Earth

Our lives, and our bodies, are dynamic. The physical state of someone in their twenties is probably vastly different from that of someone in their fifties. Naturally, healthcare should also be oriented differently to different age groups. Older people are more likely to fall and hurt themselves because their joints are less flexible than younger people. To minimize these risks and improve quality of life among elderly individuals, it is important to develop measures that improve physical abilities. However, doing so requires a better understanding of the factors that affect joint flexibility, or range of motion (ROM). In younger individuals, longstanding research suggests that skeletal muscle stiffness is the main characteristic that influences ROM. But muscles naturally reduce in size (in a process called atrophy) with age, and older people tend to have muscles that are less stiff than those of younger people. This suggests that the link between muscle stiffness and ROM is not as strong in elderly people. Then what could be the cause?

To find out, Dr. Kosuke Hirata, Mr. Ryosuke Yamadera, and Prof. Ryota Akagi, a team of researchers from Shibaura Institute of Technology (SIT) in Saitama, Japan, measured ankle ROM in a group of young (~20 years) and old (~70 years) adults. In this new study, they started by asking the participants to first lie down, and then rotate their ankle until they reported feeling pain; the angle of rotation in which the participants could move without feeling pain was the ROM. Researchers also determined tissue stiffness using a variable called "shear wave speed," which was measured with ultrasound. Stiffness was obtained for several calf muscles, the sciatic nerve (main nerve of the leg), and deep fascia (connective tissue).

The researchers had three major hypotheses. First, they believed that ankle ROM was perhaps correlated with muscle stiffness in young but not old people. Second, ROM would be correlated with nerve and fascia stiffness in both young and old people. Third, the two age groups could have different levels of tissue stiffness. "There have not been many studies that looked at the connection between non-muscle tissue stiffness and ROM, and whether there's an age difference here, so our goal was to provide some clearer answers to these questions," explains Dr. Hirata.

The results of their experiments showed that as muscle stiffness decreased, ROM increased in young participants. However, this correlation was not noted in old participants. Ankle ROM also increased as nerve stiffness decreased, but only in old participants. Fascia stiffness was not correlated with ROM in either age group. Overall, non-muscle tissues, specifically nerves, seemed to contribute more to joint flexibility as individuals age.

Prof. Akagi is optimistic about their findings: "Not every one of our hypotheses was supported--for example, we didn't find an association between fascia stiffness and ROM--the key outcome here is that a difference exists in the underlying factors affecting joint flexibility between young and old people."

These findings open up the floor for several overdue discussions. Existing medical care may be biased towards a younger and healthier population, and current exercises and therapy for improving flexibility focuses on muscles, which will not be as effective for elderly people. This study can spur the development of new flexibility training methods that are specific for older people, focusing on targeting and mobilizing nerve bundles, helping to improve the health of elderly individuals. Based on these findings, in the near future, current training modalities may even be exchanged for more effective ones.

After all, life does not stop in your thirties. Healthcare goals shouldn't either.

Digital technology has made intercultural contacts a daily activity for many people in the world. As a result, the globalization of cultural flows and the various ways that people appropriate these cultural flows have become hot topics for investigation, and the prefix "trans-" can now be seen in terms like translocalities, transnational, translanguaging and transculturing, underlying the fluidity and mix of cultures, languages and localities in the digital environment.

These transcultural meaning-making practices frequently occur in the context of fandoms, which are online spaces made up of deeply engaged consumers with a shared interest in specific popular culture products. The term fanfiction is coined in the English language. It is fiction created by fans and for fans, which takes an original text or famous person as a starting point, which is created, usually, in a community or fandom and is distributed, mainly, online.

Learning incorporated into social practices

In previous studies on literacy, expert researchers in this field, Liudmila Shafirova and Daniel Cassany, had shown that fan communities are an important field for studying the learning a second language (L2) from a new perspective of literacy, the one that considers learning incorporated into social practices.

Transcultural meaning-making and literacies that arise during the amateur translation of a fanfiction novel from Russian to English

A new study by Liudmila Shafirova, Daniel Cassany and Carme Bach, all members of the GR@EL research group of the UPF Department of Translation and Language Sciences, has explored the transcultural meaning-making and literacies that arise during the amateur translation of a fanfiction novel by from Russian to English. They have done so following the digital ethnography methodology, through online observations and interviews, and the results were published on 24 September in Journal of Language and Intercultural Communication.

As a case study, the authors used the translation into English rendered by fans of the fanfiction novel based on the US animated series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, which is written in Russian. The brony fandom of interest here consists of fans from various post-Soviet republics who create and share animations, videos, fanfiction and fanart on different digital platforms. The fan translators --from Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia and Poland-- translate this text from Russian into English, while using Russian as their lingua franca. The authors argue that translation activity of this sort can open up opportunities for the development of transcultural literacies.

The creation of transcultural meanings became apparent during discussions on how to adapt a Russian fanfiction novel to a global English-speaking audience

"We applied digital ethnography to make observations of the translation process and interviews with the participants", the authors explain. The creation of transcultural meanings became apparent during discussions on how to adapt a Russian fanfiction novel to a global English-speaking audience. During the discussions, participants creatively combined different linguistic and cultural resources and positioned themselves as mediators between two readerships, which pushed them to reflect on literary and philosophical traditions of the Russian and English-speaking cultures and engage in transcultural literacies.

The main subjects of discussion among participants were semantics, the narrative style of the translation, and the values and ideology of the characters

The discussions dealt with semantics, with the participants searching for the equivalents of idiosyncratic Russian expressions and proper nouns in English in order to make the text more fluent; stylistics, to adapt Russian narrative style to something more appropriate to modern English literature, and the deepest discussions usually concerned bringing a character's actions into line with the values and ideology of English-language literature.

