Culture

The journal Science has published a study led by the ICREA researcher João Zilhão, from the University of Barcelona, which presents the results of the excavation in Cueva de Figueira Brava, Portugal, which was used as shelter by Neanderthal populations about between 86 and 106 thousand years ago. The study reveals fishing and shellfish-gathering contributed significantly to the subsistence economy of the inhabitants of Figueira Brava. The relevance of this discovery lies in the fact that so far, there were not many signs of these practices as common among Neanderthals.

Regarding the consequences of this study, João Zilhão notes that "an influent model on our origins suggests the common consumption of water resources -rich in Omega3 and other fatty acids that favour the development of brain tissues- would have increased the cognitive skills of modern anatomy humans. That is, those humans who, in Africa, were contemporaries of Neanderthals and are usually regarded as the only ancestors of the current Homo sapiens". But the results of the excavation of Figueira Brava state that, if this common consumption of marine resources played an important role in the development of cognitive skills, it did so on the entire humanity, including Neanderthals, and not only the African population that spread later".

Zilhão member of the Prehistoric Studies and Research Seminar (SERP-UB), lists the research study in the line of "proof that accumulated over the last decade to show Neanderthals had a symbolic material culture". Two years ago, in 2018, the journals Science and Science Advances published two studies co-led by João Zilhão which showed that more than 65,000 years ago, Neanderthals made cave paintings in at least three caves in the Iberian Peninsula: La Pasiega, Maltravieso and Ardales (Science). Furthermore, more than 115,000 years ago, they used perforated marine shells and with ocher remains, such as the ones from Cueva de los Aviones (Murcia, Spain), as pendants and shell containers with residues of complex mixes of pigment (Science Advances). These findings, the most recent one being the one in Figueira Brava, "support a view on human evolution in which the known fossil variants, such as Neanderthals' in Europe and its African anatomy contemporaries -more similar to ours-, should be understood as remains from our ancestors, not as different higher-lower species", notes Zilhão.

A 50% of the diet of the inhabitants in Figueira Brava was built by coastal resources: molluscs (limpet, mussel and clams; crustaceans (brown crab and spider crab); fish (shark, eel, sea bream, mullet); birds (mallard, common scoter, goose, cormorant, gannet, shag, auk, egret, loon), and mammals (dolphin, seal). This was completed with the hunt of deer, goats, horses, aurochs and other small preys such as tortoises. Among the other carbonised plants were olive trees, vines, fig trees and other Mediterranean climate typical species, among which the most abundant was the stone pine -its wood was used as combustible. Pine forests were exploited as fruit tree gardens: mature pines, albeit closed, were taken from the branches and stored in the cave, where the fire could open them so as to take the pines.

The study also provides other results, such as the idea of the concept of Neanderthals as cold and tundra peoples, experts on hunting mammoths, rhinos, buffalos and reindeers, is biased. "Most Neanderthals would have lived in southern regions, specially in Italy and in the Iberian Peninsula, and its lifestyle would have been very similar to those in Figueira Brava", notes Zilhão.

Another important affirmation in the study is the familiarity of humans with the sea and its resources as something older and wider than what was thought. "This could probably help explain how, between 45,000 and 50,000 years ago, humans could cross the Timor Sea to colonize Australia and New Guinea, and then, about 30,000 years ago, the closest islands to the western Pacific", says Zilhão.

Over 80,000 years ago, Neanderthals were already feeding themselves regularly on mussels, fish and other marine life. The first robust evidence of this has been found by an international research team with the participation of the University of Göttingen during an excavation in the cave of Figueira Brava in Portugal. Dr Dirk Hoffmann at the Göttingen Isotope Geology Department dated flowstone layers - calcite deposits that form like stalagmites from dripping water - using the uranium-thorium method, and was thus able to determine the age of the excavation layers to between 86,000 and 106,000 years. This means that the layers date from the period in which the Neanderthals settled in Europe. The use of the sea as a source of food at that time has so far only been attributed to anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) in Africa. The results of the study were published in the journal Science.

The cave of Figueira Brava is located 30 kilometres south of Lisbon on the slopes of the Serra da Arrábida. Today it is located directly on the waterfront, but at that time it was up to two kilometres from the coast. The research team, coordinated by the first author of the study, Professor João Zilhão from the University of Barcelona, found that the Neanderthals living there were able to routinely harvest mussels and fish, and to hunt seals. Their diet included mussels, crustaceans and fish as well as waterfowl and marine mammals such as dolphins and seals. Food from the sea is rich in omega-3 fatty acids and other fatty acids that promote the development of brain tissue.

