Culture

WASHINGTON, May 26, 2020 -- Affecting up to 4% of patients older than 65 years, atrial fibrillation ranks among the most common heart conditions. Described by health professionals as an "irregularly irregular" heart rhythm, episodes of atrial fibrillation continue to prove difficult to predict.

An international team of researchers, led by Boon Leong Lan, at Monash University Malaysia, has proposed a way to define cardiac state and has studied the dynamics of the state before the cardiac rhythm changes from normal sinus to AF rhythm and vice versa. The work, appearing in Chaos, by AIP Publishing, and based on critical transition theory, looks to provide an early warning for those with paroxysmal atrial fibrillation with potential implications for future wearable devices.

The paper points a path forward for better screening for paroxysmal atrial fibrillation and may lead to more successful interventions when an atrial fibrillation episode has started.

"The flickering of the cardiac state could provide an early warning for the onset of paroxysmal atrial fibrillation for patients who are wearing a device that can measure the heartbeats accurately to monitor their cardiac state," said Lan. "This early warning would be useful if there is a medicine that the patient could take to prevent the onset."

It is not obvious how the cardiac state should be defined using just the electrocardiogram time series data. Lan said that their definition of the cardiac state, which is based on the changes between successive beat-to-beat intervals, was inspired by his previous work. He and his collaborator previously discovered that the distribution of the beat-interval changes can discriminate subjects with sustained atrial fibrillation from healthy ones very well.

Their new approach shows the cardiac state flickers back and forth between near normal and near atrial fibrillation states, resulting in a bimodal distribution of states before atrial fibrillation starts or terminates.

Others have proposed that dynamical transitions in a host of different realms from climate to stock markets to medicine are preceded by critical slowing down as the tipping point is reached. In critical slowing down, the rate of recovery from even a small perturbation approaches zero.

Lan and colleagues found that critical slowing down did not precede the onset of atrial fibrillation.

Lan is optimistic their method of defining the state of a complex system can be adapted to study critical transition in other chronic episodic diseases, such as epileptic seizure, asthma and ulcers, and other complex systems like an electrical power system or climate system.

He and his group are currently studying the changes in the brain state before epileptic seizures using their approach.

Early Muslim communities in Africa ate a cosmopolitan diet as the region became a trading centre for luxury goods, the discovery of thousands of ancient animal bones has shown.

Halal butchery practices became common when Islam spread through Ethiopia as vibrant communities developed because of the import and export of products around the Red Sea, and to Egypt, India, and the Arabian Peninsula, archaeologists have found.

New excavations at three sites in the east of the country completed by the University of Exeter and the Ethiopian Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage have uncovered around 50,000 animal bones dating from the eighth/ninth centuries onwards, and showing people living there at this early time ate a Muslim diet 400 years before major Mosques or burial sites were built in the 12th century.

The team, led by Professor Timothy Insoll, and involving archaeozoologist Jane Gaastra from the University of Exeter's Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies, found the first evidence in Africa for ancient halal butchery during the excavations, at Harlaa, Harar, and Ganda Harla.

Previous excavations led by Professor Insoll have revealed the Mosques and burial sites, as well as the remains of luxury materials such as ceramics from China and Egypt, marine shell from the Red Sea and beads from India.

Harlaa was established in the 6th and 7th centuries before Islam arrived in Ethiopia. It was abandoned in the 15th century when Harlaa and Ganda Harlaa were established, possibly because of plague or environmental change, and with the increasing spread of Islam better places to farm could be lived in.

During the period from which the animal bones date people may have been using smaller Mosques not yet discovered by archaeologists, and built larger buildings for worship as Muslim communities grew.

Professor Insoll said: "We didn't expect to find bones of this quality and quantity. They are so well preserved that we can clearly see both cuts and evidence of wear. We've also found bones in both residential areas and places of work.

"This is significant new information about people's religious identity at the time. It shows in the early days of Islam in the region people were just starting to adopt religious practices, so were sometimes pragmatic and didn't follow all of them."

Analysis of wear on the bones show cattle were used for ploughing and turning grinding stones, and other species such as camels, horses, and donkeys, may have been used as pack animals to carry trade goods and other commodities. Analysis of the age data of cattle bones at Harlaa indicated 80 to 90 per cent of animals survived beyond 3 years of age, showing they were kept for milk or for work rather than bred to eat.

Archaeologists found the remains of pigs in Harlaa and Ganda Harlaa, which could have been domesticated or wild, unexpected in an Islamic area, as pigs are haram, ot forbidden in Islamic halal diet. This suggests the region was cosmopolitan, with visitors and residents from different areas and with different religions. Another explanation could be that early Muslims in the area ate pork during this period for practical reasons. No pig remains were found at Harar, which was a city of Muslim scholarship and pilgrimage. Similar halal butchery techniques were used in all three sites, showing the influence of Muslim traders who arrived in the area and the spread of Islam to first Harlaa, and then Harar and Ganda Harla.

People also ate and hunted warthog, bushpig, aardvark, porcupine, hare, gennet, mongoose and leopard.

At Harlaa researchers also found evidence of marine fish imported from the Red Sea some 120 kilometres away. These had all been processed prior to being sent to Harlaa, either in dried or salted form to preserve them. This was indicated by the complete absence of fish heads showing these had been removed, probably at the Red Sea coast. No local freshwater fish species were found suggesting the people eating the fish were used to a sophisticated diet.

