Earth

The University of Haifa (Israel) and two teams from the IMDEA Networks Institute have developed an innovative autonomous system, SYMBIOSIS, to monitor real-time schools of fish. This system, which combines optical and acoustic technologies, will be environmentally friendly and will provide reliable information about the condition of marine fish stocks, something that at the moment is practically impossible to achieve without investing enormous resources.

The SYMBIOSIS system integrates acoustic and optical technologies without human intervention. The system is the product of an international scientific initiative under the EU's Horizon 2020 program. Real-time monitoring of schools of fish will inform the development of fishing policy and lead to enhanced protection of the marine environment.

An international scientific initiative under the auspices of the European Union's Horizon 2020, project SYMBIOSIS is developing an autonomous system to identify schools of fish, including information about their size and movements in deep waters. The University of Haifa is leading the project, while two teams from IMDEA Networks Institute in Madrid are contributing to the development effort. The SYMBIOSIS system integrates acoustic and optical technologies that require no human intervention, and will be able to transmit real-time warnings to coastal stations. These data will contribute to the formulation of ocean fishing policies and to enhanced protection of the marine environment.

"The system will be environmentally friendly, not only in its operation which will be non-invasive and won't impact the marine ecosystem, but more importantly because it will provide reliable information about the condition of marine fish stocks. At present, it's virtually impossible to collect such information without investing enormous resources. Using the latest optical and acoustic technology, we hope to change attitudes towards marine resources", explained Dr. Roee Diamant of the School of Marine Sciences at the University of Haifa, who is coordinating the initiative.

The development of fishing technology since the twentieth century has resulted in the growing realization that fishing is one of the most serious problems facing marine ecosystems. According to some estimates, if over-fishing is not brought under control, the world's fish stocks may collapse by 2048. Global fishing authorities are hoping to curb over-fishing with new regulations and enforcement based on fish stocks. But, there are very few methods presently available for real-time monitoring of those stocks. Most involve surface boats attempting to locate schools of fish using sonars. According to Dr. Diamant, these methods require considerable resources and personnel to monitor and interpret the sonar findings. Consequently, they have limited viability in cost-benefit terms. Also, the use of sonar usually limits the search for fish stocks to narrow areas (those beneath the ship doing the sampling), impairing any subsequent decision-making. The limited statistics provided by this random and short-term sampling of the marine environment mean the process is prone to numerous sampling errors.

Combining optical and acoustic technologies, the SYMBIOSIS system will monitor the marine environment, and in particular the size of the fish stock, within a radius of one kilometer. It works on an entirely autonomous basis, collecting underwater data over long periods and transmitting this information to a coastal center. The research is focusing on the identification of six large fish species that are in especially high demand from the fishing industry: two species of tuna; scad (a species of mackerel; Trachurus mediterraneus); Atlantic mackerel (Scomber scombrus); mahi-mahi (Coryphaena hippurus); and swordfish (Xiphias gladius). This will provide authorities with concrete and actionable information.

The solution has a processing chain that begins with the acoustic discovery and classification of fish, based on their typical speed and movement characteristics. Acoustic sensors also measure the size of the fish and the total biomass of the fish in the area. Once the acoustic system identifies one of the six selected species, it activates the optical system, which features several cameras and sophisticated data processing with various image identification algorithms using deep learning. When the optical system confirms the identification of one of the six selected species, it transmits the information via underwater acoustic communications, and then by radio communications to a coastal station.

IMDEA Networks' researchers are focused on the design of an efficient fish localization system, and on the visual recognition of the selected fish species. The two teams from the Madrid-based research institute are the Ubiquitous Wireless Networks laboratory led by Dr. Paolo Casari, IMDEA PI and Scientific Manager for the project; and the Global Computing Group led by Dr. Antonio Fernandez Anta.

"Using acoustics to localize specific fish species is very challenging"; said Dr. Casari. "Firstly, the acoustic processing chain has to incorporate cost-effective components, and it needs to be highly energy-efficient. The signal processing algorithms deployed in the acoustic fish identification system have to strike a good tradeoff between complexity and accuracy. On top of this, the underwater environment contains many background acoustic noise sources and reflectors, and the signals from fish around the SYMBIOSIS system will be much weaker than acoustic interference coming from the environment. The algorithms need to be robust enough to cope with these shortcomings."

"For optics, the marine environment is characterized by low visibility and elements in the water volume that distorts the image. The big challenge is to secure good detection performances and to minimize false alarms. This needs to happen autonomously in a deep-sea environment, where there's practically no possibility of human intervention," continues Dr. Diamant.

"The optical classification of fish species has its own particular challenges, too. There are very few pre-classified images available with which to train the deep-learning classifier. And many of the images that are available were taken under very different visibility conditions to those the system will encounter. In SYMBIOSIS, we are dealing with this uncertainty by leveraging public databases of fish pictures, many of them provided by scuba divers and underwater photographers. To address the lack of a large image dataset, we are starting with pre-trained neural networks for object recognition, and we'll add more images from SYMBIOSIS test environments once we enter the experimental phase of the project," concludes Dr. Fernández Anta.

