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The possibilities of citizens to participate in natural resource governance are increasing. Responsive and collaborative models of natural resource governance can open up new opportunities, but can also lead to unreasonable responsibilization, or even force responsibility on under-resourced organisations and individuals. This is the conclusion made in studies published in the Special Issue of Journal of Forest Policy and Economics, entitled Responsibilization in Natural Resource Governance and edited by Professor of Natural Resources Governance Irmeli Mustalahti from the University of Eastern Finland and Professor of Natural Resources & Environment Arun Agrawal from the University of Michigan.

The studies included in the Special Issue deal with natural resources governance in Indonesia, India, Mexico, Nepal, Tanzania and Russia, and show that natural resources governance involves a plethora of different actors for whom responsibilization has become more the rule than the exception. Often, local communities were given increasing responsibility for natural resources governance - without being given appropriate resources or operating conditions. In some cases, responsibilization had changed from mildly persuasive, to demanding, then to forced responsibility.

"The shift from responsibilization to forcing responsibility on local communities can be described as symbolic violence. Obligations and demands dictated from above are often a form of soft and invisible violence that can lead to corruption, social inequalities and exhaustion of natural resources," says Professor Irmeli Mustalahti.

The term symbolic violence was coined by Pierre Bourdieu, a sociologist and philosopher who observed and identified symbolic violence in nearly all power structures that societies have.

"In Finland, too, responsibilization has become an important objective, a tool for enhancing efficiency," says Professor Mustalahti.

She points out that some structures of governance and top-down demands do not necessarily support the well-being of citizens but instead force responsibility on them and are, in fact, manifestations of symbolic violence. Young people, too, are affected. This is a theme addressed also by the ALL-YOUTH research project which is supported by the Strategic Research Council coordinated at the Academy of Finland.

Professor Mustalahti and Professor Agrawal point out in their article that responsibilization and forced responsibility is not an issue in natural resources governance alone; the education and health care sectors are also affected. For example obligations can be transferred or reassigned to local communities, patients or students without giving them proper resources and operating conditions. In public discourse, forcing responsibility on citizens has been justified for reasons pertaining to climate, economy and labour policy.

"In order to support responsible and collaborative governance of natural resources, we need to have better understanding of citizens' skills and abilities, and of social structures and agency. Citizens must have adequate operating conditions, and tasks assigned to them must be in line with their resources and possibilities to influence," says Professor Mustalahti.

A seven-year analysis of almost 10,000 Harmful Algal Blooms (HAB) events worldwide over three decades will be published by the HAB Programme of UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission.

More than 100 scientists in 112 countries contributed to the synthesis and analysis of HAB data gathered from 1985 to 2018 -- a first-ever big data approach to detecting changes in the costly phenomenon's global distribution, frequency, and intensity.

The authors detail the health and economic damages caused by harmful microalgae, including:

Bioaccumulation of toxins in seafood (the most dominant HAB problem, broken down by both region and by algae species)

Toxic or non-toxic microalgae blooms causing discoloured water, scum, mucilage or foam, harming tourism and/or fisheries

Mass fish kills, including in aquaculture operations

High biomass, causing closures of e.g. beaches or desalination plants

The researchers also examine whether and how rising marine resource exploitation and other factors affect HAB events.

The work assesses the occurrence of toxin-producing and other harmful microalgae, and the status and probability of change in HAB frequencies, intensities, and range resulting from environmental change at the local and global scale.

Publication of the key findings in a prominent journal will be followed by a complete set of 13 papers to be published in a special edition of Harmful Algae.

Databases mined

Thousands of microalgae species form the foundation of aquatic food chains, help control atmospheric CO2 levels, and produce roughly half of the world's oxygen.

The troublemakers are approximately 200 species that can produce potent toxins or cause harm through their sheer biomass, plus a similar number of non-toxic species that can harm fish gills, impair the beauty of the sea with strange colours, scums and foams, or deplete oxygen.

The study involved mining the global Harmful Algae Event Database (HAEDAT), consisting of 9,503 events with one or more impacts on human society, together with the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS), which contains 7 million microalgal records including 289,668 toxic algal species occurrences.

Due to differences in the levels of monitoring worldwide, trends within the HAEDAT database were examined regionally and corrected for sampling effort using OBIS phytoplankton species records as a proxy.

The work creates the first-ever baseline to facilitate future tracking and detection of changes in the world's HAB problems, and to help manage the problems in future.

Three key public databases

The Harmful Algal Event Database (HAEDAT, http://haedat.iode.org)

The only existing database of information about harmful algal events from around the world, summarized into 'events' associated with a management action or negative economic / ecological impact. Includes cases of non-toxic water discolorations, mucilage, anoxia or other damage to fish.

HABMAP-OBIS (http://www.iobis.org):

A database on the geographic range of harmful algal species

HAEDAT and OBIS are both components of the IOC International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange Programme (IODE).

The IOC-UNESCO Taxonomic Reference List of Harmful Microalgae

Includes formally accepted names of 150+ planktonic or benthic microalgae that have been proven to produce toxins. The number of species in the list has doubled over the years.

