Going against the flow: Scientists reveal garden eels’ unique way of feeding

The first lab study on garden eels shows how these shy creatures use their burrows, and change their movement and posture, when feeding in strong currents

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OKINAWA INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (OIST) GRADUATE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: GARDEN EELS ANCHOR THE LOWER PART OF THEIR BODY IN BURROWS, AND FACE THEIR HEADS AGAINST THE CURRENT AS THEY PREY ON ZOOPLANKTON. THE SPECIES PICTURED IS THE SPOTTED GARDEN EEL, HETEROCONGER HASSI. FOR VIDEO FOOTAGE, PLEASE VIEW HERE: HTTPS://VIMEO.COM/731672778 view more 

CREDIT: OIST

Garden eels are the ultimate homebodies. Instead of swimming freely in the ocean, these eels anchor themselves into burrows in the sandy seabed, which they almost never leave. Their colonies, which are typically found on the outskirts of tropical coral reels, can be made up of thousands of eels, which from a distance resemble a garden of seagrass as the eels bob and wave. Their heads, complete with a pouting mouth and cute cartoon eyes, face against the flow of the current as they strike at tiny animals called zooplankton that drift past.

Currently, scientists know relatively little about these unique creatures, and how their behavior, like how they feed, changes with environmental conditions. Most marine research has focused on the more common feeding strategies of free-swimming fish, and the shyness of garden eels, who hide when predators (or scuba divers) pass by, makes their study even more challenging.

Now, for the first time, marine researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have looked at the feeding behavior of garden eels in an experimental lab setting. Their findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, reveal how garden eels make use of their burrows, and change their movement and posture, in response to strong currents, allowing them to feed in a wider range of flow speeds compared to many free-swimming fish.

“Free-swimming fish can shelter from currents by hiding in cracks and crevices in the reef,” said Kota Ishikawa, first author and PhD student in OIST’s Marine Biophysics Unit. “But garden eels are stuck in a more exposed area, with only their own burrows for shelter, so they’ve had to develop their own unique strategies for dealing with strong currents.”

In the lab, the scientists recreated typical conditions by custom-making a flume with a sandy bottom. Inside the flume was a spot to place a portable burrow, with each burrow housing a single spotted garden eel, Heteroconger hassi, a species commonly found in Okinawa. 

In the experiments, the researchers added zooplankton to the water and used cameras – two to the side and one above – to capture the motion of the garden eel as it fed at four different flow rates: 0.1, 0.15, 0.2 and 0.25 m/s. 

The footage captured by the cameras was then used to train a deep learning program to recognize and track the eye and uppermost black patch on their body. From this tracked data, the researchers then digitally reconstructed and analyzed the 3D movement and posture of each eel.

As the current increased, the 3D tracking showed that the garden eels retreated farther into their burrows and focused their strikes on zooplankton that passed closer by.  

“This is a really important adaptation, as faster currents require more energy to move in,” said Ishikawa.

After each trial finished, the scientists counted the remaining zooplankton to work out how many the eel had managed to catch and eat. They found that as the current increased in speed up to 0.2 m/s, the slow retreat into burrows didn’t stop the eels from feeding at a rapid pace. The reason for this, explained Ishikawa, is that despite limiting their feeding area, faster currents meant that more zooplankton drifted past in the given amount of time, offsetting the behavior change. The shorter strike distance also meant that the eels were more likely to successfully catch the zooplankton.

At higher flows, the eels also adopted a curved posture, in contrast to the straighter posture seen at slower flows. This, coupled with reducing the amount of their body exposed to the current, enabled the eels to reduce the amount of drag on their body by around 57%, conserving energy.    

However, even for garden eels, some currents are simply too strong. Once the flow rate reached 0.25 m/s, the garden eels retreated completely into their burrows and did not feed at all. 

Overall, the researchers found that the feeding rate of the garden eels hit its peak at just under 0.2 m/s. Free-swimming, plankton-eating fish typically have a peak feeding rate at around 0.15 m/s, showing that garden eels are adapted to feed at a wider range of flow speeds than free-swimming reef fish .

“We can see that their unique strategy of retreating into the burrows and reducing their strike distance really pays off when dealing with strong currents,” said Ishikawa.

For garden eels at least, it seems that staying at home is best.

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JOURNAL

Journal of Experimental Biology

DOI

10.1242/jeb.243655 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

RESEARCH ARTICLE| 22 APRIL 2022 Effects of prey density and flow speed on plankton feeding by garden eels: a flume study

Study details U.S. health spending by region

Peer-Reviewed Publication

YALE UNIVERSITY

Contact: Bess Connolly, 203-432-1324 or elizabeth.connolly@yale.edu

For Immediate Release: July 20, 2022

Study details U.S. health spending by region

New Haven, Conn. — A new study by researchers at Yale, Stanford, and Dartmouth provides the first nationwide, small-area analysis of the variation in spending by the three main funders of health care in the United States: Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers. The researchers’ goal: to see whether there are regions that have low health spending by each of the three payers simultaneously or whether distinct factors drive health spending variation among the payers.