Until now, it has always been suspected that this consumption increased the cognitive abilities of the human populations in Africa. "Among other influences, this could explain the early appearance of a culture of modern people that used symbolic artefacts, such as body painting with ochre, the use of ornaments or the decoration of containers made of ostrich eggs with geometric motifs," explains Hoffmann. "Such behaviour reflects human's capacity for abstract thought and communication through symbols, which also contributed to the emergence of more organised and complex societies of modern humans".

The recent results of the excavation of Figueira Brava now confirm that if the habitual consumption of marine life played an important role in the development of cognitive abilities, this is as true for Neanderthals as it is for anatomically modern humans. Hoffmann and his co-authors previously found that Neanderthals made cave paintings in three caves on the Iberian Peninsula more than 65,000 years ago and that perforated and painted shells must also be attributed to the Neanderthals.

A new feathered dinosaur that lived in New Mexico 67 million years ago is one of the last known surviving raptor species, according to a new publication in the journal Scientific Reports.

Dineobellator notohesperus adds to scientists' understanding of the paleo-biodiversity of the American Southwest, offering a clearer picture of what life was like in this region near the end of the reign of the dinosaurs.

Steven Jasinski, who recently completed his Ph.D. in Penn's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences, led the work to describe the new species, collaborating with doctoral advisor Peter Dodson of the School of Veterinary Medicine and Penn Arts and Sciences and as well as Robert Sullivan of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque.

In 2008, Sullivan found fossils of the new species in Cretaceous rocks of the San Juan Basin, New Mexico. He, along with his field team of Jasinski and James Nikas, collected the specimen on U.S. federal land under a permit issued by the Bureau of Land Management. The entire specimen was recovered over four field seasons. Jasinski and his coauthors gave the species its official name, Dineobellator notohesperus, which means "Navajo warrior from the Southwest," in honor of the people who today live in the same region where this dinosaur once dwelled.

Dineobellator, as well as its Asian cousin Velociraptor, belong to a group of dinosaurs known as the dromaeosaurids. Members of this group are commonly referred to as "raptor" dinosaurs, thanks to movies such as "Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic World." But unlike the terrifying beasts depicted in film, Dineobellator stood only about 3.5 feet (about 1 meter) at the hip and was 6 to 7 feet (about 2 meters) long--much smaller than its Hollywood counterparts.

Raptor dinosaurs are generally small, lightly built predators. Consequently, their remains are rare, particularly from the southwestern United States and Mexico. "While dromaeosaurids are better known from places like the northern United States, Canada, and Asia, little is known of the group farther south in North America," says Jasinski.

While not all of the bones of this dinosaur were recovered, bones from the forearm have quill nobs--small bumps on the surface where feathers would be anchored by ligaments--an indication that Dineobellator bore feathers in life, similar to those inferred for Velociraptor.

Features of the animal's forelimbs, including enlarged areas of the claws, suggest this dinosaur could strongly flex its arms and hands. This ability may have been useful for holding on to prey--using its hands for smaller animals such as birds and lizards, or perhaps its arms and feet for larger species such as other dinosaurs.

Its tail also possessed unique characteristics. While most raptors' tails were straight and stiffened with rod-like structures, Dineobellator's tail was rather flexible at its base, allowing the rest of the tail to remain stiff and act like a rudder.

"Think of what happens with a cat's tail as it is running," says Jasinski. "While the tail itself remains straight, it is also whipping around constantly as the animal is changing direction. A stiff tail that is highly mobile at its base allows for increased agility and changes in direction, and potentially aided Dineobellator in pursuing prey, especially in more open habitats."

This new dinosaur provides a clearer picture of the biology of North American dromaeosaurid dinosaurs, especially concerning the distribution of feathers among its members.

"As we find evidence of more members possessing feathers, we believe it is likely that all the dromaeosaurids had feathers," says Jasinski. The discovery also hints at some of the predatory habits of a group of iconic meat-eating dinosaurs that lived just before the extinction event that killed off all the dinosaurs that weren't birds.

Jasinski plans to continue his field research in New Mexico with the hope of finding more fossils.

"It was with a lot of searching and a bit of luck that this dinosaur was found weathering out of a small hillside," he says. "We do so much hiking and it is easy to overlook something or simply walk on the wrong side of a hill and miss something. We hope that the more we search, the better chance we have of finding more of Dineobellator or the other dinosaurs it lived alongside."

So far, the only direct evidence we have for the existence of dark matter is through gravity-based effects on the matter we can see. And these gravitational effects are so pronounced that we know it must make up about 85 percent of all matter in the universe.

But we know little else about dark matter, including whether it is made up of as-yet-undiscovered particles.

There are many competing theories for the composition and properties of dark matter, and for whether dark matter has any visible markers to at last unmask it.

Among the theorized dark matter particle candidates are WIMPs (weakly interactive massive particles), axions, and sterile neutrinos - and physicists have searched for each type using a variety of Earth and space-based instruments and methods.