The work will help future researchers determine:

1. The distribution of HAB species, HAB events, and toxins globally

2. How the geographic distribution, characteristic, frequency and intensity of HABs are changing and if these changes are attributable to global change

3. How climate change and other factors alter the impacts of HABs -- on human health, ecosystems, economics, food and water security

With more than 100 expert contributors from 112 countries, the work is piloted by 18 principal authors from 14 countries (including two from Australia, two from France, three from the USA):

· Gustaaf M. Hallegraeff, University of Tasmania, Australia

· Donald M. Anderson, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA

· Catherine Belin, IFREMER, France

· Marie-Yasmine Bottein, Ecotoxicologie et Développement Durable expertise, France

· Eileen Bresnan, Marine Scotland, UK

· Mireille Chinain, Institut Louis Malardé-UMR241, Tahiti

· Henrik Enevoldsen, Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

· Mitsunori Iwataki, University of Tokyo, Japan

· Cynthia H. McKenzie, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Canada

· Inés Sunesen, CONICET - UNLP, Argentina

· Grant C. Pitcher, University of Cape Town, South Africa

· Pieter Provoost, Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, Oostende, Belgium

· Anthony Richardson, CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, and University of Queensland, Australia

· Laura Schweibold, Institut Universitaire Européen de la Mer, France

· Patricia A. Tester, Ocean Tester, USA

· Vera L. Trainer, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, USA

· Aletta T. Yñiguez, University of the Philippines, Philippines

· Adriana Zingone, Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, Italy

"The most frequently asked questions about Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) are
if they are increasing and expanding, and what are the mechanisms behind observed trends," the authors say.

"Indeed a global expansion of HABs and its causes have long been debated. Eutrophication, human-mediated introduction of alien harmful species, climatic variability, and aquaculture have all been mentioned as possible causes of an expansion and intensification of HABs. Our research sheds an authoritative light on the problem and will help guide responses to it for decades to come."

The IOC Intergovernmental Panel on HABs began the Global HAB Status Report in 2013.

The work is linked with the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reporting mechanism, which increasingly is focusing on the biological impacts of climate change.

IOC UNESCO project partners include the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the International Council for Exploration of the Sea (ICES), the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES) and the International Society for the Study of Harmful Algae (ISSHA). The initiative receives financial support from the Government of Flanders/FUST-DIPS.

Interested media and other parties may apply for advance, embargoed access to the papers, approximately one week prior to publication. Please email tc@tca.tc with the subject line: Advance access, UN HAB report

Researchers at the University of Liverpool and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology have made reported some exciting findings relating to metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), a class of porous materials, which could benefit a wide range of important gas separation processes. The findings are reported in two research papers.

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a relatively new class of porous, crystalline materials with a broad range of applications.

Some MOFs can act as a molecular sieve, allowing one type of gas molecule from a mixture to pass through while blocking the others. For example, it is known that some MOFs separate propylene from propane, an important process in the manufacture of polypropylene plastics for which high purity propylene is required.

In a first paper published in Nature Communications, researchers demonstrate that unlike a kitchen sieve, these three dimensional molecular sieves can change their pore shape and their flexibility is vital for this performance.

The computational modelling supported by experimental X-ray data indicate that for one such high-performing MOF, called KAUST-7, the structural changes in the MOF triggered by the presence of the propylene and propane gas molecules are qualitatively different and result in stronger adsorption and faster transport of propylene thus essentially sieving propane molecules out.

However, it is hard to predict which other kinds of MOFs possess this functional flexibility and therefore might also be good for a given gas separation because the performance is controlled by specific molecular interactions that are hard to anticipate or identify experimentally.

In a second paper published in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, researchers focus on this challenge.

They developed a computational screening approach to assess over four thousand previously reported MOFs for their flexibility when acting like a molecular sieve. Using this approach, they identified the top four MOFs which show the potential to separate propylene from propane - two of them have been already known to have a good performance while the other two have not yet been tested for this application experimentally.

Dr Matthew Dyer, a lecturer in Chemistry and part of the University's Leverhulme Research Centre for Functional Materials Design, said: "MOFs have attracted considerable interest in recent years and there are great hopes for technical applications especially for flexible MOFs.

"Our research adds to our knowledge of MOFs, why some are able to act as sieves and which ones show flexibility.

"Using a computational approach, we are able to identify flexible MOFs and these findings have the potential to make the process of purifying gases more energy efficient. This is important in terms for the manufacture of high-quality plastics which need pure starting compounds that are commonly extracted from gaseous by-products in petrochemical processing. "

"Such high throughput screening approaches can be applied to many different materials with varying potential applications. They have the potential to change the way that we find materials to meet technological challenges."

If you've been experiencing odour distortions after Covid-19, then 'smell training' could help you start smelling normally again - according to new research involving the University of East Anglia.

Parosmia is a symptom where people experience strange and often unpleasant smell distortions. Instead of smelling a lemon you may smell rotting cabbage, or chocolate may smell like petrol. The symptom has been linked to smell disturbance in Covid-19, as well as due to other viruses and head injuries.

A new paper published today shows that the presence of parosmia is associated with clinically relevant recovery in smell performance (identifying and distinguishing smells) in patients with smell loss caused by viral infections who are undertaking smell training.

The research was led by the Technical University of Dresden (Germany) in collaboration with the University of East Anglia (UK), the Norfolk Smell and Taste Clinic at the James Paget University Hospital (UK), the Medical University of Vienna (Austria), University Hospitals of Cologne (Germany), and the University of Wroclaw (Poland).

Prof Carl Philpott from UEA's Norwich Medical School, said: "Some degree of smell loss is thought to affect up to one quarter of the general population.

"Smell loss is also a prominent symptom of Covid-19, and we know that the pandemic is leaving many people with long-term smell loss, or smell distortions such as parosmia - this may now be as many as 90,000 people in the UK.

