dissertation work at WSU on the creation of hexagonal diamonds from graphite. For this study, Volz and Gupta used gunpowder and compressed gas to propel small graphite disks about the size of a dime at a speed of around 15,000 miles per hour onto a transparent material. The impact produced shockwaves in the disks that very rapidly transformed them into hexagonal diamonds.

Immediately after impact the researchers produced a small sound wave and used lasers to measure its movement through the diamond. Sound moves faster through stiffer material. Previously sound moved fastest through cubic diamond; in the lab-created hexagonal diamonds it moved faster.

Each process happened in several billionths of a second, or nanoseconds, but the researchers were able to make the stiffness measurements before the high velocity impact destroyed the diamond.

Stiffness is the ability of a material to resist deformation under a force or pressure -- for instance, a rock is stiffer than rubber as rubber will bend when pressed. Hardness is the resistance to scratching or other surface deformations.

Generally stiffer materials are also harder, said Volz. While the researchers weren't able to scratch the diamonds to test hardness directly, by measuring the diamonds' stiffness, they can make inferences about their hardness.

If the science advances to the point where lab-made hexagonal diamonds can be created and recovered, they could have a range of uses.

"Hard materials are useful for machining capabilities," said Volz. "Diamond has been used for a long time in drill bits, for example. Since we found that the hexagonal diamond is likely harder than the cubic diamond, it could be a superior alternative for machining, drilling or any type of application where the cubic diamond is used."

While the industrial advantages are clear, Gupta said it is still possible hexagonal diamonds could one day be used on engagement rings. Currently lab-made cubic diamonds have less value compared to their natural peers, but hexagonal diamonds would likely be more novel.

"If someday we can produce them and polish them, I think they'd be more in-demand than cubic diamonds," said Gupta. "If somebody said to you, 'look, I'm going to give you the choice of two diamonds: one is lot more rare than the other one.' Which one would you pick?"

WASHINGTON--A vast global ocean may have covered early Earth during the early Archean eon, 4 to 3.2 billion years ago, a side effect of having a hotter mantle than today, according to new research.

The new findings challenge earlier assumptions that the size of the Earth's global ocean has remained constant over time and offer clues to how its size may have changed throughout geologic time, according to the study's authors.

Most of Earth's surface water exists in the oceans. But there is a second reservoir of water deep in Earth's interior, in the form of hydrogen and oxygen attached to minerals in the mantle.

A new study in AGU Advances, which publishes high-impact, open-access research and commentary across the Earth and space sciences, estimates how much water the mantle potentially could hold today and how much water it could have stored in the past.

The findings suggest that, since early Earth was hotter than it is today, its mantle may have contained less water because mantle minerals hold onto less water at higher temperatures. Assuming that the mantle currently has more than 0.3-0.8 times the mass of the ocean, a larger surface ocean might have existed during the early Archean. At that time, the mantle was about 1,900-3,000 degrees Kelvin (2,960-4,940 degrees Fahrenheit), compared to 1,600-2,600 degrees Kelvin (2,420-4,220 degrees Fahrenheit) today.

If early Earth had a larger ocean than today, that could have altered the composition of the early atmosphere and reduced how much sunlight was reflected back into space, according to the authors. These factors would have affected the climate and the habitat that supported the first life on Earth.

"It's sometimes easy to forget that the deep interior of a planet is actually important to what's going on with the surface," said Rebecca Fischer, a mineral physicist at Harvard University and co-author of the new study. "If the mantle can only hold so much water, it's got to go somewhere else, so what's going on thousands of kilometers below the surface can have pretty big implications."

Earth's sea level has remained fairly constant during the last 541 million years. Sea levels from earlier in Earth's history are more challenging to estimate, however, because little evidence has survived from the Archean eon. Over geologic time, water can move from the surface ocean to the interior through plate tectonics, but the size of that water flux is not well understood. Because of this lack of information, scientists had assumed the global ocean size remained constant over geologic time.

