What goes on in the brain when it gets too hot?

Which organisms survive and which succumb when the climate changes? A small larval fish is providing surprising insight into how the brain reacts when the temperature rises.

From: Norwegian Scitech News

By Ingebjørg Hestvik 

September 29, 2022 -- “It was pretty incredible, actually. The whole brain lit up,” says doctoral student Anna Andreassen.

Living organisms, be they fish or humans, tend to function less well as the temperature around them rises. This is something that many humans have probably experienced on a summer day that is a little too hot. But what exactly happens inside the body when the temperature gets uncomfortably warm?

Researchers at NTNU’s Department of Biology have combined genetic technology and neurophysiological methods to find the answer.

“We wanted to look at the mechanisms that limit organisms’ thermal tolerance. Which animals will survive when the Earth’s temperature increases due to climate change, and why? We chose to look at the brain,” says Andreassen.

Climate change causing heat waves

Heat waves that sweep across continents are becoming more common, and animals that live in water are experiencing temperatures that are rising to lethal levels. Understanding what limits survival at extremely high temperatures is crucial to being able to predict how organisms will cope with climate change.

“Thermal tolerance is a topic that has been researched for decades, and the idea that temperature affects brain activity is an old one. What’s new is that we can now use genetic technology and neurophysiology to study the phenomenon,” says Andreassen.

At NTNU in Trondheim, researchers used newly hatched zebrafish larvae to study their brain activity while gradually increasing the temperature around the larval fish.

“These fish have been genetically modified so that the neurons in the brain give off fluorescent light when they’re active. We can see this light under a microscope while the larvae swim around. These larval fish also have the advantage that they’re transparent. We get to look directly into the brains of the living larvae,” says Andreassen.

Lose ability to respond

In this way, the researchers can follow brain activity while gradually increasing the temperature of the water that the fish are swimming in.

“We can see how the larvae behave as it gets warmer. When it starts to get extremely warm, they lose their balance and start swimming around in circles, belly up.”

The researchers poked the fish larvae to check their response. They nudged the larvae’s tails, which normally triggers a swimming response.

“At a certain temperature, the fish stopped reacting to the pokes. They were still alive, but in an ecological sense they could be considered dead. In that condition out in nature, they wouldn’t be able to swim away from predators or find their way to colder water,” says Andreassen, who adds that this condition is only temporary in the small experimental fish.

“They’re in just as good shape as soon as we get them into cooler water again,” says Andreassen.

Heat turns off the brain

So far, the experiments had gone as the researchers were expecting. By shining light in front of the fish’s eyes, they could also check whether the brain was perceiving visual impressions. As the temperature rose, the brain completely stopped responding to stimuli and was completely inactive. But then, when they turned the temperature up a little more, something happened.

“The whole brain lit up. The closest I can come to describing what we saw was a kind of seizure,” says Andreassen.

Normally, you only see brain activity in the form of small spots of light in defined parts of the brain. Now the amazed researchers could observe under the microscope how the fluorescent light spread out within a few seconds and covered the entire brain of the small fish larva.

“We know that zebrafish brains have quite a lot in common with the human brain – 70 percent of the genetic material is the same – and researchers have speculated whether there could be a connection between what we saw in these fish larvae and what you see in the brains of children who have a fever,” says Andreassen.

Next, the researchers want to put a special type of brain cells– glial cells – under the microscope.

“What we’re excited to investigate here is the activity of glial cells during heating. These cells play a central role in oxygen supply to the brain – they both check the oxygen level and regulate the blood flow and thereby the oxygen supply. Because we can see that oxygen levels affect thermal tolerance, one hypothesis is that the brain stops working because the glial cells are no longer able to regulate the oxygen level.”

Differences advance evolution

In order to take a closer look at what happened, the researchers in Trondheim began to manipulate the amount of oxygen in the water the fish were swimming in, while increasing the temperature.

“To our surprise, we found that the oxygen level played a part in controlling the thermal tolerance. When we added extra oxygen, the larval fish did better at high temperatures, had higher brain activity and also recovered faster from being exposed to upper thermal limits compared to the fish with low oxygen.

Studies of other species have yielded contrasting results when testing the effect of oxygen concentration on thermal tolerance.

“Being “insensitive” to fluctuations in oxygen levels could thus be an evolutionary advantage as the temperature on Earth rises.

“The findings show that thermal tolerance is something that varies between species. This could be a characteristic that determines whether a species is able to adapt to climate change or will succumb to rising temperatures. A lot of organisms live in oxygen-poor environments where temperatures can quickly become higher than normal. They’ll be especially vulnerable,” says Andreassen.

She gives as an example organisms that live in shallow freshwater areas, in rivers or in the intertidal zone.

“These are habitats where large fluctuations in the oxygen level can occur, often at the same time as temperature fluctuations. In these habitats, fish whose thermal tolerance is limited by the oxygen level are likely to struggle more than fish who are not affected by it.”

“Animals that manage to maintain nerve function under low oxygen levels might be the ones that will tolerate high temperatures best,” says Andreassen.

Reference:
Anna H. Andreassen, Petter Hall, Pouya Khatibzadeh, Fredrik Jutfelt, Florence Kermen, Brain dysfunction during warming is linked to oxygen limitation in larval zebrafish, PNAS, published 19 September 2022. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2207052119

 

Stress Has an Odor and Dogs Can Smell It

Dogs can smell stress from human sweat and breath, a new study has found.

