Earth

Conservationists who apply wing tags for identifying Cape Vultures--a species of African vulture that is vulnerable to extinction--are putting the birds' lives further at risk, a new movement ecology study has shown. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany and VulPro NPC in South Africa have demonstrated that Cape Vultures fitted with tags on their wings travelled shorter distances and flew slower than those fitted with bands around their legs. The research emphasises the importance of investigating the effects that tagging methods can have on the behaviour and conservation of species, prompting a shift towards the less invasive method of leg bands in the future study of Cape Vultures.

For over a decade, many conservationists and NGOs have been marking vultures by placing a tag on the wing area known as the patagium. Patagial tags have the advantage that they are large and conspicuous enough for individuals to be identified from far away. Leg bands are smaller in size, fitted around the tarsus of the vultures leg and thus, harder to notice and record the unique number.

"After receiving many grounded and injured vultures from incorrect placement of wing tags, we felt there was an immediate need to find out exactly what these tags were doing to the flight of birds and whether this technique was, in fact, hindering the species rather than protecting them," says senior author Kerri Wolter, CEO of VulPro NPC, a vulture conservation organisation in South Africa.

The study was motivated by recent VulPro NPC research, which highlighted how an incorrect patagial tag could cause injuries and result in the grounding of vultures. To find out how patagial tags affected the birds' flights, researchers from the Max Planck Institute used GPS devices to track 27 Cape Vultures (Gyps coprotheres) marked with either patagial tags or leg bands.

The GPS devices, which were mounted to the birds' backs, recorded the birds' positions as often as every minute for 24 hours a day. These recordings allowed researchers to investigate the birds' flight performance, including occurrence of flight, proportion of time spent flying in a day, daily distance travelled and ground speed.

Individuals equipped with patagial tags covered a much smaller area in comparison to the leg band group. They were less likely to take flight and, when doing so, flew at lower ground speed compared to individuals wearing leg bands.

"Although we did not measure the effects of patagial tags on body condition or survival, our results strongly suggest that patagial tags have severe adverse effects on vultures' flight performance," says first author Teja Curk, a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior.

Vultures are scavengers. By feeding on dead animals, they play an important role in the ecosystem due to the services they provide, such as preventing the spread of infectious diseases, recycling organic material into nutrients and stabilising food webs.

"Therefore, restricted flight potential and a reduction in the area covered by these birds, caused by improper tag attachment, can have far-reaching consequences at the ecosystem level," says co-author Kamran Safi, a group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior.

About 1.8 million envenoming snakebites occur around the world annually, killing about 94,000 people. In tropical areas, especially in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, snakebites are considered a major cause of death, especially among farmers who encounter snakes in their fields. In response, the World Health Organization has launched a strategic plan to reduce snakebites by 50% by 2030. An important basis for attaining this goal is expanding relevant scientific research.

An international research group, including researchers from Tel Aviv University, has recently created an innovative simulation model for predicting snakebites, based on an improved understanding of interactions between farmers and snakes, in both time and space.

The purpose of the model is to determine the probability of a snakebites occurring in certain places (for example in rice fields vs. tea fields) at various times (hours of the day and months of the year). The study is founded upon extensive research and data from Sri Lanka, where about 30,000 envenoming snakebites kill approximately 400 people every year. It focused on 6 types of snakes, some numbered among the most venomous in the world (cobra, Russell's viper, saw-scaled viper, hump-nosed viper, common krait and Ceylon krait), matching them with farmers who grow the three most common crops in the area: rice, tea and rubber. Thus for example, the model predicts that the bites of Russell's viper peak in rice fields during February and August, while the hump-nosed viper prefers rubber plantations in April and May. The model also determines that in the southeastern part of the studied region, the largest number of snakebites are inflicted by Russell's viper, one of the world's most dangerous snakes, while in other parts of this area snakebites of the less lethal hump-nosed viper are the most common.

The study was led by Dr. Takuya Iwamura (currently at Oregon State University) and Eyal Goldstein of the School of Zoology at Tel Aviv University, and Dr. Kris Murray of Imperial College London and the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London. Other participants included researchers from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Lancaster University and the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. The paper was published in February 2021 in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

Eyal Goldstein explains: "We built a first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary model, which includes the behavior patterns of both sides - snakes and humans, identifying risk factors at various times and places, and warning against them. For example, the model can differentiate between low-risk and high-risk areas, a difference that can be manifested in double the number of snakebites per 100,000 people."

Dr. Murray explains that "Both snakes and people go about their business at different times of the day, in different seasons and in different types of habitats - the model captures all of this to predict encounters between people and snakes in areas where farmers are working. We then factor in the aggressiveness of different snake species to work out how likely an encounter is to result in a bite."

Dr. Iwamura emphasizes that "Our approach is to mathematically analyze interactions between snakes and humans, with an emphasis on the ecological perspective. This is a completely new approach to understanding the mechanism that causes snakebites. Unlike most studies, which have so far focused mainly on social and economic risk factors, we chose to focus on the ecological aspects - such as snakes' movements and habitats, the impact of climate and rainfall, and the respective behaviors of farmers and snakes - as a key to predicting potential encounters."

