Culture

WOODS HOLE, Mass. - The flashy Flamboyant Cuttlefish is among the most famous of the cephalopods (octopus, squid, and cuttlefish) - but it is widely misunderstood by its legions of fans.

A new paper from the Roger Hanlon laboratory at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, sets the record straight.

"This animal is well known in the Internet community, has been on TV many times, and is popular in public aquariums," Hanlon says. "In almost all cases, [its skin] is showing this brilliantly colorful flamboyant display."

But Hanlon's field studies in Indonesia, reported here, tell a different and richer story. "It turns out in nature, flamboyant cuttlefish are camouflaged nearly all of the time. They are nearly impossible to find," he says. In the blink of an eye, they can switch from some of "best camouflage known in the cephalopods" to their dazzling flamboyant display. But they only use this display on certain occasions: For elaborate male courtship rituals; or when males are fighting over a female; or to flash briefly at a threatening object when it approaches too close, presumably to scare it away.

"The flamboyant display is common when a diver approaches close enough to photograph, which is why the public may think this species always looks so colorful," Hanlon says. "But it is rare to see this species in flamboyant display in the wild."

A Flamboyant Courtship

The courtship displays by male flamboyant cuttlefish (Metasepia pfefferi) are among the most elaborate of all cephalopods! This study reveals new observations about the sex life of the flamboyant cuttlefish -- from courtship to mating to egg laying - gleaned from hours of video taken during many SCUBA dives in Indonesia with teams of volunteers.

Males, which tend to be significantly smaller than females, approach and court a camouflaged female with flamboyant displays and elaborate rituals, which include "waves" (rapidly waving three pairs of arms while displaying "passing cloud") and "kisses" (male darts forward and briefly, gently touches his arms to hers).

Females generally ignore males while they are courting; they stay camouflaged and motionless or just keep on foraging and hunting. Male courtship goes on non-stop for prolonged periods (6 to 52 minutes observed in this study).

In three observations, two males competed simultaneously for a female. Males can display flamboyant courtship signaling on one side of the body while flashing white (signaling aggression) on the other side toward the rival male.

In one case, male competition ended abruptly when one of the males, while facing the female and waving and kissing, backed into a camouflaged scorpionfish and was eaten! "Sex can have a real cost," Hanlon notes.

Females were choosy and often rejected courting males. Female receptivity was obvious when she widely spread her first three pairs of arms (while standing on the fourth pair of arms). The male would then swim within the arm crown and quickly deposit spermatophores in the buccal region where the seminal receptacle is located. Average duration of mating was only 2.89 seconds.

After fertilization, the successful male guarded the female for a while but not, curiously, up to egg laying, as is common with other cuttlefish. When another male was present, mate guarding was aggressive.

The female lays her eggs while camouflaged and staying still. She then pushes her eggs under a coconut shell and affixes them to the inside of the shell. When the hatchlings exit the egg case and jet away, they are fully formed and capable of camouflage and signaling.

Flamboyance for Secondary Defense

The primary mode of defense for both male and female Metasepia pfefferi is camouflage, and they remain camouflaged almost all the time. If a predator or threatening object (such as a diver) comes too close, though, the cuttlefish will flash the flamboyant display - switching from camouflaged to flamboyant in 700 milliseconds!

Elaborate Dynamic Signaling Rivaling That of Any Vertebrate

The vibrant colors (white, yellow, red and brown) of the flamboyant display are combined with apparent "waves" of dark brown color that produce a dazzling and dizzying kaleidoscope of motion, color, and patterning. The fast neural control of many thousands of chromatophore organs in the skin enable this unique signaling capability - all turned on or off in less than a second, and changed depending on the behavioral context of the courtship, or in the case of defense, the fish predators that discover them.

"Birds are renowned for highly evolved visual displays that depend partly on dramatic postural changes (with wings of different color and pattern, in particular), yet this invertebrate cuttlefish species has evolved equally dramatic and complex displays mainly with its skin coloration," Hanlon says.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- How we adapt to aging late in life may be genetically influenced, according to a study led by a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside.

The research, published in Aging Cell, has implications for how epigenetic factors relate to aging. Epigenesis is a process in which chemicals attached to DNA control its activity. Epigenetic changes, which can be passed on to offspring, may be critical to accelerated aging as well as declines in cognitive and physical functioning that often accompany aging. Epigenetic modifications resulting in altered gene expression may occur due to a number of biological processes, including one the researchers focused on: DNA methylation.