"For people with parosmia, the smell of certain things - or sometimes everything - is different, and often unpleasant. So for example, someone with parosmia could sniff at a cinnamon stick, but to them it would smell like something horrible - perhaps rotten food, or worse.

"Smell training involves sniffing at least four different odours twice a day every day for several months. It has emerged as a simple and side-effect free treatment option for various causes of smell loss.

"It aims to help recovery based on neuroplasticity - the brain's ability to reorganise itself to compensate for a change or injury.

"We wanted to find out more about how it relates to the likelihood of recovery in patients with smell loss due to viruses."

The research team worked with 143 participants who had experienced a loss or change in their sense of smell due to post viral infection.

The participants received a variety of smell training kits - consisting of different odours, including eucalyptus, lemon, rose, cinnamon, chocolate, coffee, lavender, honey, strawberry and thyme.

The participants were tested for how well they could smell different odours at the start of the trial, and after six months of smell training.

Prof Philpott said: "We found that the presence of parosmia and worse smell performance on testing of odour identification and discrimination was associated with clinically significant recovery in smell function for people experiencing post-viral smell disorders.

"This means that smell training can help the smell pathways to start to regenerate and recover.

"We also found that older people in particular were more likely to start to recover their sense of smell. And that the biggest improvements happened in those that had lost the most amount of smell function in the first place."

The research was carried out prior to Covid-19, however the researchers say their findings could be helpful to people who have lost their sense of smell as a result of the pandemic.

The ancient city of Pompeii (in the south of Italy) ended up buried under ash and volcanic material in 79 CE as a consequence of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. That fateful event made the unprecedented conservation of the archaeological site in the area possible because the pyroclastic materials spewed out by Vesuvius have protected the remains from external damage. So not only in cultural but also in scientific terms they are in fact highly prized sites where tourists and professionals of archaeology and even chemistry mingle.

For over 10 years the UPV/EHU's IBeA group, attached to the department of Analytical Chemistry, has been working at Pompeii within the framework of the Analytica Pompeiana Universitatis Vasconicae-APUV project. In 2015 the UPV/EHU and the Archaeological Park of Pompeii signed the first of the agreements thanks to which the methodologies and portable devices used by the research group are allowing the paintings to be analysed using non-destructive techniques.

Various studies conducted at the House of Marcus Lucretius, the House of Ariadne and the Casa degli Amorini Dorati or House of the Golden Cupids have concluded that "salts are responsible for the worst and most visible damage to the murals. In the end, the salts may dissolve and as a result material such as pigments, the pictorial layer, the mortar, etc. may be lost", said Maite Maguregui, lead researcher in this study. In this respect, the researchers have concluded that the leached ions from the pyroclastic materials and the ion-rich underground waters from the volcanic rocks promote the crystallization of certain salts.

"While the paintings remain underground, they are protected by the pyroclasts; but once they are brought to the surface, the salts start to form owing to the effect of the air, humidity, etc. So in order to conserve the mural paintings it is important to know in each case what the salt load of the surrounding pyroclasts is to be able to block, reduce or prevent potential damage. In fact, in Pompeii a large proportion remains buried and waiting to be studied," added Maguregui.

Fluorine marking the impact of the volcanic materials

"When the volcano erupted, it spewed out huge quantities of materials and the pyroclastic material is not homogeneous across the whole area; many different strata can be found," explained the researcher. Mineralogical analyses of samples collected at various points were made in the study, and the compositions of the leachates were determined. Thermodynamic modelling was also carried out to predict which salts can precipitate as a result of leaching and to determine their origins. It was concluded that the salts provided by the modelling coincide with those detected in the paintings.

The salts analysed in the murals contain fluorine ions, among other things. "Fluorines are ions of volcanic origin; it is not one of the main elements in the atmosphere. The emergence of fluorine salts indicates that the volcanic materials and the subterranean waters are exerting an influence on the crystallization of these salts," she explained. "So with the fluorine found in the mural it is possible to trace the impact that has been exerted and continues to be exerted by the pyroclasts and the subterranean waters on the paintings." The group's next aim would be to "map the murals on a large scale to see the extent of the salts and also to be able to determine the steps to be followed by the conservation staff when they unearth a mural painting", she added.

By embedding titanium-based sheets in water, a group led by scientists from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science has created a material using inorganic materials that can be converted from a hard gel to soft matter using temperature changes.
Science fiction often features inorganic life forms, but in reality, organisms and devices that respond to stimuli such as temperature changes are nearly always based on organic materials, and hence, research in the area of "adaptive materials" has almost exclusively focused on organic substances. However, there are advantages to using inorganic materials such as metals, including potentially better mechanical properties.
Considering this, the RIKEN-led group decided to attempt to recreate the behavior displayed by organic hydrogels, but using inorganic materials. The inspiration for the material comes from an aquatic creature called a sea cucumber. Sea cucumbers are fascinating animals, related to starfishes (but not to cucumbers!)--that have the ability to morph their skin from a hard layer to a kind of jelly, allowing them to throw out their internal organs--which are eventually regrown--to escape from predators. In the case of the sea cucumbers, chemicals released by their nervous systems trigger the change in the configuration of a protein scaffold, creating the change.

To make it, the researchers experimented with arranging nanosheets--thin sheets of titanium oxide in this case--in water, with the nanosheets making up 14 percent and water 86 percent of the material by weight.