Physical activity makes happy and is important to maintain psychic health. Researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the Central Institute of Mental Health (CIMH) in Mannheim studied the brain regions which play a central role in this process. Their findings reveal that even everyday activities, such as climbing stairs, significantly enhance well-being, in particular of persons susceptible to psychiatric disorders. The study is published in Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz8934).

Exercise enhances physical well-being and mental health. However, impacts of everyday activities, such as climbing stairs, walking, or going to the tram station instead of driving, on a person's mental health have hardly been studied so far. For example, it is not yet clear which brain structures are involved. A team of the Central Institute of Mental Health (CIMH) in Mannheim, KIT's Institute of Sports and Sports Science, and the GIScience / Geoinformatics Research Group of Heidelberg University has now studied everyday activities that make up the highest share of our daily exercise. "Climbing stairs every day may help us feel awake and full of energy. This enhances well-being," the study's first authors explain. These are Dr. Markus Reichert who conducts research at CIMH and KIT and Dr. Urs Braun, Head of the Complex Systems Research Group of the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Clinic of CIMH.

The research findings are of particular relevance in the current situation with Corona restrictions and the coming winter. "Currently, we are experiencing strong restrictions of public life and social contacts, which may adversely affect our well-being," Professor Heike Tost, Head of the Systems Neuroscience Psychiatry Research Group of the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Clinic, says. "To feel better, it may help to more often climb stairs."

Everyday Activities Enhance Alertness and Physical Energy

"For our studies, we newly combined various research methods in everyday life and at the laboratory," says Professor Ulrich Ebner-Priemer, Head of the mHealth Methods in Psychiatry Research Group, Deputy Head of IfSS, and Head of the Mental mHealth Lab of KIT. Among the methods used were ambulant assessments with movement sensors as well as smartphone surveys on the well-being that were triggered by geolocation data as soon as the subjects moved.

67 persons were subjected to ambulant assessments to determine the impact of everyday activity on alertness for seven days. It was found that the persons felt more alert and were bursting with even more energy directly after the activity. Alertness and energy were proved to be important components of well-being and psychic health of the participants.

Brain Regions for Everyday Activities and Well-being Identified

These analyses were combined with magnetic resonance tomography at CIMH for another group of 83 persons. The volume of gray brain matter was measured to find out which brain areas play a role in these everyday processes. It was found that the subgenual cingulate cortex, a section of the cerebral cortex, is important to the interaction between everyday activity and affective well-being. It is in this brain region where emotions and resistance to psychiatric disorders are regulated. The authors identified this brain region to be a decisive neural correlate that mediates the relationship between physical activity and subjective energy. "Persons with a smaller volume of gray brain matter in this region and a higher risk of psychiatric disorders felt less full of energy when they were physically inactive," Heike Tost describes the results. "After everyday activity, however, these persons felt even more filled with energy than persons with a larger brain volume."

Specific Use of Physical Activity in Everyday Life

Professor Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, Director of CIMH and Medical Director of the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Clinic, concludes that "the results suggest that physical activity in everyday life is beneficial to well-being, in particular in persons susceptible to psychiatric disorders." In future, the findings of the study might be used in a smartphone app that will motivate users to be active to enhance their well-being in case of decreasing energy." It remains to be studied whether everyday activities may change the well-being and the brain volume and how these results may help prevent and treat psychiatric disorders," Urs Braun says.

The transmission of specific infectious diseases have been altered by processes linked to climatic and environmental anomalies. An increase in infectious outbreaks is expected to be seen in mild climates due to global warming, and the alterations in climate patterns, such as El Niño, are modifying the presence, density, strength and dynamics of transmission of many viruses and pathogens.

Understanding how climate variability affects the transmission of these diseases is important for both researchers and the general public. Much has been done to raise awareness about climate change in the past years, but there still seems to be a widespread lack of knowledge of the effects climate change has on infectious diseases.

A study published recently in PlosOne and conducted by students from the international master's degree Erasmus Mundus IDOH+ (Infectious Disease and One Health) coordinated by the Université de Tours, the UAB and the Hannover Medical School, reveals that almost half of the population is unaware of the relation between climate change and its effect on infectious diseases.

The research was based on a multinational cross-sectional survey, in which a total of 458 participants from around the world were assessed to discover their knowledge of the effects climate change has on the emergence of infectious diseases.

The results reveal a lack of knowledge among the general public, and with marked differences according to nationality and educational background. A total of 48.9% of the participants had never before considered the effects of climate change on infectious diseases. This percentage falls to 38.4% among those with a solid knowledge of the natural sciences, and rises to 59.2% in those who work in sectors not related to science. Despite this difference, the survey also demonstrated that knowledge and awareness of climate change is unrelated to the educational level of participants, given that scientific dissemination of environmentally-related topics has been highly intensified in the past years.

The large majority of participants (64.6%) were afraid of contracting an infectious disease. In Europe, participants were less afraid (51.7%) than their US (71.4%) and Asian (87.7%) counterparts. With regard to protection measures, the large majority (70.5%) consult the need for vaccines before travelling to a tropical country. In line with this observation, over half of those surveyed (56.1%) were afraid of contracting an infectious disease in a tropical country, although differences were detected according to nationality: in this case, European participants were more afraid (72.0%), when compared to US (41.3%) and Asian participants (37.7%).

According to Max van Wijk, Erasmus Mundus IDOH+ student and one of the authors of the study, "this data can help to establish intervention measures that can raise awareness among the public on issures related to climate change and infectious diseases, within the concept of One Health".