In DNA methylation, methyl groups are added to the DNA molecule. DNA has four different types of nucleotides: A, T, G, and C. DNA methylation occurs at the C bases of eukaryotic DNA. Changes in DNA methylation correlate strongly with aging.

Chandra Reynolds, a professor of psychology at UCR and her colleagues considered DNA methylation across a 10-year span in 96 pairs of same-sex aging Swedish and Danish twins -- the first longitudinal twin study to establish the extent to which genetic and environmental influences contribute to site-specific DNA methylation across time.

They found individual differences in blood DNA methylation measured at more than 350,000 sites in the aging twins across the epigenome are partly heritable in late life and longitudinally across a decade -- ages 69 to 79. These findings can help scientists better understand the genetic and environmental contributions to the stability and dynamics of methylation in aging and sets a stage for future work in diverse populations.

"We also found methylation sites previously associated with age and included in methylation 'clocks' are more heritable than the other remaining sites," said Reynolds, an expert on cognitive aging, who led the research. "The sites evidencing the greatest heritability reside in genes that participate in immune-inflammatory as well as neurotransmitter pathways. Sites that show less stability in methylation across 10 years reside in genes that participate in stress-related pathways."

The finding that age-related sites are among the most heritable supports the genetic regulation of biological aging rates, including regulation of how well people respond to environmental challenges, such as exposures to viruses like SARS-Cov-2, the virus that spreads COVID-19.

"Altered methylation patterns have been observed with aging, and as methylation differences may result in part from our experiences and behavior, they may be modifiable," Reynolds said. "Our results highlight that even in late life, amid the 'slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,' some of the individual differences in methylation are moderately heritable and contribute to methylation patterns 10 years later."

Reynolds further explained that genetic influences contribute to stability while nonshared factors accumulate in importance with age, signaling an increasing diversity of how people respond to environmental exposures. Heritability is due generally to stable genetic contributions, she said, but with an increasing role of nonshared environmental factors -- those unique to a person and not shared with her siblings -- across age.

According to Reynolds, DNA methylation sites related to aging are more heritable overall. This is consistent with the genetic regulation of biological aging rates, perhaps including sites in genes involved in immune-inflammatory pathways and neurotransmitter pathways, and explains how people adapt to health and aging conditions.

"The most heritable sites may participate in these pathways, which suggests that adaptions to aging and senescence may be differentially impacted by genetic background," she said. "That the most heritable or familial sites lie within genes that participate in immune-inflammatory pathways suggests that how we adapt to aging processes, including resistance to -- or challenges from -- illness, may be partly genetically regulated."

Between 2017 and 2030, an estimated 6.8 million fewer female births will be recorded in India than would be by chance, due to sex-selective abortions, according to a new study published August 19, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Fengqing Chao of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia, and colleagues.

There has been a reported imbalance in India in the sex ratio at birth (SRB) since the 1970s due to the emergence of prenatal sex selection and the cultural preference for male babies. Unlike other countries affected by such imbalances, India is unique in its regional diversity of sex ratio imbalance. Previous projections of sex ratio at birth in India have been constructed at the national level or were based primarily on expert opinion rather than reproducible modeling.

In the new study, researchers projected the SRB in the largest 29 Indian States and Union Territories (UTs), which covered 98.4% of the total population of India as of the year 2011.

Among the 21 Indian States/Uts with high quality birth data, 17 showed a positive effective of son preference on the SRB, with the highest SRBs concentrated in the most northwestern States/UTs. In particular, the effect of son preference is statistically significant in nine States/UTs. For the whole of India, summing up the 29 state-level projections, the cumulative number of missing female births during 2017 to 2030 is projected to be 6.8 million (95% CI 6.6-7.0 million). The average annual number of missing female births between 2017 and 2025 is projected to be 469,000 (456,000-483,000) per year and is projected to increase to 519,000 (485,000-552,000) per year for the time period 2026 to 2030. The projects represent an essential input for population projection models in India, especially at the sub-national level.

The authors add: "We project that the highest deficits in female births will occur in Uttar Pradesh, with a cumulative number of missing female births of 2 million from 2017 to 2030. The total female birth deficits during 2017-2030 for the whole of India is projected to be 6.8 million."

A new study of Black residents of four distinct U.S. cities reveals variations in genetic ancestry and social status that underscore the inadequacy of using skin color as a proxy for race in research. Dede Teteh of City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, California, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on August 19, 2020.

Social science and biomedical research often treat the U.S. Black population--people of recent African descent, including African American, African, and Caribbean persons--as a homogeneous group, using skin color as a proxy for race. However, this approach ignores geographic variations in ancestry and social attainment that could provide more nuanced information.

