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)
Friday, May 26, 2023
Consistent link between the seaside and better health
15-country study confirms that people living near or visiting the seaside enjoy better health
Seaside residents and holidaymakers have felt it for centuries, but scientists have only recently started to investigate possible health benefits of the coast. Using data from 15 countries, new research led by Sandra Geiger from the Environmental Psychology Group at the University of Vienna confirms public intuition: Living near, but especially visiting, the seaside is associated with better health regardless of country or personal income.
The idea that being near the ocean may boost health is not new. As early as 1660, doctors in England began promoting sea bathing and coastal walks for health benefits. By the mid-1800s, taking 'the waters' or 'sea air' were widely promoted as health treatment among wealthier European citizens. Technological advances in medicine in the early 20th century led to the decline in such practices, which are only recently gaining popularity again among the medical profession.
As part of the EU-funded Horizon 2020 project Seas, Oceans, and Public Health In Europe led by Professor Lora Fleming, Geiger and colleagues from the Universities of Vienna, Exeter, and Birmingham, as well as Seascape Belgium and the European Marine Board, surveyed over 15,000 participants across 14 European countries (Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechia, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom) and Australia about their opinions on various marine-related activities and their own health.
The findings, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, surprised the team. Lead author Geiger said: "It is striking to see such consistent and clear patterns across all 15 countries. We also now demonstrate that everybody seems to benefit from being near the seaside, not just the wealthy. Although the associations are relatively small, living near and especially visiting the coast can still have substantial effects on population health."
Understanding the potential benefits of coastal access for all members of society is key for policymaking. Dr. Paula Kellett from the European Marine Board said: "The substantial health benefits of equal and sustainable access to our coasts should be considered when countries develop their marine spatial plans, consider future housing needs, and develop public transportation links."
But what does this mean for landlocked residents like Geiger and her colleagues in Austria? "Austrians and other central Europeans visit the coasts in their millions during the summer months, so they too get to experience some of these benefits. Besides, we are also starting to appreciate the similar health benefits offered by inland waters such as lakes and natural pools."
Spiny mice in the genus Acomys look much like more familiar house mice in the genus Mus, although their coats do have stiff guard hairs that give them their name. But now, researchers reporting in the journal iScience on May 24 have discovered that spiny mice have another feature that’s highly unusual among mammals but more common in reptiles: the skin of their tails is armored with bony plates called osteoderms.
Before this discovery, armadillos were thought to be the only living mammal with osteoderms. The findings in spiny mice show that osteoderms have come and gone multiple times in vertebrates over the course of evolution, the researchers report, presumably thanks to a set of genes that can be switched on and off.
“Osteoderms are present in this sub-family of rodents and nowhere else in living mammals except armadillos,” said Malcolm Maden of University of Florida. “They are absent in birds, frequent in reptiles—think of dinosaurs and crocodiles—and infrequent in frogs. This means that they can be lost and re-evolved time and time again in animals, and this has happened at least 19 times.”
What distinguishes osteoderms from other appendages of the skin is that they’re made of bone, Maden explained. They’re also found deep in the lower dermis layer of the skin, not on the surface. That’s in contrast to scales on the epidermis of many animals, including pangolins and birds, whose feet are made of keratin.
The discovery came about as a classic case of scientific serendipity when study co-author Edward Stanley was working on an “openVertebrate” project (https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/overt/). The effort involved CT scanning 20,000 museum specimens from all around the United States to gather high-resolution anatomical data for more than 80 percent of vertebrate genera.
“I had given Ed some of my spiny mice (Acomys) to scan as part of his project and, lo and behold, they had very rare bony plates in the skin of their tails—only seen before in living mammals in armadillos,” Maden said. “I was working on spiny mice because of their amazing powers of regeneration for a mammal; they can regenerate skin, muscle, nerves, spinal cord, and perhaps cardiac muscle, so we had a colony of these rare creatures available. It was a classical serendipitous finding of two people in the same place working on different things.”
Prompted by the discovery in Maden’s spiny mice, Stanley looked for museum specimens of close relatives. The CT scans revealed osteoderms in the other three genera of the sub-family as well and not in any other relatives, such as gerbils.
Further study found that osteoderms develop in spiny mouse tails starting in the proximal tail skin. The bony plates finish developing six weeks after birth.
Maden’s team used RNA sequencing to identify the underlying genes and gene networks involved in their formation. They found a widespread down regulation of keratin genes as osteoblast genes switch on. Maden said beyond the existence of osteoderms, he also was surprised by “how similar they are in shape and structure to extinct sloths, whose osteoderms are fossilized, so they have ‘been here before’ in mammals.”