SYMBIOSIS was selected for funding by the European Commission's research and innovation programme, Horizon2020. Four institutions are participating in the SYMBIOSIS project: the University of Haifa, Israel (coordinator); IMDEA Networks Institute in Madrid, Spain; Wireless & More company from Italy and EvoLogics Gmbh from Germany. The project includes the development of innovative discovery and classification algorithms, the application of dedicated hardware, and the completion of a large number of marine trials. As part of the project, a prototype is being developed including a system of acoustic sensors, a network of cameras, sophisticated processing units, and an energy unit permitting autonomous activity. The goal of the project is to sample the performances of the prototype system in three different marine environments: shallow Mediterranean, deep Mediterranean, and a tropical environment in the Canary Islands. The project will run until November 2020, and will offer novel solutions to the distributed and large-scale monitoring of the underwater environment, with a positive impact on marine biology research, conservation, and policy making for fisheries in Europe and worldwide.

It seems reasonable that people would want to maximize various aspects of life if they were given the opportunity to do so, whether it's the pleasure they feel, how intelligent they are, or how much personal freedom they have. In actuality, people around the world seem to aspire for more moderate levels of these and other traits, according to findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

"Our research shows that people's sense of perfection is surprisingly modest," says psychological scientist Matthew J. Hornsey of the University of Queensland, first author on the research. "People wanted to have positive qualities, such as health and happiness, but not to the exclusion of other darker experiences - they wanted about 75% of a good thing."

Furthermore, people said, on average, that they ideally wanted to live until they were 90 years old, which is only slightly higher than the current average life expectancy. Even when participants imagined that they could take a magic pill guaranteeing eternal youth, their ideal life expectancy increased by only a few decades, to a median of 120 years old. And when people were invited to choose their ideal IQ, the median score was about 130 - a score that would classify someone as smart, but not a genius.

The data also revealed that participants from holistic cultures - those that value notions of contradiction, change, and context - chose ideal levels of traits that were consistently lower than those reported by participants from nonholistic cultures.

"Interestingly, the ratings of perfection were more modest in countries that had traditions of Buddhism and Confucianism," says Hornsey. "This makes sense -- these Eastern philosophies and religions tend to place more emphasis on the notion that seemingly contradictory forces coexist in a complementary, interrelated state, such that one cannot exist without the other."

In one study, Hornsey and colleagues analyzed data from a total of 2,392 participants in Australia, Chile, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Peru, Russia, and the United States. The researchers classified China, Hong Kong, India, and Japan as holistic cultures, predominantly influenced by religions or philosophies (such as Buddhism, Hinduism, or Taoism) that emphasize a more holistic worldview. They classified the other five regions - Australia, Chile, Peru, Russia, and the United States - as nonholistic cultures.

Participants in each region received a questionnaire translated into their native language. In response to a series of questions, participants reported their ideal level of intelligence; they also reported how long they would choose to live under normal circumstance and how long they would choose to live if they could take a magic pill ensuring eternal youth.

Using a scale that ranged from 0 (none) to 100 (maximum), participants indicated their ideal levels of health, individual freedom, happiness, pleasure, and self-esteem. They used the same scale to rate ideal levels of societal characteristics, such as morality, equality of opportunity, technological advancement, and national security.

In general, participants tended to rate their ideal levels of individual characteristics to be about 70-80%, although there was some variation across the traits. For example, many more participants chose to maximize health than chose to maximize happiness. Participants' ideals were also relatively modest for both intelligence and longevity, even when there were no limits on the levels they could choose.

The researchers found that participants in holistic cultures reported lower ideal levels for each individual trait than did participants who lived in nonholistic cultures.

A second study with 5,650 participants in 27 countries produced a similar pattern of results. Importantly, this study showed that participants from the Philippines and Indonesia - regions that are collectivist but not holistic - reported ideal levels of individual traits that were similar to those of participants from other nonholistic countries. This finding suggests that the difference between holistic and nonholistic cultures is unlikely to be explained by differences in collectivism.

In both studies, the researchers found no crosscultural differences in ideal levels of societal characteristics.

"This principle of maximization is threaded through many prominent philosophical and economic theories," Hornsey notes. "But our data suggest that people have much more complex, blended notions of perfection, ones that embrace both light and dark."

For the millions of Americans who work "nonstandard" shifts - evenings, nights or with rotating days off - the schedule can be especially challenging with children at home.

But a new study from the University of Washington finds that consistent hours, at whatever time of day, can give families flexibility and in some cases, improve children's behavior.

The study, first made available online in December 2017 before being published in the June issue of the Journal of Family Issues, focuses on two-parent families in which one parent works a nonstandard shift, hours that are common in health care, law enforcement and the service sector. The study finds that the impacts of parent work schedules on children vary by age and gender, and often reflect which shift a parent works. Rotating shifts -- a schedule that varies day by day or week by week -- can be most problematic for children.

"Workers often struggle to carve out the work/life balance they want for themselves, and in dual-earner families, balancing partners' schedules remains an issue for many families," said Christine Leibbrand, a graduate student in the UW department of sociology and author of the study. "Parents are facing these decisions of balancing work and caring for their children."

There are conflicting figures on the number of people who work nonstandard shifts. In 2004, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted nearly 15 million such workers, up from 14.5 million in 2001, when one in seven people worked a nonstandard schedule. A 2014 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated as many as one in four Americans worked a night shift. Increasingly, other factors may influence who works when: rapidly changing technology affecting many industries, the increase in working remotely, and the growing gig economy.

Nonstandard schedules, especially for single-parent and lower-income families, are associated with behavior problems among children, according to past research.

To add to that research, Leibbrand examined data on two-parent households in which one parent worked a nonstandard shift. On this, she was inspired in part by her own family: a sibling who's a nurse, another a firefighter, both with children.