In a first-of-its-kind study, Teteh and colleagues analyzed and compared skin color, genetic ancestry, and social attainment of 259 Black residents of Norman, Oklahoma; Cincinnati, Ohio; Harlem, New York; and Washington, DC. Each of these cities has a unique history that has shaped its racial structure today.

Statistical analysis revealed between-city differences in ancestry, skin pigmentation, and social attainment. It also showed that men were more likely to be married if they had darker skin color, and women if they had lighter skin color. People with darker skin color and a greater degree of West African ancestry were more likely to have attained graduate degrees and professional jobs than people with lighter skin.

These findings highlight and deepen understanding of the complexity and heterogeneity of race, ancestry, and social attainment in the U.S., especially variations between geographic regions. While the sample size is small, this study supports the importance of considering local social context and genetic ancestry when conducting social science or biomedical research.

The authors add: "This study expands our knowledge of the complexity of race, ancestry, and social attainment across four cities in the United States. Our findings support the heterogeneity of the African American population in the U.S. due to regional differences and local history. Thus, the African American population should not be viewed as a singular entity, but as individual groups with their own local social histories and genetic backgrounds."

MINNEAPOLIS - Disturbed sleep patterns do not cause Alzheimer's disease but people who are at high genetic risk of developing Alzheimer's disease may be more likely to be a "morning person," have shorter sleep duration and other measures of sleep disturbance and are less likely to have insomnia, according to a study published in the August 19, 2020, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

"We know that people with Alzheimer's disease often report depression and various sleep problems, like insomnia," said study author Abbas Dehghan, Ph.D., of Imperial College London in the United Kingdom. "We wanted to find out if there are causal relationships between different sleep patterns and depression and Alzheimer's."

To evaluate the relationship between different sleep patterns, major depressive disorder, and Alzheimer's disease, researchers analyzed the result of different genetic studies collected from databases that included: 21,982 people diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease who were compared to 41,944 without Alzheimer's disease; 9,240 with major depressive disorder who were compared to 9,519 without major depressive disorder; and 446,118 people with measurements of sleep-related characteristics.

Risk of Alzheimer's was determined based on genetic studies where Alzheimer's was diagnosed by autopsy or clinical examination.

Researchers analysed the genetic information using a study design called Mendelian randomization that can determine if there is cause and effect.

Researchers found no evidence that sleep-related characteristics caused Alzheimer's disease. They also found no evidence of cause and effect between major depressive disorder and Alzheimer's.

Researchers did find a small association between the following: people with twice the genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease were 1% more likely to call themselves "morning people" compared to people at lower genetic risk; and people with twice the genetic risk of Alzheimer's had a 1% lower risk of insomnia. However, this effect of this association is small and shows only a possible link, not cause and effect.

A limitation of the study was that most of the people in the study were of European ancestry, so the results may not apply to the people of different ethnicity.

MINNEAPOLIS - While movement problems are the main symptoms of Parkinson's disease, people with the disease often have non-motor symptoms such as constipation, daytime sleepiness and depression 10 or more years before the movement problems start. A new study suggests that eating a healthy diet in middle age may be linked to having fewer of these preceding symptoms. The study is published in the August 19, 2020, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

"While this study does not show cause and effect, it certainly provides yet another reason for getting more vegetables, nuts and legumes in your diet," said study author Samantha Molsberry, Ph.D., of Harvard University in Boston, Mass. "More research is needed to determine whether eating a healthy diet could delay or even prevent the development of Parkinson's disease among people who have these preceding symptoms already."

The study involved 47,679 people who were asked about their diet every four years starting in the 1980s when they were middle-aged. Then in 2012, people were asked whether they had two conditions that are common in people who are later diagnosed with Parkinson's disease: constipation and a sleep disorder called rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder, which includes acting out dreams during sleep by movement such as flailing arms or shouting or screaming. In 2014-2015, 17,400 of the participants were asked about five more symptoms that can precede Parkinson's disease: loss of sense of smell, impaired color vision, excessive daytime sleepiness, body pain and depression.

The researchers looked at how closely people's diets followed either the alternate Mediterranean diet, which is similar to the Mediterranean diet but includes only whole grains and does not consider dairy, or the Alternative Healthy Eating Index. Both diets encourage eating fruit, vegetables, whole grains, nuts and legumes and discourage eating red meat. They divided the participants into five groups based on how closely they followed the diets.