The study, published July 20 in JAMA Network Open, analyzes spending data for more than 100 million individuals and shows that while health spending per payer varies significantly across regions, there are almost no regions that have simultaneously low spending by Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers or that have universally high spending across all three payers. In fact, the researchers found that distinct factors appear to be driving regional variation in health spending across each payer segment of the U.S. health system.

The finding has significant public policy implications because it suggests that policymakers should focus on payer-specific interventions that target individual sources of waste rather than searching for silver-bullet interventions, according to the researchers.

“In the past, policymakers have identified particular regions as having efficient health systems based solely on care delivered through Medicare,” said study co-author Zack Cooper, an associate professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health and of economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “By analyzing data from all three dominant payers, we show that analysts cannot understand the overall performance of regions by studying only one payer or learn about a model for the country by studying one region.

“Our findings suggest that payer-specific factors drive health spending across and within regions, suggesting that policymakers should focus on payer-specific strategies to increase efficiency in the U.S. health care sector.”

Olivia Stiegman, a pre-doctoral fellow for Yale’s Department of Economics and Tobin Center for Economic Policy, and Chima D. Ndumele, an associate professor of public health at the Yale School of Public Health, are co-authors of the study. The other co-authors are Becky Staiger of the School of Medicine of Stanford University and Jonathan Skinner of Dartmouth College.

The United States spends about $3.8 trillion annually on health care. By most accounts, its health care sector is inefficient compared to those of other developed countries. Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers covered 14.2%, 19.8%, and 49.6% of the country’s population in 2019, respectively.

The study found that only three regions nationwide were simultaneously in the lowest fifth of spending across the three payers: Boulder, Colorado; Bloomington, Illinois; and Olympia, Washington. Only four regions were in the highest fifth of spending simultaneously for the payers: the Bronx, New York; Manhattan, New York; White Plains, New York; and Dallas, Texas. What a region spent on the privately insured had a low correlation (21%) with what was spent in the region on Medicaid recipients and a 2% correlation with what was spent on Medicare recipients, the study found. There was also only a 16% correlation between what a region spent on the Medicaid program and what was spent on the Medicare program.

“What this tells me is that, in essence, we have multiple different health systems in the U.S. — the Medicare program, the Medicaid program, and private insurers,” said Cooper. “This means that we are going to need payer-specific policies if we really want to move the needle on increasing the productivity of health care. We have a complex health system; this means we’re going to need nuanced policy to be effective[DK1] .”

The study showed that the Medicaid and privately insured populations exhibited more variation in spending across regions than did the Medicare population. This reflects the fact that prices for care paid for by private insurers and Medicaid are generally market-driven and vary substantially across regions, while the federally administered Medicare program relies on regulated payments to health care providers, the researchers suggested.

Notably, there was substantial correlation in the regional utilization of health care services across payers, according to the study.

“While spending may not be strongly correlated across the payers, the utilization of care is,” said Jonathan Skinner, a research professor at Dartmouth College. “This finding demonstrates that health care services such as hospital days are determined at the regional level both by the underlying health needs of the population and by supply factors such as hospital beds and the supply of physicians.”

The researchers also concluded that the factors causing the variation in spending are specific to each main payer. For private insurance, regions with high prices tend to have high spending. For Medicare, regions with higher spending have more specialist physicians per capita. For Medicaid, regions with higher spending have more hospital beds and births per capita, the researchers explained.

In February 2021, Cooper launched the 1% Steps for Health Care Reform Project jointly with Fiona Scott Morton, the Theodore Nierenberg Professor of Economics at the Yale School of Management. The project convened dozens of leading scholars and identified 16 targeted interventions — policies like increasing organ donation, raising antitrust enforcement budgets, and decreasing home health fraud — each supported by a robust evidence base, which, if implemented collectively, would lower U.S. health spending by nearly 10%.

“These are the types of policies that will reduce health spending,” said Cooper. “Nobody writes country music songs about incrementalism, but I think it’s really going to be a long path of small steps that’s going to make our health system more efficient.”

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JOURNAL

JAMA Network Open

DOI

10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.22138 

ARTICLE TITLE

Geographical Variation in Health Spending Across the US Among Privately Insured Individuals and Enrollees in Medicaid and Medicare

U-M study: Paper wasps form abstract concept of 'same' and 'different'

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIG

Photos

In a series of studies over more than 20 years, University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Elizabeth Tibbetts and her colleagues have demonstrated that paper wasps, despite their tiny brains, have an impressive capacity to learn, remember and make social distinctions about others.

