Culture

NEW YORK...June 21, 2018 - Putting yourself in someone else's shoes and relying on intuition or "gut instinct" isn't an accurate way to determine what they're thinking or feeling," say researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), the University of Chicago and Northeastern University.

"We incorrectly presume that taking someone else's perspective will help us understand and improve interpersonal relationships," they say in a new study published in the American Psychological Association's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. "If you want an accurate understanding of what someone is thinking or feeling, don't make assumptions, just ask."

The researchers debunk the theories canonized in Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People that assuming you understand someone else's thoughts, feelings, attitude, or mental state is a correct approach to interpersonal insight.

The study included an exhaustive series of 25 experiments designed to separate accuracy from egotism. The researchers asked participants to adopt another person's perspective and predict their emotions based on facial expressions and body postures, identify fake versus genuine smiles, spot when someone is lying or telling the truth, and even predict a spouse's activity preferences and consumer attitudes.

"Initially a large majority of participants believed that taking someone else's perspective would help them achieve more accurate interpersonal insight," the researchers said. "However, test results showed that their predictive assumptions were not generally accurate, although it did make them feel more confident about their judgement and reduced egocentric biases."

Ultimately, the researchers confirmed gaining perspective directly through conversation is the most accurate approach.

Tiny freshwater fish have a view of the world that blows Google Street View out of the water - using different parts of their eyes to deliver optimum uses of colour, black-and-white and ultraviolet.

A zebrafish view of the world has been forensically analysed by researchers at the University of Sussex to reveal that how they see their surroundings changes hugely depending on what direction they are looking.

The study of the colour vision system of zebrafish larvae, published today in Current Biology, reveals they use their near 360 degree view of their world to detect threatening silhouettes above them in black-and-white but can seek out the almost transparent single-cell organisms they feed on by detecting the scattering of light in UV.

Dr Tom Baden, a senior lecturer in neuroscience at the University of Sussex who led the research, said: "By measuring the activity of thousands of neurons in the live animal while presenting visual stimuli, we established that different parts of their retinas, looking at different parts of the visual world, do different things. This multi-faceted view makes perfect sense for zebrafish as that's how colour is distributed in their natural habitat. In their natural visual world, most colour information is on the ground and the horizon but above them the objects of most interest are dark silhouettes, so colour vision here is rather pointless."

The study is the first in-depth physiological description of any vertebrate's retinal setup for colour vision that uses "4 input colours" which includes a large proportion of non-mammal species such as most birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish. By comparison humans only use three and mice, dogs and horses only two.

The researchers say little is understood on how colour vision based on four or more spectral inputs works at a neuronal level but their paper, should help pave the way for further discoveries in this field. The team custom-built a hyperspectral scanner that allowed them to capture the full spectrum of light in the zebrafish natural world at each pixel including for UV vision.

The study found that zebrafish, who during larval and juvenile life stages live mostly in shallow, low current pockets on the sides of streams and rice paddies, only seem to use their colour vision repertoire for looking down and along the horizon, use colour-blind circuits for looking straight up and extremely sensitive ultraviolet vision for looking forward and upwards.

The zebrafish has made a supreme evolutionary effort to develop this superior vision, with about half of all its neurons inside the eyes making up nearly a quarter of their total body volume and requiring substantial metabolic investment. Similar ratios on a human being would mean eyes around the size of a large grapefruit which would require an optic nerve the width of an arm.

Dr Baden said: "Clearly, animals like zebrafish use specialised strategies to better navigate their natural environment by adjusting their eyes to look out for different things in different parts of their visual field. In contrast, technology has not really caught up with these types of ideas. For example, most standard camera systems still "blindly" use the same type of light detection and compression across an entire image even if half the image shows bright blue sky and the other half the overgrown and shadowed ground."

(Madison, Wis.) June 21, 2018--Studying abroad can impart a number of valuable, lifelong skills in students, including improved foreign language skills, appreciation for other cultures and, importantly, access to unique learning opportunities only available in certain countries and settings. However, less than 10 percent of U.S. college students participate in study abroad experiences. The cost of these experiences remains a major impediment to many students. As part of the American Physiological Society's (APS's) Institute on Teaching and Learning in Madison, Wis., Patricia A. Halpin, PhD, will present a case study of a pilot program that aimed to provide more opportunities for students at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester to study abroad.