The study found that the people with the highest adherence to the diets were less likely to have three or more symptoms that precede Parkinson's disease than the people with the lowest adherence. Those in the high group for adherence to the Mediterranean diet were 33% less likely to have three or more symptoms than those in the low adherence group. These results were found after researchers adjusted for other factors that could affect the risk of developing these preceding symptoms, such as physical activity, smoking and body mass index (BMI). The researchers found a similarly strong relationship between following the Alternative Healthy Eating Index diet pattern and having three or more of these non-motor symptoms.

Among the 29,899 women in the study, 37% of the low adherence group had constipation, compared to 32% of the high adherence group. Among the 11,493 women with all of the non-motor symptoms measured, 15% of the low group had body pain, compared to 13% of the high group. In the same 11,493 women, 17% of the low group had symptoms of depression, compared to 14% of the high group. Among the 17,770 men in the study, 22% in the low adherence group had constipation, compared to 12% of the high adherence group. Among the 5,907 men with data on all of the non-motor symptoms, 14% of the low group and 16% had body pain and 13% of the low group and 12% of the high group had symptoms of depression. Molsberry noted that body pain and depression may have occurred at a higher rate in the study than in the general population due to the study design, but that this was also accounted for in the statistical analysis.

Looking at individual food groups, the researchers found that eating more vegetables, nuts, legumes and consuming a moderate amount of alcohol were all associated with a lower risk of having three or more of the preceding symptoms. Moderate alcohol consumption was considered no more than one drink per day for women and no more than two drinks per day for men.

"We need to emphasize that, while these symptoms are associated with an increased risk of Parkinson's disease, especially in combination, experiencing any or several of these symptoms does not necessarily mean that a person will eventually develop Parkinson's disease," Molsberry said.

A limitation of the study was that participants were not asked about preceding symptoms at the start of the study, so some people may have already had these symptoms, which could have influenced their diet.

Like biological fat reserves store energy in animals, a new rechargeable zinc battery integrates into the structure of a robot to provide much more energy, a team led by the University of Michigan has shown.

This approach to increasing capacity will be particularly important as robots shrink to the microscale and below--scales at which current stand-alone batteries are too big and inefficient.

"Robot designs are restricted by the need for batteries that often occupy 20% or more of the available space inside a robot, or account for a similar proportion of the robot's weight," said Nicholas Kotov, the Joseph B. and Florence V. Cejka Professor of Engineering, who led the research.

Applications for mobile robots are exploding, from delivery drones and bike-lane take-out bots to robotic nurses and warehouse robots. On the micro side, researchers are exploring swarm robots that can self-assemble into larger devices. Multifunctional structural batteries can potentially free up space and reduce weight, but until now they could only supplement the main battery.

"No other structural battery reported is comparable, in terms of energy density, to today's state-of-the-art advanced lithium batteries. We improved our prior version of structural zinc batteries on 10 different measures, some of which are 100 times better, to make it happen," Kotov said.

The combination of energy density and inexpensive materials means that the battery may already double the range of delivery robots, he said.

"This is not the limit, however. We estimate that robots could have 72 times more power capacity if their exteriors were replaced with zinc batteries, compared to having a single lithium ion battery," said Mingqiang Wang, first author and recently a visiting researcher to Kotov's lab.

The new battery works by passing hydroxide ions between a zinc electrode and the air side through an electrolyte membrane. That membrane is partly a network of aramid nanofibers--the carbon-based fibers found in Kevlar vests--and a new water-based polymer gel. The gel helps shuttle the hydroxide ions between the electrodes.

Made with cheap, abundant and largely nontoxic materials, the battery is more environmentally friendly than those currently in use. The gel and aramid nanofibers will not catch fire if the battery is damaged, unlike the flammable electrolyte in lithium ion batteries. The aramid nanofibers could be upcycled from retired body armor.

To demonstrate their batteries, the researchers experimented with regular-sized and miniaturized toy robots in the shape of a worm and a scorpion. The team replaced their original batteries with zinc-air cells. They wired the cells into the motors and wrapped them around the outsides of the creepy crawlers.

"Batteries that can do double duty--to store charge and protect the robot's 'organs'--replicate the multifunctionality of fat tissues serving to store energy in living creatures," said Ahmet Emre, a doctoral student in biomedical engineering in Kotov's lab.

The downside of zinc batteries is that they maintain high capacity for about 100 cycles, rather than the 500 or more that we expect from the lithium ion batteries in our smartphones. This is because the zinc metal forms spikes that eventually pierce the membrane between the electrodes. The strong aramid nanofiber network between the electrodes is the key to the relatively long cycle life for a zinc battery. And the inexpensive and recyclable materials make the batteries easy to replace.