"The study was conducted with an academic objective, but contains original content that can be applied to other scientific studies", explains UAB Department of Animal Health and Anatomy lecturer Marga Martín, one of the programme's coordinators.

Their degree of ecological specialisation --the capacity to inhabit many or few environments-- is the most important factor in the evolutionary success of squirrels in the face of climate change, according to research led by the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) and the Institute of Geosciences (UCM-CSIC).

"The most climate-restricted species, that is, those that are only present in a very specific environment, are more likely to become extinct due to destruction of their habitat", explained Iris Menéndez, a researcher in the Department of Geodynamics, Stratigraphy and Palaeontology at the UCM and the first author of the article published in Mammal Review.

But precisely for the same reason, she added, they are more likely to generate new species: "As their habitat fragments due to climate change, their populations
divide, and if they manage to survive long enough, continued isolation encourages speciation".

However, species that are capable of inhabiting very different climates are less dependent on their environment and are less affected by climate change. Consequently, "these species survive longer, and can persist for millions of years without substantial change", Menéndez indicated.

More evolution in mountainous and terrestrial habitats

This study, in which the University of Alcalá de Henares also participated, has demonstrated that species present in mountainous areas are also more likely to generate new species. During warm cycles, different populations may become isolated in the highlands, eventually becoming distinct species if the situation is sufficiently prolonged.

Other factors also affect the response of squirrels to environmental change. For example, all squirrels were originally arboreal but some lineages subsequently adapted to terrestrial habitats, enabling them to occupy new environments.

The Indo-Malayan region is the area with the highest number of squirrel species, inhabited by some 117 different species. However, analyses show that it is North American ground squirrels which have generated the most species in the shortest period of time. "North America hosts all the chipmunks, prairie dogs and marmots, which spread across the continent occupying its prairies. The explanation for this is that being terrestrial enabled them to exploit new resources and adapt to these new situations", explained the UCM researcher.

Studying how climate changes have affected the evolution of squirrels sheds light on the possible consequences of present-day climate change. The study revealed that those squirrel species most specialised in one type of environment are also the most likely to become extinct.

In particular, for this group of small mammals, if climate change is combined with other factors such as deforestation, the consequences could be devastating. "That could herald the loss of much of the diversity of the squirrel family", the author concluded.

A psychobiological study led by the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) on personal identity and its modification over time in parallel with the changes that individuals experience has shown that the essence of our being remains largely stable over the years.

"In our study, we tried to answer the question of whether we are the same person throughout our lives. In conjunction with the previous literature, our results indicate that there is a component that remains stable while another part is more susceptible to change over time", explained Miguel Rubianes, a researcher at the Department of Psychobiology and Behavioural Sciences Methodology at the UCM and the Centre for Human Evolution and Behaviour (UCM-ISCIII).

The "continuity of the self" --the capacity for self-awareness and self-recognition-- remains stable whereas other components such as physical aspects, physiological processes and even attitudes, beliefs and values are more liable to change.

Even components such as personality traits tend to change slightly over the years, but "the sense of being oneself is preserved, improving our understanding of human nature", according to Rubianes.

The study, published in Psychophysiology, also determined how long it takes the brain to recognise our own personal identity as distinctive compared to others: around 250 milliseconds.

Potential application in the diagnosis of mental illness

To carry out this study, the brain activity and event-related brain potentials of twenty participants were recorded by electroencephalography (EEG) when presented with stimuli and performing identity and age recognition tasks.

The question of human nature and the basis of the self has been asked since the beginnings of philosophy and has been the subject of research in various disciplines, including anthropology and psychology.

According to the UCM researcher, alterations in the perception of the self may underlie various personality disorders such as bipolar disorder and narcissistic personality, and even other mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression.

As regards the applications of these results, "This demonstrates the importance of basic and clinical research alike in the study of the role of personal identity, as this promises to be a much more important concept than was previously thought and may play a fundamental role in psychological assessment and intervention processes", concluded Rubianes.

PULLMAN, Wash. -- The ancient inhabitants of the American Southwest used around 11,500 feathers to make a turkey feather blanket, according to a new paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. The people who made such blankets were ancestors of present-day Pueblo Indians such as the Hopi, Zuni and Rio Grande Pueblos.

A team led by Washington State University archaeologists analyzed an approximately 800-year-old, 99 x 108 cm (about 39 x 42.5 inches) turkey feather blanket from southeastern Utah to get a better idea of how it was made. Their work revealed thousands of downy body feathers were wrapped around 180 meters (nearly 200 yards) of yucca fiber cord to make the blanket, which is currently on display at the Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum in Blanding, Utah.

The researchers also counted body feathers from the pelts of wild turkeys purchased from ethically and legally compliant dealers in Idaho to get an estimate of how many turkeys would have been needed to provide feathers for the blanket. Their efforts show it would have taken feathers from between four to 10 turkeys to make the blanket, depending on the length of feathers selected.

"Blankets or robes made with turkey feathers as the insulating medium were widely used by Ancestral Pueblo people in what is now the Upland Southwest, but little is known about how they were made because so few such textiles have survived due to their perishable nature," said Bill Lipe, emeritus professor of anthropology at WSU and lead author of the paper. "The goal of this study was to shed new light on the production of turkey feather blankets and explore the economic and cultural aspects of raising turkeys to supply the feathers."

Clothing and blankets made of animal hides, furs or feathers are widely assumed to have been innovations critical to the expansion of humans into cold, higher latitude and higher elevation environments, such as the Upland Southwest of the United States where most of the early settlements were at elevations above 5,000 feet.