Using information from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which started following a group of nearly 13,000 individuals in 1979, and its Child Supplement, which started following the children of those individuals in 1986, Leibbrand analyzed parents' work schedules against their periodic reports of their children's behavior. Child behavior (covering ages 5 to 15) was ascertained from a 28-question survey that covers issues such as anxiety, aggression and getting along with peers. Those results receive a Behavioral Problems Index score -- the higher the score, the more problems a child is reported to have.

Among Leibbrand's findings:

A mother's night shift tended to have benefits for boys and girls, especially when they're young

A mother's rotating shift, or a split shift -- say, going to work for a few hours in the morning, and again in the evening -- was associated with greater problems among boys of all ages, and among older girls

A father's rotating or split shift was associated with more behavior problems among girls, particularly younger girls

A father's night shift tended to coincide with behavioral benefits among boys

What's less clear is why.

The gender differences may relate to parent involvement. Some research finds that fathers tend to be more involved in their sons' lives, perhaps explaining why fathers' shift schedules are more likely to be associated with benefits for boys. Other research on the impact of shift work on adults' physical and emotional stamina, Leibbrand said, suggests that parents who work nonstandard schedules may be under more stress and sometimes have less energy, or "psychological capital" to meet their child's needs. Unstable shift schedules, like rotating shifts, could be especially stressful for parents. This stress may have important repercussions for children, as children learn to model their parents' behavior.

Since most of the children aged out of the survey by 2006, how these issues may play out today is a question, too. Technology has transformed how children play and learn, as well as how adults work, increasing the numbers who work remotely while rendering some jobs obsolete. All of those trends could affect child behavior and a family's quality of life, Leibbrand said.

But when it comes to nonstandard shift work, a consistent schedule -- the same hours, on the same days each week -- appears to buffer the negative effects, according to Leibbrand's research. It provides consistency in child care, gives children more structure and allows the family to predict a parent's availability for activities. A parent who regularly works the night shift, for example, may deliberately try to be awake and available for children before and after school, while the other parent handles dinner and bedtime routines.

But families don't always have the resources for child care or control over work schedules. That's where employers and policymakers come in, Leibbrand said. Solutions could involve allowing greater flexibility in the workplace or in providing paid family leave and access to quality child care.

"Most parents want to spend time with their children and want to find a way to do that," she said. "We should be prioritizing people's well-being and balancing of work and home life."

The research, led by Dr Victor Sans Sangorrin from the Faculty of Engineering and Dr Graham Newton from the School of Chemistry, is published in the academic journal, Advanced Materials.

"This bottom-up approach to device fabrication will push the boundaries of additive manufacturing like never before. Using a unique integrated design approach, we have demonstrated functional synergy between photochromic molecules and polymers in a fully 3D-printed device. Our approach expands the toolbox of advanced materials available to engineers developing devices for real-world problems," explains Dr Sans.

To demonstrate their concept, the team developed a photoactive molecule that changes from colourless to blue when irradiated with light. The colour change can then be reversed by exposure to oxygen from the air.

The researchers then 3D-printed composite materials by combining the photoactive molecules with a tailor-made polymer, yielding a new material that can store information reversibly.

Dr Newton, said: "We can now take any molecules that change properties upon exposure to light and print them into composites with almost any shape or size. In theory, it would be possible to reversibly encode something quite complex like a QR code or a barcode, and then wipe the material clean, almost like cleaning a whiteboard with an eraser. While our devices currently operate using colour changes, this approach could be used to develop materials for energy storage and electronics."

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Tohoku University (Japan) have explained the puzzling phenomenon of particle-antiparticle annihilation in graphene, recognized by specialists as Auger recombination. Although persistently observed in experiments, it was for a long time thought to be prohibited by the fundamental physical laws of energy and momentum conservation. The theoretical explanation of this process has until recently remained one of the greatest puzzles of solid-state physics. The theory explaining the phenomenon was published in Physical Review B.

In 1928, Paul Dirac predicted that an electron has a twin particle, which is identical in all respects but for its opposite electric charge. This particle, called the positron, was soon discovered experimentally. Several years later, scientists realized that the charge carriers in semiconductors -- silicon, germanium, gallium arsenide, etc. -- behave like electrons and positrons. These two kinds of charge carriers in semiconductors were called electrons and holes. Their respective charges are negative and positive, and they can recombine, or annihilate each other, releasing energy. Electron-hole recombination accompanied by the emission of light provides the operating principle of semiconductor lasers, which are devices crucial for optoelectronics.

The emission of light is not the only possible outcome of an electron coming in contact with a hole in a semiconductor. The liberated energy is often lost to thermal vibrations of the neighboring atoms or picked up by other electrons (figure 1). The latter process is referred to as Auger recombination and is the main "killer" of active electron-hole pairs in lasers. It bears the name of French physicist Pierre Auger, who studied these processes. Laser engineers strive to maximize the probability of light emission upon electron-hole recombination and to suppress all the other processes.

That is why the optoelectronics community greeted with enthusiasm the proposal for graphene-based semiconductor lasers formulated by MIPT graduate Victor Ryzhii. The initial theoretical concept said that Auger recombination in graphene should be prohibited by the energy and momentum conservation laws. These laws are mathematically similar for electron-hole pairs in graphene and for electron-positron pairs in Dirac's original theory, and the impossibility of electron-positron recombination with energy transfer to a third particle has been known for a long time.