In the new study, co-author Junjie Dong, a mineral physicist at Harvard University, developed a model to estimate the total amount of water that Earth's mantle could potentially store based on its temperature. He incorporated existing data on how much water different mantle minerals can store and considered which of these 23 minerals would have occurred at different depths and times in Earth's past. He and his co-authors then related those storage estimates to the volume of the surface ocean as Earth cooled.

Jun Korenaga, a geophysicist at Yale University who was not involved in the research, said this is the first time scientists have linked mineral physics data on water storage in the mantle to ocean size. "This connection has never been raised in the past," he said.

Dong and Fischer point out that their estimates of the mantle's water storage capacity carry a lot of uncertainty. For example, scientists don't fully understand how much water can be stored in bridgmanite, the main mineral in the mantle.

The new findings shed light on how the global ocean may have changed over time and can help scientists better understand the water cycles on Earth and other planets, which could be valuable for understanding where life can evolve.

"It is definitely useful to know something quantitative about the evolution of the global water budget," said Suzan van der Lee, a seismologist at Northwestern University who did not participate in the study. "I think this is important for nitty-gritty seismologists like myself, who do imaging of current mantle structure and estimate its water content, but it's also important for people hunting for water-bearing exoplanets and asking about the origins of where our water came from."

Dong and Fischer are now using the same approach to calculate how much water may be held inside Mars.

"Today, Mars looks very cold and dry," Dong said. "But a lot of geochemical and geomorphological evidence suggests that early Mars might have contained some water on the surface - and even a small ocean - so there's a lot of interest in understanding the water cycle on Mars."

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Oregon State University researchers broadcast marbled murrelet calls in mature forests and found that the threatened seabirds' choice of breeding locations is strongly influenced by whether they hear other murrelets in the area.

The research by scientists in the OSU College of Forestry and College of Agricultural Sciences is important because the elusive seabird's populations are in decline and recovery may be hindered by there being too few birds around to provide information to each other about where to nest.

Findings were published in Ornithology, the the flagship journal of the American Ornithologists Union.

"The odds that marbled murrelets would consider nesting at sites where we broadcast murrelet calls were many times greater than at sites where we didn't," said lead author Jonathon Valente, a postdoctoral researcher with the College of Forestry's Oregon Marbled Murrelet Project.

Marbled murrelets are closely related to puffins and murres but unlike those birds, murrelets raise their young as far as 60 miles inland in mature and old-growth forests.

"There aren't many species like it," said study co-author Jim Rivers, also a faculty member in the College of Forestry. "In fact, there's no other bird that feeds in the ocean and commutes such long distances to inland nest sites. This behavior is really unusual and it makes this species especially challenging to study."

In 2016, Valente, Rivers and three collaborators at Oregon State simulated the presence of murrelets at 14 randomly selected potential breeding sites by broadcasting the bird's calls during breeding season. Between the rounds of simulations, they recorded wild murrelet calls at the sites and compared call rates with rates at 14 control sites where no recorded were broadcast.

In the year of the broadcast experiment, simulated murrelet calls increased the odds of recording wild murrelet calls by as much as 15 times. The scientists hypothesized that these were young "prospecting" birds, on the lookout for new nesting sites.

To the researchers' surprise, these prospectors appeared to have remembered the locations of experimental areas the following breeding season, nearly a year after broadcasts of murrelet calls had ceased. The odds of a site being occupied during the 2017 breeding season were 10 times greater at the experimental sites than the control sites.

"That means it would likely be a good idea for conservation managers to consider broadcasting vocalizations to encourage murrelets to nest in unused, high-quality habitat," said co-author Matt Betts of the College of Forestry. "And because murrelets are attracted to other murrelets, protecting areas adjacent to known nesting sites may also be an effective conservation approach."

The dove-sized marbled murrelet spends most of its time in coastal waters eating krill, other invertebrates and forage fish such as herring, anchovies, smelt and capelin. Murrelets can only produce one offspring per year, if the nest is successful, and their young require forage fish for proper growth and development.

The secretive birds typically lay their single egg high in a tree on a horizontal limb at least 4 inches in diameter. Steller's jays, crows and ravens are the main predators of murrelet nests.