Beyond the advantages of the battery's chemistry, Kotov says that the design could enable a shift from a single battery to distributed energy storage, using graph theory approach developed at U-M.

"We don't have a single sac of fat, which would be bulky and require a lot of costly energy transfer," Kotov said. "Distributed energy storage, which is the biological way, is the way to go for highly efficient biomorphic devices."

What The Study Did: This observational study examined the association between state participation in Medicaid expansion through the Affordable Care Act and changes in the use of surgical care for common outpatient procedures.

Authors: Saunders Lin, M.D., of New York University in New York, is the corresponding author.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamasurg.2020.2959)

Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

An international team of researchers have discovered a dense, cold gas that's been shot out from the centre of the Milky Way "like bullets".

Exactly how the gas has been ejected is still a mystery, but the research team, including Professor Naomi McClure-Griffiths from The Australian National University (ANU), say their findings could have important implications for the future of our galaxy.

"Galaxies can be really good at shooting themselves in the foot," Professor McClure-Griffiths said.

"When you drive out a lot of mass, you're losing some of the material that could be used to form stars, and if you lose enough of it, the galaxy can't form stars at all anymore.

"So, to be able to see hints of the Milky Way losing this star forming gas is kind of exciting - it makes you wonder what's going to happen next!"

The study also raises new questions about what's happening in our galactic centre right now.

"The wind at the centre of the Milky Way has been the topic of plenty of debate since the discovery a decade ago of the so-called Fermi Bubbles - two giant orbs filled with hot gas and cosmic rays," Professor McClure-Griffiths said.

"We've observed there's not only hot gas coming from the centre of our galaxy, but also cold and very dense gas.

"This cold gas is much heavier, so moves around less easily."

The centre of the Milky Way is home to a massive black hole, but it's unclear whether this black hole has expelled the gas, or whether it was blown by the thousands of massive stars at the centre of the galaxy.

"We don't know how either the black hole or the star formation can produce this phenomenon. We're still looking for the smoking gun, but it gets more complicated the more we learn about it," lead author Dr Enrico Di Teodoro from Johns Hopkins University said.

"This is the first time something like this has been observed in our galaxy. We see these kind of processes happening in other galaxies. But, with external galaxies you get much more massive black holes, star formation activity is higher, it makes it easier for the galaxy to expel material.

"And these other galaxies are obviously a long way away, we can't see them in a lot of detail.

"Our own galaxy is almost like a laboratory that we can actually get into and try to understand how things work by looking at them up close."

Rising temperatures due to our greenhouse gas emissions can cause greater damages to our economies than previous research suggested, a new study shows. Scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the Mercator Research Institute for Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) took a closer look at what climate change does to regions at the sub-national level, such as US states, Chinese provinces or French départments, based on a first-of-its-kind dataset by MCC. If CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels are not reduced rapidly, a global warming of 4°C until 2100 can make that regions lose almost 10% of economic output on average and more than 20% in the tropics.

"Climate damages hit our businesses and jobs, not just polar bears and coral reefs," says Leonie Wenz from PIK, one of the two authors of the study. "Rising temperatures make us less productive which is relevant in particular for outdoor work in the construction industry or agriculture. They affect our harvests and they mean extra stress and thus costs for our infrastructure as for instance computer centres need to be cooled. By statistically evaluating climate and economic data from the past decades, we found that the aggregated economic damages from rising temperatures are even greater than previously estimated because we looked at the sub-national effects which provide a more comprehensive picture than national averages."

Damages from weather extremes would come on top

Previous research suggested that a 1°C hotter year reduces economic output by about 1%, whereas the new analysis points to output losses of up to three times that much in warm regions. Using these numbers as a benchmark for computing future damages of further greenhouse gas emissions, the researchers find significant economic losses: 10% on a global average and more than 20% in the tropics by 2100. This is still a conservative assessment since the study did not take into account damages from, for example, extreme weather events and sea-level rise, which will also be substantial but are hard to pin down for single regions.

The new insight was made possible by building a novel MCC-dataset of climate and economy for 1500 regions in 77 states around the world that, for some regions, dates back to the 1900s. Data coverage is best for industrialized countries, however, with economic information lacking in particular for large parts of Africa. While the calculations show a substantial impact on economic production, they do less so for permanent economic growth reductions, which might be a reason for hope once emissions are reduced. Importantly, the damages are distributed very unevenly across the world with tropical and already poor regions suffering most from continued warming whereas a few countries in the North might even profit.