However, experiments with hot charge carriers in graphene consistently returned the unfavorable result: Electrons and holes in graphene do recombine with a relatively high rate, and the phenomenon appeared attributable to the Auger effect. Moreover, it took an electron-hole pair less than a picosecond, or one-trillionth of a second, to disappear, which is hundreds of times faster than in contemporary optoelectronic materials. The experiments suggested a tough obstacle for the implementation of a graphene-based laser.

The researchers from MIPT and Tohoku University found that the recombination of electrons and holes in graphene, prohibited by the classical conservation laws, is made possible in the quantum world by the energy-time uncertainty principle. It states that conservation laws may be violated to the extent inversely proportional to the mean free time of the particle. The mean free time of an electron in graphene is quite short, as the dense carriers form a strongly-interacting "mash." To systematically account for the uncertainty of particle energy, the so-called nonequilibrium Green's functions technique was developed in modern quantum mechanics. This approach was employed by the authors of the paper to calculate Auger recombination probability in graphene. The obtained predictions are in good agreement with the experimental data.

"At first, it looked like a mathematical brain teaser, rather than an ordinary physical problem," says Dmitry Svintsov, the head of the Laboratory of 2D Materials for Optoelectronics at MIPT. "The commonly accepted conservation laws permit recombination only if all three particles involved are moving precisely in the same direction. The probability of this event is like the ratio between the volume of a point and the volume of a cube -- it approaches zero. Luckily, we soon decided to reject abstract mathematics in favor of quantum physics, which says that a particle cannot have a well-defined energy. This means that the probability in question is finite, and even sufficiently high to be experimentally observed.

The study does not merely offer an explanation for why the "prohibited" Auger process is actually possible. Importantly, it specifies the conditions when this probability is low enough to make graphene-based lasers viable. As particles and antiparticles rapidly vanish in experiments with hot carriers in graphene, the lasers can exploit the low-energy carriers, which should have longer lifetimes, according to the calculations. Meanwhile, the first experimental evidence of laser generation in graphene has been obtained at Tohoku University in Japan.

Notably, the method for calculation of the electron-hole lifetimes developed in the paper is not limited to graphene. It is applicable to a large class of so-called Dirac materials, in which charge carriers behave similarly to the electrons and positrons in Dirac's original theory. According to preliminary calculations, the mercury cadmium telluride quantum wells could enable much longer carrier lifetimes, and therefore more effective laser generation, as the conservation laws for Auger recombinations in this case are more stringent.

In seeking to achieve fusion energy, research on magnetic field confinement of high-temperature plasma is being conducted around the world. In a high-temperature plasma there is a temperature gradient. When the temperature gradient becomes steep, turbulence is generated. Because the high-temperature regions and the low temperature areas are mixed due to the turbulence, the core temperature cannot be effectively raised. Thus, research on the generation and on the suppression of turbulence is being performed around the world on experimental devices of magnetically confined plasma (tokamaks and helical devices). In research to date, numerous turbulences have been observed. It was very difficult to distinguish whether that turbulence occurred at that place or whether it occurred at another place and propagated to that place. That the turbulence generated expands into other regions, that is, the phenomenon called "turbulence propagation" has been predicted theoretically, but has not been observed experimentally.

The research group of Professor Katsumi Ida and Professor Tatsuya Kobayashi of the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS) and United States collaborators conducted research on turbulence propagation in the Doublet III-D tokamak of General Atomics, in the United States. By applying "heat pulse modulation method" conceived in the Large Helical Device (LHD) at NIFS to measure turbulence in a special region, the "magnetic island," where turbulence should not be generated because there is no temperature gradient in the magnetic island. They discovered that the turbulence exists in the magnetic island, and propagates faster toward the center of the magnetic island, which is called the O-point, than the modulated temperature change. Thus "turbulence propagation" was observed for the first time in the world.

This result is valuable because of the experimental demonstration of a new way of thinking regarding the suppression of turbulence using the idea of "propagation of turbulence." And that an article has been published in the famous academic journal Physical Review Letters is evidence of the high level of world class research.

In the future we will continue to improve high-performance plasma through accumulating further knowledge on the suppression of turbulence.

Vocabulary:

Turbulence:

When plasma is heated, while the temperature gradient increases, small eddies appear. Because this small eddy is of various sizes and it is aligned irregularly, this disturbed state is called turbulence. When turbulence occurs, the increase of the temperature gradient is suppressed.

Magnetic island:

In order to confine plasma, it is necessary to form a nested magnetic container. The form of the cross section of the container resembles concentric rings, such as tree rings. In this experiment, a small magnetic field from outside was purposely added to the intrinsic magnetic field for making magnetic field configuration with a crescent shape similar to a grain. This structure is called a magnetic island because it resembles an island in the middle of a river. Inside the magnetic island, the plasma has no temperature gradient and turbulence is not predicted to be generated forming a unique region.

The identification of small 'oases' in the world's oceans, where corals appear to be thriving, could offer vital insights in the race to save one of the world's most threatened ecosystems.

An international team of academics, including Dr James Guest, from Newcastle University, UK, has developed a framework that can identify small communities of corals that are flourishing against the odds while so many around the world are dying.

Focussing on four key locations in the Pacific and Caribbean, and using data from sites that have been surveyed for at least a decade, the research team identified small pockets of life where the coral appeared to be either escaping, resisting or rebounding from changes to their environment.

