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Earth’s earliest forest revealed in Somerset fossils

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The oldest fossilised forest known on Earth — dating from 390 million years ago — has been found in the high sandstone cliffs along the Devon and Somerset coast of South West England.

The fossils, discovered and identified by researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and Cardiff, are the oldest fossilised trees ever found in Britain, and the oldest known fossil forest on Earth. This fossil forest is roughly four million years older than the previous record holder, which was found in New York State.

The fossils were found near Minehead, on the south bank of the Bristol Channel, near what is now a Butlin’s holiday camp. The fossilised trees, known as Calamophyton, at first glance resemble palm trees, but they were a ‘prototype’ of the kinds of trees we are familiar with today. Rather than solid wood, their trunks were thin and hollow in the centre. They also lacked leaves, and their branches were covered in hundreds of twig-like structures.

These trees were also much shorter than their descendants: the largest were between two and four metres tall. As the trees grew, they shed their branches, dropping lots of vegetation litter, which supported invertebrates on the forest floor.

Scientists had previously assumed this stretch of the English coast did not contain significant plant fossils, but this particular fossil find, in addition to its age, also shows how early trees helped shape landscapes and stabilise riverbanks and coastlines hundreds of millions of years ago. The results are reported in the Journal of the Geological Society.

The forest dates to the Devonian Period, between 419 million and 358 million years ago, when life started its first big expansion onto land: by the end of the period, the first seed-bearing plants appeared and the earliest land animals, mostly arthropods, were well-established.

“The Devonian period fundamentally changed life on Earth,” said Professor Neil Davies from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, the study’s first author. “It also changed how water and land interacted with each other, since trees and other plants helped stabilise sediment through their root systems, but little is known about the very earliest forests.”

The fossil forest identified by the researchers was found in the Hangman Sandstone Formation, along the north Devon and west Somerset coasts. During the Devonian period, this region was not attached to the rest of England, but instead lay further south, connected to parts of Germany and Belgium, where similar Devonian fossils have been found.

“When I first saw pictures of the tree trunks I immediately knew what they were, based on 30 years of studying this type of tree worldwide” said co-author Dr Christopher Berry from Cardiff’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences. “It was amazing to see them so near to home. But the most revealing insight comes from seeing, for the first time, these trees in the positions where they grew. It is our first opportunity to look directly at the ecology of this earliest type of forest, to interpret the environment in which Calamophyton trees were growing, and to evaluate their impact on the sedimentary system.”

The fieldwork was undertaken along the highest sea-cliffs in England, some of which are only accessible by boat, and revealed that this sandstone formation is in fact rich with plant fossil material from the Devonian period. The researchers identified fossilised plants and plant debris, fossilised tree logs, traces of roots and sedimentary structures, preserved within the sandstone. During the Devonian, the site was a semi-arid plain, criss-crossed by small river channels spilling out from mountains to the northwest.

“This was a pretty weird forest — not like any forest you would see today,” said Davies. “There wasn’t any undergrowth to speak of and grass hadn’t yet appeared, but there were lots of twigs dropped by these densely-packed trees, which had a big effect on the landscape.”

This period marked the first time that tightly-packed plants were able to grow on land, and the sheer abundance of debris shed by the Calamophyton trees built up within layers of sediment. The sediment affected the way that the rivers flowed across the landscape, the first time that the course of rivers could be affected in this way.

“The evidence contained in these fossils preserves a key stage in Earth’s development, when rivers started to operate in a fundamentally different way than they had before, becoming the great erosive force they are today,” said Davies. “People sometimes think that British rocks have been looked at enough, but this shows that revisiting them can yield important new discoveries.”

The research was supported in part by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Neil Davies is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.

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Loss of nature costs more than previously estimated

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Researchers propose that governments apply a new method for calculating the benefits that arise from conserving biodiversity and nature for future generations.

The method can be used by governments in cost-benefit analyses for public infrastructure projects, in which the loss of animal and plant species and ‘ecosystem services’ — such as filtering air or water, pollinating crops or the recreational value of a space — are converted into a current monetary value.

This process is designed to make biodiversity loss and the benefits of nature conservation more visible in political decision-making.

However, the international research team says current methods for calculating the values of ecosystem services “fall short” and have devised a new approach, which they believe could easily be deployed in Treasury analysis underpinning future Budget statements.