The economic cost of each tonne of CO2 emissions: 70-140 US-dollars

The findings have important implications for climate policy, and namely CO2 pricing. "If you update the widely-used climate-economy model DICE developed by Nobel prize winner William Nordhaus with the statistical estimates from our data, the costs of each tonne of carbon emitted to society are two to four times higher," highlights the lead-author of the study, Matthias Kalkuhl from MCC. "According to our study, every tonne of CO2 emitted in 2020 will cause economic damage amounting to a cost between 73 to 142 dollars in 2010 prices, rather than 37 dollars shown by the DICE model. By 2030, the so-called social cost of carbon will already be almost 30 percent higher due to rising temperatures."

By way of comparison: the carbon price in European emissions trading currently fluctuates between 20 and 30 euros per tonne; the national carbon price in Germany rises from 25 euros next year to 55 euros in 2025. These current carbon prices thus reflect only a small part of the actual climate damage. According to the polluter-pays principle, they would need to be adjusted upwards significantly.

New research looking at voters' perception of gender and aspiration suggests that voters do not penalise ambitious women candidates seeking political office, contrary to popular belief.

The study, published in the US journal Political Behavior, challenges the long-held assumption that negative views about ambition are standing in the way of female candidates in politics.

Following Hillary Clinton's unsuccessful bid for the White House in 2016 a notion that 'unbridled ambition' had cost her votes gained traction. Then-President Obama suggested that ambition might be a political liability for women, but not men.

To test this hypothesis the researchers from the universities of Bath and Harvard, developed a four-part framework to evaluate public perceptions towards different aspects of ambition among female candidates.

This looked at ambition as multidimensional: 'progressive' (i.e. aiming for higher office); 'personalistic' (i.e. personality traits, including being determined to succeed and a tough negotiator); 'agenda-based' (i.e. the scope of their proposed policies); 'parental' (i.e. juggling family responsibilities with public life).

The political scientists then tested voters' reactions to these 'ambitious' traits across a sample of nearly 4000 respondents both in the US and UK. In their experiments, people evaluated pairs of hypothetical candidates against information about both their ambition and gender.

Results from their experiments which ran from 2017 to 2020 found that overall female candidates with these traits were not punished - in fact, they were slightly favoured. Yet, there were some differences in acceptance for ambitious women across parties.

In the States, Democrats were more supportive of women with progressive ambition than Republicans (a gap of 7% points). This suggests that ambitious right-wing female candidates in the US might face bias, particularly in the context of non-partisan races (primaries and local elections) when voters are unable to rely on party labels to make decisions. In the UK, they found no differences in attitudes towards female candidates across party affiliation.

They found some evidence that women were more likely to support female candidates with both progressive and agenda-based ambition, compared to men. But they say these differences are not significant across all survey samples. While ambitious political agendas are favoured by voters, they found no significant differences in voters' willingness to support female versus male candidates with ambitious agendas. Parent status was not found to be associated with candidate ambition.

Researcher, Dr Ana Catalano Weeks from the Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies at the University of Bath explains: "For a long time a popular belief has persisted that ambitious women seeking political office get penalised by voters, but our results suggest no evidence to support this assumption. Ambition, including for women, is not a negative trait for voters - if anything it's attractive, especially for Democratic voters.

"Women remain underrepresented in parties and parliaments and one of the reasons might be not the voters, but elites within parties who often play a gatekeeping role. Women might also perceive that they will face additional discrimination if they are perceived as ambitious. This research should act as a rallying cry to women seeking political office not to downplay their aspirations."

Study co-author Dr Sparsha Saha of Harvard University's Department of Government adds: "Our research is part of a line of recent studies which suggest that voter discrimination is not the cause of women's underrepresentation in advanced democracies, and that norms about women with traditionally 'masculine' traits like ambition are changing."

The team now plan to look at perceptions towards ambition in the context of race and ethnicity. They acknowledge that attitudes towards ambitiousness in ethnic minority women may be different in important ways from evaluations of white women.

They also plan to extend their work to see if it holds across other advanced democracies including in Germany, Finland and New Zealand all with prominent female political leaders, and to further explore how history, context, and institutions matter.