From:  Queen’s University Belfast

September 29. 2022 -- The study involved four dogs from Belfast -- Treo, Fingal, Soot and Winnie -- and 36 people.

Researchers collected samples of sweat and breath from participants before and after they did a difficult maths problem. They self-reported their stress levels before and after the task and researchers only used samples where the person's blood pressure and heart rate had increased.

The dogs were taught how to search a scent line-up and alert researchers to the correct sample. The stress and relaxed samples were then introduced but at this stage the researchers didn't know if there was an odour difference that dogs could detect.

In every test session, each dog was given one person's relaxed and stressed samples, taken only four minutes apart. All of the dogs were able to correctly alert the researchers to each person's stress sample.

Clara Wilson, a PhD student in the School of Psychology at Queen's, explains: "The findings show that we, as humans, produce different smells through our sweat and breath when we are stressed and dogs can tell this apart from our smell when relaxed -- even if it is someone they do not know.

"The research highlights that dogs do not need visual or audio cues to pick up on human stress. This is the first study of its kind and it provides evidence that dogs can smell stress from breath and sweat alone, which could be useful when training service dogs and therapy dogs.

"It also helps to shed more light on the human-dog relationship and adds to our understanding of how dogs may interpret and interact with human psychological states."

One of the super sniffer canines that took part in the study was Treo, a two-year old Cocker Spaniel. His owner Helen Parks says: "As the owner of a dog that thrives on sniffing, we were delighted and curious to see Treo take part in the study. We couldn't wait to hear the results each week when we collected him. He was always so excited to see the researchers at Queen's and could find his own way to the laboratory.

"The study made us more aware of a dog's ability to use their nose to "see" the world. We believe this study really developed Treo's ability to sense a change in emotion at home. The study reinforced for us that dogs are highly sensitive and intuitive animals and there is immense value in using what they do best -- sniffing!"

The research findings have been published in PLOS ONE. The study was carried out by Clara Wilson (PhD researcher) and Kerry Campbell (MSc student) in the School of Psychology. They were supervised by Catherine Reeve, with support on collecting the human physiological measures from Zachary Petzel.

        https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/09/220929133350.htm

  

Young Kids Avoid One Learning Trap that Often Snares Adults

Children can’t focus attention, which can sometimes be helpful

From Ohio State News

By Jeff Grabmeier

September 26, 2022 -- Children have a secret power that helps them avoid a “learning trap” that adults may sometimes fall into: Kids just can’t focus their attention.

A new study used eye-tracking technology to show that kids’ attention wandered all over a computer screen while they were trying to complete a task – even when adults quickly figured out they could do the task more efficiently by focusing on particular objects.

But that tendency to have a wandering eye helped 4- and 5-year-olds when the task unexpectedly changed – and they noticed important things on the screen that adults were not paying attention to.

“The ability of adults to focus their attention is usually very helpful in everyday life,” said Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.

“But sometimes it helps to see the world more as a kid and to notice things that may not seem that important or relevant at the time.”

Sloutsky conducted the research with Nathaniel Blanco, a postdoctoral researcher, and Brandon Turner, professor, both in psychology at Ohio State. The study was published online recently in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

The study involved 30 4- and 5-year-old children and 38 adults who participated in a lab, where they were fitted with eye trackers that could tell where they looked on a computer screen.

They were then shown colorful images of creatures that had seven identifiable features, including a head, tail and antennae.  

Participants were told there were two types of creatures, called Flurps and Jalets, and that they had to figure out which ones were which.

One feature was always different on the two types of creatures – for example, the Jalets may have a blue tail and the Flurps an orange tail. In addition, the children and adults were told that most (but not all) of the Flurps had a certain type of feature, such as pink antennae.

One of the features was never mentioned in the instructions and it did not differ between the types of creatures. This was what the researchers called the “irrelevant feature.”

After training, participants were shown a series of images of the creatures on the computer screen and were told to indicate which type of creature each one was.

During the first part of the experiment, adults quickly learned which feature always determined whether the creature was a Flurp or Jalet, and the eye-tracker showed that they then concentrated nearly all of their attention on that feature.

Children were slower to learn which feature was most important in determining which creature was which – and the eye-tracker showed they continued to look at all the features of the two creatures, even the ones that were not relevant.

“The kids were not as efficient as adults at learning quickly,” Sloutsky said. “They kept looking around even when they didn’t need to.”

But halfway through the experiment, the researchers made an unannounced switch: The irrelevant feature – the body part that previously had no bearing on what type of creature it was – became the feature that would determine whether it was a Flurp or a Jalet. This feature, which had been the same for both creatures before the switch, was now different for each.

After the switch, the adults were more oblivious to the importance of the new feature than the children were. Instead, they were relying on the previously learned less-important features.

Children, on the other hand, had been paying attention to everything, so they noticed more swiftly that the rules had changed.

“The adults were suffering from learned inattention,” Sloutsky said. “They weren’t paying attention to features that weren’t important during the first part of the experiment, so they missed when those features did become important.”

Sloutsky said the brains of 4- and 5-year-olds aren’t mature enough to focus attention in the way adults do. That fact may help them learn more as they explore the world.

And adults certainly have the ability to distribute their attention broadly like the children did in this study – but they often choose selective attention because it is helpful in achieving efficiency, he said.