Nearly 20 years ago, physicists suggested that the theorized sterile neutrino form of dark matter could be responsible for emitting light at a specific energy as its particles decay away in space, and in 2014 a study detailed a light signature, called the "3.5 keV line," found in very large galaxy clusters - keV is a measure of energy that represents a thousand electron volts or kilo electron volts.

The study theorized that this line, which had no confirmed source, could be the smoking gun for dark matter decay that scientists had been searching for.

But a new study by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), UC Berkeley, and the University of Michigan - publishing this week in the journal Science (see an arXiv.org preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.06976) - concludes that this explanation of sterile neutrino decay is now essentially ruled out as the source of this line.

"Our finding does not mean that the dark matter is not a sterile neutrino, but it means that ... there is no experimental evidence to-date that points towards its existence," said Benjamin Safdi, a study co-author and an assistant professor of physics at the University of Michigan.

The researchers' approach, which analyzed X-ray telescope observations of dark places within our own galaxy where dark matter was expected, did not find evidence of the 3.5 keV line.

"Our limits are so strong that they are likely to cause difficulty for any simple models of dark matter," said Nicholas Rodd, study co-author and a physicist affiliated with the Berkeley Lab theory group and the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics, which has faculty members from UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab. Rodd has been working with Safdi for several years in researching possible visible manifestations of dark matter in space.

The technique the researchers developed, which is detailed in the latest study, also has the potential to analyze, with extreme sensitivity, other possible dark matter signatures in space.

"While this work does, unfortunately, throw cold water on what looked like might have been the first evidence for the microscopic nature of dark matter, it does open up a whole new approach to looking for dark matter which could lead to a discovery in the near future," Safdi said.

Instead of looking at other galaxies and galaxy clusters - places expected to be especially rich in dark matter - for signs of this 3.5 keV line, the researchers analyzed data from more than 20 years' worth of X-ray telescope images of "empty" space within our own Milky Way galaxy where you might expect the presence of dark matter but nothing else.

Based on observed gravitational effects associated with dark matter, galaxies including our own Milky Way galaxy are expected to be surrounded by so-called halos of dark matter. Such halos would explain observations showing that objects nearer to a galaxy's center orbit as the same speed as objects at the outskirts, which defies explanation if you only take into account visible matter.

"Everywhere we look, there should be some flux of dark matter from the Milky Way halo," Rodd said, owing to our solar system's location in the galaxy. "We exploited the fact that we live in a halo of dark matter" in the study.

Christopher Dessert, a study co-author who is a physics researcher and Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, said galaxy clusters where the 3.5 keV line has been observed also have large background signals, which serve as noise in observations and can make it difficult to pinpoint specific signals that may be associated with dark matter.

"The reason why we're looking through the galactic dark matter halo of our Milky Way galaxy is that the background is much lower," Dessert said.

The researchers used data from the XMM-Newton (X-ray Multi-Mirror) mission, a space-based X-ray telescope launched in 1999 by the European Space Agency. They restricted the data they used to a collection of images from about 800 so-called "blank sky" regions in space that were sampled within 5 to 45 degrees of the Milky Way's galactic center - areas expected to have higher concentrations of dark matter.

They compared their own analysis to others' analyses that were based on observations of regions in space thought to be rich in dark matter, such as the Perseus Cluster of galaxies and the Andromeda Galaxy.

Rodd said the team's analysis technique could be used to reanalyze data taken from other X-ray telescopes' observations to scan in high detail for other light signals emitted across a far broader range of energies.

"How can we extend this technique to look at more cases?" Rodd said. "There are tons of other datasets out there that we don't say anything about in this study. If you are looking generically for dark-matter decay and you want to have more sensitivity, this is the way. This is a general tool that anyone searching for dark matter can use."

An international collaborative study led by researchers from the NUI Galway provides findings on the neural basis of intelligence, otherwise known as general cognitive ability (IQ).

This new research uses an imaging technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to provide an insight into how small variations in this wiring system is associated with differences in IQ in both the general population and how disorders such as schizophrenia manifest.

Over 40 scientists from around the world were involved in analysing brain MRI scans and measures of cognitive function of 1,717 participants, with both healthy functions and patients with schizophrenia. This resulted in a new method to harmonise data collection and analysis as part of the Enhancing Neuroimaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis project (ENIGMA), Schizophrenia Working Group. The study, published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, was led by Dr Laurena Holleran, Lecturer in Clinical Neuroscience and Professor Gary Donohoe, Established Professor at NUI Galway's School of Psychology and Centre for Neuroimaging Cognition and Genomics.