According to Koki Sano of RIKEN CEMS, the first author of the paper, "The key to whether a material is a soft hydrogel or a harder gel is based on the balance between attractive and repulsive forces among the nanosheets. If the repulsive forces dominate, it is softer, but if the attractive ones are strong, the sheets become locked into a three-dimensional network, and it can rearrange into a harder gel. By using finely tuned electrostatic repulsion, we tried to make a gel whose properties would change depending on temperature."

The group was ultimately successful in doing this, finding that the material changed from a softer repulsion-dominated state to a harder attraction-dominated state at a temperature of around 55 centigrade. They also found that they could repeat the process repeatedly without significant deterioration. "What was fascinating," he continues, "is that this transition process is completed within just two seconds even though it requires a large structural rearrangement. This transition is accompanied by a 23-fold change in the mechanical elasticity of the gel, reminiscent of sea cucumbers."

To make the material more useful, they next doped it with gold nanoparticles that could convert light into heat, allowing them to shine laser light on the material to heat it up and change the structure.

According to Yasuhiro Ishida of RIKEN CEMS, one of the corresponding authors of the paper, "This is really exciting work as it greatly opens the scope of substance that can be used in next-generation adaptive materials, and may even allow us to create a form of 'inorganic life'."

A new study looking at seven centuries of water flow in south Asia's mighty Brahmaputra River suggests that scientists are underestimating the river's potential for catastrophic flooding as climate warms. The revelation comes from examinations of tree rings, which showed rainfall patterns going back centuries before instrumental and historical records.

Many researchers agree that warming climate will intensify the seasonal monsoon rains that drive the Brahmaputra, but the presumed baseline of previous natural variations in river flow rests mainly on discharge-gauge records dating only to the 1950s. The new study, based on the rings of ancient trees in and around the river's watershed, shows that the post-1950s period was actually one of the driest since the 1300s. The rings show that there have been much wetter periods in the past, driven by natural oscillations that took place over decades or centuries. The takeaway: destructive floods probably will come more frequently than scientists have thought, even minus any effects of human-driven climate change. Estimates probably fall short by nearly 40 percent, say the researchers. The findings were just published in the journal Nature Communications.

"The tree rings suggest that the long-term baseline conditions are much wetter than we thought," said Mukund Palat Rao, a recent PhD. graduate of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and lead author of the study. "Whether you consider climate models or natural variability, the message is the same. We should be prepared for a higher frequency of flooding than we are currently predicting."

The Brahmaputra is one of the world's mightiest rivers, flowing under a variety of names and braided routes some 2,900 miles through Tibet, northeast India and Bangladesh. Near its mouth, it combines with India's Ganga River to create the world's third largest ocean outflow, behind only the Amazon and the Congo. (It is tied with Venezuela's Orinoco.) At points, it is nearly 12 miles wide. Its delta alone is home to 130 million Bangladeshis, and many millions more live upstream.

The river routinely floods surrounding areas during the July-September monsoon season, when moisture-laden winds sweep in from the Indian Ocean and bring rain along its length, from its Himalayan headwaters on down to the coastal plain. As with the Nile, the flooding has a good side, because the waters drop nutrient-rich sediment to replenish farmland, and some degree of flooding is essential for rice cultivation. But some years, the flooding runs out of control, and low-lying Bangladesh gets hit hardest. In 1998, 70 percent of the country went underwater, taking out crops, roads and buildings, and killing many people. Other serious floods came in 2007 and 2010. In September 2020 the worst flooding since 1998 was still underway, with a third of Bangladesh inundated, and 3 million people rendered homeless.

Higher temperatures drive more evaporation of ocean waters, and in this region that water ends up as rainfall on land during the monsoon. As a result, most scientists think that warming climate will intensify the monsoon rains in coming decades, and in turn increase seasonal flooding. The question is, how much more often might big floods happen in the future?

The authors of the new study first looked at records from a river-flow gauge in northern Bangladesh. This showed a median discharge some 41,000 cubic meters per second from 1956 to 1986, and 43,000 from 1987 to 2004. (In the big flood year of 1998, peak discharge more than doubled.)

They then looked at data from the rings of ancient trees that researchers sampled at 28 sites in Tibet, Myanmar, Nepal and Bhutan, at sites within the Brahmaputra watershed, or close enough to be affected by the same weather systems. Most samples were taken from conifer species in the last 20 years by scientists from the Lamont-Doherty Tree Ring Lab, led by study coauthor Edward Cook. Since people have long been cutting down trees in populous areas, Cook and his colleagues sometimes hiked for weeks to reach undisturbed sites in remote, mountainous terrain. Straw-width samples were bored from trunks, without damage to the trees. The oldest tree they found, a Tibetan juniper, dated to the year 449.

Back at the lab, they analyzed the tree rings, which grow wider in years when soil moisture is high, and thus indirectly reflect rainfall and resulting river runoff. This allowed the scientists to assemble a 696-year chronology, running from 1309 to 2004. By comparing the rings with modern instrumental records as well as historical records going back to the 1780s, they could see that the widest rings lined up neatly with known major flood years. This in turn allowed them to extrapolate yearly river discharge in the centuries preceding modern records. They found that 1956-1986 was in only the 13th percentile for river discharge, and 1987-2004 in the 22nd.

This, they say, means that anyone using the modern discharge record to estimate future flood hazard would be underestimating the danger by 24 to 38 percent, based solely on natural variations; human driven warming would have to be added on top of that. "If the instruments say we should expect flooding toward the end of the century to come about every four and a half years, we are saying we should really expect flooding to come about every three years," said Rao.