Similar animal body portions were found at each site, indicating wealth or status may not have been a factor in access to meat.

The study, published in the Journal of African Archaeology, indicates that the discarded remains of meals eaten many hundreds of years ago can provide very important information on diet, but also religious conversion, trade, and the use of animals for transport and work purposes in Islamic societies in Africa which have been largely neglected by archaeologists.

This release has been removed by request of the submitting institution. Please contact Valérie Geneux for more information: valerie.geneux@epfl.ch

Smart devices that measure electrical signals from your skin have the potential to tell you about your stress levels, help your sports performances and allow you to track your emotions.

An international team of researchers from Sweden and the UK have developed an innovative way of interpreting biological signals produced by the conductance of our skin. Using data obtained using a Philips wrist-worn wearable sensor device that also include an accelerometer to measure movement, the researchers’ system displays information in the form of colourful spiral graphics in real time on a smart phone, as well as a recording of data, for the wearer to interpret and reflect on.

Skin conductance is a measure of how much someone sweats, indicating their emotional reactions as well as physical reactions and is the basis for technologies such as lie detectors.

The prototype visualisation system called ‘Affective Health’, was developed by experts in Human-Computer Interaction looking into how new and emerging computer technologies, such as those using data extracted from sensors on the skin, can be used to design engaging visualisations on smart phones.

Dr Pedro Sanches, senior researcher at KTH - Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, and lead researcher on the study said:

“Our bodies produce a wide range of signals that can be measured. Many useful devices that measure these signals, which we call biodata, have proliferated over the years – such as heart-rate monitors for sports. However, there are other areas of biodata that are yet to be fully developed – such as skin conductance or perspiration levels. Making sense of these kinds of biodata is not easy. People are unfamiliar with this kind of information and it is not clear how people would want to use it, or interact with devices that present this biodata.”

A study group of 23 people were given the Affective Health prototype to use for a month. Importantly, the researchers deliberately did not tell the participants what the devices were useful for. Instead, they gave guidelines that Affective Health could collect information relating to both physical and emotional reactions, how increased sweating increased the conductivity, and how this was represented by different colours. Participants were left to decide the best ways of using the technology.

The researchers found that this open design stage of the study, without providing pre-specified uses, led to some participants using the system as a tool to measure, and help manage, their stress levels.

While others, including elite athletes, used the device to get information on their training and recovery regimes.

Other uses included logging information on their lives, and tracking emotions. But interestingly, few would use the technology for more than one purpose.

Prof Kristina Höök, of Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden said:

“We were surprised at how much the wearers’ initial categorisation of the system coloured how they used it. If they looked upon it as a sports tool, they did not even ’see’ the data that spoke of stress or emotional reactions. If they looked upon it as an emotion measuring tool, they did not see the data that spoke of social processes or exertion due to sports activities.

“It was also interesting to see how some would avoid engaging with data that spoke against their ideas of their personality traits. One person looked upon himself as a calm person, but in the data, there were plenty of peaks. He just could not reconcile those with his impression of himself.”

Although the open design phase helped reveal several different practices Affective Health prototypes could be used for, the prototype lacked some of the functions needed to make it a good tool for a specific role – such as a sports training system, or as a stress management tool.

The researchers found the need for a second, more tailored, step in the design process to make devices specific to particular roles.

The research is part of the AffecTech: Personal Technologies for Affective Health, Innovative Training Network, which is funded through the European Union’s Horizon2020 programme and led by Professor Corina Sas of Lancaster University’s School of Computing and Communications.

Professor Sas, said: “The study revealed insights for designers of emerging wearable technologies, and in particular of biodata-based wearable devices. Design is crucially important to help users understand their bodily responses.

“Our results suggest the value of a two-step approach for designing new technologies that present bio-data that are unfamiliar to users. A deliberately open initial design stage allows users to develop their own ideas of how these kinds of products could be used. This is followed by a second step that tailors the functions of the device for specific activities, such as wellbeing, health or productivity.”

Many businesses turned to remote workers to continue their operations after states issued stay-at-home orders to reduce COVID-19 infections, a trend that is likely to accelerate long after the coronavirus is controlled.

To help companies ease the transition online, USC researchers studied the challenges to increasing the use of crowdwork -- a manifestation of the gig economy in which companies offer ad-hoc, mundane tasks to prospects via a website. The move minimizes disruptions that organizations would experience as a result of COVID-19 or other crises.

The study, conducted in September 2019 through a collection of task responses via Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform, shows that workers will need more autonomy over tasks and a clearer sense of purpose to perform often mundane work at a high level -- advantages that AI assistance offers.

"Crowdwork functions similarly to Uber, but it is used to perform online tasks like clean data, train artificial intelligence and moderate content," said Gale Lucas, research assistant professor at the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. "As unemployment rates continue to skyrocket, it will likely become even more popular in serving as a stopgap during the current shutdown and as the economy changes due to COVID-19. We need to improve crowdwork and make it more efficient, which could involve new types of supervision assistance using AI."

The findings were presented on May 11 via the International Conference On Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems in New Zealand. A video presentation will be publicly available.

