New data from Synergy Research Group has revealed a significant surge in cloud infrastructure service spend, with Q1 2024 not only setting a new high but also sending year-on-year growth rates on an upward trajectory.
The firm’s report revealed global cloud spend surpassed $76 billion during the first three months of 2024, marking a substantial 21% year-over-year increase of $13.5 billion, and also the second quarter to have seen considerable year-on-year growth.
According to the data, Amazon, Microsoft and Google can be thanked for a large proportion of the spend, collectively accounting for two-thirds (67%) of the market.
Global cloud spend is on the up
Amazon maintains its stronghold as market leader, according for nearly one-third (31%) by itself. Microsoft (25%) and Google (11%) follow in second and third place.
However Synergy also noted healthy growth among tier-two cloud providers, including Huawei, Snowflake, MongoDB and Oracle.
Despite lingering economic and political uncertainties, the cloud market continues to prove resilient, while the increased focus on cloud computing and artificial intelligence suggests that the market will have enough fuel for plenty more quarters yet.
Public IaaS and PaaS services, which Synergy says account for a large portion of the market, saw a notable 23% increase during the quarter, with overall trailing twelve-month revenue hitting $283 billion.
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Failing to mention any geographic regions that performed poorly, Synergy confirmed that the APAC region saw the biggest growth of 25%, though the entire region still trails behind the US, which remains the single largest cloud market.
Looking ahead, John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group, commented: “We will not return to the growth rates seen prior to 2022 [up to around 40%], as the market has become too massive to grow that rapidly, but we will see the market continue to expand substantially. We are forecasting that it will double in size over the next four years.”
• Gut bacteria can affect biological processes at body sites far from the gut.
• The extent to which gut bacteria can affect reproductive tissues is not fully understood.
• Argaw-Denboba et al.1 report that altering the community of gut bacteria in male mice had negative consequences for the health and lifespan of offspring.
• Abnormalities in sperm RNA and the placenta were some of the changes associated with changes to male gut microbes.
• More work will be needed to uncover all the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon.
LIISA VEERUS & MARTIN J. BLASER: The power of paternal bacteria
The microbial communities living in and on animal hosts have become a notable focus of scientific research in recent decades. Studies have explored the many interactions that these microbiomes have with their hosts, and the consequent implications for health and disease. Argaw-Denboba and colleagues now present work that contributes to the emerging field of cross-generational microbiome effects. They investigated how the gut microbiome of male mice might affect the health of the animals’ offspring through changes in the paternal germline tissue, which contains the cells that form sperm. The authors’ observations pointing to a gut–germline axis could, if confirmed, shift the focus of microbiome research from the current mother–newborn model2 towards a new mother–father–newborn interactive system.
After changing the community of gut microbes in prospective fathers by administering either gut-specific (primarily non-absorbable) antibiotics or laxatives, the authors showed that the sperm from a father with a perturbed gut microbiome triggered changes in the placenta (which forms from cells of the embryo) that developed in its mating partner. Some of the resulting offspring had a lower birth weight and a higher chance of premature death (Fig. 1) than did offspring of fathers with a normal microbiome.
Figure 1 | The effect of male gut microbes on offspring health. Argaw-Denboba et al.1 report that using antibiotics to alter the community of gut microbes in male mice affected the production of healthy sperm in a way that had negative consequences for the development of embryonic cells into the placenta and for offspring weight and lifespan. The molecular pathways underlying this phenomenon are not yet fully understood. The effect was reversed after recovery from antibiotic treatment.
By using a variety of methods, such as microbiome transplantation, in vitro fertilization and analysis of gene expression, Argaw-Denboba et al. go beyond correlation to pinpoint that the disadvantageous effect in the offspring is transferred through sperm cells, not through the paternal microbiome. And they demonstrate that the effect is not inherited genetically, but through epigenetic modifications (alterations that do not change the DNA sequence) in the male reproductive system, with differences in sperm RNA reported. The authors also show that the paternal microbiome was restored naturally within eight weeks of the perturbation, and that this restoration was associated with a return to producing healthy offspring, indicating that the microbiome alteration effect was short-lived.
Read the paper: Paternal microbiome perturbations impact offspring fitness
One limitation of the study is that it does not define the molecular pathway through which the perturbed gut microbiome affects the male germline. Doing so could be a goal of future research. The authors note that the disadvantageous aspects of offspring development, including severe growth restriction, did not arise in all offspring, suggesting that further investigation will be required to understand the proposed gut–germline axis and its effect on offspring health.
Whether these findings in mice are also relevant to humans remains to be determined. Another interesting question is how long the gut microbiome takes to recover in people who receive a course of antibiotics. The authors’ finding that the negative effect is reversible might prove useful in providing advice on the optimal timing for fertilization, to avoid costs to the offspring.
Argaw-Denboba and colleagues’ carefully planned research demonstrates how little we still know about antibiotics’ potential effects and underlying mechanisms in relation to crucial concerns such as healthy fertilization and offspring. Exploring the modulation of the gut microbiome and the consequent effects across organ systems is a scientific frontier. Although the health implications of antibiotic use in mothers and newborns have garnered interest in previous publications3,4, the role of fathers has been mostly ignored. This study shows that the preconception microbiome has a role, and that fathers are not just gene donors, but can also, through their microbiomes, affect their offspring’s health5.