The tree rings do show some other relatively dry times, in the 1400s, 1600s and 1800s. But they also show very wet periods of extreme flooding with no analog in the relatively brief modern instrumental period. The worst lasted from about 1560-1600, 1750-1800 and 1830-1860.

Climate change will almost certainly affect the flow of other major rivers in the region, though not necessarily in the same ways. The mighty Ganga, flowing mainly through India, is also powered mainly by the monsoon, so it will likely behave much like the Brahmaputra. But the Indus, which flows through Tibet, India and Pakistan, derives most of its flow not from the monsoon, but rather from the winter buildup of snow and ice in Himalayan glaciers, and subsequent melting in summer. In 2018 Rao and colleagues published a tree-ring study showing that the river's flow has been anomalously high in recent years. They suggest that as climate warms and the glaciers undergo accelerated melting, the Indus will supply plenty of needed irrigation water--but at some point, when the glaciers lose enough mass, the seasonal spigot will turn the other way, and there may not be enough water.

Human vulnerability to floods along the Brahmaputra has increased in recent years due not only to sheer water volume, but because population and infrastructure are growing fast. On the other hand, accurate flood warnings have become more advanced, and this has helped many villages reduce economic and social losses. "High discharges will continue to be associated with an increased likelihood of flood hazard in the future," write the study authors. But, they say, this could be counteracted to some extent by "potential changes in policy, land use, or infrastructure that may ameliorate flood risk."

The aim of smart homes is to make life easier for those living in them. Applications for environment-aided daily life may have a major social impact, fostering active ageing and enabling older adults to remain independent for longer. One of the keys to smart homes is the system's ability to deduce the human activities taking place. To this end, different types of sensors are used to detect the changes triggered by inhabitants in this environment (turning lights on and off, opening and closing doors, etc.).

Normally, the information generated by these sensors is processed using data analysis methods, and the most successful systems are based on supervised learning techniques (i.e., knowledge), with someone supervising the data and an algorithm automatically learning the meaning. Nevertheless, one of the main problems with smart homes is that a system trained in one environment is not valid in another one: 'Algorithms are usually closely linked to a specific smart environment, to the types of sensor existing in that environment and their configuration, as well as to the concrete habits of one individual. The algorithm learns all this easily, but is then unable to transfer it to a different environment,' explains Gorka Azkune, a member of the UPV/EHU's IXA group.

Giving sensors names

To date, sensors have been identified using numbers, meaning that 'they lost any meaning they may have had,' continues Dr Azkune. 'We propose using sensor names instead of identifiers, to enable their meaning, their semantics, to be used to determine the activity to which they are linked. Thus, what the algorithm learns in one environment may be valid in a different one, even if the sensors are not the same, because their semantics are similar. This is why we use natural language processing techniques.'

The researcher also explains that the techniques used are totally automatic. 'At the end of the day, the algorithm learns the words first and then the representation that we develop using those words. There is no human intervention. This is important from the perspective of scalability, since it has been proven to overcome the aforementioned difficulty.' Indeed, the new approach has achieved similar results to those obtained using the knowledge-based method.

Complementary information

This study was carried out by the IXA research group at the UPV/EHU, in collaboration with the DeustoTech Institute of Technology at Deusto University.

Chemical compounds in foods or beverages like green tea, muscadine grapes and dark chocolate can bind to and block the function of a particular enzyme, or protease, in the SARS-CoV-2 virus, according to a new study by plant biologists at North Carolina State University.

Proteases are important to the health and viability of cells and viruses, says De-Yu Xie, professor of plant and microbial biology at NC State and the corresponding author of the study. If proteases are inhibited, cells cannot perform many important functions - like replication, for example.

"One of our lab's focuses is to find nutraceuticals in food or medicinal plants that inhibit either how a virus attaches to human cells or the propagation of a virus in human cells," Xie said.

In the study, the NC State researchers performed both computer simulations and lab studies showing how the so-called "main protease" (Mpro) in the SARS-CoV-2 virus reacted when confronted with a number of different plant chemical compounds already known for their potent anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties.

"Mpro in SARS-CoV-2 is required for the virus to replicate and assemble itself," Xie said. "If we can inhibit or deactivate this protease, the virus will die."

Computer simulations showed that the studied chemical compounds from green tea, two varieties of muscadine grapes, cacao powder and dark chocolate were able to bind to different portions of Mpro.

"Mpro has a portion that is like a 'pocket' that was 'filled' by the chemical compounds," Xie said. "When this pocket was filled, the protease lost its important function."

In vitro lab experiments completed by Yue Zhu, an NC State Ph.D. student in Xie's lab, showed similar results. The chemical compounds in green tea and muscadine grapes were very successful at inhibiting Mpro's function; chemical compounds in cacao powder and dark chocolate reduced Mpro activity by about half.

"Green tea has five tested chemical compounds that bind to different sites in the pocket on Mpro, essentially overwhelming it to inhibit its function," Xie said. "Muscadine grapes contain these inhibitory chemicals in their skins and seeds. Plants use these compounds to protect themselves, so it is not surprising that plant leaves and skins contain these beneficial compounds."

DURHAM, N.C. - A form of artificial intelligence designed to interpret a combination of retinal images was able to successfully identify a group of patients who were known to have Alzheimer's disease, suggesting the approach could one day be used as a predictive tool, according to an interdisciplinary study from Duke University.

The novel computer software looks at retinal structure and blood vessels on images of the inside of the eye that have been correlated with cognitive changes.