The lesson for adults, though, is to realize that selective attention, while increasing the efficiency of learning and performance, can also lead to a learning trap in some situations, Sloutsky said.

“When you know something really well or a solution to a problem seems obvious, it may help to broaden your attention, to look for clues that may not seem relevant at first – to think like a kid again.”

The study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

        https://news.osu.edu/young-kids-avoid-one-learning-trap-that-often-snares-adults/

Reducing Power Consumption In Semiconductor Devices

Imbedding platinum nanoparticles reduces power consumption by half.  The new technology extends memory by one million times and is applicable in next-generation low-power devices.

From:  University of Science & Technology (POSTECH)

September 22, 2022 -- Stepping stones are placed to help travelers to cross streams. As long as there are stepping stones that connect the both sides of the water, one can easily get across with just a few steps. Using the same principal, a research team at POSTECH has developed technology that cuts the power consumption in semiconductor devices in half by placing stepping stones.

A research team led by Professor Junwoo Son and Dr. Minguk Cho (Department of Materials Science and Engineering) at POSTECH has succeeded in maximizing the switching efficiency of oxide semiconductor devices by inserting platinum nanoparticles. The findings from the study were recently published in the international journal Nature Communications.

The oxide material with the metal-insulator phase transition, in which the phase of a material rapidly changes from an insulator to a metal when the threshold voltage is reached, is spotlighted as a key material for fabricating low-power semiconductor devices.

The metal-insulator phase transition occurs when insulator domains, several nanometer (nm, billionth of a meter) units big, are transformed into metal domains. The key was to reduce the magnitude of the voltage applied to the device to increase the switching efficiency of a semiconductor device.

The research team succeeded in increasing the switching efficiency of the device by using platinum nanoparticles. When voltage was applied to a device, an electric current "skipped" through these particles and a rapid phase transition occurred.

The memory effect of the device also increased by more than a million times. In general, after the voltage is cut off, it immediately changes to the insulator phase where no current flows; this duration was extremely short at 1 millionth of a second. However, it was confirmed that the memory effect of remembering the previous firing of the devices can be increased to several seconds, and the device could be operated again with relatively low voltage owing to the residual metallic domains remaining near the platinum nanoparticles.

This technology is anticipated to be essential for the development of next-generation electronic devices, such as intelligent semiconductors or neuromorphic semiconductor devices that can process vast amounts of data with less power.

This study was conducted with the support from the Basic Science Research Program, Mid-career Researcher Program, and the Next-generation Intelligence Semiconductor Program of the National Research Foundation of Korea.

        https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/09/220922103205.htm

 

Russian Army Call Up splits EU; Ukraine says it shows weakness

Russian Army Call Up splits EU; Ukraine says it shows weakness

By JON GAMBRELL and ADAM SCHRECK

September 25, 2022

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia’s rush to mobilize hundreds of thousands of recruits to staunch stinging losses in Ukraine is a tacit acknowledgement that its “army is not able to fight,” Ukraine’s president said Sunday, as splits sharpened in Europe over whether to welcome or turn away Russians fleeing the call-up.

Speaking to U.S. broadcaster CBS, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also said he’s bracing for more Russian strikes on Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure, as the Kremlin seeks to ramp up the pressure on Ukraine and its Western backers as the weather gets colder. Zelenskyy warned that this winter “will be very difficult.”

“They will shoot missiles, and they will target our electric grid. This is a challenge, but we are not afraid of that.” he said on “Face the Nation.”

He portrayed the Russian mobilization — its first such call-up since World War II — as a signal of weakness, not strength, saying: “They admitted that their army is not able to fight with Ukraine anymore.”

More at this link:  https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-immigration-weather-4a06f007fbc7e907ffd31b33576cf7fe?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=TopNews&utm_campaign=position_01

  

Charging Cars at Home at Night Is Not the Way to Go, Stanford Study Finds

The move to electric vehicles will result in large costs for generating, transmitting, and storing more power. Shifting current EV charging from home to work and night to day could cut costs and help the grid, according to a new Stanford study.

By Mark Golden

From: Stanford News Service

September 22, 2022 -- The vast majority of electric vehicle owners charge their cars at home in the evening or overnight. We’re doing it wrong, according to a new Stanford study.

In March, the research team published a paper on a model they created for charging demand that can be applied to an array of populations and other factors. In the new study, published Sept. 22 in Nature Energy, they applied their model to the whole of the Western United States and examined the stress the region’s electric grid will come under by 2035 from growing EV ownership. In a little over a decade, they found, rapid EV growth alone could increase peak electricity demand by up to 25%, assuming a continued dominance of residential, nighttime charging.

To limit the high costs of all that new capacity for generating and storing electricity, the researchers say, drivers should move to daytime charging at work or public charging stations, which would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This finding has policy and investment implications for the region and its utilities, especially since California moved in late August to ban sales of gasoline-powered cars and light trucks starting in 2035.

“We encourage policymakers to consider utility rates that encourage day charging and incentivize investment in charging infrastructure to shift drivers from home to work for charging,” said the study’s co-senior author, Ram Rajagopal, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford.