Along the West Coast, marbled murrelets are found regularly from Santa Cruz, California, north to the Aleutian Islands. The species is listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in Washington, Oregon and California.

A team of researchers from Graz University of Technology, Know-Center GmbH, Johannes Kepler University Linz, University of Innsbruck, Austria and University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, compared how accurate algorithm-generated music recommendations were for mainstream and non-mainstream music listeners. They used a dataset containing the listening histories of 4,148 users of the music streaming platform Last.fm who either listened to mostly non-mainstream music or mostly mainstream music (2,074 users in each group). Based on the artists music users' listened to most frequently, the authors used a computational model to predict how likely music users were to like the music recommended to them by four common music recommendation algorithms. They found that listeners of mainstream music appeared to receive more accurate music recommendations than listeners of non-mainstream music.

Algorithm to classify music listeners

The authors then used an algorithm to categorise the non-mainstream music listeners in their sample based on the features of the music they most frequently listened to. These groups were: listeners of music genres containing only acoustic instruments such as folk, listeners of high-energy music such as hard rock and hip-hop, listeners of music with acoustic instruments and no vocals such as ambient, and listeners of high-energy music with no vocals such as electronica. The authors compared the listening histories of each group and identified which users were the most likely to listen to music outside of their preferred genres and the diversity of music genres listened to within each group.

Those who mostly listened to music such as ambient were found to be most likely to also listen to music preferred by hard rock, folk or electronica listeners. Those who mostly listened to high-energy music were least likely to also listen to music preferred by folk, electronica or ambient listeners, but they listened to the widest variety of genres, for example hard rock, punk, singer/songwriter and hip-hop,

The authors then used users' listening histories and a computational model to predict how likely the different groups of non-mainstream music listeners were to like the music recommendations generated by the four common music recommendation algorithms. They found that those who listened to mostly high-energy music appeared to receive the least accurate music recommendations and those who mostly listened to music such as ambient appeared to receive the most accurate recommendations.

Biased music recommendation algorithms

Elisabeth Lex, the corresponding author, said: "As increasing amounts of music have become available via music streaming services, music recommendation systems have become essential to helping users search, sort and filter extensive music collections. Our findings suggest that many state-of-the-art music recommendation techniques may not provide quality recommendations for non-mainstream music listeners. This could be because music recommendation algorithms are biased towards more popular music, resulting in non-mainstream music being less likely to be recommended by algorithms."

"Further," added Elisabeth Lex, "our results indicate that the music preferences of those who mostly listen to music such as ambient can be more easily predicted by music recommendation algorithms than the preferences of those who listen to music such as hard rock and hip-hop. This means that they may receive better music recommendations.

The authors suggest that their findings could inform the creation of music recommendation systems that provide more accurate recommendations to non-mainstream music listeners. However, they caution that as their analyses are based on a sample of Last.fm users their findings may not be representative of all Last.fm users or users of other music streaming platforms.

This research area is anchored in the Field of Expertise "Information, Communication & Computing", one of five strategic foci of TU Graz.

Recent studies indicate a link between children's cardiorespiratory fitness and their school performance: the more athletic they are, the better their marks in the main subjects - French and mathematics. Similarly, cardiorespiratory fitness is known to benefit cognitive abilities, such as memory and attention. But what is the real influence of such fitness on school results? To answer this question, researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland tested pupils from eight Geneva schools. Their results, published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sport & Exercise, show that there is an indirect link with cardiorespiratory fitness influencing cognitive abilities, which in turn, influence school results.

Charles Hillman, a professor at Northeastern University in Boston and co-author of this study, has suggested in previous research that there is a link between children's cardiorespiratory fitness and their academic performance, as well as a beneficial effect of cardiorespiratory fitness on executive functions. "There are three main executive functions", explains Marc Yangüez, a researcher at the UNIGE's Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (FPSE) and first author of the study. "The first is inhibition, i.e., our ability to inhibit intrusive or irrelevant behaviour or thoughts. The second is cognitive flexibility, which often called multitasking, and refers to our ability to flexibility move between tasks or responses based on task demands. Finally, the third is working memory, which is our ability to maintain information in our minds and manipulate it."