Their approach, published in the journal Science, takes into consideration the increase in monetary value of nature over time as human income increases, as well as the likely deterioration in biodiversity, making it more of a scarce resource.

This contrasts with current methods, which do not consider how the value of ecosystem services changes over time.

“Our study provides governments with a formula to estimate the future values of scarce ecosystem services that can be used in decision-making processes,” said Moritz Drupp, Professor of Sustainability Economics at the University of Hamburg and lead author on this study.

Two factors play a key role in this value adjustment: on the one hand, income will rise and with it the prosperity of the world’s population — by an estimated two percent per year after adjusting for inflation.

As incomes go up, people are willing to pay more to conserve nature.

“On the other hand, the services provided by ecosystems will become more valuable the scarcer they become,” said Professor Drupp. “The fact that scarce goods become more expensive is a fundamental principle in economics, and it also applies here. And in view of current developments, unfortunately, we must expect the loss of biodiversity to continue.”

According to the researchers, the present value of ecosystem services must therefore be set much higher in today’s cost-benefit analyses, to more than 130 percent if just including the rise of income.

If also taking into account the impact on Red List Index endangered species, the value adjustment would amount to more than 180 percent.

Accounting for these effects will increase the likelihood of projects that conserve ecosystem services passing a cost-benefit test.

The research team includes three UK-based authors: Professor Mark Freeman (University of York), Dr. Frank Venmans (LSE), and Professor Ben Groom (University of Exeter).

“The monetary values for the environment that are currently used by policy makers in the appraisal of public investments and regulatory change mean that nature becomes relatively less valuable over time compared to other goods and services,” said Professor Groom.

“Our work shows this is wrong. We propose an uplift in the values of ecosystems over time. This proposal could easily be deployed in the Treasury’s analysis that will underpin future Budget statements.”

Dr Venmans added: “Take coral reefs as a specific example. These are expected to decline in area and biodiversity as the climate changes, meaning that the remaining reefs will be much more valuable than today, and even more so as household incomes rise. This matters when we assess coral reef preservation with long-lasting effects.”

Professor Freeman said: “The government is under considerable pressure from many sides for additional public investment. Ensuring that the protection of ecosystems is appraised in a way that is consistent with other public projects, including HS2 and other infrastructure spending, is critical. This is what our work aims to achieve.”

The researchers say that as political decisions can alleviate the loss of biodiversity, it is important that governments are able to adequately assess the consequences of their decisions today and in the future.

Economist Professor Moritz Drupp has developed this research in collaboration with a team of international researchers from Germany, the UK, France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United States.

The team advises, among others, HM Treasury, the US White House, and the German Federal Environment Agency.

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How the brain coordinates speaking and breathing

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MIT researchers have discovered a brain circuit that drives vocalization and ensures that you talk only when you breathe out, and stop talking when you breathe in.

The newly discovered circuit controls two actions that are required for vocalization: narrowing of the larynx and exhaling air from the lungs. The researchers also found that this vocalization circuit is under the command of a brainstem region that regulates the breathing rhythm, which ensures that breathing remains dominant over speech.

“When you need to breathe in, you have to stop vocalization. We found that the neurons that control vocalization receive direct inhibitory input from the breathing rhythm generator,” says Fan Wang, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the study.

Jaehong Park, a Duke University graduate student who is currently a visiting student at MIT, is the lead author of the study, which appears today in Science. Other authors of the paper include MIT technical associates Seonmi Choi and Andrew Harrahill, former MIT research scientist Jun Takatoh, and Duke University researchers Shengli Zhao and Bao-Xia Han.

Vocalization control

Located in the larynx, the vocal cords are two muscular bands that can open and close. When they are mostly closed, or adducted, air exhaled from the lungs generates sound as it passes through the cords.

The MIT team set out to study how the brain controls this vocalization process, using a mouse model. Mice communicate with each other using sounds known as ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs), which they produce using the unique whistling mechanism of exhaling air through a small hole between nearly closed vocal cords.

“We wanted to understand what are the neurons that control the vocal cord adduction, and then how do those neurons interact with the breathing circuit?” Wang says.