In February, cumulative sales of EVs in California reached one million, accounting for about 6% of cars and light trucks. The state has targeted five million EVs on the road by 2030. When the penetration hits 30% to 40% of cars on the road, the grid will experience significant stress without major investments and changes in charging habits, said Rajagopal. Building that infrastructure requires significant lead time and cannot be done overnight.

“We considered the entire Western U.S. region, because California depends heavily on electricity imports from the other Western states. EV charging plus all other electricity uses have consequences for the whole Western region given the interconnected nature of our electric grid,” said Siobhan Powell, lead author of the March study and the new one.

“We were able to show that with less home charging and more daytime charging, the Western U.S. would need less generating capacity and storage, and it would not waste as much solar and wind power,” said Powell, mechanical engineering PhD ’22.

“And it’s not just California and Western states. All states may need to rethink electricity pricing structures as their EV charging needs increase and their grid changes,” added Powell, who recently took a postdoctoral research position at ETH Zurich.

Once 50% of cars on the road are powered by electricity in the Western U.S. – of which about half the population lives in California – more than 5.4 gigawatts of energy storage would be needed if charging habits follow their current course. That’s the capacity equivalent of 5 large nuclear power reactors. A big shift to charging at work instead of home would reduce the storage needed for EVs to 4.2 gigawatts.

Changing incentives

Current time-of-use rates encourage consumers to switch electricity use to nighttime whenever possible, like running the dishwasher and charging EVs. This rate structure reflects the time before significant solar and wind power supplies when demand threatened to exceed supply during the day, especially late afternoons in the summer.

Today, California has excess electricity during late mornings and early afternoons, thanks mainly to its solar capacity. If most EVs were to charge during these times, then the cheap power would be used instead of wasted. Alternatively, if most EVs continue to charge at night, then the state will need to build more generators – likely powered by natural gas – or expensive energy storage on a large scale. Electricity going first to a huge battery and then to an EV battery loses power from the extra stop.

At the local level, if a third of homes in a neighborhood have EVs and most of the owners continue to set charging to start at 11 p.m. or whenever electricity rates drop, the local grid could become unstable.

“The findings from this paper have two profound implications: the first is that the price signals are not aligned with what would be best for the grid – and for ratepayers. The second is that it calls for considering investments in a charging infrastructure for where people work,” said Ines Azevedo, the new paper’s other co-senior author and associate professor of energy science and engineering in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, which opened on Sept. 1.

“We need to move quickly toward decarbonizing the transportation sector, which accounts for the bulk of emissions in California,” Azevedo continued. “This work provides insight on how to get there. Let’s ensure that we pursue policies and investment strategies that allow us to do so in a way that is sustainable.”

Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs. The research team compared several scenarios of charging infrastructure availability, along with several different residential time-of-use rates and commercial demand charges. Some rate changes made the situation at the grid level worse, while others improved it. Nevertheless, a scenario of having charging infrastructure that encourages more daytime charging and less home charging provided the biggest benefits, the study found.

Rajagopal and Azevedo are also co-directors of the Bits & Watts Initiative at Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy.  Other co-authors of this study are Gustavo Cezar, PhD student and a staff engineer at Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; and Liang Min, managing director of the Bits & Watts Initiative.

This work was funded by the California Energy Commission, the National Science Foundation, and the Bits & Watts Initiative with support from Volkswagen.

        https://news.stanford.edu/press/view/45245

 

2022 Swedish General Election

General elections were held in Sweden on 11 September 2022 to elect the 349 members of the Riksdag. They in turn will elect the prime minister of Sweden. Under the constitution, regional and municipal elections were also held on the same day. The preliminary results presented on 15 September 2022 showed the government parties lost their majority. The likely outcome of the election is that Ulf Kristersson, the leader of the Moderate Party (M), will become prime minister.

Following the 2018 Swedish general election, the Swedish Social Democratic Party (S) under Stefan Löfven formed a government with the Green Party (MP), while the Centre Party (C), Left Party (V), and Liberals (L) abstained during the vote of confidence on 18 January 2019. The Alliance, in which C and L had participated since 2004, was effectively dissolved; by late 2021, an informal right-wing alliance was formed by M with Kristersson as prime ministerial candidate of a government including the Christian Democrats (KD) with the support of L and the Sweden Democrats (SD). Löfven governed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden, even as his government was briefly dismissed due to a no-confidence vote initiated by V in June 2021 over rent controls. Löfven resigned from all political offices in November 2021. Magdalena Andersson, Sweden's former Minister for Finance, succeeded him and led the Andersson Cabinet since then, with C, V, and MP serving as confidence and supply for the government.

The campaign period was met with issues regarding the accession of Sweden to NATO due to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as crime, energy, economy, and immigration. Parliamentary parties campaigned through July and August, while in late August SD surpassed M in opinion polls. Exit polls showed that S and confidence and supply parties had a tight lead against the right-leaning bloc (SD, M, KD, L). During the counting of the preliminary results and later on, Sweden's Election Authority said that the right-leaning bloc overtook the left-leaning bloc (S, V, C, MP) by three seats. Andersson conceded the election three days later, followed by her resignation the next day.

The election saw massive swings between the two blocs in different regions. The left-leaning bloc won the most votes in large cities and several university towns with unprecedented massive margins. This included major relative gains across the capital region and also flipping two suburban municipalities in Stockholm County. Meanwhile, the right managed to overturn dozens of municipalities that had historically been dominated by S, especially in the central interior Bergslagen region. In this historically industrial area, Dalarna County was won by the right-leaning coalition for the first time in history. This also applied to some municipalities the outright leftist parties (S, V, MP) had won with 50 points overall majority in the 1994 Swedish general election.