Previous work by Lipe and others shows turkey feathers began to replace strips of rabbit skin in construction of twined blankets in the region during the first two centuries C.E. Ethnographic data suggest the blankets were made by women and were used as cloaks in cold weather, blankets for sleeping and ultimately as funerary wrappings.

"As ancestral Pueblo farming populations flourished, many thousands of feather blankets would likely have been in circulation at any one time," said Shannon Tushingham, a co-author on the study and assistant professor of anthropology at WSU. "It is likely that every member of an ancestral Pueblo community, from infants to adults, possessed one."

Another interesting finding of the study was the turkey feathers used by the ancestral Pueblo people to make garments were most likely painlessly harvested from live birds during natural molting periods. This would have allowed sustainable collection of feathers several times a year over a bird's lifetime, which could have exceeded 10 years. Archeological evidence indicates turkeys were generally not used as a food source from the time of their domestication in the early centuries C.E. until the 1100s and 1200s C.E., when the supply of wild game in the region had become depleted by over-hunting.

Prior to this period, most turkey bones reported from archaeological sites are whole skeletons from mature birds that were intentionally buried, indicating ritual or cultural significance. Such burials continued to occur even after more turkeys began to be raised for food.

"When the blanket we analyzed for our study was made, we think in the early 1200s C.E., the birds that supplied the feathers were likely being treated as individuals important to the household and would have been buried complete," Lipe said. "This reverence for turkeys and  their feathers is still evident today in Pueblo dances and rituals. They are right up there with eagle feathers as being symbolically and culturally important."

In the long run, the researchers said their hope is the study will help people appreciate the importance of turkeys to Native American cultures across the Southwest.

"Turkeys were one of the very few domesticated animals in North America until Europeans arrived in the 1500s and 1600s," Tushingham said. "They had and continue to have a very culturally significant role in the lives of Pueblo people, and our hope is this research helps shed light on this important relationship."

Carbon is one of the main building blocks for life on Earth. It's abundant in our planet's atmosphere, where it's found in the form of carbon dioxide. Carbon makes its way into Earthlings' bodies mainly through the process of photosynthesis, which incorporates carbon dioxide into sugars that serve as components for important biomolecules and fuel the global food chain. About a third of this process globally is carried out by single-celled algae that live in the oceans (most of the rest is done by plants).

The enzyme that performs the first step of the reaction to assimilate carbon dioxide into sugars is a bulky protein called Rubisco assembled from eight identical small subunits and eight identical large subunits arranged together symmetrically. All the parts of this assembly, which is called a holoenzyme, work in concert to perform Rubisco's enzymatic duty. Rubisco's rate of activity--and by extension, the rate at which plants and algae can grow--is limited by its access to carbon dioxide. Free carbon dioxide can be scarce in water, so aquatic algae such as Chlamydomonas reinhardtii sometimes struggle to keep Rubisco working at peak capacity. To counteract this, these algae evolved a special structure called the pyrenoid to supply concentrated carbon dioxide to Rubisco. The pyrenoid is so important that almost all algae on the planet have one. Different species of algae are thought to have evolved the structure independently.

"The defining feature of a pyrenoid is the matrix, a giant liquid-like condensate that contains nearly all of the cell's Rubisco," explains Jonikas, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton.

Rubisco is the main component of the pyrenoid matrix, but not the only one; in 2016, Jonikas's lab discovered another abundant protein in the pyrenoid called EPYC1. In their 2016 paper, Jonikas's group showed that EPYC1 binds to Rubisco and helps concentrate Rubisco in the pyrenoid. The researchers theorized that EPYC1 works like a molecular glue to link together Rubisco holoenzymes. Postdoc Shan He, together with colleagues in Jonikas's lab and collaborators from Germany, Singapore and England, set out to test this theory.

"In the present work, we demonstrate that this is indeed how it works," says Jonikas, "by showing that EPYC1 has five binding sites for Rubisco, allowing it to 'link' together multiple Rubisco holoenzymes."

EPYC1 is a loosely structured, extended protein, and its five Rubisco binding sites are evenly distributed across its length. The researchers also found that Rubisco has eight EPYC1 binding sites distributed evenly across its ball-like surface. Computer modeling showed that the loosely structured and flexible EPYC1 protein can make multiple contacts with a single Rubisco holoenzyme or bridge together neighboring ones. In this way, EPYC1 drives Rubisco to cluster in the pyrenoid matrix.

Although this offers a satisfying explanation for how the matrix is assembled, it poses something of a conundrum. Other proteins need to be able to access Rubisco to repair it when it breaks down. If the EPYC1-Rubisco network is rigid, it could block these proteins from accessing Rubisco. However, He and colleagues found that EPYC1's interactions with Rubisco are fairly weak, so although the two proteins may form many contacts with each other, these contacts are exchanging rapidly.

"This allows EPYC1 and Rubisco to flow past each other while staying in a densely packed condensate, allowing other pyrenoid proteins to also access Rubisco," notes Jonikas. "Our work solves the longstanding mystery of how Rubisco is held together in the pyrenoid matrix".

Land plants don't have pyrenoids, and scientists think that engineering a pyrenoid-like structure into crop plants could boost their growth rates. Understanding how the pyrenoid is assembled in algae represents a significant step toward such efforts.

"He and colleagues provide a very nice molecular study of the protein-protein interactions between the Rubisco small subunit and EPYC1," says Dr. James Moroney, Professor of Biology at the Louisiana State University department of Biological Sciences, whose lab studies photosynthesis in plants and algae.