Publishing their findings today in the Journal of Applied Ecology, the team hope these new findings will encourage further study into why these small communities of corals are surviving while so many more are not, and inspire efforts to identify similar "oases" in other ecosystems.

Dr Guest, lead author on the paper and currently a European Research Council Fellow at Newcastle University, explains:

"Coral reefs are in rapid, global decline but the severity of degradation is not uniform across the board and what we have identified are coral reefs that are doing better than their neighbours against the worst effects of climate change and local impacts.

"This glimmer of hope does not mean we can be complacent about the severity of the crisis facing most of the world's coral reefs. But it does give us a starting point from which to understand why some ecosystems might be more resistant than others and to identify areas that warrant stronger protection or specific management strategies, such as restoration or mitigation."

Escape, Resist, Rebound

Working together, the researchers were able to identify 38 oases that they tentatively categorised as either "escape", "resist", or "rebound" oases.

They describe Escape oases as coral communities that have been able to avoid disasters such as bleaching, invasions from coral-eating sea stars or the wrath of hurricanes.

Resist oases are coral communities that appear hardy and resistant to environmental challenges. Rebound oases are coral communities that have suffered damage like many other reefs, but have "rebounded" to a coral dominated state.

"There are a number of reasons why one coral reef might survive while its neighbour dies," says Dr Guest.

"It could be that the location is simply better for survival - deeper water that is outside the storm tracks, for example. The coral communities could possess biological or ecological characteristics that make them more resilient and able to resist damage. Or there may be ecological processes at play which means that the reef community is able to rebound more quickly after a disturbance.

"Identifying cases in which individuals or communities perform better than their neighbours, despite being at equal risk, is common in public health and medical fields and using a similar approach in ecology can help us to identify areas that can be prioritised for conservation."

Principal investigator Peter Edmunds, from California State University Northridge, who studies coral reefs in St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, in the Caribbean, and in Moorea, French Polynesia, in the Pacific, said he had been "blown away" by the capacity of the reefs in Moorea to rebound following devastation.

"We started working there in 2005, and almost immediately encountered hordes of coral-eating sea stars that quickly consumed the tissue of the corals," he said.

"By 2010, there was as close to zero coral on the outer reefs as I have seen in my entire career. And yet, within eight years, that coral has regrown. In places, about 80 percent of the sea floor is now covered by live coral. It is a remarkable example of an oasis.

"This does not contradict reports of coral reefs suffering huge losses across the world and that the overall situation is very bad.

"However, there are kernels of hope in places where corals are doing better, or where they are doing less badly than elsewhere and these places provide us with a focus of attention that might be used to enhance coral conservation efforts."

The work was a collaborative effort of scientists from twelve institutions and three countries and was made possible by a fellowship from the U.S. Geological Survey's John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis. Much of the development of the paper took place during two workshops held in Fort Collins, Colorado.

"Bringing together a remarkable group of people to the Powell Center for a few days to discuss these critical questions was really invigorating for me," says Dr Guest. "The Powell Center is without doubt one the best locations for a scientific workshop that I have visited."

Excessive drinking during adolescence may interfere with the activity of brain cells needed for sustaining short term memory, according to new research in adolescent male mice published in JNeurosci. The study could help scientists better understand the development of alcohol use disorders in adults.

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the behavior-management abilities it supports -- both of which continue to mature throughout the teenage years -- are particularly vulnerable to the effects of heavy alcohol use during adolescence. Teenage binge drinking is associated with reduced PFC activity, cognitive deficits, and later alcohol abuse. Yet, the mechanisms underlying these observations are unclear.

Michael Salling and colleagues found that adolescent mice consuming binge-level quantities of alcohol struggled with a working memory task and showed signs of "front-loading" -- excessive alcohol use within the first five minutes of availability -- in early adulthood. The researchers also found that adolescent alcohol exposure altered a number of properties of PFC pyramidal neurons, which connect the PFC to other brain areas and are therefore important for the regulation of behavior. These findings linking binge drinking with disrupted PFC-dependent behavior and brain function may ultimately lead to improved treatment of alcohol's negative effects on the brain.

Ecologists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) studied a population of black-browed albatross at Kerguelen Island, part of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands, where 200 breeding pairs have been monitored annually since 1979.

Reaching a wingspan of 2.5 metres, black-browed albatrosses breed on these sub-Antarctic islands during the austral summer, laying a single egg in October that will hatch in December. The chicks fledge in late March at a size similar to that of an adult.

Climate affects this seabird species in complex ways. In this study, the researchers developed a matrix population model that takes account of the combined effects of climate variables and functional traits in order to understand the entire life cycle and how population growth may be affected in light of a changing climate. Functional traits such as body size, timing of breeding, and foraging behaviour all have an impact on demographic traits such as survival and reproduction.

They found that changes in sea surface temperature during late winter cause the biggest variations in the population growth rate, through their impact on juvenile survival during their first year at sea. The effects of climatic conditions on seabirds generally occur indirectly.

"Sea surface temperature is widely used as an indicator of food availability for marine predators because warmer temperatures usually result in lower primary productivity in marine ecosystems, ultimately reducing the availability of prey", said Dr Stéphanie Jenouvrier, a seabird ecologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

She added: "As our oceans are projected to warm, fewer juvenile albatrosses will manage to survive and populations are expected to decline at a faster rate."