The findings, appearing last week in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, provide proof-of-concept that machine learning analysis of certain types of retinal images has the potential to offer a non-invasive way to detect Alzheimer's disease in symptomatic individuals.

"Diagnosing Alzheimer's disease often relies on symptoms and cognitive testing," said senior author Sharon Fekrat, M.D., retina specialist at the Duke Eye Center. "Additional tests to confirm the diagnosis are invasive, expensive, and carry some risk. Having a more accessible method to identify Alzheimer's could help patients in many ways, including improving diagnostic precision, allowing entry into clinical trials earlier in the disease course, and planning for necessary lifestyle adjustments."

Fekrat is part of an interdisciplinary team at Duke that also includes expertise from Duke's departments of Neurology, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Biostatistics and Bioinformatics. The team built on earlier work in which they identified changes in retinal blood vessel density that correlated with changes in cognition. They found decreased density of the capillary network around the center of the macula in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Using that knowledge, they then trained a machine learning model, known as a convolutional neural network (CNN), using four types of retinal scans as inputs to teach a computer to discern relevant differences among images.

Scans from 159 study participants were used to build the CNN; 123 patients were cognitively healthy, and 36 patients were known to have Alzheimer's disease.

"We tested several different approaches, but our best-performing model combined retinal images with clinical patient data," said lead author C. Ellis Wisely, M.D., a comprehensive ophthalmologist at Duke. "Our CNN differentiated patients with symptomatic Alzheimer's disease from cognitively healthy participants in an independent test group."

Wisely said it will be important to enroll a more diverse group of patients to build models that can predict Alzheimer's in all racial groups as well as in those who have conditions such as glaucoma and diabetes, which can also alter retinal and vascular structures.

"We believe additional training using images from a larger, more diverse population with known confounders will improve the model's performance," added co-author Dilraj S. Grewal, M.D., Duke retinal specialist.

He said additional studies will also determine how well the AI approach compares to current methods of diagnosing Alzheimer's disease, which often include expensive and invasive neuroimaging and cerebral spinal fluid tests.

"Links between Alzheimer's disease and retinal changes -- coupled with non-invasive, cost-effective, and widely available retinal imaging platforms -- position multimodal retinal image analysis combined with artificial intelligence as an attractive additional tool, or potentially even an alternative, for predicting the diagnosis of Alzheimer's," Fekrat said.

Durham, NC - Cellular reprogramming can reverse the aging that leads to a decline in the activities and functions of mesenchymal stem/stromal cells (MSCs). This is something that scientists have known for a while. But what they had not figured out is which molecular mechanisms are responsible for this reversal. A study released today in STEM CELLS appears to have solved this mystery. It not only enhances the knowledge of MSC aging and associated diseases, but also provides insight into developing pharmacological strategies to reduce or reverse the aging process.

The research team, made up of scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, relied on cellular reprogramming - a commonly used approach to reverse cell aging - to establish a genetically identical young and old cell model for this study. "While agreeing with previous findings in MSC rejuvenation by cellular reprogramming, our study goes further to provide insight into how reprogrammed MSCs are regulated molecularly to ameliorate the cellular hallmarks of aging," explained lead investigator, Wan-Ju Li, Ph.D., a faculty member in the Department of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation and the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

The researchers began by deriving MSCs from human synovial fluid (SF-MSCs) - that is, the fluid found in the knee, elbow and other joints - and reprogramming them into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Then they reverted these iPSCs back to MSCs, in effect rejuvenating the MSCs. "When we compared the reprogrammed MSCs to the non-rejuvenated parental MSCs, we found that aging-related activities were greatly reduced in reprogrammed MSCs compared to those in their parental lines. This indicates a reversal of cell aging," Dr. Li said.

The team next conducted an analysis of the cells to determine if there were any changes in global gene expression resulting from the reprogramming. They found that the expression of GATA6, a protein that plays an important role in gut, lung and heart development, was repressed in the reprogrammed cells compared to the control cells. This repression led to an increase in the activity of a protein essential to embryonic development called sonic hedgehog (SHH) as well as the expression level of yet another protein, FOXP1, necessary for proper development of the brain, heart and lung. "Thus, we identified the GATA6/SHH/FOXP1 pathway as a key mechanism that regulates MSC aging and rejuvenation," Dr. Li said.

"Identification of the GATA6/SHH/FOXP1 pathway in controlling the aging of MSCs is a very important accomplishment." Said Dr. Jan Nolta, Editor-in-Chief of STEM CELLS. "Premature aging can thwart the ability to expand these promising cells while maintaining function for clinical use, and enhanced knowledge about the pathways that control differentiation and senescence is highly valuable."

To determine which of the Yamanaka transcription factors (four reprogramming genes used to derive iPSCs) were involved in repressing GATA6 in the iPSCs, the team analyzed GATA6 expression in response to the knockdown of each factor. This yielded the information that only OCT4 and KLF4 are able to regulate GATA6 activity, a finding consistent with that of several previous studies.

"Overall, we were able to demonstrate that SF-MSCs undergo substantial changes in properties and functions as a result of cellular reprogramming. These changes in iPSC-MSCs collectively indicate amelioration of cell aging. Most significantly, we were able to identify the GATA6/SHH/FOXP1 signaling pathway as an underlying mechanism that controls cell aging-related activities," Dr. Li said.

"We believe our findings will help improve the understanding of MSC aging and its significance in regenerative medicine," he concluded.