To figure that out, the researchers used a technique that allows them to map the synaptic connections between neurons. They knew that vocal cord adduction is controlled by laryngeal motor neurons, so they began by tracing backward to find the neurons that innervate those motor neurons.

This revealed that one major source of input is a group of premotor neurons found in the hindbrain region called the retroambiguus nucleus (RAm). Previous studies have shown that this area is involved in vocalization, but it wasn’t known exactly which part of the RAm was required or how it enabled sound production.

The researchers found that these synaptic tracing-labeled RAm neurons were strongly activated during USVs. This observation prompted the team to use an activity-dependent method to target these vocalization-specific RAm neurons, termed as RAmVOC. They used chemogenetics and optogenetics to explore what would happen if they silenced or stimulated their activity. When the researchers blocked the RAmVOC neurons, the mice were no longer able to produce USVs or any other kind of vocalization. Their vocal cords did not close, and their abdominal muscles did not contract, as they normally do during exhalation for vocalization.

Conversely, when the RAmVOC neurons were activated, the vocal cords closed, the mice exhaled, and USVs were produced. However, if the stimulation lasted two seconds or longer, these USVs would be interrupted by inhalations, suggesting that the process is under control of the same part of the brain that regulates breathing.

“Breathing is a survival need,” Wang says. “Even though these neurons are sufficient to elicit vocalization, they are under the control of breathing, which can override our optogenetic stimulation.”

Rhythm generation

Additional synaptic mapping revealed that neurons in a part of the brainstem called the pre-Bötzinger complex, which acts as a rhythm generator for inhalation, provide direct inhibitory input to the RAmVOC neurons.

“The pre-Bötzinger complex generates inhalation rhythms automatically and continuously, and the inhibitory neurons in that region project to these vocalization premotor neurons and essentially can shut them down,” Wang says.

This ensures that breathing remains dominant over speech production, and that we have to pause to breathe while speaking.

The researchers believe that although human speech production is more complex than mouse vocalization, the circuit they identified in mice plays the conserved role in speech production and breathing in humans.

“Even though the exact mechanism and complexity of vocalization in mice and humans is really different, the fundamental vocalization process, called phonation, which requires vocal cord closure and the exhalation of air, is shared in both the human and the mouse,” Park says.

The researchers now hope to study how other functions such as coughing and swallowing food may be affected by the brain circuits that control breathing and vocalization.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

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How does a virus hijack insect sperm to control disease vectors and pests?

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A widespread bacteria called Wolbachia and a virus that it carries can cause sterility in male insects by hijacking their sperm, preventing them from fertilizing eggs of females that do not have the same combination of bacteria and virus. A new study led by microbiome researchers at Penn State has uncovered how this microbial combination manipulates sperm, which could lead to refined techniques to control populations of agricultural pests and insects that carry diseases like Zika and dengue to humans.

The study is published in the March 8 issue of the journal Science.

“Wolbachia is the most widespread bacteria in animals and lives symbiotically within the reproductive tissues of about 50% of insect species, including some mosquitos and flies,” said Seth Bordenstein, professor of biology and entomology, director of the One Health Microbiome Center at Penn State, and one of the leaders of the research team. “Wolbachia has genes from a virus called prophage WO integrated into its genome. These genes — cifA and cifB — allow the bacteria to remarkably manipulate sperm and quickly spread through an insect population for their own good.”

When a male and female insect that both have Wolbachia mate, they successfully reproduce and pass on the bacteria. But when a male with Wolbachia mates with a female with no Wolbachia, the sperm are rendered lethal to the fertilized eggs, succumbing them to death. This system cunningly increases the proportion of offspring with Wolbachia and the virus in the next generation, because females with the bacteria successfully reproduce more frequently than females without.

This system is being used in several ongoing pilot studies across the world to control insect pests and the harmful viral diseases they carry. For example, to control a population of agricultural or human pests that do not have the bacteria, scientists release males with Wolbachia in order to crash the population.

“One of Wolbachia’s superpowers is that it blocks pathogenic RNA viruses such as Zika, dengue and chikungunya virus, so mosquitos with Wolbachia do not pass these viruses on to people when they bite,” Bordenstein said. “So, releases of both male and female mosquitos with Wolbachia in an area where it isn’t already present leads to replacement of the population with mosquitos that can no longer pass on a viral disease. The World Mosquito Program is now using Wolbachia to control viruses in 11 countries. With this study, we reveal the underlying mechanics of how this process works so we can fine-tune the technique to expand its scope in vector control measures.”