With the continuous development of AI technologies, employees and gig workers increasingly encounter software algorithms that assist in assigning their work. Many tasks performed by managers -- such as hiring, evaluations and setting compensation -- will increasingly use AI as a tool to help perform these functions.

These newly automated supervisory duties, called algorithmic management, already play a major role at companies like UPS, Uber and Amazon that outsource tasks to a large pool of online workers.

New research from ICT and Fujitsu Laboratories shows that to enhance worker motivation in a crowdwork environment, worker autonomy and transparency in regard to how completed tasks have been solved is imperative.

Perceptions of autonomy can enhance productivity, especially when the work holds intrinsic meaning for workers, yet crowdwork often seems meaningless. According to the researchers, "More problematically, the meaning of the work is sometimes hidden due to security or experimental control, like when the workers serve as subjects in a scientific experiment. Enhancing user motivation and performance through human-agent interaction is an important challenge, not only for algorithmic management but in other AI disciplines, including educational technology, personal health maintenance, computer games, personal productivity monitoring and crowdsourcing."

To test the management applications, ICT researchers conducted an online experiment investigating how perceptions of autonomy and the meaningfulness of work shape crowdworker motivation. Yuushi Toyoda, senior researcher for Fujitsu Laboratories, and USC researchers Jonathan Gratch and Lucas examined alternative techniques to maintain crowdworker motivation when their work is additionally managed by an algorithm.

"Given that system designers might be designing autonomous agents that perform some management tasks in the context of algorithmic management, understanding how workers might respond to these systems, especially in remote work conditions, could provide essential guidance for designers," Toyoda said.

The team found that workers are more motivated when their work has meaning and algorithmic management is framed in a way that highlights worker autonomy. For example, when performing a tedious task like counting the number of infected blood cells on a laboratory slide, workers perform better when they are told about a societally meaningful goal -- such as curing an infectious disease -- and when feedback supports autonomy with helpful prompts and queries.

"We found that when people knew the goal was to help cure a disease, they actually overreported the number of infected cells. Their desire to see the work succeed actually undermined the usefulness of their work," said Gratch, director for virtual human research at ICT and a professor of computer science at USC Viterbi.

In contrast, when the work holds no meaning, productivity is only enhanced when algorithmic management falls back on authoritative managerial control, framing the algorithm as a boss that commands conformity rather than promotes autonomy. That can be a challenge, as it is not always possible to provide the meaning behind a task because this information can sometimes bias results, the researchers said.

The new findings highlight the importance of autonomy and meaningfulness in a crowdwork environment and contribute to the growing body of literature in algorithmic management and human-AI interaction. Ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft currently use algorithmic management via an app that gives employees freedom in scheduling and routes, and findings by the USC research team suggest ways such systems can be improved.

What is important when you choose a home? Space, security, light - or a combination of these? Like humans, animals make choices about where to live that have important implications for their livelihoods. But unlike humans, animals do not easily reveal the basis of their choice.

Now, researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz and the University of Konstanz have created a paradigm that can disentangle the strands of animal decision-making. By using CT scanning, 3D modelling and 3D printing, they have created artificial shelters that vary in precise ways, and used these structures to reveal the underlying preferences of animals.

The findings are reported in a paper by Humboldt post-doctoral fellow, Dr. Aneesh Bose; bachelor students of the University of Konstanz, Johannes Windorfer and Alex Boehm; and Alex Jordan, Principal Investigator in the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the DFG Cluster of Excellence "Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour" at the University of Konstanz. The study also included co-authors from the University of Basel.

Studying shelter selection

Aneesh Bose, a postdoc in Jordan's lab and co-first author of the study points out that the choices an animal makes, especially when it comes to choosing a home, can have major implications for the choosing animal. "A shelter can serve many ecological roles, a place to rear babies, hide from predators, perform social behaviour," says Bose. "But just looking at the choices animals make doesn't give us a correct answer of what they want because they are constrained by what's available to them."

The problem with studying shelter selection in the wild is that many traits in nature are linked. A bigger shelter (for example a burrow, den, hole, or shell), could be better for rearing offspring, while a bigger shelter entrance opens the way for more predators to enter. However, bigger shelters often have bigger entranceways, and many animals are unable to physically alter the structures they encounter and choose amongst in the wild. Therefore, pinpointing the function behind an animal's preferences for shelter structures requires circumventing the constraints of the natural world where traits are often correlated.

3D models of shells

The researchers devised an experimental framework that enabled methodical appraisal of the possible traits of importance. Selecting a species of shell-dwelling cichlid fish (Neolamprologus multifasciatus) from Lake Tanganyika, Africa, they used high resolution CT scanning on a range of the snail shells that the fish use as shelters. From the scans, 3D models of the structures were created wherein certain features of the shells were manipulated independently of each other. The models were 3D printed to create accurate shell replicas and then offered to fish in choice experiments.

Fish showed preferences for exaggerated shells that bore dimensions that do not exist, or rarely exist, in nature. Fish preferred shells that were fully intact and either enlarged, lengthened, or had widened apertures. Notably, fish were able to distinguish chirality - the direction of coiling - in the shells provided, always favouring shells with the same chirality as those that exist in their natural habitat. The important finding was that, for fish, not every home structural feature is equal. In fact, they preferred shell intactness more than shell length, which was itself preferred more heavily than entrance size. These are facets of the fish's decision-making process that could not be ascertained without such a controlled, manipulative experiment.