Commenting on the findings, lead author Dr Laurena Holleran, stated that: "To date, this is the largest meta-analysis study of brain structure and cognitive function in schizophrenia. Understanding the neural basis of cognitive function is essential so that effective therapies that address difficulties associated with disorders like schizophrenia, which aren't targeted by current treatments. This is important because cognitive deficits associated with the disorder strongly predict social and functional outcomes, such as employment or social relationships.

"Previous literature suggested that general intelligence relies on specific grey matter areas of the brain, including temporal, parietal and frontal regions. However, the results from this study indicate that efficient connection pathways across the entire brain provide a neural network that supports general cognitive function."

According to the study's senior author Professor Gary Donohoe: "These results advance our knowledge in a number of ways. Firstly, we have demonstrated that the relationship between brain structure and intelligence not only involves grey matter, but also white matter - the brain's wiring system. Secondly, it's not just one part of this wiring system that is important for intelligence, but rather the wiring system as a whole. And finally, the relationship between intelligence and the brain's wiring system is basically the same in patients with schizophrenia and healthy people, in that the lack of pattern explains their cognitive abilities. This suggests that cognitive function in patients is the same as the general population, at least as far as white matter is concerned."

Chicago, March 26, 2020 -- Researchers from New Mexico State University, University of South Carolina, Zhejiang University (China), and The Ohio State University published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing, which examines strategies for restoring customer satisfication.

The study forthcoming in the March issue of the Journal of Marketing is titled "When and Why Saying "Thank You" Is Better Than Saying "Sorry" in Redressing Service Failures: The Role of Self-Esteem" and is authored by Yanfen You, Xiaojing Yang, Lili Wang, and Xiaoyan Deng.

Business leaders worldwide report that consumers' expectations of service quality are higher than ever. It is therefore not surprising that consumers report interactions with service providers as often rife with service failures. Consider restaurant service. A high proportion of U.S. consumers are dissatisfied with various aspects of their dining experience, with 60.8% complaining about slow services, 29.4% about inadequate food and beverage quality, and 21.6% about inefficient staff. In general, service failure consequences to businesses include considerable financial loss and negative word of mouth (WOM). For example, U.S. companies lost $1.6 trillion in 2016 from customer switching caused by poor service with 44% of unsatisfied customers venting their frustrations on social media.

In their initial recovery efforts after a service failure, service providers need to decide what to communicate to consumers to restore their satisfaction. A new study in the Journal of Marketing focuses on two symbolic recovery communications commonly utilized by service providers--appreciation (saying "thank you") versus apology (saying "sorry"). For example, when there is a service delay (e.g., a plumber shows up later than the scheduled time), the service provider could either say, "Thank you for your patience," or "I am sorry for the wait."

This research suggests that appreciation (saying "thank you") is often a more effective strategy than apology (saying "sorry") at restoring consumer satisfaction. That is, in the case of service failures, when service providers redress such failures with the appreciation (vs. apology) recovery communication strategy, consumers are more satisfied with the way service providers redress the failure, report higher overall satisfaction, form higher repatronage intentions, are more likely to recommend the service provider to other consumers, and are less likely to complain.

The researchers reason that a shift of focus in the interaction between service provider and consumer--from emphasizing the service provider's fault and accountability (apology) to spotlighting the consumer's merits and contributions (appreciation)--can increase consumer self-esteem and, in turn, enhance post recovery satisfaction.

The study also identifies situations in which the superiority effect of appreciation (vs. apology) holds or disappears. For example, the superiority of appreciation over apology is more likely to be observed among consumers who are narcissistic and when recovery communications are communicated after (vs. before) the service failure. The appreciation strategy is as effective as recovery messages that combine appreciation and apology, too. The appreciation strategy's superiority over apology also holds when material recovery needs to be provided in severe failures (e.g., a server provides a free drink in addition to expressing appreciation or apology).

These findings have substantial implications for service providers about how to effectively recover from service failures. As an initial step, service providers need to decide what to say to consumers to redress the failure and restore satisfaction. Despite abundant guidance on whether and when to redress a service failure, researchers have offered little advice on what service providers should say, except for recommending that they apologize for the service failure. This study suggests that saying "thank you" is more effective at restoring consumer satisfaction than saying "sorry."

What service providers ultimately say--"thank you" or "sorry"--should be tailored to certain situational factors (i.e., timing of the recovery, severity of failure, and presence of utilitarian recovery) and individual traits (e.g., consumers' narcissism). For example, the superior effect of appreciation disappears if service providers redress potential failures in advance. Furthermore, when the service failure is severe, utilitarian recovery or material compensation is a prerequisite for the superior effect of appreciation. Service providers should use appreciation in their service recovery for consumers with a higher narcissistic tendency (e.g., those who use social networks more, are younger), but should be aware that appreciation is not necessarily better than apology for those low in narcissism.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new technique for determining the historical location and distribution of radioactive materials, such as weapons grade plutonium. The technique may allow them to use common building materials, such as bricks, as a three-dimensional "camera," relying on residual gamma radiation signatures to take a snapshot of radioactive materials even after they've been removed from a location.