However, the link between fitness and academic skills does not seem obvious at first sight. This is why researchers at the UNIGE wanted to analyze it and observe how one influences the other and whether a specific cognitive process plays a predominant role.

Testing the physical and cognitive abilities of Geneva students

The Geneva investigators teamed up with eight schools in the canton of Geneva to conduct cognitive and physical tests on 193 pupils aged 8 to 12. First of all, children took a physical test known as the "shuttle run test": the children had to run back and forth between two lines 20 meters apart at an increasingly fast pace. "Combined with height, weight, age and sex, this test allows us to assess the child's cardiovascular fitness", says Marc Yangüez. "Following this, we used nine tasks that allow us to assess children's abilities in the three main executive functions - inhibition, cognitive flexibility and working memory - and we measured different indicators such as the precision and speed of their responses", explains Julien Chanal, researcher at the FPSE of the UNIGE. For example, one of the tests of inhibition presents students with images of fish swimming. The central fish can either swim in the same direction as the others or in the opposite direction. The students have to indicate as quickly and accurately as possible the direction in which the central fish is swimming when they are only shown the picture for 200 milliseconds. To measure cognitive flexibility, the students took three tests as well, one of the tests asked the students to connect in ascending order numbers and letters (1-A-2-B-3-C, etc.). In one of the working memory tests, the students had to memorize a sequence of numbers, such as 2 6 4 9 7, and then repeat them in the reverse order. In addition, at the end of the year, the teachers, with the parents' consent, transmitted the students' marks for the three terms of the year in mathematics, French 1 (comprehension and expression of text) and French 2 (grammar, spelling and vocabulary).

An indirect link between cardiorespiratory fitness and school results

By combining the data obtained, the psychologists found that there was a link between better cardiorespiratory fitness and higher marks in mathematics and French 2. "French 1 is probably less directly concerned, because the evaluation of the text and the writing depend more on subjective factors, which is less the case for mathematics or grammar, for which there is little subjectivity in the right or wrong answers", explains Marc Yangüez. In addition to the existence of a link between cardiorespiratory fitness and school results, the data obtained also confirm a link between cardiorespiratory fitness and executive functions. But does good cardiorespiratory fitness affect academic performance directly or indirectly through executive functions?

"By decomposing these effects via a statistical mediation model, we established that the link between cardiorespiratory fitness and academic performance was indirect. In fact, physical fitness is related to better executive functions, and it is indeed executive functions that influences school performance, more specifically cognitive flexibility", emphasizes Julien Chanal.

Important results for the planning of physical education in schools

The results of this study are important for the organization of school planning. "By demonstrating the link between physical capacities, such as cardiorespiratory capacity, cognitive abilities and grades, it underlines the importance of not reducing physical activity (and in particular physical education hours) in favour of other subjects, as this could ultimately have a negative impact on the development of the child as a whole", says Marc Yangüez. This study also challenges the idea of forcing children to study more and spend more time at their desks in order to succeed at school, depriving them of physical exercise. Finally, and all the more so in times of a pandemic, the Geneva psychologists stress the importance of not depriving children of movement, which would be detrimental to both their physical health and their cognitive health. "We would now like to carry out an intervention study into schools in different regions of Switzerland, in order to demonstrate on a large scale that when children's weekly physical activity increases, it has a positive impact on the development of executive functions, leading to a significant improvement in school results", concludes Julien Chanal.

Increasing numbers of people in Belgium are turning away from meat in favour of plant-based alternatives, according to new research from psychologists at the University of Bath, in collaboration with Belgian animal welfare organisation GAIA.

New analysis finds that in 2020, over half of Belgians (51%) were 'satisfied' with meat alternatives - a figure that has increased from 44% since 2019.

The results of the research which gauged responses from a representative sample of 1,000 people in Belgium over two years (in 2019 and 2020) highlights concerns around animal agriculture and the environment that are impacting individuals' dietary choices.