Most of the students at the university's commuter campus work part-time to defray the cost of attendance. "In order to increase access to study abroad opportunities, a new semester-long course was designed with a study abroad trip to Belize occurring during spring break. The cost of the study abroad portion was made a course fee so it could potentially be covered under a financial aid package that provides funds for tuition and fees," Halpin wrote. The course explored native Belizean ecosystems, including the coral reef, mangroves and rain forests, and included in-class lectures and on-site research in Belize. Ten students enrolled in the class, with financial aid covering full or partial costs of the trip for seven of the students.

"Many [students] reported that in addition to learning about Belize they learned more about themselves and felt more comfortable getting out of their comfort zone. All of the students stated this course increased the likelihood that they would travel abroad again and that they would recommend the course to a friend," Halpin said.

Patricia A. Halpin, PhD, assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester, will present "A new course makes study abroad more accessible to commuter students" in a poster session on Thursday, June 21, at the Madison Concourse Hotel.

(Madison, Wis.) June 21, 2018--Multiple factors go into making an effective professional development (PD) program for K-12 teachers. Focusing on content, active learning, collaboration and coaching support and using models of effective teaching can broaden the knowledge of science teachers. However, many teachers are short on the resources needed to attend one-time short-term PD programs. Additionally, there is little data on the effect of national PD programs on student achievement. The results of one online PD program for teachers will be shared today as part of American Physiological Society's (APS's) Institute on Teaching and Learning in Madison, Wis.

APS analyzed the impact of its 10-month online Six Star Science Online Teacher Professional Development Program. The program focused on boosting confidence, knowledge and actual use in multiple areas, such as STEM career education, scientific content, equity and diversity in the classroom, and reflection on teaching and learning.

Participants reported an increase in confidence and felt more prepared to teach in many of the STEM-related topics covered during the program, including teaching about biomedical career options and understanding the differences between basic and clinical research. In addition, the course enrollees reported that "they reflected on their teaching and participated in online teacher communities of practice more often," APS researchers wrote.

Margaret Steiben, program manager for K-12 education programs at APS, will present "Professional development increases teacher knowledge, confidence and use of effective pedagogy" in a poster session on Thursday, June 21, at the Madison Concourse Hotel.

A team of international astrophysicists may have found a solution to a problem that has perplexed scientists for more than 50 years: why are the stars in globular clusters made of material different to other stars found in the Milky Way?

In a study published by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the team led by the University of Surrey, introduce a new actor to the equation that could solve the problem - a supermassive star.

The Milky Way galaxy hosts over 150 old globular clusters, each containing hundreds of thousands of stars densely packed together and held by gravity - these stars are almost as old as the Universe. Since the 1960s, it has been known that most stars in these clusters contain different chemical elements than all other stars in the Milky Way - these could not have been produced in the stars themselves because the required temperatures are about 10 times higher than the temperatures of the stars themselves.

The Surrey scientists argue that a supermassive star, with a mass that is tens of thousands times the mass of the Sun, formed at the same time as the globular clusters. At that time, globular clusters were filled with dense gas out of which the stars were forming. As the stars collect more and more gas, they get so close to each other that they could physically collide and form a supermassive star in a runaway collision process. The supermassive star was hot enough to produce all the observed elements and "pollute" the other stars in the cluster with the peculiar elements we observe today.

Lead-author Professor Mark Gieles of the University of Surrey said: "What is truly novel in our model is that the formation of the supermassive stars and the globular clusters are intimately linked, and this new mechanism is the first model that can form enough material to pollute the cluster, and with the correct abundances of different elements, which has been a long-standing challenge."

The team proposes various ways to test this new model of globular clusters and supermassive star formation with existing and upcoming telescopes, which can peer deep into the regions where the globular clusters formed, when the Universe was very young.

Professor Henny Lamers, co-author of the study from the University of Amsterdam, said: "There have been many attempts to solve this problem that has puzzled astronomers for decades and I believe that this is the most promising explanation that has been proposed so far. "I am especially proud that this study is the result of a collaboration between a group of my ex-students and colleagues who are experts in different branches of astronomy."