"This research builds on our previous work, which was an empirical demonstration that we could turn a brick into a gamma ray spectrometer - characterizing the energy distribution of a radiation source," says Robert Hayes, an associate professor of nuclear engineering at NC State and first author of a paper on the work.

"Our new work effectively shows that we could take an array of bricks and turn them into a gamma ray camera, characterizing the location and distribution of a radiation source," Hayes says. "Although this time we did not use bricks, instead relying on commercial dosimeters, since it's a proof of concept study. Also, the radiation source we imaged this time was 4.5 kilograms of weapons grade plutonium, whereas we previously used a commercial americium source for the spectrometry demonstration. In this most recent study, we were able to rather accurately predict not only the location of the weapons grade plutonium, but even the radius of the source, just with passive dosimeters.

"Even though we used commercial dosimeters here, our findings strongly suggest that we could do the same using building materials, such as brick," Hayes says. "That's because the silicates in brick - such as quartz, feldspars, zircons, and so on - are all individual dosimeters. It is a tedious process to remove those grains from the brick for measurements, but we have done it multiple times. For the goals of this new research, it wasn't necessary to use brick - we've already shown we can do that. This was simply a question of determining how much information we could glean from this approach. And the answer is that we could learn a lot - about the size and shape of the radiation source, as well as the nature of the radioactive material itself."

"This ability for three-dimensional imaging is a novel capability, meaning we can basically see into history in terms of what nuclear material was where or when," says Ryan O'Mara, a Ph.D. student at NC State and coauthor of the work.

Washington, DC - March 23, 2020 - The number of potential therapeutic options for treatment of COVID-19 is growing. Approaches include blocking SARS-CoV-2 from entering cells, disrupting the virus' replication, antivirals, vaccines, and suppressing overactive immune response.

The research was published in a minireview, and in a short article in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology. The authors of the former suggest that therapeutic drugs directly targeting SARS-CoV-2 will be most effective.

SARS-CoV-2 is easily transmissible because spike proteins on the virus' surface bind exceptionally efficiently to "angiotensin-converting enzyme 2" (ACE2) on the surfaces of human cells. A pilot clinical trial is underway in patients with severe COVID-19, investigating use of recombinant human ACE2 to act as "decoys" that would attach to spike proteins, disabling SARS-CoV-2's mechanism for entry into human cells.

The most promising antiviral for fighting SARS-CoV-2 is remdesivir. It gets incorporated into nascent viral RNA, where it prevents RNA synthesis, and in turn, further viral replication. Remdesivir inhibited SARS-CoV-2 replication in laboratory studies, and the clinical condition of the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the U.S. improved following intravenous remdesivir administration. But more data is needed.

Tilarone, a broad spectrum antiviral, may also be active against SARS-CoV-2. This 50-year-old synthetic small molecule is used in some Russian Federation countries and neighboring countries against multiple viruses, including acute respiratory viral infection, influenza and hepatitis. Recent observations suggest tilarone is active against chikungunya virus and MERS-CoV.

While tilarone is approved in Russian Federation countries, it has not been tested for safety and efficacy in studies that meet U.S. Food and Drug Administration standards.

Another approach being researched is the transfusion of blood from recovered patients--which contain antibodies against the virus--into current patients. Due to lack of high quality randomized clinical trials and knowledge of the precise mechanism of action, it is not clear how effective this therapy is. It is used mainly in patients in critical condition. Several clinical trials investigating its effectiveness and safety against COVID-19 are now in progress.

More than fifteen vaccine candidates are being developed around the world, which take different approaches to vaccine design. Experts say vaccine development will take approximately 12-18 months.

Shorter and warmer winters lead to an increase in emissions of methane from northern lakes, according to a new study by scientists in Finland and the US. Longer ice-free periods contribute to increased methane emissions. In Finland, emissions of methane from lakes could go up by as much as 60%.

An international study by scientists from Purdue University in the US, the University of Eastern Finland, the Finnish Environment Institute and the University of Helsinki published in Environmental Research Letters significantly enhances our current knowledge of methane emissions from boreal lakes. The backbone of the study is a large dataset on the distribution and characteristics of lakes and their methane emissions in Finland. Using this dataset and modelling tools, the scientists aimed to find out how methane emissions from northern lakes will change towards the end of this century as a result of global warming.

Lakes account for about 10% of the boreal landscape and are, globally, responsible for approximately 30% of biogenic methane emissions that have been found to increase under changing climate conditions. However, the quantification of this climate-sensitive methane source is fraught with large uncertainty under warming climate conditions. Only a few studies have addressed the mechanisms of climate impact on methane emissions from northern lakes.