YOEL SADOVSKY & ELDIN JAŠAREVIĆ: A father’s microbes and pregnancy outcomes
In mammalian species that form placentas, embryonic development and subsequent fetal growth depend on the genetic contributions and related signals carried in the egg and the sperm, with roles for the placenta, the maternal host tissues and the external environment. These influences are mediated by the exchange of gases, nutrients and metabolic waste, and are modulated by hormones. They are also affected by exposure to microbial or viral disease-causing agents and to inflammation, toxic compounds and social and behavioural stressors. The integration of these signals determines the outcome of pregnancy, and adverse influences can compromise fetal and maternal health and lifespan.
The journey to understand previously unknown microbial genes
A key challenge in studying pregnancy relates to the dynamic and complex signals arising from factors that the parent encounters during their lifetime (described as lifetime exposures), and to how these signals affect fetal and placental development. A mother might generate or modulate health-related signals in many ways during pregnancy. By contrast, the father’s influences are limited mostly to sperm-dependent genetic (DNA) contributions, and to effects resulting from epigenetic modifications of DNA and its associated proteins, which are commonly induced by stress and dietary changes6,7. Paternal effects on offspring health, such as those mediated by stress, exposure to inhaled or ingested chemicals, or male help in providing maternal nutrition, are thought to be indirect when compared with the more direct maternal effects on the offspring.
A growing body of work demonstrates that gut bacteria and the metabolite molecules that they produce are key intermediaries between maternal lifetime exposures, pregnancy outcomes and lasting outcomes for offspring8–10. In their related findings, Argaw-Denboba and colleagues add an unexpected dimension to parental gut microbiome influences on gestational biology — namely, the effect of antibiotic-mediated disruption of the paternal microbiota on a male germline. Using mice, the authors established a strong association between a perturbed paternal gut microbiome and sex-independent restriction of fetal growth; the resultant low birth weight lingered into early adulthood and was associated with reduced survival times compared with the offspring of males who had unperturbed gut microbes.
Crucially, the effect was reversed when the paternal gut microbiome was restored to normal by ceasing antibiotic exposure, and was recapitulated through in vitro fertilization using sperm from males harbouring the perturbed gut microbiome. Furthermore, the altered paternal microbiome was associated with changes in male reproductive tissue (smaller testes and seminiferous tubules with a swollen (vacuolated) appearance and thinner than normal layers of epithelial cells). The authors observed intact genomic parental-specific expression of genes (imprints) but altered transcriptome, metabolome and methylome profiles (relating, respectively, to gene expression, production of metabolite molecules and the attachment of methyl groups to DNA); these profiles were of unknown relevance to the observed outcome.
Deciphering metabolism, one microbe at a time
Do any of these changes causally explain the prenatal and postnatal effects on the offspring? Examining samples of fetal and placental tissue, Argaw-Denboba et al. listed a series of changes in the fetal gene-expression profiles, highlighting differentially expressed genes related to lipid and metabolic processes. These changes were associated mainly with the fetal brain and brown adipose tissue. Placental analysis at embryonic days 13.5 and 18.5 revealed a smaller labyrinth (the mouse placental region that governs gas and nutrient exchange between the mother and the fetus) and impaired formation of blood vessels.
Gene-expression analysis highlighted altered expression of genes related to a metabolic process called glycolysis, to the metabolism of molecules called prolactin and steroids and to several regulators of placental development (such as the genes Hand1 and Syna). Intriguingly, some of the transcriptional changes can cause placental dysfunction. Certainly, further characterization will be crucial to determine whether effects similar to those observed in the placenta-associated condition pre-eclampsia (which involves maternal hypertension and target-organ injury and can lead to fetal or maternal illness or death) are an underlying cause of disease in this context.
These exciting observations establish a link between the paternal gut microbiota, sperm RNA content and pregnancy outcome. Although the mechanisms linking altered sperm biology with changes in the offspring and placenta and with altered gene expression remain to be unravelled, this line of investigation highlights antibiotic-mediated disruption of the paternal gut microbiota as a previously unknown mode of a sperm-mediated effect on fetal development and offspring health. Furthermore, if validated in humans, the work might indicate a potentially modifiable preconceptional contribution by the father’s microbiome to pregnancy health, which would be a pioneering concept in the biology of human pregnancy.
The Centre for Policy Research has worked with the government of prime minister Narendra Modi (right) and his predecessor Manmohan Singh (left).Credit: Sushil Kumar/Hindustan Times/Sipa USA via Alamy
It is India’s leading social-science research institute with a global footprint. The Centre for Policy Research (CPR) is credited with providing an evidence base for India’s economic reforms in the 1990s and helping lay the foundations for its current agenda on climate change.
In January, the government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is seeking re-election, cancelled CPR’s international funding licence, a decision that is being challenged in court. The centre has also been served with a tax demand to pay around 10 crore rupees ($1.2 million) from India’s Income Tax Department.