Among the functional traits, the researchers found that foraging behaviour during the pre-breeding period has a major impact on the population growth rate. For a population of individuals spending a high proportion of their time on the water, with few take-offs and landings (i.e. low foraging activity), the population growth rate is projected to decline up to 5.3% per year.

The results suggest that changes in population size and structure are driven by the combined effects of climate over various seasons, multiple functional traits and demographic processes across the full life cycle of black-browed albatross. The study also unravelled the important role of the juvenile phase and wintering season, two understudied parts of the life cycle of this migratory species.

"Albatrosses and other seabirds are long-lived predators that fly very long distances to forage at sea and nest on land. As a key indicator of ecosystem health, studying how seabirds fare in the face of climate change can help us predict the ecological impacts on the entire marine food web", concluded Dr Christophe Barbraud of CNRS, who co-authored this study.

AUGUSTA, Ga. (June 18, 2018) - It's the comparative silence between the firing spikes of neurons that tells what they are really up to, scientists report.

"The brain appears to use these durations of silence to encrypt information," Dr. Joe Z. Tsien, neuroscientist at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University says of his new Neural Self-Information Theory.

It's widely held that neurons generate perceptions, thoughts and actions by emitting electrical pulses called action potentials or spikes. One problem with that standard measure of neuron action is that neurons are essentially always firing at some level and with spontaneous fluctuation, even when it's not clear what is happening as a result, says Tsien, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Cognitive and Systems Neurobiology and a corresponding author of the study in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

He uses the analogy of an ocean surface that may look calm compared to a tsunami, but is never truly still. Many scientists have noted that there can also be variation in how even the same neuron responds to the same stimulus or even a quiet, resting state. Yet, there must be some kind of operating principle that enables us to think and act in real time in the face of this ongoing variability, he says. Brain scientists call the decades-old puzzle cracking the neural code.

Tsien's team has evidence from monitoring mouse neurons during various activities that the magic happens when you see a group of neurons each entering an atypical state for them - not of firing - but of the relative periods of silence between the firing and entering that period at the same time.

These silent spaces between overt firing are called interspike intervals, and, the neurons having atypical intervals at the same time are part of a clique generating perceptions, actions and thoughts in real time, he theorizes.

"These cells belong to the same group, an assembly," Tsien says. "It's a very general finding about how neuron activity codes information."

Applying this new Neural Self-Information Theory, they have identified 15 groups of cell assemblies in the cortex and hippocampus of the brain that work together to enable things like sleep cycles, sensing where you are and how you act in response to things you see and experience.

For example, they studied mice playing a game where a light shines on a wall and the mouse learns that if he pokes a hole in that same spot, rather than four other choices, he will get a food pellet when he returns to where he started. If he doesn't come back in time or pokes the wrong hole, no food pellet awaits. "It's a simple task but highly attention driven, and how the brain executes this task was poorly understood," Tsien says.

"To identify the cell cliques that help the mouse be successful, you have to find out what each neuron's interspike intervals looks like when they are out of their normal range of occurrence," Tsien says. "Among all the cells you record, you then identify the ones that move into that different state - called a surprisal state - at the same time." This time he uses the analogy of a normally chatty individual in an uncharacteristic period of silence.

"That is when these cells start to act as a clique," he says. "That is when the neural cliques are coming together to encode a train of thought or a set of actions. If it's what happens usually, that means it does not carry much information, it's like a ground state," Tsien adds.

Researchers at the University of Waterloo may have discovered a new, pesticide-free way to limit mosquito populations in some area and reduce the spread of the West Nile virus.

Waterloo researcher Brad Fedy discovered that introducing hungry minnows into bodies of water where mosquitoes breed results in the minnows feeding on mosquito larvae, which dramatically decreases the number of adult mosquitoes capable of carrying the disease.

"The best strategies to limit mosquitoes start at the larval stage. Unfortunately, in North America, control efforts are largely limited to larvicides, which require a repeated application and have potentially negative ecological impacts," said Fedy. "Addressing the problem with minnows provides many benefits in that it is low-maintenance, cost-effective, better for the environment in many cases, and our health."

The study took place over three years and introduced minnows into ten treatment reservoirs. Researchers monitored an additional six non-treated reservoirs.

Treatment ponds demonstrated suppressed levels of mosquito larva over each season compared to controls with a model-predicted 114 per cent decrease in larva density within treatment ponds.

"There are many potential advantages to using indigenous fish species as an alternative for larval control including lowered environmental impact, decreased costs regarding time and financial inputs, and the potential for the establishment of self-sustaining fish populations," said Fedy. "This isn't a complete solution to the dangers of West Nile, but it should be considered as part of any plan to protect the health of vulnerable populations."

Fedy and his team discovered the method while researching sage grouse populations in the intermountain west. Sage grouse populations suffer adverse impacts from mosquitoes transferring viruses like West Nile and investigated ways to mitigate those negative impacts. What they discovered could also improve human health.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- The effects of sibling relationships may go beyond childhood bickering and bonding, according to Penn State researchers who found that these relationships may predict similarities and differences in siblings' education later in life.

In a study spanning about 15 years, the researchers found that when siblings felt more warmth toward each other in childhood, they were more likely to achieve similar levels of education. But, when siblings felt that their parents' treatment of themselves versus their sibling was unfair, or when their fathers spent more time with one sibling than the other, those siblings achieved different levels of education.