Verified against existing data in Sri Lanka , the model was proved very accurate in predicting snakebite patterns in different areas and different seasons, as well as the relative contribution of various types of snakes to the overall picture as seen in hospital data. Now the researchers intend to implement the model in places that don't yet have accurate snakebite data. They will and also use it to predict future changes resulting from climate change - such as increased rainfall leading to greater snake activity, as well as changes in land use and habitats available to snakes.

Dr. Iwamura concludes: "Our model can help focus the efforts of snakebite reduction policies, and serve as a tool for warning, raising awareness and saving human lives. Moreover, we regard this study as a first stage in a broader project. In the future we intend to develop more complex models of encounters between humans and wildlife, to support both public health and nature preservation policies in the real world."

Does a warmer climate mean more dry land? For years, researchers projected that drylands -- including deserts, savannas and shrublands -- will expand as the planet warms, but new research from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) challenges those prevailing views.

Previous studies used atmospheric information, including rainfall and temperature, to make projections about future land conditions. The real picture is more complicated than that, said Kaighin McColl, Assistant Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and of Environmental Science and Engineering at SEAS and senior author of the paper.

"Historically, we have relatively good records of rainfall and temperature but really poor records of the land surface, things like soil moisture and vegetation," said McColl. "As a result, previous definitions of drylands are based only on how the atmosphere is behaving, as an approximation of the land surface. But models can now simulate both atmospheric and land conditions. By just looking directly at the land surface in climate models, we find that the models aren't showing a clear increase of drylands over time and that there is huge uncertainty about the global average state of drylands in the future."

The research is published in Nature Climate Change.

"If you want to know if the land is going to get drier, if crops are going to fail or if a forest is going to dry out, you have look at the land itself," said Alexis Berg, a research associate in McColl's lab and first author of the paper. "How much vegetation is there? Are the plants water stressed?"

While climate models have historically focused on the atmosphere, modern climate models now also simulate vegetation behavior and land hydrology.

For example, when plants absorb CO2, they lose water. If there is more CO2 in the air, plants can release less water and become more water efficient. More CO2 also results in more fertilizer for plants, which helps them grow and reduces water stress.

These effects have long been known, but previous atmospheric-only indicators of drylands just weren't capturing these land surface effects.

"As the climate is warming, there is a divergence between atmospheric and land surface behavior," said Berg.

To account for that divergence, McColl and Berg developed a new metric of drylands, based on land surface properties, including biological responses to higher atmospheric CO2, and compared drylands projections to those derived solely from atmospheric metrics.

"Our research shows that while some drylands may expand, climate models don't project that there will be a dramatic and rapid global expansion of drylands," said McColl.

However, simulating complex land processes remains challenging in global models.

"There is still a lot of uncertainty about how vegetation and the water cycle will change in a warming world," said McColl.

McColl and his team aim to reduce that uncertainty in future research by developing more accurate land surface models.

AMES, Iowa - Parents would never give their children the keys to the car without supervised training and driver's education. An Iowa State University researcher says parents and educators need to take a similar approach before handing children a keyboard to access the digital world.

ISU psychology professor Douglas Gentile worked with the DQ (Digital Intelligence) Institute, an international think tank, to design a framework for digital literacy education. In a commentary, published by the journal Nature Human Behaviour, Gentile and his colleagues outlined how the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the need to implement this global standard for digital literacy.

"Children are exposed to various risks online, and COVID increases the odds because now they're online more than ever," Gentile said. "If children haven't had the training to know what to look out for, they're perhaps subject to more risks."

Gentile and colleagues Joshua Jackman, assistant professor with Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea; Nam-Joon Cho, professor with Nanyang Technological University in Singapore; and Yuhyun Park, founder of the DQ Institute, examined the responses of more than 145,000 children and adolescents from 30 countries, finding that 60% were exposed to cyber risks such as cyberbullying, gaming disorder and violence. Gentile says the results show this is a universal problem that needs a global solution.

Despite extensive efforts to create digital skills programming, the researchers wrote that the impact has been limited because a common framework did not exist and there was weak coordination between programs. In response, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Standards Association last fall approved the DQ framework as the standard for digital education. The DQ framework focuses on digital skills education across eight competencies, including identity, use, safety, security, emotional intelligence, literacy, communication and rights.

Gentile says approval of the framework is just a first step toward getting digital literacy education in K-12 classrooms. He says it is imperative that students have the tools to become savvy digital consumers, especially with the growing number of risks and misinformation online.

"If anyone can post information online, whether it's true or false, we need to give consumers the skills to detect it and guard against it," Gentile said. "Digital literacy will not eliminate the risks online, but it will develop good digital citizens who have the skills to work within the system so they can gain the benefits, without the harms that the risks might pose."

1 Billion Digital Skills Project

Gentile and his colleagues are calling on academic researchers, educators and others to join the efforts of the Coalition for Digital Intelligence (see sidebar for partners) to support the 1 Billion Digital Skills Project. As the name suggests, the project aims to equip one billion people, primarily K-12 students, teachers and parents, with digital skills within 10 years. The coalition is working to achieve the following objectives:

Build a global network to develop/implement digital skills education and training.