A new QUT-led study has found wild jaguars in the Amazon can cope with climate extremes in the short-term, but numbers will rapidly decline if weather events increase in frequency, diminishing sources of food.

Distinguished Professor Kerrie Mengersen and Professor Kevin Burrage led a team of researchers in a world-first investigation of the big cat's chances of survival.

The new research results have been published in Ecology and Evolution.

The jaguar (Panthera onca) is the dominant predator in Central and South America and is considered a near-threatened species by the International Union Conservation Nature.

Research main points: -

Results are concerning for future viability of jaguar populations in Peruvian Amazon.

Stochastic statistical temporal model of jaguar abundance considers six population scenarios and estimates of prey species.

Jaguar diet includes white lipped peccary, collared peccary, red brochet deer, white tailed deer, agouti, paca and armadillo.

Species exhibit some robustness to extreme drought and flood, but repeated exposure can result in rapid decline.

Predictions show species can recover- at lower numbers - if there are periods of benign climate patterns.

Modelling provides framework to evaluate complex ecological problems using sparse information sources.

Professor Mengersen said the Pacaya Semiria Reserve covers 20,800 km2 in the Loreto region of the Peruvian Amazon, comprised of mostly primary forest.

"Estimates of jaguar numbers are difficult to achieve because the big cats are cryptic by nature, are not always uniquely identifiable, and their habitat can be hostile to humans," Professor Mengersen said.

The project drew on information gathered during a 2016 trip to the remote reserve, as well as a census study based on camera traps and scat analysis, jaguar ecology, and an elicitation study of Indigenous rangers in the Pacaya Samiria National Reserve.

Six jaguar population scenarios were analysed mapping the jungle creature's solitary behaviour, mating, births of cubs at certain times of the year, competition, illegal hunting, death from starvation and availability of key prey.

Professor Kevin Burrage cautioned the predicted results for the jaguars in the long-term were concerning.

"Our results imply that jaguars can cope with extreme drought and flood, but there is a very high probability that the population will crash if the conditions are repeated over short time periods. These scenarios are becoming more likely due to climate change," he said.

"The declines may be further exacerbated by hunting of both jaguars and their prey, as well as loss of habitat through deforestation."

Professor Burrage said scenario 1 estimated the jaguar population at 600-700 assuming stable prey availability while scenario 6 was an extreme case with drought and flood occurring every other year.

"In this worst-case scenario, prey levels could not recover, and jaguar populations was predicted to drop to single digits in 30 years' time," Professor Burrage said.

Automobile exhaust emitted by fossil-fuel-based vehicles, especially those operating on diesel, is known to be a major source of fine dust and greenhouse gases . Using biodiesel instead of diesel is an effective way of coping with climate change caused by greenhouse gases while reducing fine dust emission. However, the current method of producing biodiesel by chemically processing vegetable oil or waste cooking oil-such as palm or soybean oil-is limited because of the unreliable availability of raw materials.

Therefore, there is an active effort to develop biofuels by converting lignocellulosic biomass generated as a by-product of farming or logging, instead of consuming raw materials derived from food crops. Lignocellulosic biomass is an economical and sustainable raw material that can be converted to eco-friendly motor fuel through microbial metabolism.

Dr. Sun-Mi Lee and her team at the Clean Energy Research Center of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) have announced that they have developed a novel microorganism capable of producing biodiesel precursors from lignocellulosic biomass such as discarded agricultural by-products, waste paper, and cardboard boxes. This microorganism has achieved the product yield twice of what was obtainable from its predecessors.

This novel microorganism can produce biodiesel precursors during the process of metabolizing sugars contained in the lignocellulosic biomass that it feeds on. The sugar contained in lignocellulosic biomass is generally composed of 65-70% glucose and 30-35% xylose. While microorganisms that exist in nature are effective in producing diesel precursors by metabolizing glucose, they do not feed on xylose, thus limiting the yield of the raw materials.

To solve this problem, the KIST research team developed a new microorganism that can produce diesel precursors by effectively metabolizing xylose as well as glucose. In particular, the metabolic pathway of the microorganism was redesigned using genetic scissors to prevent interference with the supply of coenzymes essential for producing diesel precursors. The ability to metabolize xylose was improved by effectively controlling the process of evolution in a laboratory, for instance, by selecting and cultivating only those microorganisms that delivered excellent performance.

This confirmed the possibility of producing diesel precursors using all sugar components including xylose from lignocellulosic biomass, and the product yield was almost doubled, compared to that obtained in previous studies which employed metabolic pathways having unresolved coenzyme issues.

"Biodiesel is an effective alternative fuel that can reduce greenhouse gas and fine dust emissions without restricting the operation of existing diesel-fueled vehicles, and we developed a core technology that can improve the economic efficiency of biodiesel production," said Dr. Sun-Mi Lee of KIST. "At a time like this, when we feel climate change in our bones due to frequent typhoons and severe weather phenomena, expanded supply of biofuels that help us cope with climate change most quickly and effectively will facilitate the expansion of related industries and the development of technology."

How people work out the meanings of new words has been revealed by Lancaster University researchers, who say this is similar to the way in which young children learn language.

The research published in Cognition is by Professor Patrick Rebuschat and Professor Padraic Monaghan, who said: "Have you ever caught yourself saying long burbly streams of words to babies? A lot of what infants hear is "who's a lovely baby yes you are now where's teddy gone oh look here is teddy". How do babies begin to make sense of this burbling to figure out the language?"