There is no strong evidence that vitamin D protects against pregnancy-induced high blood pressure (hypertension) or pre-eclampsia, conclude researchers in The BMJ today.

The findings support current World Health Organization guidance that evidence recommending vitamin D supplements for women during pregnancy to reduce adverse pregnancy outcomes is insufficient. However, in many countries, including the UK and the US, pregnant women are advised to take a daily dose of vitamin D.

It is common for pregnant women to have low levels of vitamin D, which can suppress the hormone that regulates blood pressure which may increase the risk of both hypertension and pre-eclampsia during pregnancy.

Previous population-based studies have found that women with lower levels of vitamin D are at greater risk of pre-eclampsia and some trials of vitamin D supplementation in pregnancy suggest a potential benefit. But it remains unclear whether vitamin D is a cause of pre-eclampsia.

So an international team led by Maria Magnus at the University of Bristol, set out to investigate whether vitamin D has a effect on pregnancy induced hypertension or pre-eclampsia.

Using a technique called Mendelian randomisation, they examined whether genetic variants associated with vitamin D production and metabolism also influenced the risk of pregnancy-induced hypertension and pre-eclampsia for 7,389 women (751 with gestational hypertension and 135 with pre-eclampsia) from two large European studies (Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, also known as Children of the 90s, and Generation R Study).

They also performed another (two sample) Mendelian randomisation analysis of 3,388 pre-eclampsia cases and 6,059 controls.

Analysing genetic information as proxies for the exposure of interest in this way avoids some of the problems that afflict traditional observational studies, making the results less prone to unmeasured (confounding) factors. An association that is observed using Mendelian randomisation therefore strengthens the inference of a causal relationship.

Mendelian randomisation analysis showed no evidence to support a direct (causal) effect of vitamin D levels on risk of gestational hypertension or pre-eclampsia.

The researchers point to some study limitations. For example, the analyses were restricted to pregnant women. If vitamin D affects fertility, this may have resulted in selection bias.

In light of the uncertainty, they suggest further studies with a larger number of women with preeclampsia or more genetic variants that would increase the predictive power of vitamin D levels are needed.

"In combination with adequately powered clinical trials, this could help finally establish whether vitamin D status has a role in pregnancy related hypertensive disorders." they conclude.

An international team of researchers has discovered evidence of 27 previously unknown viruses in bees. The finding could help scientists design strategies to prevent the spread of viral pathogens among these important pollinators.

"Populations of bees around the world are declining, and viruses are known to contribute to these declines," said David Galbraith, research scientist at Bristol Myers Squibb and a recent Penn State graduate. "Despite the importance of bees as pollinators of flowering plants in agricultural and natural landscapes and the importance of viruses to bee health, our understanding of bee viruses is surprisingly limited."

To investigate viruses in bees, the team collected samples of DNA and RNA, which is responsible for the synthesis of proteins, from 12 bee species in nine countries across the world. Next, they developed a novel high-throughput sequencing technique that efficiently detected both previously identified and 27 never-seen-before viruses belonging to at least six new families in a single experiment. The results appear in the June 11, 2018, issue of Scientific Reports.

"Typically, researchers would have to develop labor-intensive molecular assays to test for the presence of specific viruses," said Zachary Fuller, postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University and a recent Penn State graduate. "With our method, they can sequence all the viruses present in a sample without having any prior knowledge about what might be there."

Fuller noted that because the cost of high-throughput sequencing continues to decrease, the team's approach provides an inexpensive and efficient technique for other researchers to identify additional unknown viruses in bee populations around the world.

"Although our study nearly doubles the number of described bee-associated viruses, there are undoubtedly many more viruses yet to be uncovered, both in well-studied regions and in understudied countries," he said.

Among the new viruses the team identified was one that is similar to a virus that infects plants.

"It is possible that bees may acquire viruses from plants, and could then spread these viruses to other plants, posing a risk to agricultural crops," said Christina Grozinger, distinguished professor of entomology and director of the Center for Pollinator Research at Penn State. "We need to do more experiments to see if the viruses are actively infecting the bees -- because the viruses could be on the pollen they eat, but not directly infecting the bees -- and then determine if they are having negative effects on the bees and crops. Some viruses may not cause symptoms or only cause symptoms if the bees are stressed in other ways."