The researchers showed that paper wasps recognize individuals of their species by variations in their facial markings and that they behave more aggressively toward wasps with unfamiliar markings.

They established that paper wasps have surprisingly long memories and base their actions on what they remember of previous social interactions with other wasps. And they provided the first evidence of transitive inference—a behavior that resembles logical reasoning—in a nonvertebrate animal, the lowly paper wasp.

Now, Tibbetts and her students are reporting the first evidence that paper wasps can form abstract concepts. Strikingly, the wasps were also able to transfer what they learned through visual training into a different sensory modality: the sense of smell.

The study used laboratory tasks to test whether paper wasps (Polistes fuscatus) could learn and apply one of the most basic abstract concepts: the idea of sameness and difference.

The wasps were trained to distinguish between pairs of visual or olfactory stimuli (two colored bits of paper, two photos of wasp faces, or two chemical odors) that were either identical or different. One pair of stimuli was associated with a mild but unpleasant electrical shock, the other was not.

Then the stinging insects were exposed to novel pairs of stimuli (either identical or different) and tested on their ability to avoid an electric shock by selecting the "correct" pair—the one associated with safety.

The previously trained wasps made the correct choice more than 80% of the time, according to the researchers. The team's findings were published online July 20 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"Our findings show the wasps learned the general concept of sameness and difference and applied it to new samples and new types of stimuli," said Tibbetts, a professor in the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

"Abstract concepts are thought to be associated with high levels of cognitive sophistication, so there has been much interest in which species can form and use them. This is the first time anyone has shown that wasps can form abstract concepts."

Historically, only primates were thought to be capable of same-different concept learning. But subsequent research found evidence of same-different concepts in many animals, including crows, pigeons, parrots, dolphins, ducklings and honeybees.

Now, the U-M researchers are adding paper wasps to the list. The first author of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B study is Chloe Weise, a former U-M master's student who graduated this spring.

"Concept learning is a cornerstone of challenging tasks like language, analogy and consciousness," Weise said. "Our results add to a growing body of evidence that the miniature nervous systems of insects do not limit sophisticated behaviors."

For the study, female paper wasps were collected on their nests in areas surrounding Ann Arbor, Michigan. The wasps and their nests were housed in the lab and were given water, sugar and waxworms for food.

During training and testing, individual wasps were placed inside a small balsa wood-and-plexiglass chamber to determine whether they could learn and apply same-different concepts.

The wasps were trained and tested using a method called the simultaneous two-item same-different task. Three types of stimuli were used in the study: colored paper, images of wasp faces and the scents of chemicals called alkenes, which resemble the odors that wasps use to identify nestmates.

The laboratory tests showed that wasps trained with visual stimuli were able to apply the concept of sameness and difference to olfactory stimuli.

"Remarkably, wasps applied the concept of sameness and difference across sensory modalities, as they transferred concepts learned in the visual domain to the odor domain," Weise said. "Therefore, our results illustrate that Polistes are able to master abstract interrelationships between stimuli."

Paper wasps are the second invertebrate shown to form same-different concepts, after honeybees. Paper wasps and honeybees have considerably smaller brains (fewer than 1 million neurons) than vertebrates known to form same-different concepts. Pigeons, for example, have brains with 310 million neurons, and macaque brains have 6 billion neurons.

Interestingly, paper wasps in this study achieved more than 80% correct choices after training involving just eight trials with eight stimulus pairs, while pigeons require 100 unique stimuli and thousands of trials to learn same-different concepts, according to Tibbetts.

The paper wasps used in the current study may have been more adept than pigeons at forming concepts because they were trained with different methods, including the use of biologically relevant stimuli, Tibbetts said.

"We trained and tested wasps using wasp face images, colors and odors," she said. "All three types of stimuli are important in wild wasp behavior."

The other author of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B study is former U-M graduate student Christian Cely Ortiz. The work was supported by National Science Foundation grant IOS-1557564.

Study: Paper wasps form abstract concept of 'same and different' (DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2022.1156)

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences

DOI

10.1098/rspb.2022.1156 

NPS researchers explore the impact of sea ice change in Bering Sea

Business Announcement

NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL

The Bering Sea is the most productive ground fishery in the world, particularly for salmon, halibut and shellfish. About half of U.S. fish and shellfish come from that area and the fishing industry is the main driver of jobs in and around the Aleutian Islands. The freezing and melting of sea ice in the area heavily impacts the primary productivity, which is the bottom of the marine food chain.

Research Associate Professor Jaclyn Kinney, Research Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, and Research Assistant Professor Younjoo Lee – all in the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Department of Oceanography – looked at how sea ice variability in the Bering Sea over the last several decades might impact the cold pool and marine primary production. Their research, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and National Science Foundation, was published in PLOS One in April 2022. 