Understanding animal behaviour

"The innovation of our study is that we have been able to 3D print a biological structure with precisely controlled dimensions, rather than using samples of real shells, which are limited in how they can be manipulated," says Windorfer, a bachelor student and co-lead author on the study. "And that way we escape the confines of the natural world."

Jordan, senior author on the study says: "Our ultimate goal is to understand why animals choose the things they do, so first we have be certain we know what they choose. For example, I choose my beer based on taste, and I don't really care about the bottle it comes in. But someone watching me might notice that all my favourite beers come in green bottles, and conclude I prefer green bottles."

"If we are to avoid making the same mistake in animal behaviour, we need to figure out a different way. Our study shows how you can experimentally dissociate linked traits and gives us a very powerful experimental framework to explore the ultimate basis of animal decision-making."

The transmission of cultures from generation-to-generation is only found in a few species besides humans. Chimpanzees are one such species and exhibit a large diversity of cultural and tool use behaviours. Although these behaviours have been well documented at a handful of long term research sites, the true cultural repertoire of chimpanzees across populations is still poorly understood. To better understand this diversity, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, initiated the 'Pan African Programme: The Cultured Chimpanzee' (PanAf) in 2010. Using a standardized protocol, researchers set up camera traps, collected samples and recorded ecological data at over 40 temporary and long-term research sites across Africa.

Prior to this study, termite fishing was thought to occur in only two forms with one or multiple tools, from either above-ground or underground termite nests. By carefully observing the techniques required to termite fish at ten different sites, lead author Christophe Boesch created a catalogue of behaviours (ethogram) for each chimpanzee in the study.

What was found was 38 different technical elements making up the various termite fishing techniques, all of which were combined in different ways in each of the chimpanzee communities. In addition, individuals in the same community shared more of the termite fishing technical elements, and unique combinations of the technical elements, when compared to chimpanzees from other groups.

Surprising diversity

"The diversity of techniques seen in chimpanzee termite fishing was a huge surprise to me. Not only does each community have a very unique way of fishing, they also combine a number of different elements into specific termite fishing etiquettes", explains Christophe Boesch."The most striking examples of this are how the Wonga Wongue chimpanzees of Gabon usually lie down on their sides to termite fish, while the Korup chimpanzees in Cameroon lean on their elbows, and the ones from Goualougo in the Republic of Congo sit while fishing."

Because the communities of chimpanzees live in similar habitats with access to the same resources, ecological differences could mostly be ruled out to explain the observed differences. "This supports the idea that chimpanzees are capable of imitating social techniques in 'how to termite fish' which goes beyond alternative explanations such as each individual reinventing termite fishing each time they learn it", explains co-author Ammie Kalan.

Conforming to the group

Much like in human etiquette, not everything is about increased efficiency but rather about conforming to what the rest of the group is doing. In humans, this is observed in the different chopstick cultures across Asia. "For example, in Thailand and Japan not only are chopsticks somehow shaped differently, but the way they hold them differ as well, and this is very reminiscent of what we see here with chimpanzees. In La Belgique in Cameroon, chimpanzees fashion their stick by opening the fibers to obtain a long brush and then rest the termite-covered stick on their wrist while they eat. On the other hand, at another site in Cameroon called Korup, the chimpanzees do not make a brush at all and use their mouth to shake the inserted stick while it is in the mound", explains Christophe Boesch.

In humans, cultural variation has been documented in hundreds of different populations which is one explanation for why chimpanzee culture seems so limited in comparison. "What we knew before about chimpanzees came from at most 15 communities", notes co-author Hjalmar Kuehl. "Through the PanAf we have been able to study many more communities and by this we are able to learn more about the richness of chimpanzee diversity and culture and could demonstrate that there is so much more to discover out there."

Further analyses of videos and other data collected from the PanAf are currently underway. "Termite fishing and other cultural behaviours of wild chimpanzees can be observed first hand by signing onto our citizen science platform Chimp&See", says co-author Mimi Arandjelovic. "At Chimp&See citizen scientists can watch the over one million video clips the PanAf has recorded from all across Africa of chimpanzees, gorillas, elephants, buffalo, leopards and many more species. Visit http://www.chimpandsee.org and you could be a citizen scientist contributing to analyzing data and help with further discoveries in the wild!"

You may like them or not, but almost everyone knows them: brown algae such as Fucus vesiculosus, commonly known as bladderwrack, grow along the entire German coast. Giant kelp like Macrocystis or Sargassum grow closely together along the coasts but can also form floating aggregates that can cover the Atlantic from west to east. Some ecologists see this this very productive ecosystem as a marine counterpart to rainforests on land. In these algal forests, large amounts of carbon dioxide are stored, making them an important part of the global carbon cycle.

Andreas Sichert from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology dedicated his PhD to the question how brown algae can be such a good sink of carbon: "Main constituents of algal biomass are their cell walls - a tight network of proteins and long-chained sugars. When the algae die, we actually have little clue about the fate of algal biomass in the ocean, for example which compounds are degraded fast or slowly".