"This work is encouraging for researchers trying to introduce pyrenoid-like structures into plants to improve photosynthesis," he adds.

In a world beset by hunger and disease, we can use all the boosts we can get.

2020 is the worst fire year on record in the United States, with nearly 13 million acres burned, 14,000 structures destroyed and an estimated $3 billion spent on fire suppression -- and counting. At the same time, certain land managers have invested huge amounts of time and resources toward restoring fire through "controlled burn" approaches.

In the face of heartbreaking losses, effort and expense, scientists are still grappling with some of the most basic questions about how fire influences interactions between plants and animals in the natural world.

A new study grounded in the northern Rockies explores the role of fire in the finely tuned dance between plants and their pollinators. Published Nov. 25 in the Journal of Ecology, the findings from researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, Marquette University, Montana State University and The Wilderness Society are particularly significant in light of recent reports about the rapid and widespread decline of insects globally.

"A large number of studies have looked at how fire affects plants, or how fire affects animals. But what is largely understudied is the question of how fire affects both, and about how linkages within those ecological networks might respond to fire disturbance," said Jonathan Myers, associate professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University, a co-author of the study.

The researchers discovered that wildfire disturbance and plant-pollinator interactions are both important in determining where plants take root and where pollinators are found. But in burned landscapes, plant-pollinator interactions are generally as important or more important than any other factor in determining the composition of species present.

The importance of flowering-plant species in determining the composition of pollinator species doubled to quadrupled following wildfire. In addition, the importance of pollinators in determining plant composition nearly doubled following wildfire.

"Clearly, pollinators perform a valuable ecosystem service for humans by pollinating all our crops. In intact natural ecosystems, they perform an equally valuable service," said Joseph LaManna, assistant professor of biological sciences at Marquette University, first author of the study. "What we are seeing is that plant and pollinator linkages become even more important in disturbed or burned landscapes. These connections are important for restoring ecosystems in which natural wildfire regimes have been altered or suppressed by human activities.

"And as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of wildfires, the potential for biodiversity loss -- for losses of individual plant or pollinator species -- is going to be even more profound than we anticipated," he said.

Feeling the burn

Wildfire in the northern Rockies can be ignited by lightning -- but more and more, it is started by people.

Historically, wildfires tended to burn hot in some spots and cold in others, resulting in a patchwork or mosaic of differing levels of fire disturbance. But with rising global temperatures, the plant debris and other materials that fuel fires are drying out. That trend combined with decades of active fire suppression has resulted in a shift from a majority mixed-severity wildfire regime to today's high-severity blazes.

For this study, co-author Laura Burkle at Montana State University led the field inventories of plants and pollinators at 152 plots in Montana representing a wildfire gradient including plots with no recent wildfire (unburned), mixed-severity wildfire and high-severity wildfire. LaManna and Myers worked with Burkle and Travis Belote of The Wilderness Society to analyze the data.

At the sites they compared, the scientists found that the number of individual bees, flies and butterflies -- and the flowering plants they frequent -- were higher in parts of the landscape that had burned, as opposed to those that hadn't burned.

However, increases were greater in areas that had experienced mixed-severity wildfire, which leaves some vegetation intact in a mosaic of habitat types, as opposed to high-severity wildfire, which largely removes all vegetation and can damage the soil and seed bank.

For example, flowering-plant abundances increased more than 10-fold in mixed-severity wildfire and more than nine-fold in high-severity wildfire compared with unburned areas. Overall the researchers identified 329 pollinator species and 193 flowering-plant species.

"Oftentimes, the public perception about fire in general is that it is bad. But it was impressive how much higher the abundances of both plants and pollinators were -- as well as the number of species -- in the burned landscapes compared with the unburned landscapes," Myers said.

Leave it to the bees

Although this study shows that fire increased abundances and species diversity of pollinators and flowering plants overall, the intensity of the fire matters. Hotter, high-severity burns can eliminate landscape features that pollinators require, like stumps or woody debris for nesting. Mixed-severity wildfire is most beneficial.

Around the world, pollinator populations are in decline. The northern Rockies are no exception to this troubling trend.

"Thanks to this project, we now have very in-depth knowledge of local pollinator communities, especially the bee communities," Burkle said. "One of the benefits of these data is to be able to provide expert knowledge about declining pollinator species and species of concern, like the Western Bumble Bee (Bombus occidentalis), which is currently being considered for federal listing under the Endangered Species Act.

"When we think about patterns of biodiversity across space, we typically consider different groups of species separately," she said. "In our case, we might consider patterns of plant diversity separately from patterns of pollinator diversity. But our study provides solid evidence that -- above and beyond the influence of disturbances like wildfires -- the relationships that plants have with pollinators are strong contributors to these patterns of biodiversity.

"This means that biotic interactions among species are important and will need to be considered more explicitly in conservation actions, like plans for species range shifts with climate change."

Accelerating extinction

Global climate change is likely to increase the frequency and intensity of wildfires in many other regions -- as it has in the mountain West, the researchers said.

The findings from this study suggest that this could possibly result in additional losses of vulnerable species.

"We may see wildfire accelerating co-extinction events where you lose a pollinator and then you lose all of the plants that the pollinator depended on -- and then you lose more pollinators that were associated with those plants, and so on," LaManna said. "You have a potential for a chain of losses."

Overall, this research advances understanding of how and why wildfire affects conservation, land management and restoration of forest ecosystems. It also shows that ecological models that predict how species will respond under various climate change scenarios also should consider biological interactions within food webs, Myers said.