The Arctic region has become increasingly critical to U.S. security interests, and particularly to the U.S. Navy, over the past several years. Dual purpose research in predicting sea ice, and the impact of its fluctuations, is critical for navigation and understanding how systems operate. 

On top of that, less sea ice also means more tourism and commercial activity in the area, potentially, which could also result in the need for more patrols, and searches and rescues. And how sea ice impacts the food supply and local jobs could dictate the economic and cultural stability of the region. All of these factors are recognized as potential challenges in the Department of the Navy’s Strategic Blueprint for the Arctic, released in 2021, underscoring the importance for oceanography team’s detailed study. 

The NPS research team looked specifically at the very cold water near the sea floor (less than 2ºC) that forms on the shelf each winter, which is called a cold pool. It’s formed by the cooling and sinking of surface water. Vertical mixing caused by salt being expelled from water as it freezes into sea ice during the autumn and winter, a process called brine rejection, increases the density of the cold pool water. This cold, salty, dense water sinks down to the bottom, forming its own marine habitat unique from other parts of the Bering Sea by the summer. 

Sea ice melt is usually the first cause of water stratification during spring, but when there is not as much sea ice, stratification is mainly caused by the sun warming up surface water later in the year. Stratification is necessary for primary productivity, in the form of phytoplankton, to bloom. 

“If there’s a lot of primary production in the water early, then the zooplankton are still very small and they’re not able to consume much of it,” Kinney explains. “So what happens is those phytoplankton cells will eventually settle out to the bottom, feeding the benthic community. That’s good for walruses and gray whales, which feed on the benthic community.”

But this means the pelagic community doesn’t get as much food, she says. If primary production starts later in the season, which is what happens when there’s less sea ice, it becomes a pelagic-dominated ecosystem because the zooplankton have the opportunity to get bigger. These fluctuations can heavily impact fish and shellfish populations from year to year.

Maintaining these habitat distinctions is important for maintaining the food chain for the region. Some marine species that live in the cold pool include the snow crab and Arctic cod.

Kinney fell in love with the complexity of the Bering Sea in the early 2000s, and it was actually her first region of research. 

“It’s really important for food sustainability and for people’s livelihoods,” Kinney says. “I used to study invertebrates that live in the bottom sediment, and that was what I started out doing back in the early 2000s. So I’ve just always really loved that region.”

Naturally, she keeps up with the research coming out of the region. She recently came across a paper observing the cold pool shrinking northward.

“The reduction of the cold pool means that we have a whole new potential for a brand new ecosystem moving in,” Kinney explains. “If we have much warmer water, then we’re going to get these southerly fish species moving North, and that’s going to push the Arctic species even further to the north.”

How large and wide the cold pool is varies drastically from year to year, and the researchers wanted to figure out how this variability relates to sea ice variability. They used the Regional Arctic System Model (RASM), developed at NPS, to examine the variability of the cold pool’s extent and distribution to see how its size and shape is impacted by the sea ice cover. The researchers developed statistical calculations of past sea ice cover conditions in the Bering Sea from 1980 to 2018. RASM can simulate critical physical processes, feedbacks, and their impact on the Arctic climate system using several coupled models and components, including the atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, biogeochemistry, and land hydrology.

The RASM confirmed a direct correlation between the extent of sea ice and the cold pool, showing a smaller cold pool during times with less sea ice cover. In general, the researchers found that in July 2018, the cold pool was only 31 percent of what its mean was from 1980 to 2018. The researchers point to a lack of sea ice, caused by strong winds out of the south, restricting the typical southward expansion of sea ice towards the shelf break.

And as for how this impacts the food chain, the researchers found that years with low amounts of sea ice were followed by a later diatom bloom, and vice versa. These results follow the Oscillating Control Hypothesis, originally developed in 2002, which states that early ice retreat will lead to a late bloom, while late ice retreat leads to an early bloom. 

Diatoms are a common type of phytoplankton that forms the base of the food chain. Diatom levels can be measured by looking at how much chlorophyll-a is found in an area, which can be done via satellite, as well as in models. A comparison of the chlorophyll-a trends in the northern Bering Sea between satellite data and RASM showed similar results, which forms the basis of another study Kinney coauthored, published in the journal Oceanography in May 2022. RASM results also provided insight into the mechanism responsible for the changes by showing the variability in nitrate concentration (a variable not measured by satellite).

The researchers were excited to see RASM’s results mirror real-life observations. But the cold pool retreat they observed in 2018 continued to be a problem in 2019 and 2020, which also saw unusually high temperatures, resulting in less sea ice. Then 2021 saw a major snow crab population collapse, likely due to a reduction of their preferred cold pool habitat. Without the cold pool, the snow crab’s predators are able to eat juvenile crabs more easily. This population collapse bankrupted communities that rely on snow crabs to make a living. The Central Bering Sea Fisherman’s Association expects to see about a 65% drop in revenue due to necessary crab quota cuts.