Beyond identifying the new viruses, the team also found that some of the viruses exist in multiple bee species -- such as in honey bees and in bumble bees -- suggesting that these viruses may freely circulate within different bee populations.

"This finding highlights the importance of monitoring bee populations brought into the United States due to the potential for these species to transmit viruses to local pollinator populations," said Galbraith. "We have identified several novel viruses that can now be used in screening processes to monitor bee health across the world."

According to Galbraith, the study represents the largest effort to identify novel pathogens in global bee samples and greatly expands our understanding of the diversity of viruses found in bee communities around the world.

"Our protocol has provided a foundation for future studies to continue to identify novel pathogens that infect global bee populations using an inexpensive method for the detection of novel viruses," he said.

Health impacts of neonicotinoids may go well beyond bees, according to a new University of Guelph study.

U of G researchers found residues of the insecticides in the livers of wild turkeys, providing evidence that this common agrochemical is being ingested by free-ranging animals.

The researchers from the Ontario Veterinary College are among the first to study the broader effects of neonics on wildlife.

Published in Environmental Science and Pollution Research, the study showed that nearly 10 of the 40 wild turkey carcasses tested had detectable levels of neonicotinoids in their livers. Two types of the insecticide were found in some birds.

The researchers also found corn and soybean seeds coated with the insecticide in the digestive system of some birds.

"Wild turkeys supplement their diet with seeds from farm fields," said pathobiology professor Claire Jardine. She conducted the study with former pathobiology professor Nicole Nemeth, who is now at the University of Georgia, pathobiology PhD Amanda MacDonald, and Philippe Thomas, a wildlife toxicologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

“There has been growing concern among natural resource managers, conservationists and hunters about whether the use of neonics may be linked to poor reproductive output of wild turkeys.”

While researchers have focused on health risks of neonicotinoids to bees, studying exposure levels in larger wildlife species is critical in understanding wider impacts on migratory behaviour, reproduction and mortality, said Jardine.

"Our results serve as baseline data for southern Ontario wild turkeys and provide context for reference values in future analyses."

MacDonald began the study after officials with the Ontario Federation of Hunters and Anglers called for research into the potential threat posed by neonics to wild turkeys.

"A number of member hunters throughout southern Ontario had seen wild turkeys in the fields eating these seeds," said MacDonald. "In certain areas, they noticed a lack of young birds and wanted to know if neonicotinoids had anything to do with it."

The study proves wild turkeys consumed neonic-treated seeds, but long-term health effects on the birds remain unknown, added MacDonald.

Previous studies have found that neonic-coated seeds cause health risks in partridges, pigeons and quail. Small amounts of the insecticide have been shown to affect body mass, reproductive efforts and perhaps mortality in migratory white-crowned sparrows.

"We need to continue to assess levels of neonics in a variety of wildlife, especially those that may feed off the ground or consume plants and insects and therefore might be more likely to come into contact with them," said Nemeth.

DES PLAINES, IL--Most emergency department patients want to be involved in some aspects of medical decision-making, but they need to be invited. These are the primary findings of a study to be published in the July 2018 issue of Academic Emergency Medicine (AEM), a journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM).

The lead author of the study is Elizabeth M. Schoenfeld, MD, MS, assistant professor, Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Massachusetts Medical School-Baystate, and a fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Delivery and Population Science, Baystate Medical Center.

The study, by Schoenfeld, et al, found that most adult emergency department patients want some degree of involvement in decision making in situations for which there are multiple reasonable options; however, they will wait for a clinicians' invitation before sharing in decision making. The study recommends that this invitation be accompanied by clear and jargon-free explanations of options and consequences and that clinicians avoid "misdiagnosing" the patients' preferences for involvement based on their verbal and nonverbal expressions of trust, deference, or disengagement.

The study --the first to evaluate the attitudes and preferences of emergency department patients regarding shared decision making (SDM)--suggests that further research should examine these issues in a larger and more representative population.