Wolbachia’s prophage WO genes code for proteins that interfere with normal development of sperm cells. These proteins impact a critical transformation during sperm development, when the sperm’s genome is repackaged and the sperm changes from a canoe-shape into a more refined needle-like shape.

“This shape change is incredibly important to the success of sperm, and any interference can impact the sperm’s ability to travel in the female reproductive tract and successfully fertilize the egg,” said Rupinder Kaur, assistant research professor of biology and entomology at Penn State and the other leader of the research team. “The transition is highly conserved in almost everything from insects to humans. Defects in this process can also cause male sterility in humans.”

According to the researchers, sperm is particularly prone to DNA damage and repair during this transition. In this study, they found that sperm exposed to Wolbachia, or the Cif proteins alone, had an elevated level of DNA damage at this stage. The DNA damage, if not repaired in a timely fashion, can result in abnormal sperm genome packaging, male infertility and embryonic inviability.

“These results confirmed the impact of Wolbachia and Cif proteins at this stage of sperm development, but we still wanted to know what was happening at earlier stages to trigger these changes,” Kaur said. “We conducted a series of tests to explore the structure and biochemical function of the Cif proteins and found that they can cleave messenger molecules called long non-coding RNA, which sets the stage to interfere with downstream development and function of the sperm.”

The researchers used fruit flies with Wolbachia to test the potential link between the bacteria and long non-coding RNA. They found that Wolbachia — or the Cif proteins alone — reduced the amount of these RNAs. Additionally, mutant flies with reduced expression of these RNAs in conjunction with Wolbachia had elevated levels of embryonic inviability because it augmented the defective transition process of sperm development. So, Kaur explained, the virus proteins control sperm by depleting the long non-coding RNAs required for a normal sperm function.

“Long non-coding RNAs do not make any proteins themselves, but they can have profound impacts on regulating the function of other genes required for sperm development,” Bordenstein said. “By altering this non-coding part of the genome, we found that Cif proteins start impacting sperm right from the earliest stages of development. Wolbachia’s prophage WO genes act like master puppeteers, manipulating sperm development in a way that allows their genes and the symbiotic bacteria to quickly spread through arthropod populations.”

Because the process of sperm development looks similar across the animal kingdom, the researchers said that knowledge of this process could lend insight into sterility challenges in humans as well as inform new control methods of harmful insect populations.

“Now that we have reverse engineered this process, we can fine tune methods of population control with Wolbachia that are already in use,” Kaur said. “We plan to take advantage of this knowledge to augment currently existing disease vector and pest control methods, and perhaps emulate the technique without Wolbachia or virus proteins in the long-term.”

In addition to Bordenstein and Kaur, the research team includes Angelina McGarry, research technologist II at Penn State; J. Dylan Shropshire, assistant professor at Lehigh University; and Brittany Leigh, a postdoctoral researcher at Vanderbilt University at the time of the research.

Funding from the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. National Science Foundation and Penn State supported this research.

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New study reveals insight into which animals are most vulnerable to extinction due to climate change

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In a new study, researchers have used the fossil record to better understand what factors make animals more vulnerable to extinction from climate change. The results could help to identify species most at risk today from human-driven climate change. The findings have been published today in the journal Science.

Past climate change (often caused by natural changes in greenhouse gases due to volcanic activity) has been responsible for countless species’ extinctions during the history of life on Earth. But, to date, it has not been clear what factors cause species to be more or less resilient to such change, and how the magnitude of climate change affects extinction risk.

Led by researchers at the University of Oxford, this new study sought to answer this question by analysing the fossil record for marine invertebrates (such as sea urchins, snails, and shellfish) over the past 485 million years. Marine invertebrates have a rich and well-studied fossil record, making it possible to identify when, and potentially why, species become extinct.

Using over 290,000 fossil records covering more than 9,200 genera, the researchers collated a dataset of key traits that may affect resilience to extinction, including traits not studied in depth previously, such as preferred temperature. This trait information was integrated with climate simulation data to develop a model to understand which factors were most important in determining the risk of extinction during climate change.