“We want to know, as scientists, is this reduction of the cold pool the new normal? Are we going to see sea ice come back? And then how will the population reestablish to the south if we do see the sea ice come back to normal?” Kinney said.

She points out that this isn’t the first time the area has seen a diminished cold pool, the last one being in 2001. It did recover, with sea ice prevalence peaking in 2012. But sea ice extent has declined since then. Bering Sea sea ice is hard to predict because it starts from scratch each year, resigned to the whims of seasonal and interannual variability in addition to the larger climatic trends.

“There’s no straightforward linear relationship for ice retreating,” Maslowski explains. But the team is encouraged by how well RASM was able to predict the sea ice trends so far, and see it as a powerful tool to help the Navy glance into the future of the Bering Sea.

Research on bacteria: Electron highway for hydrogen and carbon dioxide storage discovered

Researchers from Goethe University Frankfurt, together with teams from the universities of Marburg and Basel, have shed light on the atomic structure of a bacterial protein that stores hydrogen and carbon dioxide

Peer-Reviewed Publication

GOETHE UNIVERSITY FRANKFURT

 

IMAGE: THE FILAMENTS OF THE BACTERIAL ENZYME HDCR, WHICH PRODUCES FORMIC ACID FROM GASEOUS H2 AND CO2, ARE WOUND AROUND EACH OTHER LIKE A PLAIT. view more 

CREDIT: VERENA RESCH -- HTTPS://LUMINOUS-LAB.COM/

FRANKFURT/MARBURG/BASEL. In 2013, a team of microbiologists led by Professor Volker Müller from Goethe University Frankfurt discovered an unusual enzyme in a heat-loving (thermophilic) bacterium: the hydrogen-dependent CO2 reductase HDCR. It produces formic acid (formate) from gaseous hydrogen (H2) and carbon dioxide (CO2), and in the process the hydrogen transfers electrons to the carbon dioxide. That makes this HDCR the first known enzyme which can directly utilise hydrogen. In contrast, all enzymes known until then that produce formic acid take a detour: they obtain the electrons from soluble cellular electron transfer agents, which for their part receive the electrons from the hydrogen with the help of other enzymes. 

The bacterium Thermoanaerobacter kivui thrives far away from oxygen, for example in the deep sea, and uses CO2 and hydrogen to produce cellular energy. The HDCR of Thermoanaerobacter kivui consists of four protein modules: one that splits hydrogen, one that produces formic acid and two small modules that contain iron sulphur. “It was already clear to us after our discovery that it had to be the two small subunits that transfer the electrons from one module to the other,” says Müller. In 2016, the researchers observed that the enzyme forms long filaments. Müller: “We could see how important this structure was from the fact that filament formation massively stimulates enzyme activity.”

The researchers from Goethe University Frankfurt, together with the group led by Dr. Jan Schuller, University of Marburg and LOEWE Centre for Synthetic Microbiology, have now produced a molecular close-up of the enzyme. Through cryo-electron microscopy analysis, Schuller’s group has succeeded in determining the HDCR structure at atomic resolution. This made details of the long filaments visible, which the enzyme forms under experimental conditions in the laboratory (in vitro): the filaments’ backbone is composed of the two small HDCR subunits, which are arranged together to form a kind of nanowire with thousands of electron-conducting iron atoms. “This is the only enzymatically decorated nanowire discovered so far. On this wire, the hydrogenase module and the formate dehydrogenase module sit like mushroom heads on a cable,” explains Schuller.

Helge Dietrich, a doctoral researcher in Volker Müller’s group at Goethe University Frankfurt, tested a genetic modification of the small modules that prevented the HDCR filaments from forming. The result: the individual components or monomers were far less active than the filament.

Enzyme monomers arrange themselves into filamentous structures inside bacterial cells too. Professor Ben Engel, a structural cell biologist at the University of Basel, and his team contributed this finding by performing cryo-electron tomography. Using this cutting-edge technique, the researchers discovered something special: “Hundreds of filaments bundle together to form ring-shaped superstructures. These structures are really striking—we informally call them ‘portals’,” explains Engel. The bundles are evidently anchored in the inner membrane of the bacterial cell and span almost its entire width. Dr. Ricardo Righetto, senior scientist in Ben Engel’s team, analyzed the structure of HDCR filaments within the native bacteria: “Cryo-electron tomography allows us to directly look inside cells at very high resolution. Using this approach, we were really surprised to not only confirm the occurrence of HDCR filaments in the cells but to find they form large bundles attached to membrane”.