"By sharing our findings with federal land managers across the region, we hope to contribute to management plans, with the dual aim of maintaining biodiversity of plants and pollinators while restoring environmental complexity representative of historical fire regimes," Myers said.

Scientists have built tiny droplet-based microbial factories that produce hydrogen, instead of oxygen, when exposed to daylight in air.

The findings of the international research team based at the University of Bristol and Harbin Institute of Technology in China, are published today in Nature Communications.

Normally, algal cells fix carbon dioxide and produce oxygen by photosynthesis. The study used sugary droplets packed with living algal cells to generate hydrogen, rather than oxygen, by photosynthesis.

Hydrogen is potentially a climate-neutral fuel, offering many possible uses as a future energy source. A major drawback is that making hydrogen involves using a lot of energy, so green alternatives are being sought and this discovery could provide an important step forward.

The team, comprising Professor Stephen Mann and Dr Mei Li from Bristol's School of Chemistry together with Professor Xin Huang and colleagues at Harbin Institute of Technology in China, trapped ten thousand or so algal cells in each droplet, which were then crammed together by osmotic compression. By burying the cells deep inside the droplets, oxygen levels fell to a level that switched on special enzymes called hydrogenases that hijacked the normal photosynthetic pathway to produce hydrogen. In this way, around a quarter of a million microbial factories, typically only one-tenth of a millimetre in size, could be prepared in one millilitre of water.

To increase the level of hydrogen evolution, the team coated the living micro-reactors with a thin shell of bacteria, which were able to scavenge for oxygen and therefore increase the number of algal cells geared up for hydrogenase activity.

Although still at an early stage, the work provides a step towards photobiological green energy development under natural aerobic conditions.

Professor Stephen Mann, Co-Director of the Max Planck Bristol Centre for Minimal Biology at Bristol, said: "Using simple droplets as vectors for controlling algal cell organization and photosynthesis in synthetic micro-spaces offers a potentially environmentally benign approach to hydrogen production that we hope to develop in future work."

Professor Xin Huang at Harbin Institute of Technology added: "Our methodology is facile and should be capable of scale-up without impairing the viability of the living cells. It also seems flexible; for example, we recently captured large numbers of yeast cells in the droplets and used the microbial reactors for ethanol production."

Waste fishing gear in the River Ganges poses a threat to wildlife including otters, turtles and dolphins, new research shows.

The study says entanglement in fishing gear could harm species including the critically endangered three-striped roofed turtle and the endangered Ganges river dolphin.

Surveys along the length of the river, from the mouth in Bangladesh to the Himalayas in India, show levels of waste fishing gear are highest near to the sea.

Fishing nets - all made of plastic - were the most common type of gear found.

Interviews with local fishers revealed high rates of fishing equipment being discarded in the river - driven by short gear lifespans and lack of appropriate disposal systems.

The study, led by researchers from the University of Exeter, with an international team including researchers from India and Bangladesh, was conducted as part of the National Geographic Society's "Sea to Source: Ganges" expedition.

"The Ganges River supports some of the world's largest inland fisheries, but no research has been done to assess plastic pollution from this industry, and its impacts on wildlife," said Dr Sarah Nelms, of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation on Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall.

"Ingesting plastic can harm wildlife, but our threat assessment focussed on entanglement, which is known to injure and kill a wide range of marine species."

The researchers used a list of 21 river species of "conservation concern" identified by the Wildlife Institute for India.

They combined existing information on entanglements of similar species worldwide with the new data on levels of waste fishing gear in the Ganges to estimate which species are most at risk.

Speaking about the why so much fishing gear was found in the river, Dr Nelms said: "There is no system for fishers to recycle their nets.

"Most fishers told us they mend and repurpose nets if they can, but if they can't do that the nets are often discarded in the river.

"Many held the view that the river 'cleans it away', so one useful step would be to raise awareness of the real environmental impacts."

National Geographic Fellow and science co-lead of the expedition Professor Heather Koldewey, of ZSL (the Zoological Society of London) and the University of Exeter, said the study's findings offer hope for solutions based on "circular economy" - where waste is dramatically reduced by reusing materials.

"A high proportion of the fishing gear we found was made of nylon 6, which is valuable and can be used to make products including carpets and clothing," she said.

"Collection and recycling of nylon 6 has strong potential as a solution because it would cut plastic pollution and provide an income.

"We demonstrated this through the Net-Works project in the Philippines, which has been so successful it has become a standalone social enterprise called COAST-4C."

Professor Koldewey added: "This is a complex problem that will require multiple solutions - all of which must work for both local communities and wildlife."

- Monash University researchers have created the world's first bioactive plant-based nanocellulose hydrogel to support organoid growth for biomedical applications. This includes cancer development and treatment.

Nanocellulose gels cost a fraction of the price compared to the current gold standard.

These hydrogels are plant-based and animal-free, and can mimic the human body conditions on a dish.

Monash University researchers have created the world's first bioactive plant-based nanocellulose hydrogel to support organoid growth and help significantly reduce the costs of studies into cancer and COVID-19.

This discovery by researchers at BioPRIA (Bioresource Processing Institute of Australia), Monash University's Department of Chemical Engineering and the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute will develop organoids cheaper, faster and more ethically.

The hydrogel can also improve drug screening and disease modelling for infectious diseases, like COVID-19; metabolic diseases, such as obesity and diabetes; and cancer.

The findings, published in Advanced Science, emerge as a promising finding for growth of organoids for essential laboratory testing across the world. With additional testing, this hydrogel could be available to researchers and health professionals across the world in less than 12 months.

Nanocellulose gels cost just cents for every 10ml used, compared to $600 or more for the current gold standard.