Develop a certification system to evaluate digital skills programs.

Develop microbadge credits students can earn to incentivize learning.

Create an online assessment platform to measure digital skills.

Support ongoing improvement of DQ standards and evaluation of educational programs.

Gentile says achieving these objectives will require state and federal investment to train K-12 teachers and provide programming in schools. The return on the investment is twofold, he said. The training will not only protect children from online risks, but help prepare the future workforce.

"More and more jobs include an online component," Gentile said. "If we train people to be good digital citizens, we'd likely have fewer breaches in corporate America. There is a financial incentive to put resources into our schools to provide this training."

Coalition for Digital Intelligence

The Coalition for Digital Intelligence is working to implement the digital intelligence framework across the technology and education sectors, making sure that both work together toward universal digital intelligence. Coalition partners include:

DQ Institute

Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)

IEEE Standards Association

World Economic Forum

Scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found evidence that a planet orbiting a distant star may have lost its atmosphere but gained a second one through volcanic activity.

The planet, GJ 1132 b, is hypothesized to have begun as a gaseous world with a thick hydrogen blanket of atmosphere. Starting out at several times the diameter of Earth, this so-called "sub-Neptune" is believed to have quickly lost its primordial hydrogen and helium atmosphere due to the intense radiation of the hot, young star it orbits. In a short period of time, such a planet would be stripped down to a bare core about the size of Earth. That's when things got interesting.

To the surprise of astronomers, Hubble observed an atmosphere which, according to their theory, is a "secondary atmosphere" that is present now. Based on a combination of direct observational evidence and inference through computer modeling, the team reports that the atmosphere consists of molecular hydrogen, hydrogen cyanide, methane and also contains an aerosol haze. Modeling suggests the aerosol haze is based on photochemically produced hydrocarbons, similar to smog on Earth.

Scientists interpret the current atmospheric hydrogen in GJ 1132 b as hydrogen from the original atmosphere which was absorbed into the planet's molten magma mantle and is now being slowly released through volcanic processes to form a new atmosphere. The atmosphere we see today is believed to be continually replenished to balance the hydrogen escaping into space.

"It's super exciting because we believe the atmosphere that we see now was regenerated, so it could be a secondary atmosphere," said study co-author Raissa Estrela of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. "We first thought that these highly irradiated planets could be pretty boring because we believed that they lost their atmospheres. But we looked at existing observations of this planet with Hubble and said, 'Oh no, there is an atmosphere there.'"

The findings could have implications for other exoplanets, planets beyond our solar system.

"How many terrestrial planets don't begin as terrestrials? Some may start as sub-Neptunes, and they become terrestrials through a mechanism that photo-evaporates the primordial atmosphere. This process works early in a planet's life, when the star is hotter," said lead author Mark Swain of JPL. "Then the star cools down and the planet's just sitting there. So you've got this mechanism where you can cook off the atmosphere in the first 100 million years, and then things settle down. And if you can regenerate the atmosphere, maybe you can keep it."

In some ways GJ 1132 b, located about 41 light-years from Earth, has tantalizing parallels to Earth, but in some ways it is very different. Both have similar densities, similar sizes, and similar ages, being about 4.5 billion years old. Both started with a hydrogen-dominated atmosphere, and both were hot before they cooled down. The team's work even suggests that GJ 1132 b and Earth have similar atmospheric pressure at the surface.

But the planets have profoundly different formation histories. Earth is not believed to be the surviving core of a sub-Neptune. And Earth orbits at a comfortable distance from our Sun. GJ 1132 b is so close to its red dwarf star that it completes an orbit around its host star once every day and a half. This extremely close proximity keeps GJ 1132 b tidally locked, showing the same face to its star at all times--just as our Moon keeps one hemisphere permanently facing Earth.

"The question is, what is keeping the mantle hot enough to remain liquid and power volcanism?" asked Swain. "This system is special because it has the opportunity for quite a lot of tidal heating."

Tidal heating is a phenomenon that occurs through friction, when energy from a planet's orbit and rotation is dispersed as heat inside the planet. GJ 1132 b is in an elliptical orbit, and the tidal forces acting on it are strongest when it is closest to or farthest from its host star. At least one other planet in the host star's system also gravitationally pulls on the planet.

The consequences are that the planet is squeezed or stretched through this gravitational "pumping." That tidal heating keeps the mantle liquid for a long time. A nearby example in our own solar system is Jupiter's moon Io, which has continuous volcanic activity due to a tidal tug-of-war from Jupiter and the neighboring Jovian moons.

Given GJ 1132 b's hot interior, the team believes the planet's cooler, overlying crust is extremely thin, perhaps only hundreds of feet thick. That's much too feeble to support anything resembling volcanic mountains. Its flat terrain may also be cracked like an eggshell due to tidal flexing. Hydrogen and other gases could be released through such cracks.

NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope has the ability to observe this exoplanet. Webb's infrared vision may allow scientists to see down to the planet's surface. "If there are magma pools or volcanism going on, those areas will be hotter," explained Swain. "That will generate more emission, and so they'll be looking potentially at the actual geologic activity--which is exciting!"

For the first time ever, a Northwestern University-led research team has peered inside a human cell to view a multi-subunit machine responsible for regulating gene expression.

Called the Mediator-bound pre-initiation complex (Med-PIC), the structure is a key player in determining which genes are activated and which are suppressed. Mediator helps position the rest of the complex -- RNA polymerase II and the general transcription factors -- at the beginning of genes that the cell wants to transcribe.

The researchers visualized the complex in high resolution using cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM), enabling them to better understand how it works. Because this complex plays a role in many diseases, including cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, HIV and metabolic disorders, researchers' new understanding of its structure could potentially be leveraged to treat disease.

"This machine is so basic to every branch of modern molecular biology in the context of gene expression," said Northwestern's Yuan He, senior author of the study. "Visualizing the structure in 3D will help us answer basic biological questions, such as how DNA is copied to RNA."

"Seeing this structure allows us to understand how it works," added Ryan Abdella, the paper's co-first author. "It's like taking apart a common household appliance to see how everything fits together. Now we can understand how the proteins in the complex come together to perform their function."

The study will be published March 11 in the journal Science. This marks the first time the human Mediator complex has been visualized in 3D in the human cell.

He is an assistant professor of molecular biosciences in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Abdella and Anna Talyzina, both graduate students in the He lab, are co-first authors of the paper.

Famed biochemist Roger Kornberg discovered the Mediator complex in yeast in 1990, a project for which he won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. But Mediator comprises a daunting 26 subunits -- 56 total when combined with the pre-initiation complex -- it's taken researchers until now to obtain high-resolution images of the human version.

"It's a technically quite challenging project," He said. "These complexes are scarce. It takes hundreds of liters of human cells, which are very hard to grow, to obtain small amounts of the protein complexes."

A breakthrough came when He's team put the sample on a single layer of graphene oxide. By providing this support, the graphene sheet minimized the amount of sample needed for imaging. And compared to the typical support used -- amorphous carbon -- graphene improved the signal-to-noise ratio for higher-resolution imaging.

After preparing the sample, the team used cryo-EM, a relatively new technique that won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, to determine the 3D shape of proteins, which are often thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair. The technique works by blasting a stream of electrons at a flash-frozen sample to take many 2D images.

For this study, He's team captured hundreds of thousands of images of the Med-PIC complex. They then used computational methods to reconstruct a 3D image.

"Solving this complex was like assembling a puzzle," Talyzina said. "Some of those subunits were already known from other experiments, but we had no idea how the pieces assembled together or interacted with each other. With our final structure, we were finally able to see this whole complex and understand its organization."

The resulting image shows the Med-PIC complex as a flat, elongated structure, measuring 45 nanometers in length. The researchers also were surprised to discover that the Mediator moves relative to the rest of the complex, binding to RNA polymerase II at a hinge point.

"Mediator moves like a pendulum," Abdella said. "Next, we want to understand what this flexibility means. We think it might have an impact on the activity of a key enzyme within the complex."

Climate change is affecting the water balance of our planet: depending on the region and the time of year, this can influence the amount of water in rivers potentially resulting in more flooding or drought. River flow is an important indicator of water resources available to humans and the environment. The amount of available water also depends on further factors, such as direct interventions in the water cycle or land use change: if, for example, water is diverted for irrigation or regulated via reservoirs, or forests are cleared and monocultures grown in their place, this can have an impact on river flow.

However, how river flow has changed worldwide in recent years was so far not investigated using direct observations. Similarly, the question whether globally visible changes are attributable to climate change or to water and land management had not been clarified.

Now, an international research team led by ETH Zurich has succeeded in breaking down the influence of these factors, after analysing data from 7,250 measuring stations worldwide. The study, which has been published in the renowned scientific journal Science, demonstrates that river flow changed systematically between 1971 and 2010. Complex patterns were revealed - some regions such as the Mediterranean and north-eastern Brazil had become drier, while elsewhere the volume of water had increased, such as in Scandinavia.

The quest for the causes

"The actual question, however, concerned the cause of this change," says Lukas Gudmundsson, lead author of the study and senior assistant in the group led by Sonia Seneviratne, professor at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH Zurich.

To answer this question, the researchers carried out several computer simulations, using global hydrological models fed with observed climate data from the period studied (1971 to 2010). The results of the model calculations closely matched the analysis of observed river flow. "This means that climatic conditions can explain the observed trends in the flow volumes," says Gudmundsson. In a second procedure, the researchers included additional water and land management in their simulations in order to study the influence of these factors. This did not affect the result, however. "Changes in water and land management are evidently not the cause of global changes in rivers," he says.

Although water management and land use can result in large local fluctuations in flow volumes, investigating this was not within the scope of the study, adds Gudmundsson: "For us, it was not about local trends but global changes that become visible over longer periods." This is why the researchers did not consider data from individual measuring stations in isolation, but collated them into larger subcontinental regions for the analysis, thereby making it possible to identify the influence of climate change.