Margaret Samuels-Kalow, MD, MPhil, MSHP, assistant professor of emergency medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital commented on the study:

"This rigorous qualitative study provides important insights into patient preferences for shared decision making (SDM) in the emergency department (ED), emphasizing the importance of ED physicians identifying situations where SDM is applicable and inviting patient involvement. Some of the identified challenges to SDM are likely problematic in any clinical encounter, such as physician use of technical language/jargon, while others may be worse in the ED, such as patient inability to identify their provider. In the future, it will be interesting to see if these same themes hold true for patients with unstable critical illness or who speak a language other than English."

Boston, MA - Current experimental approaches in Medicaid programs--including requirements to pay premiums, contribute to health savings accounts, or to work--may lead to unintended consequences for patient coverage and access, such as confusing beneficiaries or dissuading some people from enrolling, according to a new study from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The study will be published online June 20, 2018 in Health Affairs.

"There's been a lot of recent research showing that expanding Medicaid leads to improved access to care and better quality of care--which suggests that any expansion will be better for public health than not expanding," said Benjamin Sommers, associate professor of health policy and economics at Harvard Chan School and lead author of the study. "But our findings suggest that some of the benefits of expanding Medicaid may be at least partially compromised by some of the current innovations in use."

Under the Trump Administration, which has prioritized increased flexibility for state Medicaid programs, some states have been experimenting with new approaches. Most recently, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) approved proposals from Kentucky, Arkansas, and Indiana for the first-ever work requirements in Medicaid, and other states, including Kansas, have expressed interest in following suit.

The researchers sought to assess views about new Medicaid approaches in three Midwestern states with different policies: Ohio, which has a traditional Medicaid expansion without premiums and with minimal cost-sharing; Indiana, which expanded Medicaid coverage in 2015 but which requires enrollees to pay premiums and contribute to health savings accounts; and Kansas, which did not expand Medicaid and where only very poor parents and disabled adults are eligible.

The researchers conducted a telephone survey in late 2017 of 2,739 low-income adults in the three states. The survey gathered respondents' views on health insurance, access to and quality of care, financial well-being, experiences with the Affordable Care Act (ACA), health savings accounts, work requirements, and private vs. public insurance coverage.

The study found:

In 2017, health insurance coverage rates were significantly higher in the Medicaid expansion states (Ohio and Indiana) than in the non-expansion state (Kansas).

Cost-related barriers to care were more common in Indiana than in Ohio. Indiana's health savings accounts were confusing for many enrollees, with nearly 40% saying they had never even heard of the required accounts and only 36% making regular required payments--meaning that two-thirds of beneficiaries were at risk of losing benefits or coverage for non-payment.

In Kansas, 77% of low-income individuals said they supported Medicaid expansion. Although Kansas is considering work requirements for its Medicaid program, most potential enrollees in the state were either already working or had a disability that prevented them from working. Only 11% of potential enrollees said they would be more likely to seek work if required to do so by Medicaid.

"For both work requirements and health savings accounts, the policies may operate as intended for modest numbers of Medicaid beneficiaries who understand or react to the incentives. But there's a real risk that even greater numbers of low-income adults will be adversely affected because they don't understand the new policies, can't afford them, or get tied up in administrative complexity. For these reasons, it's critical that there be ongoing independent monitoring of these approaches," Sommers said.

ITHACA, N.Y. - Using shotgun DNA sequencing, Cornell University researchers have demonstrated a new method for monitoring urinary tract infections (UTIs) that surpasses traditional methods in providing valuable information about the dynamics of the infection as well as the patient's biological response.

The technique is detailed in the paper "Urinary cell-free DNA is a versatile analyte for monitoring infections of the urinary tract," published June 20 in the journal Nature Communications.

UTIs are one of the most common infections in humans and occur when harmful bacteria or viruses reach parts of the urinary system, including the kidneys, bladder or urethra.

Researchers at Cornell Engineering and Weill Cornell Medicine discovered that they could learn about the bacterial and viral composition of a patient's urinary tract by isolating cell-free DNA - fragments of a dead cells' genome derived from human and microbial cells - from a urine sample.

Beyond measurement of the abundance of different components of the microbiome, urinary cell-free DNA provides a wealth of information about bacterial phenotypes, according to Iwijn De Vlaminck, professor of biomedical engineering and co-lead author of the study.

