It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, January 11, 2021
The enormous advantage that the Electoral College gives Republicans, in one chart
In 2019, a team of economic researchers from the University of Texas released a shocking finding. Republicans, they predicted, would win nearly one in six presidential races where the GOP lost the popular vote by three points. Thus, there was a significant likelihood that Republicans would capture the White House even when a clear majority of the public preferred to elect a Democrat
The bottom line is that Trump received a four-point boost from the Electoral College in 2020 — or, as Shor puts it, Democrats needed to win 52 percent of the national electorate in order to have an even chance of winning the presidency. (Trump received about a three-point boost from the Electoral College in 2016, when he lost the national popular vote by 2.1 points.)
As recently as 2012, the Electoral College gave a slight advantage to Democrats. As Shor writes, “this big change in bias happened because white voters without a college degree *in large midwestern states* switched their votes en-masse from Obama to Trump in 2016.”
In 2012, President Barack Obama won the national popular vote by just under 4 percentage points. But he overperformed his national margins in midwestern swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Obama won Michigan by nearly 10 points.
In 2020, by contrast, Democratic President-elect Joe Biden defeated Trump by a larger margin than Obama’s victory in 2012 — Biden won the national popular vote by 4.5 percentage points. But Biden also underperformed his national margin in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Biden won Wisconsin by less than a full percentage point.
Indeed, while Biden won a commanding victory in the national popular vote — his 4.5 percentage point victory is the second-largest margin in a 21st-century presidential contest — Biden barely eked out a victory in the Electoral College.
Nearly 160 million voters cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election, but if a total of 43,000 Biden voters had stayed at home in the states of Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, Trump would have won a second term.
Mindfulness can improve mental health and wellbeing -- but unlikely to work for everyone
Mindfulness courses can reduce anxiety, depression and stress and increase mental wellbeing within most but not all non-clinical settings, say a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge. They also found that mindfulness may be no better than other practices aimed at improving mental health and wellbeing.
Mindfulness is typically defined as 'the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment'. It has become increasingly popular in recent years as a way of increasing wellbeing and reducing stress levels.
In the UK, the National Health Service offers therapies based on mindfulness to help treat mental health issues such as depression and suicidal thoughts. However, the majority of people who practice mindfulness learn their skills in community settings such as universities, workplaces, or private courses. Mindfulness-based programmes are frequently promoted as the go-to universal tool to reduce stress and increase wellbeing, accessible to anyone, anywhere.
Many randomised controlled trials (RCTs) have been conducted around the world to assess whether in-person mindfulness training can improve mental health and wellbeing, but the results are often varied. In a report published today in PLOS Medicine, a team of researchers from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge led a systematic review and meta-analysis to examine the published data from the RCTs. This approach allows them to bring together existing - and often contradictory or under-powered - studies to provide more robust conclusions.
The team identified 136 RCTs on mindfulness training for mental health promotion in community settings. These trials included 11,605 participants aged 18 to 73 years from 29 countries, more than three-quarters (77%) of whom were women.
The researchers found that in most community settings, compared with doing nothing, mindfulness reduces anxiety, depression and stress, and increases wellbeing. However, the data suggested that in more than one in 20 trials settings, mindfulness-based programmes may not improve anxiety and depression.
Dr Julieta Galante from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, the report's first author, said: "For the average person and setting, practising mindfulness appears to be better than doing nothing for improving our mental health, particularly when it comes to depression, anxiety and psychological distress - but we shouldn't assume that it works for everyone, everywhere.
"Mindfulness training in the community needs to be implemented with care. Community mindfulness courses should be just one option among others, and the range of effects should be researched as courses are implemented in new settings. The courses that work best may be those aimed at people who are most stressed or in stressful situations, for example health workers, as they appear to see the biggest benefit."