The impact of greenhouse gases

The researchers were able to substantiate the role of climate change using the detection and attribution method. For this they compared the observations with simulations from climate models that were calculated once with man-made greenhouse gases and once without. In the first case the simulation matched the actual data, but in the second case it did not. "This suggests that the observed changes are highly unlikely without climate change," says Gudmundsson.

The study is the first to use direct observations to demonstrate that climate change has a globally visible influence on rivers. "This was only possible thanks to the great collaboration between researchers and institutions from 12 countries," emphasises Gudmundsson. The data collection from the 7,250 measuring stations worldwide was also the result of a joint effort: researchers had collated the data with Australian collaboration partners in a previous study. This data now represents the largest global data set with river flow observations available today. "Thanks to this data, we were able to validate the models and demonstrate that they provide a good reflection of reality," says Gudmundsson.

This means that the models can also provide reliable scenarios on how rivers will continue to change in future. Such projections provide an important basis for planning in the affected regions in order to secure water supply and adjust to climate change.

As gatherings to observe whooping cranes join the ranks of online-only events this year, a new study offers insight into how the endangered bird is faring on a landscape increasingly dotted with wind turbines. The paper, published this week in Ecological Applications, reports that whooping cranes migrating through the U.S. Great Plains avoid "rest stop" sites that are within 5 km of wind-energy infrastructure.

Avoidance of wind turbines can decrease collision mortality for birds, but can also make it more difficult and time-consuming for migrating flocks to find safe and suitable rest and refueling locations. The study's insights into migratory behavior could improve future siting decisions as wind energy infrastructure continues to expand.

"In the past, federal agencies had thought of impacts related to wind energy primarily associated with collision risks," said Aaron Pearse, the paper's first author and a research wildlife biologist for the U.S. Geological Survey's Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center in Jamestown, N.D. "I think this research changes that paradigm to a greater focus on potential impacts to important migration habitats."

The study tracked whooping cranes migrating across the Great Plains, a region that encompasses a mosaic of croplands, grasslands and wetlands. The region has seen a rapid proliferation of wind energy infrastructure in recent years: in 2010, there were 2,215 wind towers within the whooping crane migration corridor that the study focused on; by 2016, when the study ended, there were 7,622 wind towers within the same area.

Pearse and his colleagues found that whooping cranes migrating across the study area in 2010 and 2016 were 20 times more likely to select "rest stop" locations at least 5 km away from wind turbines than those closer to turbines.

The authors estimated that 5% of high-quality stopover habitat in the study area was affected by presence of wind towers. Siting wind infrastructure outside of whooping cranes' migration corridor would reduce the risk of further habitat loss not only for whooping cranes, but also for millions of other birds that use the same land for breeding, migration, and wintering habitat.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. However, many women artists - and the stories their works tell - comprise less than 4 per cent of total art sold at auction and fail to attract high selling prices compared to male artists.

A world-first international study by researchers at Monash University, Maastricht University (The Netherlands) and Artnet Worldwide, based in New York City, found that a staggering 96.1 per cent (2,572,346) of all artworks sold at auctions worldwide between 2000 and 2017 are attributed to male artists.

However, work by female artists are on average 4.4 per cent more expensive after controlling for artwork and transaction characteristics. This factor contributes to higher barriers for women to enter the art market, researchers say.

Despite commanding a higher average price for their work, women artists are almost exclusively absent from the top echelons of the total value of art sold at auction. Forty-two men occupy the top 0.03 per cent of the market, where 40 per cent of the sales value is concentrated. Just one woman artist, Joan Mitchell, cracks the top 50.

Findings of this study were published in the Journal of Cultural Economics.

Dr Marina Gertsberg, Lecturer in Banking & Finance in the Monash Business School and co-author of the study, said even with a near equal share of women and men pursuing fine art degrees, women find it more difficult to turn that interest into saleable artwork.

"Women might feel discouraged by their market prospects at the very top, or they might experience discrimination by dealers and buyers who ascribe higher potential to men at the very top. Increasing the visibility of female artists and giving them the chance to compete early on in their careers is therefore most important in improving female representation," Dr Gertsberg said.

"There is currently some movement in this direction. Museums and galleries are increasing the share of female artists on display. This helps buyers to be acquainted with female art and gain more confidence in it."

At the same time, Dr Gertsberg says it is important not to segregate female and male artists.

"For example, 'women-only' exhibits do not allow the audience to compare artworks by males and females and pushes female art to a niche category. Women should be given the chance to compete side-by-side with men," she said.

"The fact that the auction prices are higher for artwork by women than artwork by men, after accounting for artwork style and other characteristics that affect prices, shows that women can compete in the market when given the chance."

This investigation considered the prices paid at auction for artworks created by male and female artists based on birth-identified sex, and how these prices have evolved over time.

Their dataset comprised almost the full population of global art auction transactions from 2000 to 2017, covering more than 1800 auction houses.

In the top echelon of the art market - for sales of greater than $1 million - artworks by male artists sell for 18.4 per cent more than those by female artists. The top 40 artists, consisting solely of men, represent 40 per cent of total market share. Artworks by female artists represent just 3-5 per cent of major permanent collections in the USA and Europe.