"We found that we could deduce the fraction of the bacterial population that is growing, by carefully looking at the places in the genome where the cell-free DNA was derived from" said De Vlaminck, who added that metagenomic analysis of the cell-free DNA can also be used to infer which antimicrobial drugs may work best against a particular infection.

The monitoring technique can be especially beneficial for kidney transplant recipients, according to the study's authors, which include co-lead author John Richard Lee, assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, as well as Darshana Dadhania, an associate professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, and Lars Westblade, an assistant professor of pathology at Weill Cornell Medicine. Half of all kidney recipients will suffer from a bacterial UTI within the first three years of receiving the transplant, putting those patients at risk of infection related complications.

"The cell-free DNA profiling technique can diagnose rare infections that are not routinely screened for and has the potential for earlier diagnosis and treatment and improve outcomes in kidney transplantation," said Manikkam Suthanthiran, chief of nephrology, hypertension, and transplantation at Weill Cornell Medicine and co-author of the study.

The time required to test urine samples for cell-free DNA can be made comparable to traditional UTI assays, according to the researchers, and will benefit from continued technical advances in DNA sequencing that will reduce cost and increase throughput in the years to come.

American swamp sparrows may have sung the same songs for more than 1,000 years and passed them on through generations by learning, according to researchers at Queen Mary University of London, Imperial College London and Duke University.

The study, published in Nature Communications, demonstrates that birds are capable of matching and potentially exceeding the stability of human cultural traditions despite their much smaller brains.

The researchers were able to estimate that the swamp sparrows (Melospiza georgiana), a well-studied species of songbird from the marshes of north-eastern USA, accurately learn their songs 98 per cent of the time.

More surprisingly, they do not pick songs to learn at random from those that they hear. Instead, they selectively choose songs that are more common - a learning strategy called conformist bias which was recently only thought of as particular to humans.

This has the effect of filtering out most new song types from the population as soon as they arise and makes the song traditions of swamp sparrows very stable.

The combination of accurate learning and conformist bias has led to some common song types being maintained in populations for extraordinarily long periods of time.

Lead author Dr Robert Lachlan, from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, said: "It is well known that many species of birds learn their songs from other members of their species. In humans, such vocal learning leads to large communities of people sharing the same dialect, and learning in general leads to long-lasting traditions, through processes of cultural evolution.

"Our study suggests that animal cultural behaviour can match that of humans in a couple of respects. We demonstrate that a fairly humble songbird species - there is really nothing particularly extraordinary about swamp sparrows - can generate stable cultural traditions, and that to do so, they rely on a behaviour, conformist bias, that until recently was thought to be a uniquely human trait."

He added: "The song-types that you could hear today in the marshes of north-eastern USA may well have been there 1,000 years ago and have been precisely passed on from one generation to the next, rivaling the stability of human cultural traditions."

To find this out, the researchers first recorded the song repertoires of 615 swamp sparrows in six populations across the North East of the US. They then used computational methods to measure the diversity of different song types found in each population. Finally, they used a statistical method called Approximate Bayesian Computation to fit simulation models of cultural evolution to their data.

This is the first time that simulations of culture have been fitted to animal behaviour in this way, and it allowed the researchers to explore what styles of learning were consistent with the patterns of song diversity they measured.

Their findings tie in with other recent work which has looked at how this cultural behaviour is central to the communication system of these birds. Building on their stable traditions, swamp sparrows also prefer songs that are more typical versions of song-types, compared to unusual renditions.

Other studies have shown that swamp sparrows learn categories of the building blocks of their songs, much as we learn categories of the building blocks of speech, known as phonemes.

Together, this work suggests that culture lies at the heart of the swamp sparrow song communication system.

Dr Lachlan added: "The study helps demonstrate how cultural traditions can generate underlying complex behaviour, even in the absence of cognitive sophistication. More broadly still, songbirds have become a model system for understanding the genomics underlying speech and language. But as yet, we haven't fully exploited the huge diversity found between different species in the way they learn their songs. Our study suggests how that might be addressed."

A heat wave sweeps through a city and people swelter, running indoors to find air conditioning. But crops out in a field aren't so lucky. For them, there is no escape.