The researchers caution that RCTs in this field tended to be of poor quality, so the combined results may not represent the true effects. For example, many participants stopped attending mindfulness courses and were not asked why, so they are not represented in the results. When the researchers repeated the analyses including only the higher quality studies, mindfulness only showed effects on stress, not on wellbeing, depression or anxiety.
When compared against other 'feel good' practices such as exercise, mindfulness fared neither better nor worse. Professor Peter Jones, also from Cambridge's Department of Psychiatry, and senior author, said: "While mindfulness is often better than taking no action, we found that there may be other effective ways of improving our mental health and wellbeing, such as exercise. In many cases, these may prove to be more suitable alternatives if they are more effective, culturally more acceptable or are more feasible or cost effective to implement. The good news is that there are now more options."
The researchers say that the variability in the success of different mindfulness-based programmes identified among the RCTs may be down to a number of reasons, including how, where and by whom they are implemented as well as at whom they are targeted. The techniques and frameworks taught in mindfulness have rich and diverse backgrounds, from early Buddhist psychology and meditation through to cognitive neuroscience and participatory medicine - the interplay between all of these different factors can be expected to influence how effective a programme is.
The number of online mindfulness courses has increased rapidly, accelerated further by the COVID-19 pandemic. Although this review has not looked at online courses, studies suggest that these may be as effective as their offline counterparts, despite most lacking interactions with teacher and peers.
Dr Galante added: "If the effects of online mindfulness courses vary as widely according to the setting as their offline counterparts, then the lack of human support they offer could cause potential problems. We need more research before we can be confident about their effectiveness and safety."
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The research was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Applied Research Collaboration East of England and NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre, with additional support from the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, Medical Research Council, Wellcome and the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport.
Reference
Galante, J et al. Mindfulness-based programmes for mental health promotion in adults in non-clinical settings: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. PLOS Medicine; 11 Jan 2021; DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1003481
More management measures lead to healthier fish populations
Fish populations tend to do better in places where rigorous fisheries management practices are used, and the more measures employed, the better for fish populations and food production, according to a new paper published Jan. 11 in Nature Sustainability.
The study, led by Michael Melnychuk of the University of Washington's School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, draws upon the expertise of more than two dozen researchers from 17 regions around the world. The research team analyzed the management practices of nearly 300 fish populations to tease out patterns that lead to healthier fisheries across different locations. Their findings confirmed, through extensive data analysis, what many researchers have argued for several years.
"In general, we found that more management attention devoted to fisheries is leading to better outcomes for fish and shellfish populations," Melnychuk said. "While this won't be surprising to some, the novelty of this work was in assembling the data required and then using statistical tools to reveal this pattern across hundreds of marine populations."
The research team used an international database that is the go-to scientific resource on the status of more than 600 individual fish populations They chose to analyze 288 populations that generally are of value economically and represent a diversity of species and regions. They then looked over time at each fish population's management practices and were able to draw these conclusions:
In regions of the world where fish and shellfish populations are well studied, overall fisheries management intensity has steadily increased over the past half century
As fisheries management measures are implemented, fishing pressure is usually reduced toward sustainable levels, and population abundance usually increases toward healthy targets
If fish populations become depleted as a result of overfishing, a rebuilding plan may be implemented. These plans tend to immediately decrease fishing pressure and allow populations to recover
If strong fisheries management systems are put in place early enough, then overfishing can be avoided and large, sustainable catches can be harvested annually, rendering emergency measures like rebuilding plans unnecessary
CAPTION
A selection of herring from a recent fishing trip.
The study builds on previous work that found, by using the same database, that nearly half of the fish caught worldwide are from populations that are scientifically monitored and, on average, are increasing in abundance. The new paper takes a closer look at specific management actions and how they have impacted fishing pressure and the abundance of each population examined, Melnychuk explained.
"All fish populations have their own unique contexts that might dictate what management tools would be most helpful and promising to use," he said. "Despite the great diversity in their management objectives and various strategies to meet those, we focused on key management tools in common to many fisheries around the world."