Major gains in minority were also made by the right-leaning bloc in northern Sweden, leading the vote in eight municipalities compared to none four years prior. In the lower east, the historically leftist swing counties Kalmar, Södermanland, Västmanland, and Östergötland all went to the right to seal the majority. S won 30% of the popular vote with a net increase in spite of the election loss. SD became the second largest party with above 20% of the popular vote, surpassing M at 19%. The blocs were separated by a thin margin of about half a percentage point. The parties aligned with the outgoing government did somewhat better in the regional and municipal elections.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Swedish_general_election

  

New Method for Comparing Neural Networks Exposes how Artificial Intelligence Works

Adversarial training makes it harder to fool the networks

From:  DOE/Los Alamos National Laboratory

September 14, 2022 -- A team at Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a novel approach for comparing neural networks that looks within the "black box" of artificial intelligence to help researchers understand neural network behavior. Neural networks recognize patterns in datasets; they are used everywhere in society, in applications such as virtual assistants, facial recognition systems and self-driving cars.

"The artificial intelligence research community doesn't necessarily have a complete understanding of what neural networks are doing; they give us good results, but we don't know how or why," said Haydn Jones, a researcher in the Advanced Research in Cyber Systems group at Los Alamos. "Our new method does a better job of comparing neural networks, which is a crucial step toward better understanding the mathematics behind AI."

Jones is the lead author of the paper "If You've Trained One You've Trained Them All: Inter-Architecture Similarity Increases With Robustness," which was presented recently at the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. In addition to studying network similarity, the paper is a crucial step toward characterizing the behavior of robust neural networks.

Neural networks are high performance, but fragile. For example, self-driving cars use neural networks to detect signs. When conditions are ideal, they do this quite well. However, the smallest aberration -- such as a sticker on a stop sign -- can cause the neural network to misidentify the sign and never stop.

To improve neural networks, researchers are looking at ways to improve network robustness. One state-of-the-art approach involves "attacking" networks during their training process. Researchers intentionally introduce aberrations and train the AI to ignore them. This process is called adversarial training and essentially makes it harder to fool the networks.

Jones, Los Alamos collaborators Jacob Springer and Garrett Kenyon, and Jones' mentor Juston Moore, applied their new metric of network similarity to adversarially trained neural networks, and found, surprisingly, that adversarial training causes neural networks in the computer vision domain to converge to very similar data representations, regardless of network architecture, as the magnitude of the attack increases.

"We found that when we train neural networks to be robust against adversarial attacks, they begin to do the same things," Jones said.

There has been extensive effort in industry and in the academic community searching for the "right architecture" for neural networks, but the Los Alamos team's findings indicate that the introduction of adversarial training narrows this search space substantially. As a result, the AI research community may not need to spend as much time exploring new architectures, knowing that adversarial training causes diverse architectures to converge to similar solutions.

"By finding that robust neural networks are similar to each other, we're making it easier to understand how robust AI might really work. We might even be uncovering hints as to how perception occurs in humans and other animals," Jones said.

        https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/09/220914102256.htm

 

Scientists Find that Wolves Can Show Attachment toward Humans

Scientists Find that Wolves Can Show Attachment toward Humans

When it comes to showing affection towards people, many dogs are naturals. Now comes word reported in the journal Ecology and Evolution on September 20th that the remarkable ability to show attachment behaviour toward human caregivers also exists in wolves.

From Stockholm University Communications Office

September 20, 2022 -- The findings were made when researchers at Stockholm University, Sweden, tested 10 wolves and 12 dogs in a behavioural test specifically designed to quantify attachment behaviours in canids. During this test 23-week-old wolves spontaneously discriminated between a familiar person and a stranger just as well as dogs did, and showed more proximity seeking and affiliative behaviours towards the familiar person. Additionally, the presence of the familiar person acted as a social stress buffer for the wolves calming them in a stressful situation. These discoveries build on a slowly accumulating body of evidence contradicting the hypothesis that the abilities necessary to form attachment with humans, arose in dogs only after humans domesticated them at least 15,000 years ago. 

“We felt that there was a need to thoroughly test this,” says Dr. Christina Hansen Wheat, PhD in Ethology from Stockholm University, Sweden. “Together with earlier studies making important contributions to this question, I think it is now appropriate to entertain the idea that if variation in human-directed attachment behaviour exists in wolves, this behaviour could have been a potential target for early selective pressures exerted during dog domestication.”

Dr. Hansen Wheat is interested in understanding how domestication affects behaviour. To study this, she and her team raised wolf and dog puppies from the age of 10 days and put them through various behavioural tests. In one of those tests, a familiar person and a stranger takes turn in coming in and out of a test room to create a somewhat strange and stressful situation for the animal. The theory behind the test, originally developed to assess attachment in human infants, is that by creating this unstable environment attachment behaviours, such as proximity seeking, will be stimulated.

In essence, what the researchers were looking for in this Strange Situation Test was if the wolves and dogs could discriminate between the familiar person and the stranger. That is, did they show more affection, and spend more time greeting and in physical contact with the familiar person than the stranger. If wolves and dogs would do so equally it would point towards this ability not being unique to dogs, i.e. it has not evolved specifically in dogs.