Firm and flexible

The Atlantic coast is not a cozy habitat. Tides, wind and waves demand special adaptations from the inhabitants of this harsh environment. Brown algae developed a special cell wall structure, making them both firm and flexible, and enabling the plant to successfully withstand heavy currents and waves. A major component of the cell walls is the polysaccharide fucoidan, a long-chained sugar accounting for about a quarter of algal dry mass. Likely, fucoidan can regulate the water content of the cell wall which protects brown algae from drying out at low tide.

What role this sugar plays in the long degradation process of brown algae was analyzed by scientists from the research group Marine Glycobiology at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology and the MARUM, Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen. For their study, they cooperated with colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from the University of Greifswald and from the University of Vienna. "It was already known that microbial communities hydrolyze fucoidan slower than other algal polysaccharides and thus fucoidan might act as carbon sink" says Andreas Sichert from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, first author of the study, published in the scientific journal Nature Microbiology in May 2020. "Usually, polysaccharides are a favorite energy source for bacteria, but the reason why fucoidan should be barely digestible remained unclear".

Only specialists degrade this sugar

So far, the fucoidan degradation pathways were only partially known, but it was evident that they involve a substantial number of enzymes either distributed within a microbial community or housed within individual, highly specialized bacteria. The scientists from Bremen examined the latter theory and analyzed newly isolated bacteria of the genus Lentimonas, belonging to the phylum Verrucomicrobia. Even the isolation of these Lentimonas bacteria was challenging. "From initially more than thousand colonies, only one was able to degrade fucoidan in the end," remembers Christopher H. Corzett from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, first author of the study next to Andreas Sichert.

"We could show that Lentimonas acquired a remarkably complex machinery for the degradation of fucoidan that uses about one hundred enzymes to liberate the sugar fucose - a part of fucoidan", says Jan-Hendrik Hehemann, leader of the research group Marine Glycobiology. „This is probably one of the most complicated biochemical degradation pathways for natural material that we know of." Fucose is then metabolized via a bacterial microcompartment, a proteinaceous shell that shields the cell from the toxic intermediate lactaldehyde. „The need for such a complex catabolic pathway underpins the recalcitrance of fucoidans for most marine bacteria and it shows that only highly specialized organisms in the ocean are able to break down this algal sugar," says Hehemann. „This can explain the slower turnover of the algal biomass in the environment and suggests that fucoidans sequester carbon in the ocean."

Potential for pharmacology

Scientists are also interested in enzymes for fucoidan degradation because it may be a pharmacologically active molecule that shows similar effects to heparin in blood clotting. "Enzymes that specifically fragment fucoidan and thus help to characterize its structure are of great scientific interest because they enable researchers to understand the effects of fucoidan and to open up these marine sugars for biotechnological applications," says Thomas Schweder, participating microbiologist from the University of Greifswald.

Besides being a major threat to biodiversity, the wildlife trade can be a cause of global public health issues and hundreds of billions of dollars of economic damage around the world from disease outbreaks, as might be the case for COVID-19. Despite its major ecological and socio-economic importance, no comprehensive analysis has been made of the global patterns of the wildlife trade.

"The illegal wildlife trade often has connections with organised crime. Criminal groups involved in drug trafficking, fraud and other illegal businesses are also active in the wildlife trade along routes used for other types of illicit products, and can combine this with different illegal activities, such as trafficking animals and drugs," points out Caroline Fukushima, researcher at the Finnish Museum of Natural History (Luomus), University of Helsinki. Based on such concerns, a group of researchers sought to describe the importance of all major groups of organisms in the global wildlife trade and called for more research on neglected groups.

"To us, it is evident that the phenomenon of the global wildlife trade is much more complex and widespread than previously acknowledged," says Stefano Mammola, researcher at the Italian National Research Council, as well as one of the authors. "Even though the wildlife trade permeates all branches of the tree of life - from fungi to plants, from small marine species to big terrestrial mammals - more attention is given to the trade of a small selection of charismatic species, preventing the development of comprehensive and effective conservation strategies."

Even the smallest, apparently insignificant organisms are traded

The research group found that trade is common among many different organisms, from mushrooms to large vertebrates. Sea cucumbers, anemones and corals in particular have extremely large proportions of threatened species being traded worldwide.

Additionally, when considering legal wildlife commerce on the global scale, the timber trade is the most relevant in monetary value, and plants emerged as the most traded group in sheer numbers of individuals.

Extensive data is needed on the trade and its consequences

Due to the obvious illegality of much of wildlife trafficking, it is difficult to obtain systematic and reliable data. For some groups such as invertebrates, the species listed in CITES or the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species are just the tip of the iceberg. The numbers of traded taxa in such databases are a gross underestimation of what is actually traded, as most species have never even been assessed for their relevance in the trade business.

"We are facing a biodiversity crisis. We need to be fast and effective in filling our gaps in knowledge, especially about non-vertebrate species. In this way, we can achieve a deep understanding of global trading patterns across the full canopy of the tree of life, and not just its most appealing twig," says Pedro Cardoso, at the Finnish Museum of Natural History.