Scientists in Australia are working to understand how heat waves impact wheat. They are mixing observational studies with techniques from computer science. This will allow them to create models to understand how wheat will respond in certain conditions.

Heat can affect plants and the soil, water, air, and microbes around them in many different ways. Knowing how all of these factors affect crops could help farmers protect their plants against heat waves' effects.

"Heat waves can greatly reduce wheat in growing regions and modeling could aid in finding strategies to limit the impact of extreme weather and climate change," says James Nuttall. Nuttall works for Australia's Agriculture Victoria, Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources. "This can specifically come in handy during the sensitive periods of crop flowering and the grain filling phase."

Wheat is an important crop with a worldwide production of 729 million tons in 2014. It is a major source of human nutrition. Nuttall says that maintaining stable production into the future includes finding ways to reduce the effects of heat stress to plants.

Nuttall and his team performed three experiments. They tried to get a complete picture of the different characteristics of heat stress, such as timing, intensity, and duration. They tested how plants responded to a multi-day heat wave and if it affected plants more during their flowering or grain-filling phase. They also studied how water availability during the heat wave affected the wheat.

Results showed that high temperatures five days before the wheat began to flower reduced the number of wheat grains on a plant. Also, a high-temperature event while the grain of wheat was growing reduced how big it got.

They then put all the results together into a computer simulation model. This allowed them to predict how wheat beyond just the plants in their experiment could be impacted by a heat wave.

Nuttall explains: "Crop modeling allows you to test responses for environment or treatment combinations, and also test how those interact with each other."

He says a good example is in climate change studies where scientists are interested in plants' response to carbon dioxide levels, temperature, and rainfall. A crop model allows them to test combinations of these factors on growth and yield.

"These models allow us to make a prediction of crop growth and yield," he says. "In finding ways to combat heat waves, modeling provides a tool to see the effects of climate and weather changes on wheat production. It helps us predict how wheat will react so we can try to stop any negative effects beforehand."

Nuttall says the next step in their research is to test their models using fields of wheat rather than a smaller sample of plants. They ultimately want to include their work in larger crop models to improve them.

"As a scientist, there is satisfaction in finding relationships between crop growth and stresses like heat waves," he says. "I also think the work is valuable because we can help crop models identify possible ways that allow us to keep producing the food our planet needs."

DURHAM , N.C. -- What makes human cultural traditions unique? One common answer is that we are better copycats than other species, which allows us to pass our habits and ways of life down through the generations without losing or forgetting them.

But a new study of birdsong finds that swamp sparrows are good impersonators too. And by faithfully copying the most popular songs, these birds create time-honored song traditions that can be just as long-lasting as human traditions, researchers say.

In fact, swamp sparrow song traditions often last hundreds of years, with some songs going back further than that.

"According to the models, some of the songs could go back as far as the Vikings," said first author Robert Lachlan, a lecturer in psychology at Queen Mary University of London.

The results appear June 20 in the journal Nature Communications.

The slow trill of the swamp sparrow can be heard in marshes and wetlands across eastern and central North America.

A grey-breasted bird with brownish wings, the swamp sparrow attracts mates and defends his territory with songs built from two- to five-note snippets, repeated over and over.

Researchers observed decades ago that swamp sparrows living in different places sing slightly different songs. Birds in New York might tend to sing in three-note repeats while their counterparts in Minnesota favor four, or combine the same basic notes in a different order.

Young birds learn the local customs in the first weeks of life by imitating their elders.

But while similar cultural traditions -- shared behaviors that are learned from others and passed from one generation to the next -- have been observed in all sorts of animals, the thinking has been that human traditions are more likely to last.

To test the idea, the researchers recorded the songs of 615 male swamp sparrows in six populations across New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Using computer software to measure and analyze each song, the team identified 160 song types across the species' range.

Each male has only a handful of songs in his repertoire. To figure out how young birds choose which songs to learn, the researchers developed a mathematical model that simulates how each new song type spreads within groups over time.

Each run of the model represented 5,000 years, at the end of which the researchers measured the song types in each group of birds.