A team of researchers at DESY has reached an important milestone on the road to the particle accelerator of the future. For the first time, a so-called laser plasma accelerator has run for more than a day while continuously producing electron beams. The LUX beamline, jointly developed and operated by DESY and the University of Hamburg, achieved a run time of 30 hours. "This brings us a big step closer to the steady operation of this innovative particle accelerator technology," says DESY's Andreas R. Maier, the leader of the group. The scientists are reporting on their record in the journal Physical Review X. "The time is ripe to move laser plasma acceleration from the laboratory to practical applications," adds the director of DESY's Accelerator Division, Wim Leemans.

Physicists hope that the technique of laser plasma acceleration will lead to a new generation of powerful and compact particle accelerators offering unique properties for a wide range of applications. In this technique, a laser or energetic particle beam creates a plasma wave inside a fine capillary. A plasma is a gas in which the gas molecules have been stripped of their electrons. LUX uses hydrogen as the gas.

"The laser pulses plough their way through the gas in the form of narrow discs, stripping the electrons from the hydrogen molecules and sweeping them aside like a snow plough," explains Maier, who works at the Centre for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL), a joint enterprise between DESY, the University of Hamburg and the Max Planck Society. "Electrons in the wake of the pulse are accelerated by the positively charged plasma wave in front of them - much like a wakeboarder rides the wave behind the stern of a boat."

This phenomenon allows laser plasma accelerators to achieve acceleration strengths that are up to a thousand times greater than what could be provided by today's most powerful machines. Plasma accelerators will enable more compact and powerful systems for a wide range of applications, from fundamental research to medicine. A number of technical challenges still need to be overcome before these devices can be put to practical use. "Now that we are able to operate our beamline for extended periods of time, we will be in a better position to tackle these challenges," explains Maier.

During the record-breaking nonstop operation, the physicists accelerated more than 100,000 electron bunches, one every second. Thanks to this large dataset, the properties of the accelerator, the laser and the bunches can be correlated and analysed much more precisely. "Unwanted variations in the electron beam can be traced back to specific points in the laser, for example, so that we now know exactly where we need to start in order to produce an even better particle beam," says Maier. "This approach lays the foundations for an active stabilisation of the beams, such as is deployed on every high performance accelerator in the world," explains Leemans.

According to Maier, the key to success was combining expertise from two different fields: plasma acceleration and know-how in stable accelerator operation." Both are available at DESY, which is unparalleled in the world in this respect," Maier emphasises. According to him, numerous factors contributed to the accelerator's stable long-term operation, from vacuum technology and laser expertise to a comprehensive and sophisticated control system. "In principle, the system could have kept running for even longer, but we stopped it after 30 hours," reports Maier. "Since then, we have repeated such runs three more times."

"This work demonstrates that laser plasma accelerators can generate a reproducible and controllable output. This provides a concrete basis for developing this technology further, in order to build future accelerator-based light sources at DESY and elsewhere," Leemans summarises.

PULLMAN, Wash. - Washington State University researchers have made a key first step in economically converting plant materials to fuels: keeping iron from rusting.

The researchers have determined how to keep iron from rusting in important chemical reactions that are needed to convert plant materials to fuels, meaning that the cheap and readily available element could be used for cost-effective biofuels conversion.

Led by Yong Wang, Voiland Distinguished Professor in the Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, and Shuai Wang from the State Key Laboratory for Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces at Xiamen University, the researchers report on their work on the cover of the July issue of ACS Catalysis.

Researchers have been trying to find more efficient ways to create fuels and chemicals from renewable plant-based resources, such as from algae, crop waste, or forest residuals. But, these bio-based fuels tend to be more expensive with less energy density than fossil fuels.

One big hurdle in using plant-based feedstocks for fuel is that oxygen has to be removed from them before they can be used.

"You want to use the cheapest catalyst to remove the oxygen," said Jean-Sabin McEwen, a co-author on the paper and associate professor in the Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering.  "Iron is a good choice because it's super abundant."

Iron-based catalysts show great promise for being able to remove oxygen, but because the plant materials also contain oxygen, the iron oxidizes, or rusts, during the reaction, and then the reaction stops working. The trick is to get the iron to remove the oxygen from the plants without taking up so much oxygen that the reaction stops.

In their work, the researchers anchored their iron catalyst with a carbon structure that was modified to incorporate nitrogen. The structure modifies the properties of the iron, so that it interacts less with oxygen while it continues to do the required work of removing oxygen from the plant material. The researchers used the nitrogen as a sort of control dial to tune the iron's interaction with oxygen.

In another recently published paper in Chemical Science led by Yong Wang and Junming Sun, a research assistant professor in the Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering,  the researchers discovered a durable iron-based catalyst with a thin carbon graphene layer around it. The graphene layer protected the iron while cesium ions allowed the researchers to tailor its electronic properties for the desired reaction.