The future challenge for conservation biologists is now to map global trade across all living beings, know what drives such trade and find ways to fight traffic that might put both wildlife species and human health in danger. A major consequence of the widespread trade are disease outbreaks, as might be the case for the possible origin of COVID-19 from wildlife markets. It is urgent to take these matters seriously, as their consequences reach far beyond wildlife species survival.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have developed a new sequencing method that makes it possible to map how DNA is spatially organised in the cell nucleus - revealing which genomic regions are at higher risk of mutation and DNA damage. The technique is described in an article published in the scientific journal Nature Biotechnology.

Most cells in the human body contain approximately two metres of DNA. This long stretch of DNA is divided in 46 large pieces - the chromosomes - which occupy discrete regions of the cell nucleus known as chromosome territories.

How individual parts of the genome are spatially arranged in the nucleus strongly affects how they are being read by the cell's transcriptional apparatus. However, the spatial arrangement of individual genes in the three-dimensional (3D) space of the nucleus has remained largely unexplored.

Now, a team of researchers led by Dr. Magda Bienko at Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) and the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics at Karolinska Institutet has developed a new genomic method, named Genomic loci Positioning by Sequencing or GPSeq, which can be used to obtain high-resolution maps of how DNA is spatially organized in the cell nucleus.

The method works by gradually cutting the DNA from the nuclear periphery towards the centre, followed by reading the DNA sequence around each cut. Mathematical modelling can then be used to reconstruct the 3D genome structure and find where individual genes and regions between genes are located along the nuclear radius as well as in relation to each other.

"We found that the spatial distribution of different types of chromatin (composed of DNA, RNA and protein complexes) often differed from what we expected to find," says Dr. Bienko, one of the senior authors of the paper. "To our surprise, we found that the picture is not as simple as having all the inactive chromatin sitting at the nuclear periphery and the active chromatin amassed in the centre. Instead, there is a continuum, a gradient of increasing activity from the nuclear periphery towards the interior, even though the inactive chromatin can be found in the very centre of the nucleus too."

An important aspect of knowing where different genomic regions are located in the nucleus is that it is now possible to map where DNA damage and mutations are most likely to occur, explains Dr. Nicola Crosetto, a senior researcher at the same department at Karolinska Institutet and the other senior author of the paper.

"We discovered that DNA mutations that are often encountered in different cancer types are enriched in the inactive chromatin located at the nuclear periphery, which might have to do with the fact that many mutagens originate from outside the cell," he says. "On the other hand, DNA breaks and gene fusions are much more likely to be found in the nuclear centre, which might be due to the high levels of transcription that we find in the centre."

WASHINGTON--With the help of Inuit hunters, geophysicists recently recorded the various calls, buzzes, clicks and whistles of narwhals as they summered in a Greenland fjord. The recordings help scientists better understand the soundscape of Arctic glacial fjords and provide valuable insight into the behavior of these shy and mysterious creatures, according to the researchers.

Narwhals are difficult to study because they are notoriously shy and skittish and spend most of their time deep in the freezing Arctic Ocean. They tend to summer in glacial fjords around Greenland and Canada, but scientists often have trouble getting close enough to study them. Glacier fronts can be dangerous and hard to access, and the animals tend to swim off when approached by motorized boats.

But Inuit hunters familiar with the mysterious cetaceans can get closer to the animals without disturbing them. In July 2019, researchers accompanied several Inuit whale hunting expeditions in Northwest Greenland to study the narwhals that summer there in more detail.

Using underwater microphones attached to small boats, the researchers captured narwhal social calls and foraging sounds, getting as close as 25 meters (82 feet) to the elusive cetaceans. Listen to the vocalizations they captured here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn5r7lcWhJQ&feature=youtu.be

The recordings help the researchers provide a baseline of the kinds of sounds that permeate the narwhals' pristine habitat. In combination with sightings, they also show narwhals get closer to glacier ice than previously thought for this area and the animals do forage for food in summer, contrary to some previous findings.

"Their world is the soundscape of this glacial fjord," said Evgeny Podolskiy, a geophysicist at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan and lead author of a new study detailing the findings in AGU's Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans. "There are many questions we can answer by listening to glacier fjords in general."

Getting close

Podolskiy and his colleagues had been working in Greenland fjords for several years, studying the sounds made by melting glaciers. Coincidentally, a population of narwhals summers in the fjords they were studying, and Podolskiy saw an opportunity to study the wily creatures.

"I realized working in the area and not paying attention to the elephant in the room -- the key endemic legendary Arctic unicorn just flowing around our glacier -- was a big mistake," he said.

The researchers tagged along on several Inuit hunting expeditions departing from the village of Qaanaaq, placing microphones underwater and recording the baseline sounds of the fjord.

They captured several types of sounds made by narwhals, including social calls, or whistles, and clicks used for echolocation, the biological sonar used by dolphins, bats, some whales and other animals to navigate and find food.

The closer narwhals get to their food, the faster they click, until the noise becomes a buzz not unlike that of a chainsaw. This terminal buzz helps the narwhals pinpoint the location of their prey.

"If you approach and target these fast fish, you better know precisely where they are; you need to gather this information more frequently," Podolskiy said.

Few studies have documented narwhals feeding in the summertime. Because the microphones picked up terminal buzz, a sound associated with finding food, the new study provides further evidence that narwhals do forage in summer.