While there are about 110,938 male artists with work on display and up for auction at major galleries, there are only 5612 female artists present. The proportion of female artists is highest for contemporary art (9.3 per cent) and the least for artwork from the 'old masters' period (2.9 per cent).

Dr Gertsberg said the career trajectories of female and male artists are likely to diverge very early, and in order to formulate policy, it is important to identify when female artists encounter barriers that forces them to drop out of the profession.

"The fact that we observe higher median prices for female artists indicates that buyers perceive quality of artworks by female artists as overall better than the artworks of male artists. We would not expect this difference in quality if men and women faced the same difficulty in entering the market," Dr Gertsberg said.

"It might seem counterintuitive, but we would like to see the average price for artworks produced by women fall to the level of men. This would imply that the quality of male and female artists is similar and suggest that the playing field is truly equal."

New research conducted at the UNESCO World Heritage listed 'Plain of Jars' in Laos has established the stone jars were likely placed in their final resting position from as early as 1240 to 660 BCE.

Sediment samples from beneath stone jars from two of the more than 120 recorded megalithic sites were obtained by a team led Dr Louise Shewan from the University of Melbourne, Associate Professor Dougald O'Reilly from the Australian National University (ANU) and Dr Thonglith Luangkoth from the Lao Department of Heritage.

The samples were analysed using a technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) to determine when sediment grains were last exposed to sunlight.

"With these new data and radiocarbon dates obtained for skeletal material and charcoal from other burial contexts, we now know that these sites have maintained enduring ritual significance from the period of their initial jar placement into historic times," Dr Shewan said.

The megalithic jar sites in Northern Laos comprise one to three-metre-tall carved stone jars, weighing up to 20 tonnes, dotted across the landscape, appearing alone or in groups of up to several hundred.

Dr Shewan and her team completed their most recent excavations in March 2020, revisiting Site 1 (Ban Hai Hin), and arriving back in Australia just before global pandemic international boarder closures.

Site 1 revealed more burials placed around the jars and confirmed earlier observations that the exotic boulders distributed across the site are markers for ceramic burial jars buried below.

Published today in PLOS One, Dr Shewan and collaborators present new radiocarbon results for site use and also introduce geochronological data determining the likely quarry source for one of the largest megalithic sites.

While geologists have used detrital zircon U-Pb dating for several decades, this methodology has recently been used to establish the provenance of ceramic and stone sources in archaeological contexts including Stonehenge.

Conducted at ANU by Associate Professor Richard Armstrong, the U-Pb zircon ages measured in jar samples from Site 1 were compared to potential source material, including a sandstone outcrop and an incomplete jar from a presumed quarry located some 8km away. The zircon age distributions revealed very similar provenance suggesting that this outcrop was the likely source of the material used for the creation of jars at the site.

"How the jars were moved from the quarry to the site, however, remains a mystery," Associate Professor O'Reilly said.

The next challenge for the researchers is to obtain further samples from other sites and from across the geographic expanse of this megalithic culture to understand more about these enigmatic sites and the period over which they were created.

Dr Shewan said this is not an especially easy task given the extensive unexploded ordnance (UXO) contamination in the region where less than 10 per cent of the known jar sites have been cleared.

"We expect that this complex process will eventually help us share more insights into what is one of Southeast Asia's most mysterious archaeological cultures."

The full team of researchers includes La Trobe University, James Cook University, University of Gloucestershire and international collaborators from Laos, New Zealand and Hong Kong.

People with aphantasia - that is, the inability to visualise mental images - are harder to spook with scary stories, a new UNSW Sydney study shows.

The study, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, tested how aphantasic people reacted to reading distressing scenarios, like being chased by a shark, falling off a cliff, or being in a plane that's about to crash.

The researchers were able to physically measure each participant's fear response by monitoring changing skin conductivity levels - in other words, how much the story made a person sweat. This type of test is commonly used in psychology research to measure the body's physical expression of emotion.

According to the findings, scary stories lost their fear factor when the readers couldn't visually imagine the scene - suggesting imagery may have a closer link to emotions than scientists previously thought.

"We found the strongest evidence yet that mental imagery plays a key role in linking thoughts and emotions," says Professor Joel Pearson, senior author on the paper and Director of UNSW Science's Future Minds Lab.

"In all of our research to date, this is by far the biggest difference we've found between people with aphantasia and the general population."

To test the role of visual imagery in fear, the researchers guided 46 study participants (22 with aphantasia, and 24 with imagery) to a blackened room before attaching several electrodes to their skin. Skin is known to become a better conductor of electricity when a person feels strong emotions, like fear.

The scientists then left the room and turned the light off, leaving the participants alone as a story started to appear in the screen in front of them.

At first, the stories started innocuously - for example, 'You are at the beach, in the water' or 'You're on a plane, by the window'. But as the stories continued, the suspense slowly built, whether it was a dark flash in the distant waves and people on the beach pointing, or the cabin lights dimming as the plane starts to shake.