With their model they also compared various song-learning strategies. For example, young birds might prefer to imitate one particular adult, such as their dad or a male with a good territory. Alternately, they might pick certain songs because they find them inherently more attractive, regardless of who sings them.

When they looked at how well their simulations fit the real data, the researchers found that young birds don't just randomly pick any song they hear and imitate that.

Instead, they copy the crowd, mimicking the most popular songs more often than one would expect by chance. Unique or rare songs that go against the mainstream rarely get a peep.

"It's called a 'conformist bias'," Lachlan said.

What's more, swamp sparrows learn their songs with amazing fidelity, correctly matching the songs they attempt to imitate more than 98 percent of the time.

There's an evolutionary benefit to fitting in, the researchers say. Previous studies show that females prefer typical tunes over outliers.

The end result, their models show, is that local song customs in swamp sparrows are far from fleeting trends, quickly going out of fashion and never to be uttered again.

Instead, they are handed down from one swamp sparrow generation to the next, with song types often persisting for 500 years or more, the researchers estimate.

The study also shows that creating traditions that pass the test of time doesn't necessarily require exceptional smarts.

The birds need not keep track of how many birds are singing each song to figure out how to fit in, the analyses show. They memorize a variety of songs early in life, from multiple older birds, but once they reach adulthood they only keep the songs they repeatedly hear others singing.

"The longstanding stable traditions so characteristic of human behavior have often been ascribed to the high cognitive abilities of humans and our ancestors," said study co-author Stephen Nowicki, professor of biology at Duke. "But what we're showing is that a relatively simple set of rules that these songbirds are capable of following can achieve equally lasting traditions."

"We're not saying that birds have anything akin to human culture," Lachlan said. "It shows that just those two ingredients -- a preference for popular songs, and the ability to copy them -- can get you quite a long way to having stable complex culture."

Paralysis of an arm and/or leg is one of the most common effects of a stroke. But thanks to research carried out by scientists at the Defitech Foundation Chair in Brain-Machine Interface, in association with other members of EPFL's Center for Neuroprothetics, the Clinique Romande de Réadaptation in Sion, and the Geneva University Hospitals, stroke victims may soon be able to recover greater use of their paralyzed limbs. The scientists' pioneering approach brings together two known types of therapies - a brain-computer interface (BCI) and functional electrical stimulation (FES) - and has been published in Nature Communications.

"The key is to stimulate the nerves of the paralyzed arm precisely when the stroke-affected part of the brain activates to move the limb, even if the patient can't actually carry out the movement. That helps reestablish the link between the two nerve pathways where the signal comes in and goes out," says José del R. Millán, who holds the Defitech Chair at EPFL.

Twenty-seven patients aged 36 to 76 took part in the clinical trial. All had a similar lesion that resulted in moderate to severe arm paralysis following a stroke occurring at least ten months earlier. Half of the patients were treated with the scientists' dual-therapy approach and reported clinically significant improvements. The other half were treated only with FES and served as a control group.

For the first group, the scientists used a BCI system to link the patients' brains to computers using electrodes. That let the scientists pinpoint exactly where the electrical activity occurred in the brain tissue when the patients tried to reach out their hands. Every time that the electrical activity was identified, the system immediately stimulated the arm muscle controlling the corresponding wrist and finger movements. The patients in the second group also had their arm muscles stimulated, but at random times. This control group enabled the scientists to determine how much of the additional motor-function improvement could be attributed to the BCI system.

Reactivated tissue

The scientists noted a significant improvement in arm mobility among patients in the first group after just ten one-hour sessions. When the full round of treatment was completed, some of the first-group patients' scores on the Fugl-Meyer Assessment - a test used to evaluate motor recovery among patients with post-stroke hemiplegia - were over twice as high as those of the second group.

"Patients who received the BCI treatment showed more activity in the neural tissue surrounding the affected area. Due to their plasticity, they could help make up for the functioning of the damaged tissue," says Millán.

Electroencephalographies (EEGs) of the patients clearly showed an increase in the number of connections among the motor cortex regions of their damaged brain hemisphere, which corresponded with the increased ease in carrying out the associated movements. What's more, the enhanced motor function didn't seem to diminish with time. Evaluated again 6-12 months later, the patients hadn't lost any of their recovered mobility.