Surprisingly, the researchers found narwhals come roughly within 1 kilometer (half a mile) of a glacier calving front, despite the fact that these areas are some of the noisiest places in the ocean and calving icebergs can be dangerous.

"There is so much cracking due to ice fracturing and bubbles melting out... it's like a fizzy drink underwater," Podolskiy said. "It seems we are dealing with animals living in one of the most noisy environments without having much trouble with that."

Findings from a new NUI Galway study on workplace bullying, led by Dr John Cullinan of the Discipline of Economics and Dr Margaret Hodgins from the Discipline of Health Promotion, has been published in the journal Occupational Medicine.

Workplace bullying is aggressive behaviour perpetrated by one or more persons, repeatedly and systematically over a prolonged time period, where the targeted person feels unable to defend themself. In a previous study, the NUI Galway research team highlighted the relationship between bullying and work-related stress in the Irish workplace. The current study builds on this to examine the economic costs of workplace bullying.

The research describes the range of impacts of workplace bullying on individuals and organisations. Using statistical methods, it estimates the number of workdays lost as a result of workplace bullying and calculates the economic value of the associated lost productivity. Overall, the research estimates a total of 1.7 million days lost due to bullying at a cost to the economy of €239 million per year. In addition, the study finds that although bullying is more prevalent in the public sector, it has a larger effect on absences in the private sector.

Commenting on the study, Dr John Cullinan said: "Workplace bullying is a pervasive problem with significant personal and wider costs. Our study highlights the considerable economic cost of workplace bullying in Ireland. In addition to lost productivity from workplace bullying, there are also likely to be costs associated with early retirement and presenteeism. Furthermore, bullying-related costs are unlikely to have gone away as a result of new COVID-19 work-from-home practices."

Dr Margaret Hodgins noted that: "To tackle the problem, organisations need an anti-bullying policy in order to signal to staff that bullying is unacceptable. However a policy is insufficient in itself and it is vital that it is implemented fairly and in a timely fashion. Ideally, organisations should be proactive, identifying how and when bullying occurs in the organisation, and be prepared to develop specific interventions that are appropriate to context."

VANCOUVER, Wash. - Some of the most common mental disorders, including depression, anxiety and PTSD, might not be disorders at all, according to a recent paper by Washington State University biological anthropologists.

In the paper, published in the Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, the researchers propose a new approach to mental illness that would be informed by human evolution, noting that modern psychology, and in particular its use of drugs like antidepressants, has largely failed to reduce the prevalence of mental disorders. (This paper was made available online on Nov. 28, 2019 ahead of final publication in the issue on April 28, 2020). For example, the global prevalence of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders remained steady at 4.4% and 4% respectively from 1990 to 2010.

The authors also theorize that depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder may be primarily responses to adversity; therefore, only treating the "psychic pain" of these issues with drugs will not solve the underlying problem. Kristen Syme, the first author on the paper and recent WSU Ph.D. graduate, compared it to medicating someone for a broken bone without setting the bone itself.

"The pain is not the disease; the pain is the function that is telling you there is a problem," said Syme. "Depression, anxiety and PTSD often involve a threat or exposure to violence, which are predictable sources for these things that we call mental diseases. Instead, they look more like sociocultural phenomena, so the solution is not necessarily fixing a dysfunction in the person's brain but fixing dysfunctions in the social world."

Syme and co-author Edward Hagen advocate for biological anthropologists to enter the study of the "diseases of the mind," to help find effective solutions, particularly for some problems that may be social instead of mental.

"Mental health research is still very much stuck in a view that comes out of the 19th century, and revived in 1980, of classifying everything by symptoms in the hopes of revealing underlying patterns that would lead to solutions, but it really has not," said Hagen, a WSU professor of evolutionary anthropology and corresponding author on the paper. "Even though we're using new measurements, like genetics, biomarkers and imaging, these still haven't added up to the insights needed to really improve people's lives."

Among the more problematic issues, the researchers point to the "chemical imbalance" theory of depression, which has helped create a boom in antidepressant drugs meant to modulate certain chemicals in the brain called neurotransmitters. A large meta-analysis of antidepressant trials in 2018 found that antidepressants had almost the same effect as a placebo, and their widespread use has not delivered measurable results. For example, in Australia alone, antidepressant use increased 352% from 1990 to 2002, yet there has been no observed reduction in the prevalence of mood, anxiety or substance use disorders in any country.

Instead of addressing mental issues by their symptoms, Hagen and Syme propose approaching mental illness by their probable causes. They acknowledge that some psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia are likely genetic and often inherited and others like Alzheimer's appear connected with aging.

However, the anthropologists argue that some conditions might be a mismatch between modern and ancestral environments such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, also known as ADHD. Hagen pointed out that there is little in our evolutionary history that accounts for children sitting at desks quietly while watching a teacher do math equations at a board.

Other disorders such as depression, anxiety and PTSD are not hereditary, occur at any age and are often tied to threatening experiences. Hagen and Syme propose they may be responses to adversity and serve as signals, much like physical pain does, to make people aware of the need for help.

These conditions also disproportionately affect people in developing countries. For instance, 1 in 5 people in conflict-affected countries suffer from depression versus 1 in 14 in worldwide.