"Skin conductivity levels quickly started to grow for people who were able to visualise the stories," says Prof Pearson. "The more the stories went on, the more their skin reacted.

"But for people with aphantasia, the skin conductivity levels pretty much flatlined."

To check that differences in fear thresholds didn't cause the response, the experiment was repeated using a series of scary images instead of text, like a photo of a cadaver or a snake bearing its fangs.

But this time, the pictures made the skin crawl equally in both groups of people.

"These two sets of results suggest that aphantasia isn't linked to reduced emotion in general, but is specific to participants reading scary stories," says Prof. Pearson. "The emotional fear response was present when participants actually saw the scary material play out in front of them.

"The findings suggest that imagery is an emotional thought amplifier. We can think all kind of things, but without imagery, the thoughts aren't going to have that emotional 'boom'."

Living with aphantasia

Aphantasia affects 2-5 per cent of the population, but there is still very little known about the condition.

A UNSW study published last year found that aphantasia is linked to a widespread pattern of changes to other cognitive processes, like remembering, dreaming and imagining.

But while most previous aphantasia research focused on behavioural studies, this study used an objective measure of skin conductance.

"This evidence further supports aphantasia as a unique, verifiable phenomenon," says study co-author Dr Rebecca Keogh, a postdoctoral fellow formerly of UNSW and now based at Macquarie University.

"This work may provide a potential new objective tool which could be used to help to confirm and diagnose aphantasia in the future."

The idea for this experiment came after the research team noticed a recurring sentiment on aphantasia discussion boards that many people with the condition didn't enjoy reading fiction.

While the findings suggest that reading may not be as emotionally impactful for people with aphantasia, Prof. Pearson says it's important to note that the findings are based on averages, and not everyone with aphantasia will have the same reading experience.

The study was also focused on fear, and other emotional responses to fiction could be different.

"Aphantasia comes in different shapes and sizes," he says. "Some people have no visual imagery, while other people have no imagery in one or all of their other senses. Some people dream while others don't.

"So don't be concerned if you have aphantasia and don't fit this mould. There are all kinds of variations to aphantasia that we're only just discovering."

Next, Prof. Pearson and his team at the Future Minds Lab plan to investigate how disorders like anxiety and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder might be experienced differently by people with aphantasia.

"Aphantasia is neural diversity," says Prof. Pearson. "It's an amazing example of how different our brain and minds can be."

WESTMINSTER, Colorado - March 10, 2021 - The paperbark tree (Melaleuca quinquenervia) was introduced to the U.S. from Australia in the 1900s. Unfortunately, it went on to become a weedy invader that has dominated natural landscapes across southern Florida, including the fragile wetlands of the Everglades.

According to an article in the journal Invasive Plant Science and Management (IPSM), one of the challenges in managing the paperbark species is its large seedbank. A single, large tree located within a dense stand can retain as many as 9 million viable seeds. The seeds are contained in capsules within the tree canopy and are released in response to disturbances, including wildfires and even the application of herbicides.

Researchers conducting a 13-year study of Florida paperbark populations say a biological control program launched by state and federal authorities has helped to slow the plant's invasive capacity. Now seedlings, saplings and large trees are continuously attacked by weevils, psyllids and galling flies.

After implementation of biological controls, there was a reduction of greater than 95 percent in the size of new populations of paperbark tree that emerged following wildfires. The biological controls have helped to reduce seedling and sapling density, slow their growth and inhibit surviving plants from achieving the capacity to reproduce for many years. One example: After a 1998 fire, the density of paperbark tree was reduced by 96.3 percent. By 2005, none of the remaining recruits had produced seed capsules.

Researchers say insights from Florida's experience can help other communities facing a paperbark invasion bring new focus to their control efforts.

"Our study shows biological controls help to suppress new growth, which can be left for a decade or more before any additional treatment is needed," said Philip Tipping, leader of the USDA-ARS Invasive Plant Research Laboratory in Davie, Florida. "As a result, land managers can prioritize removing large, reproductive trees instead of treating newly emerged populations."

Global targets to improve the welfare of people across the planet will have mixed impacts on the world's forests, according to new research.

The United Nations' 17 key areas for global development - known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) - range from tackling poverty, hunger and sanitation to promoting clean energy, economic growth and reducing inequality.

Many of these goals, such as improved peace and justice, good health and wellbeing, and quality education, will have a positive impact on the Earth's natural forests.

But others, including creating new roads, industry and infrastructure, are likely to have detrimental consequences.

The research, led by the University of Leeds, reviewed a wide range of existing academic papers into the UN's global goals.

The findings, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and the United Bank of Carbon, are published in the journal Forest Policy and Economics.

Lead author Jamie Carr, of Leeds' School of Earth and Environment, said: "Almost none of the 17 goals are universally good or bad for forests.

"The only exception to this is the goal concerning education, for which all impacts were identified as beneficial. Well-being and social progress are also most commonly associated with beneficial outcomes.

"Overall, targets relating to energy and infrastructure have the potential to be the most damaging to the world's forest ecosystems.

"For example, negative impacts were associated with hard infrastructure including roads, railways, dams, housing and industrial areas.