Above all, nanocellulose gels are completely plant-based, preventing the harvesting of animal organs and unknown biomolecules for any advanced medical testing.

Professor Gil Garnier and Dr Rodrigo Curvello from BioPRIA within Monash University's Department of Chemical Engineering led the study.

"Organoids provide a robust model for key applications in biomedicine, including drug screening and disease modelling. But current approaches remain expensive, biochemically variable and undefined," Professor Garnier, Director of BioPRIA, said.

"These are major obstacles for fundamental research studies and the translation of organoids to clinics. Alternative matrices able to sustain organoid systems are required to reduce costs drastically and to eliminate the unreliability of unknown biomolecules.

"As nanocellulose hydrogel is animal-free, its composition is controlled perfectly and reproducible - unlike the current progress - and fully mimic the human body conditions."

Organoids are three-dimensional, miniaturised and simplified versions of organs produced in vitro that can replicate behaviours and functionalities of developed organs.

Commonly referred to as 'organs in a dish' or 'mini-organs', organoids are an excellent tool to study basic biological processes. Through organoids, we can understand how cells interact in an organ, how diseases affect them and the effects of drugs in disease reduction.

Organoids are generated from embryonic, adult, pluripotent or induced pluripotent stem cells, as well as from primary healthy or cancerous tissues. For long-term use, organoids are commonly embedded within an Engelbreth-Holm Swarm (EHS) matrix derived from the reconstituted basement membrane of mouse sarcoma.

Currently, organoid culture is dependent of this expensive and undefined tumour-derived material that hinders its application in high-throughput screening, regenerative medicine and diagnostics.

"Our study was essentially able to use an engineered plant-based nanocellulose hydrogel that can replicate the growth of small intestinal organoids derived from mice," Dr Curvello said.

"It is essentially made from 99.9% water and only 0.1% solids, functionalised with a single cell adhesive peptide. Cellulose nanofibers are linked with salts that provide the microenvironment needed for small intestinal organoid growth and proliferation.

"Engineered nanocellulose gel represents a sustainable alternative for the growth of organoids, contributing to reducing the costs of studies on diseases of global concern, particularly in developing countries."

On November 18 scientists from the US National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) National Solar Observatory (NSO) predicted the arrival of a large sunspot just in time for Thanksgiving. Using a special technique called helioseismology, the team has been “listening” to changing sound waves from the Sun’s interior which beckon the arrival of a large sunspot. Recent changes in these sound waves pointed to the imminent appearance of new sunspots which we can now see from Earth near the eastern solar limb.

"We measured a change in acoustic signals on the far-side of the Sun", explains Dr. Alexei Pevtsov, Associate Director for NSO's Integrated Synoptic Program, the program responsible for the prediction. "We can use this technique to identify what is happening on the side of the Sun that faces away from Earth days before we can catch a glimpse from here. Having up to five days lead time on the presence of active sun spots is extremely valuable to our technology-heavy society."

Solar storms often originate in sunspot regions, especially if the sunspot is large and complicated. The more tangled the magnetic field, the more likely it will result in large solar flares and coronal mass ejections which in turn can result in space weather effects at Earth. These include impacts on communications, GPS and possibly electrical grid systems. NSO provides 24/7 “eyes on the Sun” through the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) network, which is funded by NSF and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The network consists of six monitoring stations positioned across the globe, observing the Sun’s magnetic field and other features all day every day.

"The ability of GONG to identify and track active regions emergent on the far side of the Sun has important implications for future space weather predictive capabilities" said Dr. Carrie Black, Program Director at NSF. "GONG continues to be a valuable tool for both fundamental science research and operations."

Dr. Kiran Jain, the scientist who is leading the far side prediction at NSO, describes the evolution of the sunspot as "the strongest far-side signal we have had this solar cycle. We first noticed the signal in our far-side images on November 14, 2020," she continues. "It was inconspicuous at first but grew quickly, breaking detection thresholds just one day later. Since we are in the very early phase of the new solar cycle, the signal from this large spot stands out clearly."

The far-side maps use "helioseismology," a technique developed by NSO scientists in the 1990s, to detect how sound waves interact with the Sun's interior structure, especially magnetic fields.

Seismology here on Earth measures sound waves traveling through Earth's interior to reveal what we cannot see beneath the Earth's surface. Similarly, helio-seismology can highlight structures on the Sun that cannot yet be seen from Earth. Millions of sound frequencies bounce freely throughout the Sun's interior, like a bell. Regions of strong magnetic fields perturb with these sound waves, thus a change in wave signal measurements indicates that sunspots may be present.

"The GONG network is providing an essential service to United States space weather preparedness" explains Dr. Valentin Martinez Pillet, Director of the National Solar Observatory. “But it is close to three decades old and is in need of an upgrade. The original system was not created with space weather in mind, so we are exploring options for the Next Generation GONG network, with modern instrumentation specially attuned with space weather as a priority."

The GONG measurements suggest the new sunspot has been growing since its first detection on the far side of the Sun late last week and is now finally visible from Earth where it will continue to be monitored by the GONG network and other solar observing assets. The sunspot will likely be visible using binoculars or small telescopes with appropriate solar filters* later this week as it passes across the face of the Sun.