Additional findings from the study published in the journal Appetite, suggest there has been no significant change in attitudes towards cultured meat (e.g. meat produced by in-vitro cell culture of animal cells, instead of from slaughtered animals) over the two years. Roughly 40% of Belgians said they would buy cultured meat in both waves of the survey.

Deeper analysis revealed that plant-based alternatives were more appealing to women, whilst cultured meat was more appealing to men. Both cultured meat and plant-based meat were also more appealing to younger consumers and those in the northern, predominantly Dutch-speaking region of Flanders.

Lead researcher Dr Chris Bryant from the University of Bath explains: "In many ways, this survey data confirms what many of us can see in the supermarkets: plant-based alternatives to meat and animal products are on the rise.

"In just one year, we saw a significant increase in the number of Belgian consumers satisfied with plant-based alternatives with the key figure moving to just over half in 2020."

The research comes as a report from Boston Consulting Group predicted that Europe and the US would hit 'peak meat' in 2025, with consumers increasingly favouring plant-based and other more sustainable alternatives.

"We know that meat production is a key driver of a whole range of ethical, environmental and public health problems," said study co-author Hermes Sanctorum, consultant for GAIA. "It is good news that we are seeing consumers turn towards alternatives. What we have already - plant-based alternatives - are increasingly popular. What is to come - cultured meat - has a stable potential. And both options seem to be complementary as a solution, according to our study, since they are appealing to different consumer categories."

Scrutiny around meat consumption has been growing. The Dasgupta Review, published earlier this year by the Treasury, is the latest high-profile report to call for a reduction in meat consumption for the sake of the planet. Meanwhile, animal product alternatives are attracting record investments - over $3 billion in 2020, according to The Good Food Institute.

'A transmissible cancer was first discovered in dogs in the middle of the 19th century. It is transmitted sexually from a sick dog to a healthy one, the cancer cells themselves being the infective agent. In the 1990s, a contagious cancer was discovered in the Tasmanian devil. Since the cancer was found in only two species of mammals, scientists used to think that it is quite rare in the nature. However, time has come to reconsider this view. A transmissible cancer appears to be fairly widespread among bivalve molluscs,' says Maria Skazina, a research associate at the Department of Applied Ecology at St Petersburg University and the first author of the publication in Scientific Reports.

Disseminated neoplasia (DN) is a large-scale, fatal cancer disease of bivalve molluscs, which can be compared to leukemia in vertebrates. Diseased mussels have cancer cells, which circulate in the hemolymph, a functional analogue of blood. As neoplasia develops, they infiltrate all tissues and organs, disrupting their work.

The causes of this disease were described for the first time in 2016 in an article published by a group of scientists under the leadership of by Michael Metzger in Nature. The authors showed that disseminated neoplasia was a transmissible cancer lineage. Its cells have their own genotype, different from those of the molluscan hosts. In a way, they are parasites transmitted from sick individuals to healthy ones.

'A study proposing a mechanism of the transfer of cancer cells between individuals was published last year. When the mussel is under stress, the cells of its haemolymph can leave the body, exist for some time in the environment and then invade other mussels. This process has been observed in healthy molluscs. Cancer cells, it would seem, might use this mechanism too,' says Maria Skazina. 'However, this is only a hypothesis. To test it, sophisticated experimental research is necessary'.

Mussels Mytilus are important commercial invertebrates. Two genetic lineages of transmissible cancer are known in them: BTN1 and BTN2 (BTN stands for bivalve transmissible neoplasia). Both of them originated from the Pacific mussel Mytilus trossulus, which is also found in the Far Eastern and Northern seas of Russia.

'So far, BTN1 lineage has been found in a single mussel population at the Pacific coast of North America. BTN2 is much more widespread. Before our research, it had been found in several mussel species in Europe and South America, though not in the parental species Mytilus trossulus,' says Maria Skazina.

In 2019, marine biologists from St Petersburg University, A.V. Zhirmunsky National Research Centre of Marine Biology, and the University of Helsinki joined forces to search for transmissible cancer lineages in the mussels of the Russian seas. To diagnose the disease, they developed an integrated approach, which included cytological and molecular genetic tests, and applied it to the mussels Mytilus trossulus from the Sea of Japan, in which disseminated neoplasia had been previously shown.