The international research team chose to look at a spectrum of fish populations, such as hakes in South Africa and Europe, orange roughy in New Zealand, tuna species on the high seas, anchovies in South America and scallops off the Atlantic coast of North America. Most of the populations they examined had a history of being depleted at some point, usually due to historical overfishing.
For example, with U.S. mid-Atlantic population of black sea bass, a rebuilding plan instituted in 1996 brought fishing rates down from three times the sustainable level to below this mark, which led to a steady rebuilding of the fishery and full recovery by 2009.
"Fishers targeting black sea bass in the northeastern U.S. are finally reaping the rewards of harvest caps that allowed the population to rebuild," said co-author Olaf Jensen of the University of Wisconsin--Madison. "The 2020 catch limit of more than 6,000 tons is the highest since catch limits were first imposed more than 20 years ago."
This analysis omits fisheries that lack scientific estimates of population status, even though these account for a large amount of the world's catch. These include most of the fish populations in South Asia and Southeast Asia -- fisheries in India, Indonesia and China alone represent 30% to 40% of the world's catch, most of which is essentially unassessed. Although fisheries in these regions could not be included in the analyses, the paper's authors conclude that lessons learned can equally apply to data-limited fisheries: Greater investment in fisheries management systems is expected to lead to better outcomes for the fish populations upon which our fisheries are based.
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A full list of paper co-authors is available in the paper. This research was funded by The Nature Conservancy, The Wildlife Conservation Society, the Walton Family Foundation and a consortium of Seattle fishing companies.
For more information, contact Melnychuk at mmel@uw.edu.
CAPTION
Trap gear used during fishing.
CREDIT
Michael Melnychuk/University of Washington
Climate change has caused billions of dollars in flood damages
In a new study, Stanford researchers report that intensifying precipitation contributed one-third of the financial costs of flooding in the United States over the past three decades, totaling almost $75 billion of the estimated $199 billion in flood damages from 1988 to 2017.
The research, published Jan. 11 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, helps to resolve a long-standing debate about the role of climate change in the rising costs of flooding and provides new insight into the financial costs of global warming overall.
"The fact that extreme precipitation has been increasing and will likely increase in the future is well known, but what effect that has had on financial damages has been uncertain," said lead author Frances Davenport, a PhD student in Earth system science at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). "Our analysis allows us to isolate how much of those changes in precipitation translate to changes in the cost of flooding, both now and in the future."
The global insurance company Munich Re calls flooding "the number-one natural peril in the U.S." However, although flooding is one of the most common, widespread and costly natural hazards, whether climate change has contributed to the rising financial costs of flooding - and if so, how much - has been a topic of debate, including in the most recent climate change assessments from the U.S. government and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
At the crux of that debate is the question of whether or not the increasing trend in the cost of flooding in the U.S. has been driven primarily by socioeconomic factors like population growth, housing development and increasing property values. Most previous research has focused either on very detailed case studies (for example, of individual disasters or long-term changes in individual states) or on correlations between precipitation and flood damages for the U.S. overall.
In an effort to close this gap, the researchers started with higher resolution climate and socioeconomic data. They then applied advanced methods from economics to quantify the relationship between historical precipitation variations and historical flooding costs, along with methods from statistics and climate science to evaluate the impact of changes in precipitation on total flooding costs. Together, these analyses revealed that climate change has contributed substantially to the growing cost of flooding in the U.S., and that exceeding the levels of global warming agreed upon in the United Nations Paris Agreement is very likely to lead to greater intensification of the kinds of extreme precipitation events that have been most costly and devastating in recent decades.
"Previous studies have analyzed pieces of this puzzle, but this is the first study to combine rigorous economic analysis of the historical relationships between climate and flooding costs with really careful extreme event analyses in both historical observations and global climate models, across the whole United States," said senior author and climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, the Kara J. Foundation Professor at Stanford Earth.