Key findings:

  • The authors found that species exposed to greater climate change were more likely to become extinct. In particular, species that experienced temperature changes of 7°C or more across geological stages were significantly more vulnerable to extinction.
  • The authors also found that species occupying climatic extremes (for instance in polar regions) were disproportionately vulnerable to extinction, and animals that could only live in a narrow range of temperatures (especially ranges less than 15°C) were significantly more likely to become extinct.
  • However, geographic range size was the strongest predictor of extinction risk. Species with larger geographic ranges were significantly less likely to go extinct. Body size was also important, with smaller-bodied species more likely to become extinct.
  • All of the traits studied had a cumulative impact on extinction risk. For instance, species with both small geographic ranges and narrow thermal ranges were even more susceptible to extinction than species that had only one of these traits.

Cooper Malanoski (Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford), first author of the study, said: ‘Our study revealed that geographic range was the strongest predictor of extinction risk for marine invertebrates, but that the magnitude of climate change is also an important predictor of extinction, which has implications for biodiversity today in the face of climate change.’

With current human-driven climate change already pushing many species up to and beyond the brink of extinction, these results could help identify the animals that are most at risk, and inform strategies to protect them.

Lead author Professor Erin Saupe (Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford) said: ‘The evidence from the geological past suggests that global biodiversity faces a harrowing future, given projected climate change estimates. In particular, our model suggests that species with restricted thermal ranges of less than 15°C, living in the poles or tropics, are likely to be at the greatest risk of extinction. However, if the localized climate change is large enough, it could lead to significant extinction globally, potentially pushing us closer to a sixth mass extinction.’

According to the research team, future work should explore how climate change interacts with other potential drivers of extinction, such as ocean acidification and anoxia (where seawater becomes depleted of oxygen).

The study also involved researchers from the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol. Professor Dan Lunt, from the University of Bristol, said: ‘This study shows that over the course of Earth’s history, the extinction risk of marine life has been inextricably linked to climate change. This should act as a stark warning to humanity as we recklessly continue to cause climate change ourselves through burning fossil fuels.’

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COVID vaccines are safe for pregnant women and babies, study finds

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Landmark study contradicts misinformation about brain development and conditions like autism in children.

The COVID vaccine is safe to administer during pregnancy, reports UC San Francisco in an important finding on the safety of the vaccine in infants — despite widespread fear and misinformation.

The study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, is the first scientific inquiry into whether infants are at increased risk of neurodevelopmental impairments as a result of maternal vaccination.

The landmark study of more than 2,200 infants from across the country found that in utero exposure to the vaccine caused no abnormal delays when the infants were tested at 12 months and again at 18 months.

“This is a very reassuring finding — pregnant women have been facing unanswered questions around COVID vaccinations for several years,” said first author Eleni Jaswa, MD, MSc, a reproductive endocrinologist and fertility specialist at UCSF Health, noting the investigation started in April 2020. She is also an assistant professor in the UCSF Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences.

First meaningful evidence of maternal vaccination safety during pregnancy

Although pregnant women are considered at increased risk of severe illness with COVID-19, some chose not to get the COVID vaccine due to safety concerns around potential risks to their unborn children.

Some 34% of the participants in the study were vaccinated in the first trimester, about 45% in the second trimester, and nearly 21% in the third trimester. They were asked to complete a 30-item questionnaire assessing whether their infants performed expected milestones.

After adjusting for such factors as maternal age, race, ethnicity, education, income and maternal depression, the researchers found no difference in the risk of infant neurodevelopment at either 12 months or 18 months. They noted an increased risk of delay among male infants at 12 months but the difference was not observed at 18 months.

The study is ongoing.

“Understandably, there’s been concern about the potential impact of maternal vaccination on offspring,” said senior author Heather Huddleston, MD, a UCSF Health reproductive endocrinologist and director of the UCSF Polycystic Ovary Syndrome Clinic (PCOS).

“Despite early safety data as well as recommendations from physicians and health organizations, vaccine hesitancy is still preventing universal use,” she said. “To this day, misinformation continues to abound. People are concerned about such issues as brain development and conditions like autism in children. This is the first meaningful evidence into the safety of vaccination from the standpoint of early offspring neurodevelopment.”