The authors estimated that the total current diffusive emission from Finnish lakes is 0.12±0.03 Tg CH4 yr-1 and will increase by 26-59% by the end of this century, depending on the warming scenario used. The study showed that while the warming of lake water and sediments plays a vital role, the increase in the length of the ice-free period is a key factor increasing methane emissions in the future.

"The boreal lakes remain a significant methane source under the warming climate within this century, and the increase in methane emissions depends on latitude: the increase is greater from the lower latitude northern lakes," Dr Narasinha Shurpali from the University of Eastern Finland and Dr Pirkko Kortelainen from the Finnish Environment Institute point out.

"The study shows the importance of co-operation between modellers and experimentalists. Here the representative dataset on lakes and their methane emissions was produced by the Finnish Environment Institute and the universities, enabling biogeochemical modelling to estimate the present and future methane emissions from lakes," Professor Pertti Martikainen from the University of Eastern Finland notes.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Scientists have found a way in the laboratory to shorten the time it takes to create a key chemical used to synthesize a variety of medications, fertilizers and other important substances.

The finding could make a number of industrial manufacturing processes cheaper and more efficient. And all it takes, essentially, is electrifying an aluminum container that includes the right chemicals.

In a study recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the research team described how to shorten a process to turn one chemical - triphenylphosphine oxide - into another chemical - triphenylphosphine. Triphenylphosphine is an important chemical for the manufacturing of materials that improve farming or can be used as pharmaceuticals.

"It might make it easier or cheaper to produce certain medications, materials, agrochemicals - essentially all organic synthesis," said Christo Sevov, an assistant professor of chemistry at The Ohio State University and senior author of the study.

Manufacturers already are making this conversion happen, but the process by which they do it is lengthy and expensive. The process also uses a substance, phosgene, that is toxic to humans.

"Nobody wants to use phosgene - it's incredibly toxic - but you need to use it in order to reactivate the chemicals - and you need a lot of it," Sevov said. Phosgene is a high-energy chemical; that high energy is necessary to convert triphenylphosphine oxide to triphenylphosphine, he said.

The current conversion process also produces carbon dioxide - something chemists have been trying to figure out how to limit.

The study published by Sevov and his research group shows that the energy needed to allow that conversion can happen by sending an electrical charge through an aluminum container. Doing so provides enough energy to allow aluminum to break one of the chemical bonds in triphenylphosphine oxide - essentially, to strip oxygen away from that molecule - and to leave behind just triphenylphosphine.

"We just cut the top off an aluminum soda can and poured everything we needed in there. Then we clipped a couple of electrical leads to the wall of the can and then that was the electricity we needed to make the conversions," Sevov said.

Chemists have been trying for decades to shorten this conversion process and to find a way to achieve the conversion without using toxic chemicals. Sevov's research group, which studies the interactions between electricity and chemicals, discovered this shortcut almost by accident, while working on another experiment.

Shuhei Manabe, a researcher in Sevov's lab, noted that introducing aluminum and electricity allowed the team to convert one chemical to the other with very little waste.

Sevov said the simplicity of that process was surprising to the whole research team.

"Usually, you get a whole mess of byproducts when you convert one to the other - that's why nobody does this in a single step," he said. "And it's really the steps in the conversion process that make things expensive. If you can cut steps, that makes the final product much cheaper."

As cities physically expanded worldwide between 1970 and 2010, the population in those cities became less dense, according to a study led by a Texas A&M university professor.

Researchers found the trend was driven by small- and medium-sized cities, particularly in India, China, North America and Europe. Burak Güneralp, assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M, Billy Hales, a doctoral student in the same department, and colleagues from Yale University and Arizona State University examined these changes in a study published in Environmental Research Letters.

More than 60 percent of the reported urban expansion was formerly agricultural land, the researchers estimated.

"If urban population densities had remained unchanged since 1970, more than 48,000 square miles (roughly the size of North Carolina) would have been saved from conversion to urban and instead could have remained in cultivation or as natural vegetation," Güneralp said.

He said decreases in urban population densities present several problems. Loss of fertile lands at the outskirts of growing cities caused by decreasing urban population densities is of serious concern in China, India and Nigeria, Güneralp said.

"These three countries are expected to account for more than a third of the projected increase in the world's urban population by 2050," he said. "They also still have many millions of small farmers earning their livelihoods working fertile lands on the outskirts of cities. Thus, any loss of these high-quality lands to urban expansion has huge implications for the livelihoods of these farmers."

This is "especially disconcerting" for India, he said, with about half of its land classified as "degraded" while the country had the steepest decreases in urban land-use efficiency from 1970 to 2010. India has the world's largest rural population.