"By bringing all those pieces together, this framework provides a novel quantification not only of how much historical changes in precipitation have contributed to the costs of flooding, but also how greenhouse gases influence the kinds of precipitation events that cause the most damaging flooding events," Diffenbaugh added.
The researchers liken isolating the role of changing precipitation to other questions of cause and effect, such as determining how much an increase in minimum wage will affect local employment, or how many wins an individual player contributes to the overall success of a basketball team. In this case, the research team started by developing an economic model based on observed precipitation and monthly reports of flood damage, controlling for other factors that might affect flooding costs like increases in home values. They then calculated the change in extreme precipitation in each state over the study period. Finally, they used the model to calculate what the economic damages would have been if those changes in extreme precipitation had not occurred.
"This counterfactual analysis is similar to computing how many games the Los Angeles Lakers would have won, with and without the addition of LeBron James, holding all other players constant," said study co-author and economist Marshall Burke, an associate professor of Earth system science.
Applying this framework, the research team found that - when totaled across all the individual states - changes in precipitation accounted for 36 percent of the actual flooding costs that occurred in the U.S. from 1988 to 2017. The effect of changing precipitation was primarily driven by increases in extreme precipitation, which have been responsible for the largest share of flooding costs historically.
"What we find is that, even in states where the long-term mean precipitation hasn't changed, in most cases the wettest events have intensified, increasing the financial damages relative to what would have occurred without the changes in precipitation," said Davenport, who received a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship in 2020.
The researchers emphasize that, by providing a new quantification of the scale of the financial costs of climate change, their findings have implications beyond flooding in the U.S.
"Accurately and comprehensively tallying the past and future costs of climate change is key to making good policy decisions," said Burke. "This work shows that past climate change has already cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars, just due to flood damages alone."
The authors envision their approach being applied to different natural hazards, to climate impacts in different sectors of the economy and to other regions of the globe to help understand the costs and benefits of climate adaptation and mitigation actions.
"That these results are as robust and definitive as they are really advances our understanding of the role of historical precipitation changes in the financial costs of flooding," Diffenbaugh said. "But, more broadly, the framework that we developed provides an objective basis for estimating what it will cost to adapt to continued climate change and the economic value of avoiding higher levels of global warming in the future."
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Diffenbaugh is also the Kimmelman Family Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and an affiliate of the Precourt Institute for Energy. Burke is also deputy director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment and a fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
VIDEO: A SIMULATED COLLISION BETWEEN TWO GAS-RICH GALAXIES. PART OF THE GAS IS EJECTED IN LARGE TAILS AND AS THE GALAXIES GET CLOSER THEY MERGE TO FORM A SINGLE SYSTEM. view more
CREDIT: JEREMY FENSCH, ET AL
Astronomers have looked nine billion years into the past to find evidence that galaxy mergers in the early universe could shut down star formation and affect galaxy growth.
New research led by Durham University, UK, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA)-Saclay and the University of Paris-Saclay, shows that a huge amount of star-forming gas was ejected into the intergalactic medium by the coming together of two galaxies.
The researchers say that this event, together with a large amount of star formation in the nuclear regions of the galaxy, would eventually deprive the merged galaxy - called ID2299 - of fuel for new stars. This would stop star formation for several hundred million years, effectively halting the galaxy's development.
Astronomers observe many massive, dead galaxies containing very old stars in the nearby Universe and don't exactly know how these galaxies have been formed.
Simulations suggest that winds generated by active black holes as they feed, or those created by intense star formation, are responsible for such deaths by expelling the gas from galaxies.
Now the Durham-led study offers galaxy mergers as another way of shutting down star formation and altering galaxy growth.
CAPTION
This artist's impression of ID2299 shows the galaxy, the product of a galactic collision, and some of its gas being ejected by a "tidal tail" as a result of the merger. New observations made with ALMA, in which ESO is a partner, have captured the earliest stages of this ejection, before the gas reached the very large scales depicted in this artist's impression.