There are two problems about language that young children have to solve:

1. they need to work out which sounds group together to form words and what these words mean

2. they need to understand how those words go together in sentences

These problems are interwoven, because to be able to acquire the meaning of words the child also needs to know what role they play in the sentence: is the word "teddy" about a thing, or what the thing is doing, or something else? And to figure out what a word's role is, the child needs to already know what it means.

Professor Rebuschat said: "This is a chicken-and-egg type of problem: Which comes first, the word or the sentence?"

To find out, the researchers tested how people learned new words and sentence by giving adults an artificial language to learn. They invented a language spoken by aliens and showed people sentences in alien language alongside scenes showing aliens carrying out different actions.

Over time, learners were able to acquire the words' meanings and their roles in the scenes - the names of the aliens, their colours, and the actions they were doing.

Learners do this by keeping track of all the associations between words and different aspects of the scenes across many learning trials before narrowing down to focus on those associations that are reliable.

The researchers said this method is similar to how young children learn.

Professor Rebuschat said: "So, when you say a sentence including "teddy", very often baby's teddy bear will be nearby and in view. When this occurs repeatedly over time, the child is able to figure out from "look at teddy" that "teddy" means that cuddly brown thing."

The only way to learn a new language is by keeping track of the words and grammar across hundreds of learning trials, a process called cross-situational statistical learning.

Professor Rebuschat said: "We knew children and adults can use this learning process to acquire individual words and very limited languages. But it was remarkable to witness that our participants could use this process to learn a highly complex language with considerable speed. It shows the power of humans' ability to keep track of all kinds of possible links between language and the world. This study shows us the way in which language can be learned in natural situations."

Professor Padraic Monaghan added: "We have discovered that the chicken-and-egg problem of learning language can be solved just by hearing lots of language and applying some very simple but very powerful learning to this. Our brains are clearly geared up to keep track of these links between words and the world. We know that infants already have the same power to their learning as adults, and we are confident that young children acquire language using the same types of learning as the adults in our study."

Scientists of Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU) with international collaborators propose direct magnetic writing of skyrmions, i.e. magnetic quasiparticles, and skyrmion lattices, within which it is possible to encode, transmit, process information, and produce topological patterns with a resolution of less than 100 nanometers. This brings closer miniaturized post-silicon electronics, new topological cryptography techniques, and green data centers, reducing the load on the Earth's ecosystem significantly. A related article appears in ACS Nano.

International scientific teams are intensively looking for alternative materials and approaches to replace silicon electronics devices based on CMOS technology (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor). The major drawback of this technology is the size of contemporary transistors based on it. Physical impossibility to further miniaturizing them implies the future development of the electronics industry is under question.

One of the promising alternatives to CMOS transistors is thin-film magnetic materials with layers from one to several nanometers thick, in which skyrmions, nontrivial magnetic structures, are formed under certain conditions.

In the study, researchers claim they have designed close-packed stable arrays of skyrmions via affecting a thin-film magnetic structure by the local magnetic field of a magnetic force microscope probe.

Thus, the team pioneered topological nanolithography, getting nanoscale topological patterns where each individual skyrmion acts as a pixel, just like in digital photography. Such skyrmion pixels are not visible in the optical range and to decode them, as well as to create them, one needs a magnetic force microscope.

"Skyrmions driven by current pulses can be used as basic elements mimic the action potential of biological neurons to create neuromorphic chips. Arrays of chips with each tiny neuron element communicating with another one by means of moving and interacting skyrmions, will have energy efficiency and high computing power", says Alexander Samardak, one of the authors of the research idea, FEFU Vice-President for Research. "Another interesting field is visual or topological cryptography. In that case, a message is encrypted as a topological pattern which is a set of ordered skyrmions. Deciphering such a message will require, first, knowledge of the coordinates of the nanoscale image and, second, the availability of a special gear as a magnetic force microscope with high sensitivity to stray fields of skyrmions. Attempting to hack the message with incorrectly selected parameters for reading the topological image will lead to its destruction. Currently, about 25 MB of information can be recorded on a square millimeter of a magnetic thin film. By reducing the size of skyrmions to 10 nm, a capacity of 2.5 Gb / mm2 can be achieved."

The limitation of the approach is that the speed of recording of information with local point magnetic fields. It is still very slow, which curbs the approach from mass implementation.

Alexander Samardak said that the team learned how to regulate the size and density of the skyrmions packing, controlling the scanning step (a distance between two adjacent scanning lines) with a probe of the magnetic force microscope. It expands the possible future applications. For example, if the skyrmions have a size of less than 100 nanometers, they can be used as a base for reservoir computing, reconfigurable logic, and magnonic crystals which are the basis of magnonic processors and microwave communication devices in the sub-THz and THz range. Such devices will be much more energy-efficient compared to existing electronics. That paves the way for future green and high-performance data centers.

"Skyrmion can be a carrier of information bits. That is possible due to the skyrmion polarization, i.e. positions "up" or "down" which relates to well-known "0" or "1". Hence, skyrmions can be basic elements for magnetic or racetrack memory. Such devices, in contrast to hard magnetic disks, will have no mechanical parts, bits of information will move by themselves. Moreover, ordered two-dimensional arrays of skyrmions can play the role of artificial magnonic crystals, through which not electric current but spin waves propagate transmitting information from a source to a receiver without heating the working elements," Alexey Ognev says, the first author of the article, Head of the FEFU Laboratory for thin-film technologies.

Using the developed technology, scientists plan to scale down the size of skyrmions and develop practical devices based on them.