"In particular, there is good evidence to suggest that roads designed to boost access to markets are especially damaging for forests.

"Other damaging impacts included efforts to combat cocaine-associated crime in Colombia. Despite having some forest benefits, coca crop eradication has been shown to result in cultivators simply moving their activities elsewhere or switching to even more damaging agricultural practices.

"Overall, beneficial impacts are more numerous than damaging ones, but are typically less well understood. This suggests an urgent need for increased research on these so that society and policymakers can take full advantage."

Forest ecosystems also help to mitigate against climate change while offering watershed protection and preventing soil erosion. In addition, about 1.6 billion people live near forests, and hundreds of millions depend on forest products in the form of fuel, food and timber.

The UN goals to create a fairer society for everyone are broken down into 169 more specific targets. These were agreed by the organisation's General Assembly in 2015 and are intended to be achieved by 2030.

The research team led by the University of Leeds included scientists from the University of Oxford, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre, and the International Institute for Environment and Development.

They reviewed 466 academic papers on the UN targets, collecting 963 examples of impacts.

They found that 63 of the 169 targets were likely to have effects on forests that were either damaging or beneficial, or in some cases, both.

Of the identified impacts, 29 were potentially beneficial, 15 damaging and 19 had mixed impacts.

Identifying and understanding these effects will help Governments to avoid negative impacts, while capitalising on the positive ones.

Lead supervisors of the research were Professor Dominick Spracklen and Dr Susannah Sallu, of Leeds' School of Earth and Environment.

Dr Sallu said: "Institutions working to help achieve the UN goals need to be aware that their actions can have negative implications for forests and the environmental services these forests provide.

"Inter-sectoral coordination between agriculture, energy, health, transport and forest sectors can help ensure future development does not cause unintended consequences.

"Inclusive planning involving a diverse range of society further minimises the potential for negative impacts."

The balance of human intestinal microbiota, consisting of hundreds of bacterial species and phages (bacteria viruses), is crucial to good health. A research team, including scientists from the CNRS* and the Institut Pasteur, has characterised the phage-bacterial interaction networks of the microbiota in ten healthy individuals, with unprecedented precision. Scientists detected several hundred bacterial and phage genomes and identified the thousands of interactions that bind them by quantifying the contacts between the DNA molecules of viruses and their hosts. This method has the advantage of providing exhaustive data from limited biological samples. The results were then analysed using algorithms similar to those applied to the study of social media communities. This panorama of relationships between bacteria and phages could be applied to therapies involving intestinal microbiota, such as faecal transplantation and phagotherapy. The approach used in the study, recently published in eLife, could also lead to more precise analyses of terrestrial and marine ecosystems.

* Researchers from the Génétique des génomes unit (CNRS/Institut Pasteur) and the Bioinformatics and Biostatistics Hub (CNRS/Institut Pasteur)

Stormier weather will increasingly force fishers to choose between their safety and income, researchers say.

Climate change is causing more extreme weather in many locations. Storms will likely increase around the UK in the future, while many fishers in the UK also face economic insecurity.

The new study - led by the University of Exeter - worked with fishers in Cornwall to understand how they balance the risks and rewards of fishing in varying conditions.

Factors that made skippers more likely to risk fishing in high wind or waves included: being the main earner in their household, poor recent fishing success, and having a crew to support.

"Climate change and economic insecurity create a 'perfect storm', putting ever-increasing pressure on skippers," said lead author Dr Nigel Sainsbury.

"Fishing is already the most dangerous peacetime profession in the UK, and the combination of more extreme weather and financial challenges will only make this worse.

"Solving this problem is difficult.

"Our suggestions include policies that improve the safety of boats and support less vulnerable fishing methods, and the creation of insurance products that pay fishers to stay in port in dangerous conditions."

The research team included scientists from the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas) and the universities of East Anglia, Bristol and North Carolina Wilmington.

Researchers presented skippers with various scenarios with differing factors including wave height, wind speed, likely catch and price - and asked them which trip they would prefer, or whether they would stay ashore.

"Skippers working with a crew were more likely to 'push the weather'," Dr Sainsbury said.

"This could partly be explained by the fact it's safer to fish with a crew than alone, but might also be because skippers feel responsible for providing incomes for their crew - even if the conditions are risky."

Fishers were asked to score their fishing success over the previous month on a scale of one to five - and catch levels were more important to those with low scores, which would lead them to take greater risks if they expected a good catch.

Boat size and fishing method also affected decision making. Unsurprisingly, skippers of larger boats and those whose method was less risky in high winds or waves were more willing to go out in such conditions.

The study included 80 skippers at seven Cornish ports, and fishing methods included otter board trawl, purse seines, gillnets, tangle nets, trammel nets, hand lines and pots.

"By taking a human behavioural perspective, this study provides new understanding of how changing storminess can impact fisheries," Dr Sainsbury said.

"We have shown that fishers' trade-offs of physical risk and fishing rewards are influenced by technical, social and economic factors.

"This study provides insights that could be very helpful in trying to predict levels of disruption to the fishing industry in the future as a result of changing storminess and climate change."