"Our findings suggest that decreasing urban population densities in India and Nigeria since 1970 caused 85 percent and 30 percent more land, respectively, to be converted to urban," Güneralp said.

A decrease in density as cities grow outward also puts pressure on local and regional governments to provide adequate infrastructure such as water, transportation and housing to formerly rural areas, he said.

The researchers found that these trends are the strongest in small- and medium-sized urban centers, defined in the study as those with fewer than 2 million people.

"Furthermore, small-medium cities in India, China, Southeast Asia, Africa and Europe are following in the footsteps of the United States in declines in urban population densities," he said. "These findings are important because, globally, it is these small-medium sized cities with limited institutional and financial capacity that are growing the fastest."

The U.S. had the lowest urban population densities across all four decades the researchers looked at, which led to many of the same problems seen in other countries.

"Such low density development whether in the U.S. or anywhere else generally means inefficient use of resources," Güneralp said.

Güneralp said the findings are relevant to one of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations', SDG11, which was established specifically to measure progress around the world toward making cities and communities more sustainable.

"It is important for urban areas to attain densities that would both improve living conditions in urban landscapes and promote efficient use of resources including land," he said.

(Boston)--Physician gender pay gaps continue to persist in the U.S. despite an impressive body of research spanning more than 25 years. While men have a larger representation within academic medical leadership, a new study publish in JAMA Network Open has found that women are significantly overrepresented as the authors and disseminators of physician compensation studies and this research is largely unfunded.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers led by Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and Harvard University examined multiple areas of medicine including surgery, critical care and infectious disease, physical medicine and rehabilitation, dermatology, psychiatry, interventional radiology and pediatric emergency medicine.

"If compensation studies are unfunded and if women are more engaged than men in the pay equity issue, these factors may contribute to slow progress in addressing compensation disparities," explained corresponding author Allison R. Larson, MD, MS, associate professor of dermatology at BUSM.

"This study supports the idea that women physicians and scientists may be considerably more knowledgeable about and engaged in solving gender disparities than male colleagues, but because of a dearth of women in top leadership roles they have less power to do so," added senior author, Julie K. Silver, MD, associate professor and associate chair of the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School.

In 2019, the average male doctor made $258,000 per year, while the average female physician earned $207,000--25 percent less. The pay gap among specialists was larger, but narrowed slightly, from 36 percent in 2018 to 33 percent in 2019.

Researchers searched the literature for physician compensation studies (including salary, income, industry payments and Medicare reimbursements) that included data on gender differences. They then analyzed the genders of the authors of these studies as well as the genders of authors of articles citing these studies and individuals who disseminated the studies on Twitter. They found that women made up the majority of study authors, citation authors and Twitter disseminators. In terms of funding, more than half of these studies were unfunded.

According to the researchers, equity and diversity in the physician workforce are a priority as they have implications for patient care. "Based on our findings, women may be more engaged and knowledgeable about pay disparities while men are disproportionately represented in medical school and hospital leadership, and thus are better positioned to fix disparities.

Additionally, if women are primarily producing this mostly unfunded research, they are doing so largely at the expense of additional income in the form of clinical revenue and without appropriate academic credit for promotions in the form of grant funding," added Larson, a dermatologist at Boston Medical Center.

The researchers believe all healthcare leaders need to actively engage in fixing pay disparities and grant funding organizations should make these studies a priority.

A global research effort

'There is broad agreement on the importance of academic freedom, yet we have strikingly little knowledge about global or country-level trends,' says Prof. Kinzelbach, Professor for International Politics of Human Rights. 'This is why we decided to assess academic freedom worldwide and across time.'

The Academic Freedom Index (AFi) attempts to fill an important gap in knowledge and promote academic freedom as a fundamental principle of higher education and scientific research. Prof. Kinzelbach developed the project and a series of indicators in close coordination with the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin and with the Scholars at Risk Network in New York. The V-Dem Institute in Gothenburg managed the data collection. '1810 scholars from around the globe contributed to the new index by answering an expert survey, spanning the years 1900-2019,' explains Prof. Dr. Anna Lührmann, who is deputy director of the V-Dem Institute. 'We vetted and aggregated this data using our tested and award-winning statistical model.'

Indicators of academic freedom

AFi provides near global, time-series data on national levels of academic freedom. It includes five indicators, each measuring a different dimension of academic freedom: freedom to research and teach, freedom of academic exchange and dissemination, institutional autonomy, campus integrity, and freedom of academic and cultural expression. An online tool hosted by the V-Dem Institute provides easy access to the data. The tool allows researchers, policy-makers, advocates, students or others to analyse the various indicators, and compare trends across states and regions. The AFi opens up a wide variety of opportunities for research as well as for informing debates and enhancing decision-making by key stakeholders in both higher education and government.