 

Wolves prefer a familiar person over an stranger

“That was exactly what we saw,” says Dr. Hansen Wheat. “It was very clear that the wolves, as the dogs, preferred the familiar person over the stranger. But what was perhaps even more interesting was that while the dogs were not particularly affected by the test situation, the wolves were. They were pacing the test room. However, the remarkable thing was that when the familiar person, a hand-raiser that had been with the wolves all their lives, re-entered the test room the pacing behaviour stopped, indicating that the familiar person acted as a social stress buffer for the wolves. I do not believe that this has ever been shown to be the case for wolves before and this also complements the existence of a strong bond between the animals and the familiar person.”

Dr. Hansen Wheat adds that similarities between dogs and wolves can tell us something about where the behaviour we see in our dogs come from. And, while it may be a surprise to some that wolves can connect with a person in this way, she says in retrospect it also makes sense.

 

Selective advantage during dog domestication

“Wolves showing human-directed attachment could have had a selective advantage in early stages of dog domestication,” she says.

Dr. Hansen Wheat will now continue to work with the data she and her team have collected over the course of three years hand-raising wolves and dogs under identical conditions to learn even more about their behavioural differences and similarities. 

The article “Human-directed attachment behaviour in wolves suggests standing ancestral variation for human-dog attachment bonds” is published in Ecology and Evolution. DOI: 10.1002/ece3.9299

This research did not receive any specific grants from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

https://www.su.se/english/news/Scientists find that wolves can show attachment toward humans - Stockholm University (su.se)

  

Human Brain Project Researchers Map Four New Brain Areas

Researchers of the Human Brain Project (HBP) have mapped four new areas of the human anterior prefrontal cortex that plays a major role in cognitive functions. Two of the newly identified areas are relatively larger in females than in males. 

From:   Researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich and Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf

Probability maps of the four newly identified areas SFS1, SFS2, MFG1 and MFG2.

August 24, 2022 -- The human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is involved in cognitive control including attention selection, working memory, decision making and planning of actions. Changes in this brain region are suspected to play a role in schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression and bipolar disorder, making it an important research target. Researchers University Düsseldorf now provide detailed, three-dimensional maps of four new areas identity of the borders between brain areas; the researchers statistically analysed the distribution of cells (the cytoarchitecture) in 10 post mortem human brains. After reconstructing the mapped areas in 3D, the researchers superimposed the maps of the 10 different brains and generated probability maps that reflect how much the localization and size of each area varies among individuals. 

High inter-subject variability has been a major challenge for prior attempts to map this brain region leading to considerable discrepancies in pre-existing maps and inconclusive information making it very difficult to understand the specific involvement of individual brain areas in the different cognitive functions. The new probabilistic maps account for the variability between individuals and can be directly superimposed with datasets from functional studies in order to directly correlate structure and function of the areas. 

When comparing the brains of female and male tissue donors, the researchers found that the relative volumes of two of the newly identified areas were significantly larger in female than in male brains. This finding may be related to sex differences in cognitive function and behaviour as well as in the prevalence and symptoms of associated brain diseases. 
The maps are being integrated into the Julich Brain Atlas that is openly accessible via EBRAINS.

Text: Lisa Vincenz-Donnelly

Original publication: Bruno A, Bludau S, Mohlberg H and Amunts K (2022) Cytoarchitecture, intersubject variability, and 3D mapping of four new areas of the human anterior prefrontal cortex. Front. Neuroanat. 16:915877. doi: 10.3389/fnana.2022.915877  

https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/follow-hbp/news/2022/08/24/human-brain-project-researchers-map-four-new-brain-areas-involved-many-cognitive-processes/ 

Changes to Animal Feed Could Supply Food for One Billion People

Livestock and fish could be fed more agricultural by-products, freeing up food for people

From:  Aalto University

September 19, 2022

Reorganizing food production systems to direct more agricultural byproducts and residues to animal feed would free enough material in feed about one billion people without requiring additional production.

While millions around the world face the threat of famine or malnutrition, the production of feed for livestock and fish is tying up limited natural resources that could be used to produce food for people. New research from Aalto University, published in Nature Food, shows how adjustment to the feeding of livestock and fish could maintain production while making more food available for people. These relatively simple changes would increase the global food supply significantly, providing calories for up to 13% more people without requiring any increase in natural resource use or major dietary changes.

Currently, roughly a third of cereal crop production is used as animal feed, and about a quarter of captured fish aren't used to feed people. Matti Kummu, an associate professor of global water and food issues at Aalto, led a team that investigated the potential of using crop residues and food by-products in livestock and aquaculture production, freeing up the human-usable material to feed people.

'This was the first time anyone has collected the food and feed flows in this detail globally, from both terrestrial and aquatic systems, and combined them together. That let us understand how much of the food by-products and residues is already in use, which was the first step to determining the untapped potential,' explains Kummu.

The team analysed the flow of food and feed, as well as their by-products and residues, through the global food production system. They then identified ways to shift these flows to produce a better outcome. For example, livestock and farmed fish could be fed food system by-products, such as sugar beet or citrus pulp, fish and livestock by-products or even crop residues, instead of materials that are fit for human use.