The case against CPR, which is based in New Delhi, has shocked researchers and policymakers all over the world.
“CPR has a long track record of excellent scholarship, which has consistently illuminated and informed Indian public debates,” says Harald Winkler, an environmental economist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
Around three-quarters of CPR’s annual funding came from international grants, most of which the organization is now unable to access. Fewer than 10 staff members are now left of a total of around 200. The centre, has also lost its chief executive, Yamini Aiyar, who stepped down on 31 March.
Mysterious case
The Ministry of Home Affairs cancelled the CPR’s international funding licence under the 2010 Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, or FCRA. The law requires organizations to register with the government to receive international funds. The aim, as described in the text of the act, is partly to protect “the national interest” from international influence.
The difficulty faced by CPR and other research organizations is that the law does not allow them to transfer funds from international sources to partner organizations. This makes collaborative research impossible to do, Aiyar writes in a World View article in Nature this week.
CPR’s international funders include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation based in Seattle, Washington, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office in London (FCDO and the Ford Foundation, based in New York city. Nature reached out to the funders for a response. The Gates foundation and FCDO did not respond before this article was published. The Ford Foundation declined to respond.
The path to India’s growth
Since its founding in 1973, the CPR has worked with governments of both left- and right-leaning parties. “They were doing objective, non-partisan research,” says Robert Stavins, who studies energy and economic development at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In 1991, the country’s then government, led by the Indian National Congress party, embarked on reforms to liberalize its economy after some four decades of government restrictions on industrial development. That liberalization fueled India’s subsequent growth, including the rise of new corporations in finance, information technology, pharmaceuticals and services industries.
Economist Isher Judge Ahluwalia’s empirical work helped build evidence in support of economic liberalization that fuelled India’s growth.Credit: Sam Panthaky/AFP via Getty
CPR researchers helped to lay the intellectual foundation as well as provide empirical support for economic reforms through publications authored by staff. According to Aiyar, these include Towards an Industrial Policy: 2000 ad (1977) by CPR’s founding director V A Pai Panandiker and policy researcher P D Malgavkar; and Industrial Growth inIndiaby economist Isher Judge Ahluwalia (1985).
Ahluwalia analysed productivity data for 30 industries over a 20- year period up to 1979/80. She concluded that India’s industrial growth had slowed after the mid-1960s and that government controls on industry were an important cause. It was painstaking work, carried out at a time when data were not digitized. This and subsequent work, were among the sources of evidence supporting the 1991 economic reforms enacted by the government of prime minister Manmohan Singh.
Climate strategies
CPR researchers have also helped the current BJP-led government with its climate-change policy development. Ahead of the United Nations climate meeting COP27 in Egypt in 2022, the CPR convened a cross-ministry team of the government to craft India’s first long-term low-emissions strategy.
The process to create the strategy “is an example where we were directly invited into a formal governmental process”, according to Navroz Dubash, CPR’s former head of climate, energy and environment research, now based at the National University of Singapore.
“The invitation likely came out of the academic work we did,” Dubash said in an interview published on CPR’s website. These include studies showing how climate and development can be integrated. Dubash explained how CPR encouraged different ministries to be in the room when the strategy was being developed. “We designed a process where we said let’s make this a cross-government approach because climate change is not . . . just about environment and emissions, it’s about the choice of electricity system, choice of transport systems, patterns of urbanization,” he said.
CPR has “done exceptionally important work on climate and energy policy”, says Matto Mildenberger, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It is one of the most important voices from the perspective of the global south.”
Action on accountability
In 2008, Aiyar and her team established a research project called the Accountability Initiative aimed at improving transparency and accountability in government. The programme studies and documents the government’s mechanisms for delivering and assessing its policies. It also analyses how communities can hold the government accountable, or improve its accountability.
The Accountability Initiative has highlighted the need for improvements to government funding mechanisms, says a US-based social scientist, who asked not to be named. For example, researchers showed a rising trend in late payments from a government welfare scheme for rural households, between 2016 and 2022.
CPR’s plight could have a chilling effect on anyone else attempting similar work, researchers have told Nature. “Now any research organization in India is going to be wary of getting involved in anything that may challenge the government and lead to FCRA status cancellations,” says Johannes Urpelainen, a political scientist who studies environment policy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and who has partnered with researchers in India.
In Breaking Through, a memoir published in 2020, the year that she died, Ahluwalia wrote: “More than any other institution I have known, and particularly relevant to bear in mind today, [CPR colleagues] showed a genuine ability to leave political differences at the door and reap the benefit of differing perspectives on issues of national importance.”
Nature has reached out to India’s Ministry of Home Affairs and the FCRA office in New Delhi. No response was received by the time this article was published.
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.
Planning to kickstart a new phase of growth for your business? You’re in good company. Every business leader aspires to maintain a solid momentum of growth and stay ahead of competition. The golden key for triggering such robust business growth might just be hiding in plain sight. Today, we are going to reveal and thoroughly discuss the importance and power of analytics in the business world, an area that often doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.
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