CREDIT
ESO/M. Kornmesser
Observational features of winds and "tidal tails" caused by the gravitational interaction between galaxies in such mergers can be very similar, so the researchers suggest that some past results where galactic winds have been seen as the cause of halting star formation might need to be re-evaluated.
The findings are published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Lead author Dr Annagrazia Puglisi, in Durham University's Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, said: "We don't yet know what the exact processes are behind the switching off of star formation in massive galaxies.
"Feedback driven winds from star formation or active black holes are thought to be the main responsible for expelling the gas and quenching the growth of massive galaxies.
"Our research provides compelling evidence that the gas being flung from ID2299 is likely to have been tidally ejected because of the merger between two gas rich spiral galaxies. The gravitational interaction between two galaxies can thus provide sufficient angular momentum to kick out part of the gas into the galaxy surroundings.
"This suggests that mergers are also capable of altering the future evolution of a galaxy by limiting its ability to form stars over millions of years and deserve more investigation when thinking about the factors that limit galaxy growth."
Due to the amount of time it takes the light from ID2299 to reach Earth the researchers were able to see the galaxy as it would have appeared nine billion years ago when it was in the late stages of its merger.
This is a time when the universe was only 4.5 billion years old and was in its most active, "young adult" phase if compared to a human life.
Using the European Southern Observatory's Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) telescope, in northern Chile, the researchers saw it was ejecting about half of its total gas reservoir into the galaxy surroundings.
Researchers were able to rule out star formation and the galaxy's active black hole as the reason for this ejection by comparing their measurements to previous studies and simulations and by measuring the physical properties of the escaped gas.
The rate at which the gas is being expelled from ID2299 is too high to have been caused by the energy created by a black hole or starburst as seen in previous studies, while simulations suggest that no black holes can kick out as much cold gas from a galaxy.
The excitation of the escaped gas is also not compatible with a wind generated by a black hole or the birth of new stars.
Co-author Dr Emanuele Daddi, from CEA-Saclay said: "This galaxy is witnessing a truly extreme event.
"It is probably caught during an important physical phase for galaxy evolution that occurs within a relatively short time window. We had to look at over 100 galaxies with ALMA to find it."
Fellow co-author Dr Jeremy Fensch, of the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, added: "Studying this single case unveiled the possibility that this type of event might not be unusual at all and that many galaxies suffered from this 'gravitational gas removal', including misinterpreted past observations.
"This might have huge consequences on our understanding of what actually shapes the evolution of galaxies."
CAPTION
Map of the cold molecular gas from the galaxy ID2299 taken using the European Southern Observatory's Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) telescope.
CREDIT
A Puglisi et al
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The researchers now hope to obtain higher resolution images of ID2299 and other distant galaxy mergers and carry out computer simulations to further understand the effect galaxy mergers have on the life cycle of galaxies.
The research was funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, part of UK Research and Innovation, Region Île-de-France, and the CEA-Enhanced Eurotalents program, co-funded by the FP7 Marie-Sk?odowska-Curie COFUND program, Comunidad de Madrid, Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MICIU), and co-financed by FEDER (European Regional Development Funds).
ALMA captures distant colliding galaxy dying out as it loses the ability to form stars
IMAGE: THIS ARTIST'S IMPRESSION OF ID2299 SHOWS THE GALAXY, THE PRODUCT OF A GALACTIC COLLISION, AND SOME OF ITS GAS BEING EJECTED BY A "TIDAL TAIL " AS A RESULT OF THE... view more
CREDIT: ESO/M. KORNMESSER
Galaxies begin to "die" when they stop forming stars, but until now astronomers had never clearly glimpsed the start of this process in a far-away galaxy. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner, astronomers have seen a galaxy ejecting nearly half of its star-forming gas. This ejection is happening at a startling rate, equivalent to 10 000 Suns-worth of gas a year -- the galaxy is rapidly losing its fuel to make new stars. The team believes that this spectacular event was triggered by a collision with another galaxy, which could lead astronomers to rethink how galaxies stop bringing new stars to life.