In the haemolymph of molluscs from the Gaydamak Bay near the port city of Nakhodka, flow cytometry and immunocytochemistry methods revealed neoplastic cells. They are large, have polyploid nuclei and an abnormal cytoskeleton resembling the spines of a bristling hedgehog. Genotyping of the haemolymph and other tissues by nuclear and mitochondrial characteristics revealed genetic 'chimerism' of the sick mussels, that is, the presence of more than one individual genotype. Multiple alleles (different forms of the same gene that determine the development of a particular trait) were separated by molecular cloning. All diseased mussels were found to have 'additional' genotypes corresponding to BTN2. This means that the scientists from St Petersburg University and their colleagues proved, for the first time, the presence of BTN2 in Mytilus trossulus as well as the presence of transmittable cancer in mussels from the Sea of Japan and the Northwest Pacific.

At the next stage of the research, the scientists used molecular phylogenetic methods to compare the sequences of the mitochondrial BTN genes obtained by them with all the homologous sequences of the mussels themselves stored in the NCBI genetic bank. It turned out that the mitochondria of BTN2 are most similar to those of Mytilus trossulus from the Russian seas. It was probably there that 'patient zero' lived, the mussel that 'gave birth' to this transmissible cancer.

The Baltic Sea mussels were also shown to have BTN2. In 2014, Polish biologists found an unusual mitochondrial genotype in a Baltic mussel, which they interpreted as the genotype of Mytilus trossulus. It is now clear that this was not a mussel genotype, but a BTN2 genotype. It appears that the transmissible cancer that the scientists were looking for in the Far East could be found much closer to St Petersburg. Whether this disease is common among the molluscs of the Baltic Sea remains to be found out.

'This disease is so virulent for invertebrates because they do not have a developed immune system that can reliably distinguish alien cells from their own. Transmissible cancer of molluscs cannot harm humans in any way. However, the disease can be detrimental for the mussel marine culture. We do not yet know how widespread transmissible cancer is among mussels in Russia,' says Maria Skazina.

The scientists now continue to search for transmissible cancer in mussels in different seas of Russia. Preliminary evidence suggests that it is found not only in mussels in the Sea of Japan and the Baltic Sea and that its diversity is not limited to BTN2 lineage. They are also developing a method for rapid diagnosis of the disease in order to monitor it in natural and commercial populations of molluscs.

'Hopefully, our work might be of help for comparative oncology. I think that mussels, as a research model, can tell a lot about the mechanisms of the spread of cancer in different species, including humans,' notes Maria Skazina.

Babies can recognise combinations of words even before they have uttered their first word, a study suggests, challenging ideas of how children learn language.

Assessments in 11-12 month-olds show that infants at the cusp of talking are already processing multiword phrases such as 'clap your hands'.

Researchers say the study is the first to provide evidence that young children can pick up and understand multiword sequences before they can talk or begin producing such combinations themselves.

The findings suggest that babies learn individual words and more complex phrases at the same time, which challenges the perspective that they progress from single words to phrases and sentences, experts say.

It may also explain why adults who learn a new language in later life by focusing on individual words often do not achieve native-like proficiency.

Linguists at the University of Edinburgh assessed 36 infants' language learning behaviour in a series of attention tests using recorded adult speech.

They looked at how the babies responded to multiword combinations of three-word sequences used in parent-child conversations.

The researchers compared the infants' responses using a testing method called central fixation, which measures infants' looking behaviour in response to sounds.

They assessed if the babies could distinguish more frequently used three-word sequences such as 'clap your hands' from similar but less common phrases such as 'take your hands'.

On average, fixation times were longer for the frequently used phrases. This pattern was found in 23 of the 36 infants.

Researchers say this suggests babies who are still learning their first words are simultaneously learning word combinations.

This development happens months before parents hear their children's first attempts at sequences of words, experts say.