Co-authors: All from UCSF, the paper’s co-authors are Marcelle Cedars, MD; Karla Lindquist, PhD; Somer Bishop, PhD; Young-Shin Kim, MD, MPH, PhD; Amy Kaing, MD; Mary Prahl, MD; Stephanie Gaw, MD, PhD; Jamie Corley, BS; Elena Hoskin, MS; Yoon Jae Cho, MD; and Elizabeth Rogers, MD.

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Interstellar signal linked to aliens was actually just a truck

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Sound waves thought to be from a 2014 meteor fireball north of Papua New Guinea were almost certainly vibrations from a truck rumbling along a nearby road, new Johns Hopkins University-led research shows. The findings raise doubts that materials pulled last year from the ocean are alien materials from that meteor, as was widely reported.

“The signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer,” said Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins who led the research. “It’s really difficult to take a signal and confirm it is not from something. But what we can do is show that there are lots of signals like this, and show they have all the characteristics we’d expect from a truck and none of the characteristics we’d expect from a meteor.”

The team will present its findings March 12 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston.

After a meteor entered Earth’s atmosphere over the Western Pacific in January 2014, the event was linked to ground vibrations recorded at a seismic station in Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. In 2023, materials at the bottom of the ocean near where the meteor fragments were thought to have fallen were identified as of “extraterrestrial technological” (alien) origin.

But according to Fernando, that supposition relies on misinterpreted data and the meteor actually entered the atmosphere somewhere else. Fernando’s team did not find evidence of seismic waves from the meteor.

“The fireball location was actually very far away from where the oceanographic expedition went to retrieve these meteor fragments,” he said. “Not only did they use the wrong signal, they were looking in the wrong place.”

Using data from stations in Australia and Palau designed to detect sound waves from nuclear testing, Fernando’s team identified a more likely location for the meteor, more than 100 miles from the area initially investigated. They concluded the materials recovered from the ocean bottom were tiny, ordinary meteorites — or particles produced from other meteorites hitting Earth’s surface mixed with terrestrial contamination.

“Whatever was found on the sea floor is totally unrelated to this meteor, regardless of whether it was a natural space rock or a piece of alien spacecraft — even though we strongly suspect that it wasn’t aliens,” Fernando added.

Fernando’s team includes Constantinos Charalambous of Imperial College London; Steve Desch of Arizona State University; Alan Jackson of Towson University; Pierrick Mialle of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization; Eleanor K. Sansom of Curtin University; and Göran Ekström of Columbia University.

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Children with ‘lazy eye’ are at increased risk of serious disease in adulthood

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Adults who had amblyopia (‘lazy eye’) in childhood are more likely to experience hypertension, obesity, and metabolic syndrome in adulthood, as well as an increased risk of heart attack, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.

In publishing the study in eClinicalMedicine, the authors stress that while they have identified a correlation, their research does not show a causal relationship between amblyopia and ill health in adulthood.

The researchers analysed data from more than 126,000 participants aged 40 to 69 years old from the UK Biobank cohort, who had undergone ocular examination.

Participants had been asked during recruitment whether they were treated for amblyopia in childhood and whether they still had the condition in adulthood. They were also asked if they had a medical diagnosis of diabetes, high blood pressure, or cardio/cerebrovascular disease (ie. angina, heart attack, stroke).

Meanwhile, their BMI (body mass index), blood glucose, and cholesterol levels were also measured and mortality was tracked.

The researchers confirmed that from 3,238 participants who reported having a ‘lazy eye’ as a child, 82.2% had persistent reduced vision in one eye as an adult.

The findings showed that participants with amblyopia as a child had 29% higher odds of developing diabetes, 25% higher odds of having hypertension and 16% higher odds of having obesity. They were also at increased risk of heart attack — even when other risk factors for these conditions (e.g. other disease, ethnicity and social class) were taken into account.

This increased risk of health problems was found not only among those whose vision problems persisted, but also to some extent in participants who had had amblyopia as a child and 20/20 vision as an adult, although the correlation was not as strong.

Corresponding author, Professor Jugnoo Rahi (UCL Great Ormond Street Institute for Child Health, UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and Great Ormond Street Hospital), said: “Amblyopia is an eye condition affecting up to four in 100 children. In the UK, all children are supposed to have vision screening before the age of five, to ensure a prompt diagnosis and relevant ophthalmic treatment.