With these changes, up to 10-26% of total cereal production and 17 million tons of fish (~11% of the current seafood supply) could be redirected from animal feed to human use. Depending on the precise scenario, the gains in food supply would be 6-13% in terms of caloric content and 9-15% in terms of protein content. 'That may not sound like a lot, but that's food for up to about one billion people,' says Aalto's Vilma Sandström, the first author of the study.

These findings dovetail nicely with earlier work from Kummu's group on reducing food loss throughout the supply chain, from production, transport and storage through to consumer waste. 'In that study, we showed that reducing food loss and waste by half would increase the food supply by about 12%. Combined with using by-products as feed, that would be about one-quarter more food,' he says.

Some of the changes, such as feeding crop residues to livestock, would lead to a drop in livestock productivity, but the researchers accounted for that in their analysis. Another challenge is that the human-edible food currently used in livestock production and aquaculture is different from the food people are used to. For example, a different variety of corn is used in feed industries and some of the grains are lower quality, while the fish used in fishmeal production tend to be small, bony fish that currently aren't popular with consumers.

However, overcoming these hurdles could result in substantial gains. Realising these benefits would require some adjustments in supply chains. 'For example, we'd need to reorganise the food system so that the industries and producers with by-products can find the livestock and aquaculture producers who would need them. And some of the by-products would need processing prior to using them as feed,' says Sandström.

'I don't think there's any serious problem with doing this. What we're suggesting is already being done on a certain scale and in some areas, so it's not something that would have to be developed from scratch. We just need to adjust the current system and increase the scale of those practices,' Kummu concludes.

        https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/09/220919122239.htm

  

Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week is an annual awareness campaign promoted by the American Library Association and Amnesty International, that celebrates the freedom to read, draws attention to banned and challenged books, and highlights persecuted individuals.  Held during the last full week of September since 1982, the United States campaign "stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them" and the requirement to keep material publicly available so that people can develop their own conclusions and opinions. The international campaign notes individuals "persecuted because of the writings that they produce, circulate or read."  Some of the events that occur during Banned Book Week are The Virtual Read-Out and The First Amendment Film Festival.

History

Banned Books Week was founded in 1982 by prominent First Amendment and library activist Judith Krug.  Krug said that the Association of American Publishers contacted her with ideas to bring banned books "to the attention of the American public" after a "slew of books" had been banned that year.  Krug relayed the information to the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee, and "six weeks later we celebrated the first Banned Books Week."

The event is sponsored by a coalition of organizations dedicated to free expression, including American Booksellers Association; American Library Association; American Society of Journalists and Authors; Association of University Presses; Authors Guild; Comic Book Legal Defense Fund; Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE); Freedom to Read Foundation; Index on Censorship; National Coalition Against Censorship; National Council of Teachers of English; PEN America; People For the American Way Foundation; and Project Censored. It is endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. Banned Books Week also receives generous support from DKT Liberty Project and Penguin Random House.

Since 2011, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) has designated the Wednesday of Banned Books Week as Banned Websites Awareness Day.  Their goal is "to bring attention to the overly aggressive filtering of educational and social websites used by students and educators."  In the AASL's 2012 national longitudinal survey, 94% of respondents said their school used filtering software, with the majority of blocked websites relating to social networking (88%), IM or online chatting (74%), gaming (69%), and video services like YouTube (66%).  The AASL's position is that "the social aspect of learning" is important for students in the 21st century and that many schools go "beyond the requirements set forth by the Federal Communications Commission in its Child Internet Protection Act."

For the 2022 event, student activist Cameron Samuels was named the first Youth Honorary Chair for distributing banned books in the Katy Independent School District in Texas. In April 2022, PEN America released a report entitled "Banned in the USA" revealing an unprecedented increase in book banning in the United States since 2021. Student activism against book banning increased significantly.

United States Event

The event has been held during the last full week of September since 1982.  Banned Books Week is intended to encourage readers to examine challenged literary works and to promote intellectual freedom in libraries, schools, and bookstores. Its goal is "to teach the importance of our First Amendment rights and the power of literature, and to draw attention to the danger that exists when restraints are imposed on the availability of information in a free society."  Offering Banned Books Week kits, the ALA sells posters, buttons, and bookmarks to celebrate the event.

Educational facilities celebrate banned and challenged books during this week, often creating displays and programs around the awareness campaign. Additionally, booksellers sponsor activities and events in support of Banned Books Week. Some retailers create window displays, while others invite authors of banned and challenged materials to speak at their stores, as well as funding annual essay contests about freedom of expression. Educational facilities and booksellers also sponsor "read outs," allowing participants to read aloud passages from their favorite banned books.

International Event

Amnesty International celebrates Banned Books Week by directing attention to individuals "persecuted because of the writings that they produce, circulate or read."  Its web site documents "focus cases" annually which show individuals who have been reportedly killed, incarcerated, or otherwise harassed by national authorities around the world, and urge people to "take action" to help it in partnership with its "Urgent Action Network" by contacting authorities regarding human rights violations.  They also provide updates to cases from previous years, giving a history and current status of people who have been allegedly persecuted for their writings. The cases include individuals from Azerbaijan, China, Cuba, Egypt, Gambia, Iran, Myanmar, Russia, and Sri Lanka.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banned_Books_Week#cite_note-call_attention-16

 

Saturn's Rings and Tilt Could Be the Product of an Ancient Missing Moon

A ‘grazing encounter' may have smashed the moon to bits to form Saturn's rings, a new study suggests

From:  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

September 15, 2022 -- Scientists propose a lost moon of Saturn, which they call Chrysalis, pulled on the planet until it ripped apart, forming rings and contributing to Saturn's tilt.