"As anthropologists, we should be studying this a lot more because the mental health burden in the populations we often study is quite high," Hagen said. "In many cases, they're suffering from pervasive warfare, conflict and inadequate policing."

Various diseases in humans and animals - such as tumors, strokes or chronic kidney disease - damage the blood vessels. Capillaries, the smallest blood vessels in the body, are particularly affected. The large surface area of the capillary network enables oxygen to be exchanged between the blood and the surrounding tissue, such as the muscles when we exercise or the brain when we think.

Revealing the vascular structure

For the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular and other diseases, it is important to know the three-dimensional structure of blood vessels. This knowledge of the exact anatomy of the capillaries in humans and animals is also crucial for basic research. It enables researchers to investigate diseases that attack the blood vessels and evaluate new treatments. Researchers at the University of Zurich (UZH), the National Centre of Competence in Research Kidney.CH and the Biomaterials Science Center of the University of Basel have now developed a novel X-ray contrast agent called "XlinCA", with which capillaries can be made visible much more precisely using computer tomography.

Previous methods often faulty

Previously, contrast agents were added to polymerizing plastic resins before they were injected into the blood vessels of euthanized animals. However, it is very difficult to completely fill out the delicate capillaries in various organs with viscous resins. "Without years of experience using the right injection techniques, the capillaries are often only partially filled, or missing entirely. Up to a quarter of the resulting images are therefore unusable," says Willy Kuo, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Physiology of UZH. By using "XlinCA" instead of other contrast agents, up to 25 percent fewer animals would be needed for experiments, states Kuo.

The basic problem with conventional methods is that plastic and water do not mix. This results in water inclusions where the contrast agent is absent, which causes disconnected vessel segments on the X-ray image. While the water-soluble X-ray contrast agents used in medicine may not have this problem, they cannot be solidified and leak through blood vessel walls into the surrounding tissue within minutes.

Optimum results thanks to custom contrast agent

Contrast agents for medical use in humans consist of small molecules and are relatively simple to produce. "A custom contrast agent for ex vivo use was significantly more difficult to synthesize, since it is made up of polymers - molecules bonded together in long chains," says Bernhard Spingler, professor at UZH's Department of Chemistry. "XlinCA" has several advantages over previously used X-ray contrast agents: It is easy to use and enables complete and uninterrupted vascular imaging. It also allows multiple organs or even whole animals such as mice to be examined at the same time.

Australian archaeologists have discovered some of the most detailed examples of rare, small-scale rock art in the form of miniature stencils in a rockshelter traditionally owned by the Marra people.

The research, published in the journal Antiquity, examined the unusual art found in the Yilbilinji rockshelter at Limmen National Park in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria region of northern Australia.

Traditionally owned by the Marra Aboriginal people, the site was documented by the research team in 2017 and instantly stood out as unique.

"It's the size of the rock art that makes this site unusual and highly distinctive," says Flinders University archaeologist ARC Future Fellow Dr Liam Brady.

"Typically, stencilled rock art around the globe features full or life-sized dimensions such as human and animal body parts, objects (e.g. boomerangs), and even plant matter," says Associate Professor Brady.

"However, many of the stencils at Yilbilinji are tiny or miniature-sized, and too small to have been made using real-life body parts and full-size objects."

Only two other examples of this miniature stencilled form of rock art, both human figures, are known from anywhere in the world: one at Nielson's Creek in New South Wales, and one at Kisar Island in Indonesia.

The research team - archaeologists, anthropologists, Marra rangers, and Limmen National Park rangers - recorded a total of 17 images of these miniature stencils during a 2017 field trip.

The images depict a wide range of motifs including, human figures, animals (crab, long-necked turtles), kangaroo paws, wavy lines, boomerangs, and geometric shapes.

The researchers set out to find out how these unusual images were made. One clue came from the fact most of the miniature stencils were made with rounded and curved edges meaning they were probably made using something that could be easily moulded and stuck to the rock surface.

Another clue came from anthropological research in the region. Co-author and anthropologist Dr John Bradley, from the Monash Indigenous Centre, has worked with Aboriginal people in the study area for more than 40 years.

He remembers seeing beeswax used by people for a range of purposes such as an adhesive for repairing spears and harpoons. He also saw children shaping beeswax into objects and animals such as cattle, horses and cowboys.

"Using these clues, the researchers decided to test if beeswax could have been used to make the miniature stencils," he says.

"Our experiments involving heating and shaping beeswax into human figures, animals, objects, and geometric shapes, and then stencilling onto a rock slab confirmed beeswax was an excellent material for making miniature stencils."

"Whoever made these miniature stencils - adults or children - is open for debate, as is their meaning," says Matthew Flinders Fellow Professor Amanda Kearney.

"However, what is important here is that this discovery adds another dimension to the Australian and global rock art record," she says.

In fact, since this discovery was made, three additional stencils have been discovered in the area - a human figure, an echidna and a freshwater turtle - which further highlights the archaeological potential at Limmen National Park.

Glenn Durie, Manager of Aboriginal Partnerships, Northern Territory Parks and Wildlife, says the research with Marra Traditional Owners, archaeologists, and park rangers means this discovery could be among the first of many more in the area.