“It is rare to have a ‘marker’ in childhood that is associated with increased risk of serious disease in adult life, and also one that is measured and known for every child — because of population screening.

“The large numbers of affected children and their families, may want to think of our findings as an extra incentive for trying to achieve healthy lifestyles from childhood.”

Amblyopia is when the vision in one eye does not develop properly and can be triggered by a squint or being long-sighted.

It is a neurodevelopmental condition that develops when there’s a breakdown in how the brain and the eye work together and the brain can’t process properly the visual signal from the affected eye. As it usually causes reduced vision in one eye only, many children don’t notice anything wrong with their sight and are only diagnosed through the vision test done at four to five years of age.

A recent report from the Academy of Medical Sciences* involving some researchers from the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute for Child Health, called on policymakers to address the declining physical and mental health of children under five in the UK and prioritise child health.

The team hope that their new research will help reinforce this message and highlight how child health lays the foundations for adult health.

First author, Dr Siegfried Wagner (UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and Moorfields Eye Hospital), said: “Vision and the eyes are sentinels for overall health — whether heart disease or metabolic disfunction, they are intimately linked with other organ systems. This is one of the reasons why we screen for good vision in both eyes.

“We emphasise that our research does not show a causal relationship between amblyopia and ill health in adulthood. Our research means that the ‘average’ adult who had amblyopia as a child is more likely to develop these disorders than the ‘average’ adult who did not have amblyopia. The findings don’t mean that every child with amblyopia will inevitably develop cardiometabolic disorders in adult life.”

The research was carried out in collaboration with the University of the Aegean, University of Leicester, King’s College London, the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) at Moorfields Eye Hospital and UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and the NIHR BRC at UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and Great Ormond Street Hospital.

The work was funded by the Medical Research Council, the NIHR and the Ulverscroft Foundation.

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Lack of focus doesn’t equal lack of intelligence — it’s proof of an intricate brain

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Imagine a busy restaurant: dishes clattering, music playing, people talking loudly over one another. It’s a wonder that anyone in that kind of environment can focus enough to have a conversation. A new study by researchers at Brown University’s Carney Institute for Brain Science provides some of the most detailed insights yet into the brain mechanisms that help people pay attention amid such distraction, as well as what’s happening when they can’t focus.

In an earlier psychology study, the researchers established that people can separately control how much they focus (by enhancing relevant information) and how much they filter (by tuning out distraction). The team’s new research, published in Nature Human Behaviour, unveils the process by which the brain coordinates these two critical functions.

Lead author and neuroscientist Harrison Ritz likened the process to how humans coordinate muscle activity to perform complex physical tasks.

“In the same way that we bring together more than 50 muscles to perform a physical task like using chopsticks, our study found that we can coordinate multiple different forms of attention in order to perform acts of mental dexterity,” said Ritz, who conducted the study while a Ph.D. student at Brown.

The findings provide insight into how people use their powers of attention as well as what makes attention fail, said co-author Amitai Shenhav, an associate professor in Brown’s Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences.

“These findings can help us to understand how we as humans are able to exhibit such tremendous cognitive flexibility — to pay attention to what we want, when we want to,” Shenhav said. “They can also help us better understand limitations on that flexibility, and how limitations might manifest in certain attention-related disorders such as ADHD.”

The focus-and-filter test

To conduct the study, Ritz administered a cognitive task to participants while measuring their brain activity in an fMRI machine. Participants saw a swirling mass of green and purple dots moving left and right, like a swarm of fireflies. The tasks, which varied in difficulty, involved distinguishing between the movement and colors of the dots. For example, participants in one exercise were instructed to select which color was in the majority for the rapidly moving dots when the ratio of purple to green was almost 50/50.

Ritz and Shenhav then analyzed participants’ brain activity in response to the tasks.

Ritz, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, explained how the two brain regions work together during these types of tasks.

“You can think about the intraparietal sulcus as having two knobs on a radio dial: one that adjusts focusing and one that adjusts filtering,” Ritz said. “In our study, the anterior cingulate cortex tracks what’s going on with the dots. When the anterior cingulate cortex recognizes that, for instance, motion is making the task more difficult, it directs the intraparietal sulcus to adjust the filtering knob in order to reduce the sensitivity to motion.