"We dialed down the oxygen reaction," Sun said. "By protecting iron and tuning its properties, these works provide the scientific basis for using earth abundant and cost-effective iron as catalysts for biomass conversion."

The researchers are now working to better understand the chemistry of the reactions, so they can further increase the reactivity of the iron catalysts. They also will need to try their catalysts with real feedstocks instead of the model compounds used for the study. The feedstocks collected from farm fields will be more complicated in their compositions with a lot of impurities, and the researchers would also have to integrate their catalyst into a series of steps that are used in the conversion process.

"We are trying to make the conversion as economically as possible," Wang said.  "The key is trying to find robust catalysts based on low-cost, earth abundant elements. This is a first step in that direction."

Over the past two decades, a new area at the interface of semiconductor physics, electronics and quantum mechanics has been gaining popularity among theoretical physicists and experimenters. This new field is called spintronics, and one of its main tasks is to learn how to control the spin of charge carriers in well known semiconductor structures. Many theoretical efforts are always required before some idea finds its embodiment in an actual device, and so far theoretical work on spintronics has been outweighing experimental research.

Denis Khomitsky, Associate Professor of Theoretical Physics Department at Lobachevsky University together with postgraduate student Ekaterina Lavrukhina in collaboration with Professor Evgeny Sherman from the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao (Spain) have proposed a new model that describes electron spin behavior in a semiconductor nanowire with a deep quantum dot (an area where electron movement is confined by electrodes), where spin behavior can be controlled by means of a periodic electric field.

It is known that in materials with strong spin-orbital interactions it is possible to control the electron spin without switching the magnetic field. Instead, the control can be achieved by applying a periodic electric field at a specially selected frequency.

This phenomenon, called electric dipole spin resonance, has been known for quite some time, but its practical application is still limited and there is a need for such technology.

"In the proposed model, we have elucidated the role of the continuum states with energies "above" the quantum dot, to which the electron will inevitably "make its way" or tunnel under the action of a sufficiently strong field in the process of resonance. It turns out that to accelerate the spin flip, which is very desirable in electronics and spintronics, there is no need to have very strong electric fields, because in such fields the electron tunnels into the continuum too quickly, and the projection of its spin begins to "fade" with time, taking away valuable information", says Denis Khomitsky who is in charge of this research project at Lobachevsky University.

Hence, a practically important conclusion: it is necessary to choose an optimum interval of control fields in such structures, which will make it possible to flip the electron spin quickly and "carefully" enough not to lose the valuable information.

The team is led by Associate Professor Ayrat Kayumov (Department of Genetics, Kazan Federal University). In this research, the scientists not only performed genome sequencing, but also found a completely new type of PII-Like Protein PotN.

"PII proteins can be called molecular processors," explains Kayumov. "They monitor the ratios of metabolites in a cell which signal the availability of energy, carbon and nitrogen sufficiency, and, depending on this data, they can rearrange the cell functioning. We found a new type of PII-like proteins in this Lactobacillus hilgardii LMG 7934, and it has different functions. We now have to understand which signals trigger the activity of this type of proteins and how cell metabolism is coordinated as a result."

The research is funded by the Presidential Grant Program of Russia for Young Scientists with DSc degrees.

"Our projects aims to characterize molecular mechanisms which allow bacteria to use nitrogen-containing compounds. This can help correct the bacterial metabolism in such a way that it could work in a targeted direction, such as nitrate consumption," continues the interviewee.

For instance, this may come in handy for biological purification and remediation of polluted water sources or to ensilage livestock feed with high nitrate ratios. Excessive nitrates in food can be detrimental to animals.

"Nitrates amass in plants when nitrogen-containing fertilizers are used. These nitrates transform into nitrites during storage or directly in animal gut. Nitrites turn blood hemoglobin into methemoglobin, which leads to oxygen deficiency, including acute forms," says Kayumov. "During ensilaging, gases are produced, and fresh silage is very poisonous. Silage gases contain molecular oxygen, nitrous oxide, nitrous dioxide, and nitric oxide. During ensilaging, nitrates can also be reduced to ammonium. That's why it's important to abide by technological norms to decrease the ratio of nitrates in feed. However, if source plants have over 0.28% of nitrates, ensilaging cannot effectively reduce their ratio."

That's why geneticists aim to produce special ferments for feed ensilaging based on lactobacilli - the latter can help remove nitrates. Targeted genetic modification is a way to achieve exactly that.