'The new data not only helps us to examine where and why infringements of academic freedom occur, but also ways of strengthening academic freedom,' explains Prof. Kinzelbach. 'For example, we can show that countries where universities enjoy high institutional autonomy also tend to respect the freedom to research and teach. Further research into the data can open important doors for advocates of academic freedom around the world.'

Challenging university rankings

AFi is the result of a unique collaboration between scholars, an advocacy organisation and a think tank. 'Our aim is to modify incentive structures for universities and governments to make genuine respect for academic freedom a priority,' says Janika Spannagel from the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin. 'By providing data on the state of academic freedom worldwide, we aim to bring a rights and freedoms perspective into international debates on the quality, reputation and governance of higher education.' This should also call into question existing university rankings, which purport to measure 'excellence', without adequately considering academic freedom. 'We hope that academics, students, university management, research funders, governments, and other higher education stakeholders will use the Academic Freedom Index to enhance monitoring systems, make better informed decisions, and to strengthen concrete safeguards for academic freedom,' adds her colleague Ilyas Saliba, also from GPPi. For example, funders and universities could require the submission of risk mitigation strategies with research and partnership proposals that foresee activities in repressive settings.

Robert Quinn, Executive Director of the Scholars at Risk Network, agrees that the AFi data demands international attention and calls for better safeguards. 'We need an Academic Freedom Index to understand trends over time and we must act on the findings. For too long now, governments and universities have lacked the data to measure and promote academic freedom,' says Quinn. 'I am extremely pleased that we now have a global dataset, which was produced by academics themselves in a collaborative, international effort,' says Quinn. 'We must now use it to defend historical advances, push back against contemporary pressures on free academia, and nurture higher education values. The Academic Freedom Index will help us to do so.'

The index and all disaggregated indicators will be updated annually.

Full global coverage will be reached by spring 2021.

Ithaca, NY--According to a new study, Zebra Finches exposed to low levels of environmental PCBs as nestlings show changes in breeding behavior as adults. The study published in the journal PLoS ONE was conducted by scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Though polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, were banned in 1979, they still contaminate the environment because of improper disposal.

"Decades of work has shown that high levels of PCB-exposure can be toxic and carcinogenic, but less is known about low levels of PCB exposure," explains lead author Sara DeLeon, who conducted the research as part of her doctoral studies at Cornell University. "PCBs are endocrine disruptors, meaning that even very low levels could be mimicking the effects of hormones, and potentially influencing behavior."

The researchers investigated the effects of two kinds of PCBs used by industry. Nestling Zebra Finches were exposed to low levels of PCBs for seven days to mimic exposure to contaminated food that parent birds in the wild would deliver to their young.

"Our results show that this level of PCB exposure during nestling development does have consequences on adult reproductive behavior," says DeLeon. "Male Zebra Finches exposed to PCBs during development sang fewer syllables as adults. Depending on the type of PCB treatment, some finches made more nesting attempts and also abandoned nests more often."

Some young fledged significantly earlier than normal. DeLeon says these results are likely the result of increased aggression between males.

"Our findings suggest that sub-lethal PCB-exposure during development can change key reproductive characteristics of adult Zebra Finches, likely reducing fitness in the wild," concludes DeLeon.

Washington, DC - March 20, 2020 - SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 disease is more transmissible, but has a lower mortality rate than its sibling, SARS-CoV, according to a review article published this week in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

In humans, coronaviruses cause mainly respiratory infections. Individuals with SARS-CoV-2 may remain asymptomatic for 2 to 14 days post-infection and some individuals likely transmit the virus without developing disease symptoms.

So far, the most promising compound for treating COVID-19 is the antiviral, remdesivir. It is currently in clinical trials for treating Ebola virus infections.

Remdesivir was recently tested in a non-human primate model of MERS-CoV infection. Prophylactic treatment 24 hours prior to inoculation prevented MERS-CoV from causing clinical disease and inhibited viral replication in lung tissues, preventing formation of lung lesions. Initiation of treatment 12 hours after virus inoculation was similarly effective.

Remdesivir has also shown effectiveness against a wide range of coronaviruses. It has already undergone safety testing in clinical trials for Ebola, thereby reducing the time that would be necessary for conducting clinical trials for SARS-CoV-2.

Nonetheless, much work needs to be done to gain a better understanding of the mechanics of SARS-CoV-2. For example, understanding how SARS-CoV-2 interacts with the host ACE2 receptor--by which SARS-CoV-2 gains entry into the host (whether human or animal)--might reveal how this virus overcame the species barrier between animals and humans. This could also lead to design of new antivirals.

Although coronaviruses are common in bats, no direct animal source of the epidemic has been identified to date, according to the report. "It is critical to identify the intermediate species to stop the current spread and to prevent future human SARS-related coronavirus epidemics," the researchers write.