Dr Barbora Skarabela, of the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Languages Sciences, said: "Previous research has shown that young infants recognise many common words. But this is the first study that shows that infants extract and store more than just single words from everyday speech. This suggests that when children learn language, they build on linguistic units of varying sizes, including multiword sequences, and not just single words as we often assume. This may explain why adults learning a second language, who tend to rely on individual words, often fall short of reaching native-like proficiency in the way they string words together into phrases and sentences."

Female doctors who suffer domestic abuse can feel unable to get help due to perceptions that it "should not happen to a doctor" and a judgemental culture in medical settings, a new study suggests.

Victim-survivors who work as doctors often do not feel able to talk about abuse confidentially and fear the consequences of reporting it.

Researchers from the University of Southampton interviewed twenty-one female doctors who had previously left an abusive relationship about their experience of domestic abuse, barriers they faced when seeking help, and the impact on their work. The findings have been published in the British Journal of General Practice.

Dr Emily Donovan, who led the study from the University of Southampton's Primary Care Research Centre said: "Domestic abuse is a huge problem for women from all walks of life but I was surprised to hear through conversations how prevalent it seemed to be in the medical profession. Despite this, very little has been written about doctors who are victims, all the research seems to focus on how doctors help other victims of domestic abuse. So I wanted to find out more about how it affected these women at work and their experiences of seeking support."

1. "It shouldn't happen to a doctor"

Several participants expressed embarrassment and felt that, as doctors, they "should have known better" and that they are "supposed to be intelligent, strong women who are not vulnerable." This could also lead them to question how they would be able to help their patients whilst feeling as though they could not look after themselves.

Despite the perceptions that it should not happen to them, many of the victim-survivors said that the nature of their job actually made them more vulnerable to persistent domestic abuse. Because they work hard every day to resolve problems for others, it was natural for this determination to 'keep going' to continue in their personal lives. For some participants, routinely dealing with difficult and demanding colleagues normalised the poor treatment that they experienced at home, causing them to persist with relationships even after they had become abusive.

2. Hard to disclose problems or seek help from fellow health professionals.

The study identified a number of barriers to disclosing and seeking help, the main concerns being confidentiality, for example having to speak to health professionals who they know personally or professionally.

Many participants said that not fitting the stereotype of a female suffering domestic abuse caused disbelief from health professionals from whom they sought help as a patient. Some victim-survivors felt that health or social care professionals were quick to shut the conversations down, whilst some were threatened with being reported to the General Medical Council (GMC).

Problems in disclosure were particularly prominent when the abusive partner was also a health professional, which often deterred the victim-survivor from reporting the abuse through fear that they would not be believed due to their partner's status.

3. A "judgemental" medical culture

A culture of presenteeism in medical settings and perception that weakness is not tolerated also made it difficult to get the time off needed to access domestic abuse services during working hours.

When victim-survivors were able to speak to health professionals who would listen and validate that they were experiencing domestic abuse, it made a huge difference. Peer support groups were also extremely valuable in helping them understand that they were not alone and inspiring them to take action.

Speaking about how the medical profession can support its workers, Dr Donovan said, "A designated confidential service for doctor victim-survivors would give them access to support without the risk of meeting their patients and colleagues.

"The medical profession also needs to change its culture so that its workers feel that they can talk to each other more and that they are being looked after as well as their patients."

Remote monitoring using airborne devices such as drones or satellites could revolutionise the effectiveness of nature-based solutions (NBS) that protect communities from devastating natural hazards such as floods, storms and landslides, say climate change experts from the University of Surrey.

Grey structural measures (a collective term for engineering projects that use concrete and steel) like floodgates, dams, dikes and sea walls are still the most common methods to guard against natural hazards. However, these 'grey measures' are expensive and lack the long-term flexibility and sustainability needed to help communities manage their growing population and address the planet's ongoing struggle against urbanisation and climate change. While NBS are cost-effective, their usability and reproducibility are often hindered by the lack of standard monitoring methods, tools and indicators.

In a comprehensive study published in the Earth-Science Reviews journal, researchers from Surrey's Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE) collaborated with experts from across Europe* to analyse monitoring methods that measure the effectiveness of NBS - such as wetlands, forest restoration projects and installation of green walls.