Swirling around the planet's equator, the rings of Saturn are a dead giveaway that the planet is spinning at a tilt. The belted giant rotates at a 26.7-degree angle relative to the plane in which it orbits the sun. Astronomers have long suspected that this tilt comes from gravitational interactions with its neighbor Neptune, as Saturn's tilt precesses, like a spinning top, at nearly the same rate as the orbit of Neptune.

But a new modeling study by astronomers at MIT and elsewhere has found that, while the two planets may have once been in sync, Saturn has since escaped Neptune's pull. What was responsible for this planetary realignment? The team has one meticulously tested hypothesis: a missing moon.

In a study appearing in Science, the team proposes that Saturn, which today hosts 83 moons, once harbored at least one more, an extra satellite that they name Chrysalis. Together with its siblings, the researchers suggest, Chrysalis orbited Saturn for several billion years, pulling and tugging on the planet in a way that kept its tilt, or "obliquity," in resonance with Neptune.

But around 160 million years ago, the team estimates, Chrysalis became unstable and came too close to its planet in a grazing encounter that pulled the satellite apart. The loss of the moon was enough to remove Saturn from Neptune's grasp and leave it with the present-day tilt.

What's more, the researchers surmise, while most of Chrysalis' shattered body may have made impact with Saturn, a fraction of its fragments could have remained suspended in orbit, eventually breaking into small icy chunks to form the planet's signature rings.

The missing satellite, therefore, could explain two longstanding mysteries: Saturn's present-day tilt and the age of its rings, which were previously estimated to be about 100 million years old -- much younger than the planet itself.

"Just like a butterfly's chrysalis, this satellite was long dormant and suddenly became active, and the rings emerged," says Jack Wisdom, professor of planetary sciences at MIT and lead author of the new study.

The study's co-authors include Rola Dbouk at MIT, Burkhard Militzer of the University of California at Berkeley, William Hubbard at the University of Arizona, Francis Nimmo and Brynna Downey of the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Richard French of Wellesley College.

A moment of progress

In the early 2000s, scientists put forward the idea that Saturn's tilted axis is a result of the planet being trapped in a resonance, or gravitational association, with Neptune. But observations taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, put a new twist on the problem. Scientists found that Titan, Saturn's largest satellite, was migrating away from Saturn at a faster clip than expected, at a rate of about 11 centimeters per year. Titan's fast migration, and its gravitational pull, led scientists to conclude that the moon was likely responsible for tilting and keeping Saturn in resonance with Neptune.

But this explanation hinges on one major unknown: Saturn's moment of inertia, which is how mass is distributed in the planet's interior. Saturn's tilt could behave differently, depending on whether matter is more concentrated at its core or toward the surface.

"To make progress on the problem, we had to determine the moment of inertia of Saturn," Wisdom says.

The lost element

In their new study, Wisdom and his colleagues looked to pin down Saturn's moment of inertia using some of the last observations taken by Cassini in its "Grand Finale," a phase of the mission during which the spacecraft made an extremely close approach to precisely map the gravitational field around the entire planet. The gravitational field can be used to determine the distribution of mass in the planet.

Wisdom and his colleagues modeled the interior of Saturn and identified a distribution of mass that matched the gravitational field that Cassini observed. Surprisingly, they found that this newly identified moment of inertia placed Saturn close to, but just outside the resonance with Neptune. The planets may have once been in sync, but are no longer.

"Then we went hunting for ways of getting Saturn out of Neptune's resonance," Wisdom says.

The team first carried out simulations to evolve the orbital dynamics of Saturn and its moons backward in time, to see whether any natural instabilities among the existing satellites could have influenced the planet's tilt. This search came up empty.

So, the researchers reexamined the mathematical equations that describe a planet's precession, which is how a planet's axis of rotation changes over time. One term in this equation has contributions from all the satellites. The team reasoned that if one satellite were removed from this sum, it could affect the planet's precession.

The question was, how massive would that satellite have to be, and what dynamics would it have to undergo to take Saturn out of Neptune's resonance?

Wisdom and his colleagues ran simulations to determine the properties of a satellite, such as its mass and orbital radius, and the orbital dynamics that would be required to knock Saturn out of the resonance.

They conclude that Saturn's present tilt is the result of the resonance with Neptune and that the loss of the satellite, Chrysalis, which was about the size of Iapetus, Saturn's third-largest moon, allowed it to escape the resonance.

Sometime between 200 and 100 million years ago, Chrysalis entered a chaotic orbital zone, experienced a number of close encounters with Iapetus and Titan, and eventually came too close to Saturn, in a grazing encounter that ripped the satellite to bits, leaving a small fraction to circle the planet as a debris-strewn ring.

The loss of Chrysalis, they found, explains Saturn's precession, and its present-day tilt, as well as the late formation of its rings.

"It's a pretty good story, but like any other result, it will have to be examined by others," Wisdom says. "But it seems that this lost satellite was just a chrysalis, waiting to have its instability."

This research was supported, in part, by NASA and the National Science Foundation.

        https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/09/220915142436.htm