"This is the first time we have observed a typical massive star-forming galaxy in the distant Universe about to 'die' because of a massive cold gas ejection," says Annagrazia Puglisi, lead researcher on the new study, from the Durham University, UK, and the Saclay Nuclear Research Centre (CEA-Saclay), France. The galaxy, ID2299, is distant enough that its light takes some 9 billion years to reach us; we see it when the Universe was just 4.5 billion years old.
The gas ejection is happening at a rate equivalent to 10 000 Suns per year, and is removing an astonishing 46% of the total cold gas from ID2299. Because the galaxy is also forming stars very rapidly, hundreds of times faster than our Milky Way, the remaining gas will be quickly consumed, shutting down ID2299 in just a few tens of million years.
The event responsible for the spectacular gas loss, the team believes, is a collision between two galaxies, which eventually merged to form ID2299. The elusive clue that pointed the scientists towards this scenario was the association of the ejected gas with a "tidal tail". Tidal tails are elongated streams of stars and gas extending into interstellar space that result when two galaxies merge, and they are usually too faint to see in distant galaxies. However, the team managed to observe the relatively bright feature just as it was launching into space, and were able to identify it as a tidal tail.
Most astronomers believe that winds caused by star formation and the activity of black holes at the centres of massive galaxies are responsible for launching star-forming material into space, thus ending galaxies' ability to make new stars. However, the new study published today in Nature Astronomy suggests that galactic mergers can also be responsible for ejecting star-forming fuel into space.
"Our study suggests that gas ejections can be produced by mergers and that winds and tidal tails can appear very similar," says study co-author Emanuele Daddi of CEA-Saclay. Because of this, some of the teams that previously identified winds from distant galaxies could in fact have been observing tidal tails ejecting gas from them. "This might lead us to revise our understanding of how galaxies 'die'," Daddi adds.
Puglisi agrees about the significance of the team's finding, saying: "I was thrilled to discover such an exceptional galaxy! I was eager to learn more about this weird object because I was convinced that there was some important lesson to be learned about how distant galaxies evolve."
This surprising discovery was made by chance, while the team were inspecting a survey of galaxies made with ALMA (https://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/alma/) , designed to study the properties of cold gas in more than 100 far-away galaxies. ID2299 had been observed by ALMA for only a few minutes, but the powerful observatory, located in northern Chile, allowed the team to collect enough data to detect the galaxy and its ejection tail.
"ALMA has shed new light on the mechanisms that can halt the formation of stars in distant galaxies. Witnessing such a massive disruption event adds an important piece to the complex puzzle of galaxy evolution," says Chiara Circosta, a researcher at the University College London, UK, who also contributed to the research.
In the future, the team could use ALMA to make higher-resolution and deeper observations of this galaxy, enabling them to better understand the dynamics of the ejected gas. Observations with the future ESO's Extremely Large Telescope could allow the team to explore the connections between the stars and gas in ID2299, shedding new light on how galaxies evolve.
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More information
This research was presented in the paper "A titanic interstellar medium ejection from a massive starburst galaxy at z=1.4" to appear in Nature Astronomy (doi: 10.1038/s41550-020-01268-x).
The team is composed of A. Puglisi (Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Durham University, UK and CEA, IRFU, DAp, AIM, Université Paris-Saclay, Université Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité, CNRS, France [CEA]), E. Daddi (CEA), M. Brusa (Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Università di Bologna, Italy and INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Bologna, Italy), F. Bournaud (CEA), J. Fensch (Univ. Lyon, ENS de Lyon, Univ. Lyon 1, CNRS, Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, France), D. Liu (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Germany), I. Delvecchio (CEA), A. Calabrò (INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, Italy), C. Circosta (Department of Physics & Astronomy, University College London, UK), F. Valentino (Cosmic Dawn Center at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen and DTU-Space, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark), M. Perna (Centro de Astrobiología (CAB, CSIC-INTA), Departamento de Astrofísica, Spain and INAF-Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Italy), S. Jin (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and Universidad de La Laguna, Dpto. Astrofísica, Spain), A. Enia (Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Università di Padova, Italy [Padova]), C. Mancini (Padova) and G. Rodighiero (Padova and INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova, Italy).
ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the world's most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It has 16 Member States: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, along with the host state of Chile and with Australia as a Strategic Partner. ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope and its world-leading Very Large Telescope Interferometer as well as two survey telescopes, VISTA working in the infrared and the visible-light VLT Survey Telescope. Also at Paranal ESO will host and operate the Cherenkov Telescope Array South, the world's largest and most sensitive gamma-ray observatory. ESO is also a major partner in two facilities on Chajnantor, APEX and ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. And on Cerro Armazones, close to Paranal, ESO is building the 39-metre Extremely Large Telescope, the ELT, which will become "the world's biggest eye on the sky".
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of ESO, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded by ESO on behalf of its Member States, by NSF in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) and by NINS in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI). ALMA construction and operations are led by ESO on behalf of its Member States; by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), on behalf of North America; and by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) on behalf of East Asia. The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.
Most organisms on earth depend on the energy from the sun. Sunlight is also an important coordinator of life's timers. Animals take important cues for proliferation, activity, feeding, or sleep from changing light conditions. These rhythms also exist in humans - as changing light conditions across the year can strongly impact human mood and psychology.
Part of the natural light from the sun we are exposed to consists of ultraviolet (UVA and UVB) light, a short-wavelength part of the spectrum that is largely missing in artificial lighting. So far, most research on seasonal cycles has focused on daylength. "In contrast to previous assumptions, we discovered that, in addition to daylength, the intensity of UVA light influences the seasonal responses of the bristle worm Platynereis dumerilii", explains first author Vinoth Babu Veedin Rajan, who carried out the work during his PhD in the Tessmar-Raible lab.
Initially, the researchers set out to measure the light conditions the worms are exposed to in the Bay of Naples (Italy), one of their natural habitats. Upon inspection of the data the scientists noticed that the light intensities of UV wavelengths exhibit annual changes distinct from the variation in daylength. They wondered if these variations in light intensity could be used by the worms to tell the time of the year. In cooperation with an electrical engineer, the team built lamps that closely resemble the natural light environment, including UVA. The intensity of UVA light altered worm behavior. The scientists then identified a key light receptor (c-opsin 1) involved in the response. Worms lacking the receptors showed altered levels of enzymes that produce important neurohormones such as dopamine and serotonin.
UVA-sensitive opsins with similar properties are also found in other organisms, ranging from fish to humans. "We like to think of UVA light as something that we should be protected from, but in these marine worms it clearly has a biological function. It will be interesting to find out what impact UVA levels have on other animals, and even ourselves." says Tessmar-Raible. As part of a complex environment, the correct timing of the behavior of marine life also has an impact on populations and the ecosystem of the ocean. How UVA light exactly influences this delicate balance is still unclear. "Understanding more about the relevance of UVA light for marine animal physiology and behavior will therefore also be of ecological importance", the researchers suggest. This latter aspect has already prompted interest from other marine chrono-ecologists, which may pave the way for future collaborations to bridge molecular genetics to ecology.
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Publication in "Nature Ecology and Evolution": Vinoth Babu Veedin Rajan, N. So?ren Ha?fker, Enrique Arboleda, Birgit Poehn, Thomas Gossenreiter, Elliot Gerrard, Maximillian Hofbauer, Christian Mu?hlestein, Andrea Bileck, Christopher Gerner, Maurizio Ribera d'Alcala, Maria C. Buia, Markus Hartl, Robert J. Lucas and Kristin Tessmar-Raible: Seasonal variation in UVA light drives hormonal and behavioural changes in a ma-rine annelid via a ciliary opsin. Nature Ecology and Evolution (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-01356-1
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