In the paper, the team found that while there is a need for combining ground and remote monitoring methods for holistic assessment, the advances in remote monitoring techniques present a significant source of hope for routinely, continually and accurately measuring the effectiveness of NBS and quelling skepticism around choosing NBS over grey-engineered options. Remote monitoring offers the ability to cover large geographical areas, and high-resolution imagery could change the way farmers, scientists, hazard managers and other decision-makers view NBS usage and applicability.

However, the study also warns that the lack of globally accepted standards to gauge an NBS success hinders their progress and use and needs to be urgently addressed.

Professor Prashant Kumar, Associate Dean (International) and the Director of the GCARE at the University of Surrey, said: "Unfortunately we do expect a significant uptick in natural hazards, thanks to climate change. Therefore, our decisions on how we protect ourselves are crucial, and nature-based solutions have the advantages of being flexible and not adding to the damage caused to our environment.

"I hope that this review begins an urgent discussion on how we can move forward as a scientific community and start to develop an accepted framework for measuring the effectiveness of nature-based solutions."

Indigenous traditions often place land at the centre of their cultures. However, with more than half of Canada's Indigenous population now living in urban areas and Indigenous communities struggling to overcome legacies of colonialism defined by assimilation and land theft, that connection is getting frayed.

Elizabeth Fast, an associate professor of applied human sciences in the Faculty of Arts and Science, wanted to help Indigenous youth reconnect with their cultures in safe and accessible ways. Along with a youth advisory group composed of Indigenous youth (some of whom are also students), she has been organizing a series of land-based learning retreats revolving around Indigenous traditions and ceremonies.

The first, held in July 2018, is the subject of a new paper published in the International Journal of Indigenous Health.

"The youth participants found the retreat extremely nourishing," Fast says. "It provided many opportunities they've never had before to spend more time with Elders and Knowledge Holders to learn more about ceremonies and to connect with land-based learning. We explicitly created a cultural safety framework that welcomed different levels of connections with one's identity, including gender and sexuality."

The Restoring Our Roots project has since evolved into a five-year Land As Our Teacher participatory action research project exploring the ways land-based pedagogies benefit Indigenous youth.

Once-banned cultural practices now out in the open

Restoring Our Roots would not have been possible without input from the project's youth advisory committee, many of whom also participated in the program. By helping to develop the framework, pedagogical content, ethics and other aspects of the four-day retreat, they were able to come up with programming that was educational, culturally appropriate and inclusive.

Over the course of the retreat, the participants were mentored by Elders and worked with artists, community leaders, storytellers and other young people who guided them through activities meant to help them (re)connect to their Indigeneity. These included cultural workshops, arts-based activities, ceremonies, sweat lodges, medicines and storytelling sessions. All of it was centered around relationship with the land.

"Our ancestors grew up learning from and on the land. It was a way of life and still is for some," Fast says. "But for many Indigenous people, even those living in communities, it is less so because many of our cultural practices and ceremonies were banned. There is a real sense of loss and grief from losing those traditions. We were seeing a lot of interest in relearning and reclaiming them."

Land-based learning includes ways that Indigenous communities survive as peoples as well, such as hunting, fishing, gathering medicines, tanning hides and building fires and shelters, Fast explains.

Belonging for all

She adds that the retreat specifically made space for LGBTQ and Two-Spirit youth hoping to reconnect to their heritage -- a group often cut off or separated from their wider communities.

"Many of these youth have moved away from ceremony or accessing land-based learning because they might feel the impact of colonization around gender and sexual identity norms even more," she says. "If they feel they are going to experience transphobia or homophobia, they might just assimilate and move away from their cultures or communities."

Fast is now organizing a queer-only retreat for Indigenous youth this summer, despite the overall positivity and inclusion seen in past retreats.

"I think the sense of belonging is very important for Indigenous youth, especially for those who have felt disconnected for many reasons," she concludes. "It increases their courage to reconnect and can lead to some healing of intergenerational trauma. It also can be a foundation for deeper and better relationships with the land and help them get away from their technology-heavy lives to provide an experience many of them never had before."