This structure reveals why the HDCR enzyme is orders of magnitude more efficient than all chemical catalysts and far better than all known enzymes at producing formic acid as a “liquid organic hydrogen carrier” from hydrogen and CO2 (cf. background information). Volker Müller: “The hydrogen concentrations in the ecosystem of these bacteria are low, and, in addition, the CO2 and H2 concentrations can switch. Formation of filaments and bundling not only substantially increase the concentration of these enzymes in the cell. The thousands of electron-conducting iron atoms in this ‘nanowire’ can also store the electrons from hydrogen oxidation intermediately when even just one hydrogen bubble passes by the bacteria.”

The team is convinced that not all the enigmas surrounding the HDCR enzyme have yet been solved through the atomic resolution of the structure. Jan Schuller says: “We don’t yet know how the wire stores the electrons, why filament formation stimulates enzymatic activity so intensively or how the bundles are anchored in the membrane. We’re working on these research questions.” But the HDCR’s future could be very exciting, believes Volker Müller: “Perhaps one day we’ll be able to produce synthetic nanowires which we can use to capture CO2 from the atmosphere. We’re also a step closer now to biological hydrogen storage.”

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DOI

10.1038/s41586-022-04971-z 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Cells

ARTICLE TITLE

Membrane-anchored HDCR nanowires drive hydrogen-powered CO2 fixation

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

20-Jul-2022

 Racial discrimination affects brain microstructure

Anomalies could underlie higher risk for health conditions in Black Americans

Peer-Reviewed Publication

ELSEVIER

 

IMAGE: SIGNIFICANT INDIRECT EFFECTS OF RACIAL DISCRIMINATION ON MEDICAL DISORDERS THROUGH LEFT ANTERIOR CINGULUM BUNDLE (HIGHLIGHTED IN BLUE) FRACTIONAL ANISOTROPY. view more 

CREDIT: BIOLOGICAL PSYCHIATRY: COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE AND NEUROIMAGING

Philadelphia, July 20, 2022 – Racial discrimination increases the risk for physical and mental illnesses, and Black women suffer from diseases at significantly higher rates than White women. How traumatic experiences such as discrimination increase vulnerability to illness remains the topic of intense research. Now, a new study shows that the experience of racial discrimination affects the microstructure of the brain, as well as increasing the risk for health disorders.

The study, led by Negar Fani, PhD, Emory University Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Atlanta, GA, USA, appears in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, published by Elsevier.

Dr. Fani said, “Here we see a pathway through which racist experiences may increase risk for health problems via effects on select stress-sensitive brain pathways. Earlier, we found that racial discrimination has a negative impact on brain white matter; now we can see that these changes may enhance risk for negative health outcomes, possibly by influencing regulatory behaviors.”

For the study, researchers recruited 79 Black women from a county hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. The women were clinically assessed for trauma and for medical disorders ranging from asthma to diabetes to chronic pain. Over half the women reported severe economic disadvantage, with a household income under $1,000 per month, for which the researchers controlled in their analysis.

The participants also underwent a brain scan using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The researchers measured the brain’s fractional anisotropy (FA), a reflection of water movement through brain white matter – specifically the long, fatty tracts that connect distant regions of the brain. Changes in FA can result from structural disruptions of white matter tracts.

Women who experienced more racial discrimination displayed lower FA in select brain tracts including the anterior cingulum bundle and the corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres of the brain. In addition, the structural integrity of these two specific tracts mediated the relationship between racial discrimination and medical disorders in these women.

“That points to a possible brain mechanism for adverse health outcomes,” Dr. Fani added.

Cameron Carter, MD, Editor of Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, said of the work, “These findings provide important new evidence that changes in the brain measured using MRI may occur, in association with a range of ongoing chronic health problems, in the wake of ongoing experiences of racial discrimination in African American women. Such insights may contribute to our understanding of the origins of health disparities in minoritized communities and the negative impact that racial discrimination may have on human health.”

The authors hypothesize that the burden of trauma and racial discrimination may affect brain matter integrity through the stress system. The affected tracts are involved in emotional regulation and cognitive processes, which may in turn lead to behavioral changes, such as increased consumption of drugs or foods, that increase risk for health conditions.

 

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JOURNAL

Biological Psychiatry Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging

DOI

10.1016/j.bpsc.2022.05.004 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Imaging analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Indirect Effects of Racial Discrimination on Health Outcomes Through Prefrontal Cortical White Matter Integrity

COI STATEMENT

The authors’ affiliations and disclosures of financial and conflicts of interests are available in the article. Cameron S. Carter, MD, is Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology and Director of the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis. His disclosures of financial and conflicts of interests are available at http://www.biologicalpsychiatrycnni.org/bpsc-editorial-disclosures.