“In the scenario where the purple and green dots are almost at 50/50, it might also direct the intraparietal sulcus to adjust the focusing knob in order to increase the sensitivity to color. Now the relevant brain regions are less sensitive to motion and more sensitive to the appropriate color, so the participant is better able to make the correct selection.”

Ritz’s description highlights the importance of mental coordination over mental capacity, revealing an often-expressed idea to be a misconception.

“When people talk about the limitations of the mind, they often put it in terms of, ‘humans just don’t have the mental capacity’ or ‘humans lack computing power,'” Ritz said. “These findings support a different perspective on why we’re not focused all the time. It’s not that our brains are too simple, but instead that our brains are really complicated, and it’s the coordination that’s hard.”

Ongoing research projects are building on these study findings. A partnership with physician-scientists at Brown University and Baylor College of Medicine is investigating focus-and-filter strategies in patients with treatment-resistant depression. Researchers in Shenhav’s lab are looking at the way motivation drives attention; one study co-led by Ritz and Brown Ph.D. student Xiamin Leng examines the impact of financial rewards and penalties on focus-and-filter strategies.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (R01MH124849, S10OD02518), the National Science Foundation (2046111) and by a postdoctoral fellowship from the C.V. Starr Foundation.

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Good news for coral reef restoration efforts: Study finds ‘full recovery’ of reef growth within four years

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While the majority of the world’s reefs are now under threat or even damaged potentially beyond repair, a new study reported in the journal Current Biology on March 8 offers some encouraging news: efforts to restore coral reefs not only increase coral cover, but they can also bring back important ecosystem functions, and surprisingly fast.

“We found that restored coral reefs can grow at the same speed as healthy coral reefs just four years after coral transplantation,” says Ines Lange of University of Exeter, UK. “This means that they provide lots of habitat for marine life and efficiently protect the adjacent island from wave energy and erosion.”

“The speed of recovery that we saw was incredible,” she says. “We did not expect a full recovery of reef framework production after only four years.”

The work by Lange and her international colleagues represents the first reef carbonate budget trajectories at any coral restoration sites. The study was conducted at the Mars Coral Reef Restoration Programme in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, one of the largest restoration projects in the world. The project relies on transplanting corals and adding substrate to restore reefs badly damaged by blast fishing 30 or 40 years ago. Without human intervention, those reefs had shown no signs of recovering due to the presence of loose coral rubble that prevents young coral larvae from surviving.

The restoration effort has added a continuous network of sand-coated steel structures to consolidate the rubble and offer a structure for transplanting coral fragments. The question was whether and how quickly such restored sites would recover. To find out, the researchers measured the carbonate budgets of 12 sites that had been restored at different times, up to four years ago.

“Corals constantly add calcium carbonate to the reef framework while some fishes and sea urchins erode it away, so calculating the overall carbonate budget basically tells you if the reef as a whole is growing or shrinking,” Lange says. “Positive reef growth is important to keep up with sea-level rise, protect coastlines from storms and erosion, and provide habitat for reef animals.”

They wanted to know how long it takes to bring back healthy reef growth and its associated functions. Their data show that rapid growth of transplanted corals supports the recovery of coral cover and carbonate production. In fact, just four years in, the net carbonate budget had tripled such that it matched that at healthy control sites.

There were some important differences, however. Because branched corals had been transplanted preferentially over other corals, the makeup of the restored reef communities differs. The researchers say those differences “may affect habitat provision for some marine species and resilience to future heatwaves, as branching corals are more sensitive to bleaching.”

While longer-term study is necessary to see what happens over time and under stress, the findings show that active management actions can help to boost the resilience of reefs and bring back important ecosystem functions that are critical for marine life and local communities in relatively short periods of time, according to the researchers. They’re hopeful that, over time, restored reefs will naturally recruit a more diverse mix of coral species. However, they note that what will happen in any given location around the world will depend on many factors, including environmental conditions and restoration techniques.

“As is so often the case, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, but we hope that this positive example can be used as inspiration for other reef restoration projects around the world,” Lange says.

“These results give us the encouragement that if we can rapidly reduce emissions and stabilize the climate, we have effective tools to help regrow functioning coral reefs,” says Tim Lamont, a study co-author at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK.

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