Xiaoran Sun, a doctoral candidate in human development and family studies, said the results held up even when the researchers controlled for the siblings' grade-point averages across childhood and adolescence, suggesting that school achievement may not be the only factor determining what level of education a person achieves.

"While school is obviously important, this study helps show that what goes on inside families can have an impact, as well," said Susan McHale, distinguished professor of human development and family studies. "Warmth from siblings may not mean you're more likely to go to college, but it seems to be a factor in how similarly the two siblings turn out. People don't tend to think about siblings being important to academic achievement, but our findings highlight the importance of family experiences -- beyond what happens at school."

Previous research has shown that graduating college has an impact on an individual's employment, health and the way they form families of their own. While it's been shown that parenting can affect educational achievement, little work has been done to study whether siblings have an effect.

"A lot of research on child development focuses on one child in the family, with the assumption that if you know what happens to this one child, you know how families operate to socialize children," McHale said. "But in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world, more children grow up in a home with a sibling than with a father figure. So by studying siblings, you start to get a better sense of the larger family context of development."

The researchers followed the two oldest siblings from 152 families from middle childhood through their mid-twenties. The families lived in central Pennsylvania and were mainly European-American.

When the siblings were an average of 11.8 and 9.2 years old, the researchers measured warmth by asking the children questions, like how often they turned to their sibling for advice or support. Additionally, the researchers gathered data on whether the parents treated their children differently, and whether the siblings thought this different treatment was fair or not. They also measured how much time the siblings spent alone with their mothers and fathers.

When the siblings were around 26 years old, the researchers followed up to ask each sibling about their highest level of completed education.

"The sibling relationship factors that we tested did not predict whether an individual sibling would graduate from college or not, but we did find predictors of whether siblings would achieve different levels of education," said Sun. "The findings provide clues about how sibling relationships can affect education pathways."

The researchers said there are a few possible explanations for the findings, which were recently published in the journal Child Development. Sun said that when siblings feel more warmth for each other, they have a closer relationship in general, and thus may be more likely to follow similar paths in their education achievement.

"When two people are closer to each other, they tend to treat each other as role models," Sun said. "And this could be for better or for worse. They can be 'partners in crime,' as some prior work suggests, or partners in achievement, as we found. It's not that siblings who are close are more likely to graduate from college, they're just more likely to end up with the same level of education, either graduating from college or not."

McHale said that for the siblings who ended up with different levels of education, the perception of their parents treating them differently and unfairly may have been part of what drove their different choices.

"Children are vigilant in noticing how they're treated relative to their siblings, and parents need to be aware of this and on their guard," McHale said. "Many parents treat their children differently and have very good reasons to do so, but children need to understand parents' reasons, and parents have to have conversations with their children to explain those reasons. If kids perceive their treatment as fair or justified, even if it's different from their siblings', then there's not the same negative effect."

Sun said the results could help design future interventions that focus on siblings. The researchers said that it may be helpful to design studies that could explore the possible causal role of sibling relationships on education, as well as studies of more diverse populations.

Stress in early childhood leads to faster maturation of certain brain regions during adolescence. In contrast, stress experienced later in life leads to slower maturation of the adolescent brain. This is the outcome of a long-term study conducted by researchers of Radboud University in which 37 subjects have been monitored for almost 20 years. The findings will be published in Scientific Reports on 15 June.

In 1998, the group - which then comprised 129 one-year-olds and their parents - was tested for the first time. Over the past 20 years, researchers studied, inter alia, their play sessions and interactions with parents, friends and classmates. The children were also subjected to MRI scans. This wealth of data has enabled Karin Roelofs, Professor of Experimental Psychopathology, her PhD student Anna Tyborowska and other colleagues of Radboud University to investigate how stress in various life stages affected the adolescent brain of these children.

More specifically, they looked at the effects on cerebral maturation. During adolescence, our brain experiences a natural pruning process in which previously made connections between brain cells are refined, allowing the creation of more useful and efficient networks.

More pruning due to early life stress

The researchers investigated two types of stressors - negative life events and negative influences from the social environment - in two life stages of their subjects: early childhood (0-5 years) and adolescence (14-17 years). They related these stress levels to the maturation of the prefrontal cortex, amygdala and hippocampus. These brain regions play an important role in functioning in social and emotional situations and are known to be sensitive to stress.

Stress due to negative experiences during childhood , such as illness or divorce, appears to be related to faster maturation of the prefrontal cortex and amygdala in adolescence. However, stress resulting from a negative social environment during adolescence, such as low peer esteem at school, is connected to slower maturation of the brain area hippocampus and another part of the prefrontal cortex. 'Unfortunately, in this study we can't say with certainty that stress causes these effects. However, based on animal studies we can hypothesize that these mechanisms are indeed causal,' Anna Tyborowska says.

Loss of flexibility

'The fact that early childhood stress accelerates the maturation process during adolescence is consistent with theories of evolutionary biology,' says Tyborowska. 'From an evolutionary perspective, it is useful to mature faster if you grow up in a stressful environment. However, it also prevents the brain from adjusting to the current environment in a flexible way. In other words, the brain become "mature" too soon.' The researchers were surprised to find, however, that social stress later in life seems to lead to slower maturation during adolescence. Tyborowska: 'What makes this interesting is that a stronger effect of stress on the brain also increases the risk of developing antisocial personality traits'.