Does family matter in business? Surrey study evaluates family ownership on firms' environmental strategies

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF SURREY

Professor Tazeeb Rajwani, co-author of the study and Head of the Department of Strategy and International Business at the University of Surrey, said:   

"The aim of every business is to generate shareholder value, and this is no different for family-owned businesses. However, within a family business, the economic motive and the family are inextricably linked.  We have found that one of the immediate objectives of the firm is to pursue initiatives that better their local community and environment. 

"The desire to preserve socioemotional wealth and the firm's own survival through generations drives family-owned firms to pursue legitimacy by conforming to institutional expectations, such as the ISO 14001 criteria." 

The study also determined that the effect is stronger for firms whose names include the family name and for companies located closer to large cities. Researchers found that the family name is an important symbolic characteristic that contributes to family members' identification with society. 

Professor Tazeeb Rajwani continued: 

“Investors, whose interest is profit maximisation, should be aware of the influence of non-financial objectives on strategic decisions in family firms. Additionally, managers who are not family members of family-owned firms need to understand the existence of and recognise the potential influence of the family's motives. 

“Family members with controlling stakes in the firm may push strategic decisions that resonate with their socioemotional aspirations but are not directly associated with profitability. It is important for these managers to be aware of and understand family members' personal imperatives that may affect the firms' operations and performance." 

Aside from investors and managerial positions within family-owned firms, these findings also have important implications for environmentally concerned stakeholders, including the firms' own consumers and suppliers.  

Ends 

Note to editors:   

• Professor Tazeeb Rajwani is available for interview upon request   

• Read the full study online  

• Contact the University of Surrey press office: mediarelations@surrey.ac.uk  

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DOI

10.1016/j.lrp.2022.102216 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Does family matter? Ownership, motives and firms’ environmental strategy

Professional athletes perform better against former clubs, according to research

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NATIONAL RESEARCH UNIVERSITY HIGHER SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

A team of Russian researchers affiliated with the HSE University, RANEPA, and NES found professional athletes to perform better against their former clubs. At least in some circumstances, emotions seem to have a greater effect on their performance than knowledge of the opponent's tactics. The study's findings are published in the Journal of Behavioural and Experimental Economics and may be useful for coaches, sports managers, and bookmakers. 

By hiring a competitor's former employee, companies bring in their social capital, knowledge and skills, potentially weakening the competition. Since measuring employee performance may be difficult in a typical business environment, this study examined the sphere of professional sports, where such data is abundant, to track changes in athletes' performance against their former teams. 

The study used econometric models on game data of the National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Hockey League (NHL), and six major European football leagues, available from the NBA.com, Hockey-Reference and Understat. The authors examined player performance data over time, taking into account  history of transactions and players' matches against their former clubs. The variables included the dates and venues of the games, players’ home and opposing teams, playing time, basic individual game statistics, and several more advanced performance indicators. 

Artur Assanskiy, Daniil Shaposhnikov, Igor Tylkin, and Gleb Vasiliev found professional athletes to show better individual attacking performance in matches against their former clubs. Basketball players scored more points, ice hockey players made more shots, as did footballers in the English Premier League, while footballers in the Italian Championship scored more often. The researchers assumed that the knowledge of opponents’ tactics and the additional motivation both contributed to athletes' better performance against former clubs. While these two factors are likely to complement each other, the researchers ultimately found emotions to prevail over a better understanding of the other team's game. 

Playing against former teammates can be a source of additional motivation for athletes. According to American football defensive tackle Barry Cofield, 'Realistically, it's not like any other game, especially when you first play that former team'. These matches arouse strong emotions, causing athletes to give the game their best. Apparently, emotions such as anxiety and anger have the greatest effect on loaned athletes' performance. 

Individual success can matter more to transferred players than their overall team's victory. They perform better in quantitative, rather than qualitative terms, i.e. they make more shots but not necessarily more accurate shots. These athletes tend to act selfishly, choosing to shoot rather than pass, making them less of team players. 

The athletes performed better against former teammates on venues which used to be their home stadiums compared to the new venues: basketball players took more shots, hockey players shot more pucks. According to the researchers, this may indirectly indicate the effect of emotions rather than knowledge of the opponents' tactics, since the latter would have helped players perform just as well on their current home stadium. 

Basketballers and English Premier League footballers who had been given little playing time in their former teams made more shots in matches against them. Likewise, hockey players shot more pucks against their former club if they had been given secondary roles and moderate playing time there. The results reaffirm that motivation and emotions are the key factors affecting these elite athletes' performance. Those who felt they had been treated unfairly by former coaches were more committed to proving them wrong. The circumstances of the players' transfer, i.e. whether they were waived or had to accept a wage reduction, also play a role.