BOSTON - When it comes to brain scans for assessing head trauma, detecting brain cancer, and performing numerous other tests, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the best option, but MRI scanners are costly, require special infrastructure, and are immobile. Now a team led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has developed a low-cost, compact, portable and low-power "head only" MRI scanner that could be mounted in an ambulance, wheeled into a patient's room, or put in small clinics or doctors' offices around the world. The advance is described in a study published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

"Although MRI is the premier imaging modality for brain imaging, the purchase and installation of traditional high-field MRI scanners can be prohibitively expensive and difficult," says lead author Clarissa Zimmerman Cooley, PhD, an investigator in Radiology at MGH's Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. "Even in a hospital where MRI scanners are available, there are cases where it may be too difficult or dangerous to transport the patient to scanner suites. The work in this paper was really motivated by this need for more accessible MRI."

Cooley and her colleagues designed and tested a portable prototype scanner for brain MRI that can be plugged into a standard outlet and emits much less noise than traditional MRI scanners. The magnet itself is about the size of a laundry basket, and the total weight of the full scanner system (including the magnet, coils, amplifiers, console and cart) is 230kg, or about 500 pounds, and the cart can be pushed by a single person for transport. If the standard equipment components are replaced with custom efficient lightweight designs, the total weight could be reduced to 160 kg, or approximately 350 pounds.

When tested in three healthy adult volunteers, the scanner generated 3D brain images, typically within 10 minutes.

"This type of technology could really extend the reach of MRI," says Cooley. "With some further development, this could allow truly point-of-care, bedside brain imaging for patients or scanning in remote locations, where MRI has traditionally been unavailable."

Memory is as much about the future as it is the past.

Whether experiencing something new, or something we've experienced a hundred times, people use memories of the past to navigate subsequent encounters. Traditionally, psychologists believed that the more ingrained a memory of something was, the more difficult it would be to update your understanding of that thing, should it change.

New research from Washington University in St. Louis finds, however, the opposite is true. In a paper published Nov. 20 in PNAS, Jeffrey Zacks, professor and associate chair of the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences in Arts & Sciences and professor of radiology in the School of Medicine, found the stronger a memory is first encoded, the easier it is for a person to notice subsequent changes and to integrate them into their updated understanding.

"The bigger the discrepancy is between a previous memory and what happens the next time," Zacks said, "the stronger the signal is that you need to update your memory representation."

Results of the study also suggested that in older adults, a weaker ability to discern that one event differs from a previous memory may be partially responsible for a decline in memory function.

In the experiment, two groups of participants were tested -- younger adults, ages 18-27, and older adults, ages 65-84. Over two days, participants had their brains scanned using MRI while they watched and answered questions about movies that represented a day in an actor's life.

Some of the activities changed from day to day. For example, on Day One, the actor might unroll a yoga mat and do some stretches. On Day Two, the movie might begin the same; the actor might pull out a yoga mat. Then, however, they could do one of two things: either the same stretch routine or abdominal crunches.

While participants watched the movie of Day Two, after the actor had unrolled the mat, the researchers paused the movie and asked participants to remember what happened in the second half of the previous day's movie. They analyzed the MRI signal during this phase to quantify the degree to which their brains were able to reinstate patterns formed when watching the original ending. Then the second movie continued -- showing either the previous ending or the changed one.

Three days later, participants were asked to remember what happened in the second movie, and whether or not it was different from the first.

Classical memory theory would suggest the stronger a person encoded the first movie, the more it would interfere with the conflicting information on the second day if the actor had done something different.

However, researchers saw the opposite. When viewers showed more reinstatement of brain activity patterns from Day One endings while watching Day Two, they were more likely to notice a difference in the second movie.

This illustrated memory retrieval was happening in real time, Zacks said. When people were watching the second movie, they weren't just encoding it, or forming new memories, "They were retrieving what had happened in the first movie as they watched the second movie, integrating the two, and utilizing retrieval to guide comprehension."

Performance differences between age groups

When it came to differences in performance between the two different age groups, older adults had somewhat poorer memory overall. But it wasn't as though the older adults were unable on Day Two to recall what they had seen on Day One. More striking was the relationship between their objective retrieval, measured from the brain and from their responses, and their self-awareness of their memory.

On Day Two, after being asked to remember the previous film, participants would indicate their confidence in being able to predict what would happen next, based on what they had seen on Day One. When they were shown a different ending on Day Two, however, the older participants were more likely to say that both movies unfolded identically.

While both the older and younger adults made errors, older adults were more likely to be confident that they hadn't made an error, whether or not their memory responses and brain activity indicated that they had actually remembered. Younger adults' self-reporting more closely mirrored their actual performance.

So why did the older participants remain confident, despite their poorer performance? While this study did not consider that question directly, Zacks has some ideas, based on a theoretical framework designed by Larry Jacoby, professor emeritus of psychological and brain sciences.

In short, Jacoby's model said people draw from multiple sources of information when trying to remember an event. Some of that is specific, acute information: the color or texture of your favorite pillow, for example. Others are more general, provoking more of a generic response without being tightly bound to a specific, situational feature.

That might explain some participants' inability to distinguish between Day One and Day Two. Crunches or stretches (or planks or push ups, for that matter) on a yoga mat might all feel similar enough to provoke the same response, accounting for the older adults' confidence in their memory.

When any of the participants -- of either age group -- wrongly predicted the outcome of the second movie, they were committing what psychologists usually think of as a "prediction error," Zacks said. "They were making a prediction based on memory, but that prediction was violated," he added. This study, however, shows there is at least some value in such errors; they can drive memory updates.

"If you look at how many psychologists behave, you'd think memory evolved so we could sit in armchairs and think about the past -- but that doesn't confer any selective advantage by itself," he said. "We have memory so we can recall -- the last time I went to the watering hole, the sabretooth came from my left, so I'm going to look left this time. But if this time it comes from my right, I'd better be able to update my representation. That is how you pass on your genes."