Tyborowska is now conducting the eleventh round of measurements, with the subjects now being in their twenties. 'Now that we know that stress affects the maturation of brain regions that also play a role in the control of emotions, we can investigate how this development continues later in life'.

Longitudinal study from Nijmegen

The Nijmeegse Longitudinale Studie (Nijmegen Longitudinal Study) was initiated in 1998. This study aims to investigate how the development and functioning of children at various ages is influenced by their interactions with parents and peers and how this relates to their disposition and personality. Several research groups have access to the data collected from the subjects (at present about 100). Other research topics include mother-child relationships, bullying and risk behaviour. This long-term study is one of the few worldwide in which so many measurements are taken over such a long period.

Tropical Depression Gaemi moved through Taiwan and was tracking to the northeast in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean on June 15. NASA's Aqua satellite provided a visible image of the storm that showed it as an elongated system.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite saw Tropical Storm Gaemi exit Taiwan and move into the Northwestern Pacific Ocean on June 15 at 1:10 a.m. EDT (0510 UTC). Gaemi appeared elongated after it moved over Taiwan, and the strongest thunderstorms were northeast of the center of circulation and over open waters.

At 5 a.m. EDT (0900 UTC) on June 15, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center noted that Gaemi had maximum sustained winds near 34.5 mph (30 knots/55.5 kph). Gaemi was centered near 23.2 degrees north latitude and 121.8 degrees east longitude. That's approximately 115 nautical miles south of Taipei, Taiwan. Gaemi was moving to the east-northeast.

The Joint Typhoon Warning Center noted that Gaemi will strengthen to a tropical storm again before becoming extra-tropical near Okinawa Island, Japan.

HOUSTON - Using a targeted therapy to block a protein that suppresses T cell activity could improve cancer treatment with immune checkpoint inhibitors, researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center report today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

The team showed that EZH2 is elevated in immune T cells in patients after treatment with ipilimumab, a drug that unleashes an immune response by blocking the activity of CTLA-4 on T cells, white blood cells that serve as the targeted warriors of the adaptive immune system.

"Immune checkpoint therapy has led to significant clinical responses in some patients but in order to provide benefit to even more patients, we will need rationally designed combination therapies," said senior author Padmanee Sharma, M.D., Ph.D., professor of Genitourinary Medical Oncology and Immunology.

"Our studies show that anti-CTLA-4 therapy can lead to increased EZH2 expression in T cells, which can act to diminish T cell responses," Sharma said.

Preclinical research in mouse models showed that combination therapy using a drug that inhibits EZH2 and ipilimumab improved T cell responses, tumor rejection and extended survival. MD Anderson researchers have translated these findings into the clinic, with a phase I clinical trial of the combination open this spring.

First clue in ipilimumab-treated patients

The team's research began with an observation in Sharma's lab with experiments conducted by first author Sangeeta Goswami, M.D., Ph.D., who was studying patient samples from a clinical trial of ipilimumab. Sharma's team, working through MD Anderson's Immunotherapy platform, examined samples from bladder cancer, prostate cancer and melanoma patients taken before and after treatment to analyze changes in immune activity.

Goswami found EZH2 levels in patients' T cells elevated after treatment with ipilimumab and that increase was correlated in prostate cancer patients with cancer progression as measured by prostate specific antigen levels.

EZH2 is known to work epigenetically, repressing genes by regulating a histone protein to stabilize expression of a transcription factor in regulatory T cells that act to suppress immune response.

To better understand the consequences of EZH2 elevation, Goswami, Sharma and colleagues conducted a series of lab experiments.

They were the first to show that EZH2 inhibition enhances the function of effector T cells (CD8+ and CD4+ T cells). Goswami ran a series of tests on four different inhibitors and showed for the first time that CPI-1205 had the greatest effect suppressing T cell differentiation into regulatory T cells.

Follow-up experiments showed that EZH2 inhibition forced regulatory T cells to lose their suppressive capacity, changing their phenotype to effector-like T cells. Additionally, mice genetically altered to lack EZH2 on their regulatory T cells had significant tumor regression compared to control mice after inoculation with a bladder cancer cell line. They also had elevated levels of CD8-positive T cells in and around their tumors

Connection with anti-CTLA-4

T cells are activated by CD28, a co-stimulatory molecule that fires up the cells once their T cell receptor has connected with an antigen target. CD28 also turns on CTLA-4, an immune checkpoint. The team hypothesized that blocking CTLA-4 with ipilimumab results in exaggerated CD28 signaling that increases EZH2 in T cells.

By examining T cells collected before and after treatment with ipilimumab for bladder, melanoma and prostate cancer patients, the team found increased EZH2 expression in effector T cells and regulatory T cells after treatment. Among prostate cancer patients, elevated EZH2 in those T cells was correlated with PSA-measured tumor progression.

Combination thwarts tumor growth

Treatment with the ipilimumab and CPI-1205 combination caused major reductions in tumor growth, significantly increased survival, reduced the percentage of regulatory T cells and increased tumor-penetrating effector cells compared to treatment with either drug alone in two types of mice, one that develops bladder cancer and one with melanoma.

Treating mice that have EZH2 knocked out with ipilimumab resulted in complete tumor rejection by the immune system.

No immune-related toxicities were observed in mice treated with the combination.

The phase I clinical trial at MD Anderson is a safety and dosing trial that treats patients with advanced tumors with either combination of CPI-1205 and ipilimumab or CPI-1205 and pembrolizumab, which blocks PD1, a different immune checkpoint.