The effects found by examining competitive sports may be applicable to most situations involving an employee's performance in competition against their former employer and can thus be relevant to sociology and management theory. 

'Employees are motivated to perform better against their former employers. Situations in which one's former and current employers compete are not limited to sports but include bidding for contracts, power struggles between political parties, and marketing campaigns. An additionally motivated employee can turn things around in such confrontations and increase their current employer's chances of success', according to HSE Laboratory of Sports Studies researchers.

Coaches can benefit from a better understanding of player motivations by changing game tactics when someone on their team plays against their former club. Sports managers should keep future matches in mind when they sell or loan players to a competitor, and bookmakers could use these findings to adjust betting odds.

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JOURNAL

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics

DOI

10.1016/j.socec.2022.101879 

ARTICLE TITLE

Prove them wrong: Do professional athletes perform better when facing their former clubs?

Webb Images of Jupiter and more now available in commissioning data

Reports and Proceedings

NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

 

IMAGE: JUPITER, CENTER, AND ITS MOON EUROPA, LEFT, ARE SEEN THROUGH THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE’S NIRCAM INSTRUMENT 2.12 MICRON FILTER. view more 

CREDIT: CREDITS: NASA, ESA, CSA, AND B. HOLLER AND J. STANSBERRY (STSCI)

On the heels of Tuesday’s release of the first images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, data from the telescope’s commissioning period is now being released on the Space Telescope Science Institute’s Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes. The data includes images of Jupiter and images and spectra of several asteroids, captured to test the telescope’s instruments before science operations officially began July 12. The data demonstrates Webb’s ability to track solar system targets and produce images and spectra with unprecedented detail.

Fans of Jupiter will recognize some familiar features of our solar system’s enormous planet in these images seen through Webb’s infrared gaze. A view from the NIRCam instrument’s short-wavelength filter shows distinct bands that encircle the planet as well as the Great Red Spot, a storm big enough to swallow the Earth. The iconic spot appears white in this image because of the way Webb’s infrared image was processed.

“Combined with the deep field images released the other day, these images of Jupiter demonstrate the full grasp of what Webb can observe, from the faintest, most distant observable galaxies to planets in our own cosmic backyard that you can see with the naked eye from your actual backyard,” said Bryan Holler, a scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who helped plan these observations.

 

Clearly visible at left is Europa, a moon with a probable ocean below its thick icy crust, and the target of NASA’s forthcoming Europa Clipper mission. What’s more, Europa’s shadow can be seen to the left of the Great Red Spot. Other visible moons in these images include Thebe and Metis.

“I couldn’t believe that we saw everything so clearly, and how bright they were,” said Stefanie Milam, Webb’s deputy project scientist for planetary science based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It’s really exciting to think of the capability and opportunity that we have for observing these kinds of objects in our solar system.”

Scientists were especially eager to see these images because they are proof that Webb can observe the satellites and rings near bright solar system objects such as Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars. Scientists will use Webb to explore the tantalizing question of whether we can see plumes of material spewing out of moons like Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Webb may be able to see the signatures of plumes depositing material on the surface on Europa. “I think that’s just one of the coolest things that we’ll be able to do with this telescope in the solar system,” Milam said.

Additionally, Webb easily captured some of Jupiter’s rings, which especially stand out in the NIRcam long-wavelength filter image. That the rings showed up in one of Webb’s first solar system images is “absolutely astonishing and amazing,” Milam said.

“The Jupiter images in the narrow-band filters were designed to provide nice images of the entire disk of the planet, but the wealth of additional information about very faint objects (Metis, Thebe, the main ring, hazes) in those images with approximately one-minute exposures was absolutely a very pleasant surprise,” said John Stansberry, observatory scientist and NIRCam commissioning lead at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Webb also obtained these images of Jupiter and Europa moving across the telescope’s field of view in three separate observations. This test demonstrated the ability of the observatory to find and track guide stars in the vicinity of bright Jupiter.

But just how fast can an object move and still be tracked by Webb? This was an important question for scientists who study asteroids and comets. During commissioning, Webb used an asteroid called 6481 Tenzing, located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, to start the moving-target tracking “speed limit” tests.

Webb was designed with the requirement to track objects that move as fast as Mars, which has a maximum speed of 30 milliarcseconds per second. During commissioning, the Webb team conducted observations of various asteroids, which all appeared as a dot because they were all small. The team proved that Webb will still get valuable data with all of the science instruments for objects moving up to 67 milliarcseconds per second, which is more than twice the expected baseline – similar to photographing a turtle crawling when you’re standing a mile away. “Everything worked brilliantly,” Milam said.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s largest, most powerful, and most complex space science telescope ever built. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

 

More images of Jupiter from Webb: https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/07/14/webb-images-of-jupiter-and-more-now-available-in-commissioning-data/