Maden notes that the new finding is especially notable because spiny mice can be studied in ways that armadillos and most other animals can’t. As a result, they can now continue to study the underlying molecular evolution to understand why and how these structural novelties appear in evolution. He reports that they want to learn more about the regulatory genes responsible for switching keratin “off” and osteoblasts “on” in the dermis “so that we can eventually make an armor-plated lab mouse.”
####
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
iScience (@iScience_CP) is an open-access journal from Cell Press that provides a platform for original research and interdisciplinary thinking in the life, physical, and earth sciences. The primary criterion for publication in iScience is a significant contribution to a relevant field combined with robust results and underlying methodology. Visit http://www.cell.com/iscience. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.
Mammals are a bit odd when it comes to bones. Rather than the bony plates and scales of crocodiles, turtles, lizards, dinosaurs and fish, mammals long ago traded in their ancestral suit of armor for a layer of insulating hair.
Armadillos, with their protective and flexible shell of imbricated bone, are considered the only living exception. But a new study, published in the journal iScience, unexpectedly shows that African spiny mice produce the same structures beneath the skin of their tails, which until now had gone largely undetected.
The discovery was made during routine CT scanning of museum specimens for the openVertebrate program, an initiative to provide 3D models of vertebrate organisms for researchers, educators and artists.
“I was scanning a mouse specimen from the Yale Peabody Museum, and the tails looked abnormally dark,” said co-author Edward Stanley, director of the Florida Museum of Natural History’s digital imaging laboratory.
He initially assumed the discoloration was caused by an imperfection introduced during the specimen’s preservation. But when he analyzed the X-Rays several days later, Stanley observed an unmistakable feature he was intimately familiar with.
“My entire PhD was focused on osteoderm development in lizards. Once the specimen scans had been processed, the tail was very clearly covered in osteoderms.”
Spiny mice osteoderms have been observed at least once before and were noted by German biologist Jochen Niethammer, who compared their architecture to medieval stonework in an article published in 1975. Niethammer correctly interpreted the plates as being a type of bone but never followed up on his initial observations, and the group was largely overlooked for several decades — until scientists discovered another, seemingly unrelated peculiarity of spiny mice.
A study from 2012 demonstrated spiny mice can completely regenerate injured tissue without scarring, an ability common in reptiles and invertebrates but previously unknown in mammals. Their skin is also particularly fragile, tearing at roughly one-fourth the amount of force required to injure the skin of a common mouse. But spiny mice can heal twice as fast as their relatives.
Researchers hoping to find a model for human tissue regeneration have begun mapping the genetic pathways that give spiny mice their extraordinary powers of healing. One such researcher, Malcolm Maden, just so happened to have a lab in the building across from Stanley’s office.
“Spiny mice can regenerate skin, muscle, nerves, spinal cord and perhaps even cardiac tissue, so we maintain a colony of these rare creatures for research,” said Maden, a biology professor at the University of Florida and lead author on the study.
Maden and his colleagues analyzed the development of spiny mice osteoderms, confirming they were in fact similar to those of armadillos but had most likely evolved independently. Osteoderms are also distinct from the scales of pangolins or the quills of hedgehogs and porcupines, which are composed of keratin, the same tissue that makes up hair, skin and nails.
There are four genera of spiny mice, which all belong to the subfamily Deomyinae. However, aside from similarities in their DNA and potentially the shape of their teeth, scientists have been unable to find a single feature shared among species of this group that distinguishes them from other rodents.
Stanley, suspecting their differences might only be skin deep, scanned additional museum specimens from all four genera. In each, he found spiny mice tails were covered in the same sheath of bone. The closest relatives of Deomyinae — gerbils — lacked osteoderms, meaning the trait had likely evolved just once, in the ancestor of erstwhile disparate spiny mice.
The ubiquity of osteoderms in the group indicate they serve an important protective function. Just what that function might be wasn’t immediately apparent, however, due to yet another peculiar attribute of spiny mice: Their tails are uncharacteristically detachable. Tail loss is so common in some spiny mouse species that nearly half the individuals of a given population have been shown to lack them in the wild.
“This was a real head-scratcher,” Stanley said. “Spiny mice are famously able to deglove their tails, meaning the outer layer of skin comes off, leaving behind the muscle and bone. Individuals will often chew off the remainder of the tail when this happens.”
Despite their powers of regeneration, tail shedding is a trick that spiny mice can only perform once. Unlike some lizards, they can’t regrow their tails, and not every part of the tail separates easily.
To find out why rodents that seem ambivalent about keeping their tails would go through the trouble of covering them in armor, the authors turned to a group of similarly odd fish-tale geckos from Madagascar. Most geckos lack osteoderms, but as their name implies, fish-tale geckos are covered in thin, overlapping plates, and just like spiny mice, they have incredibly fragile skin that sheds at the slightest provocation.
According to Stanley, the osteoderms in fish-tale geckos and spiny mice possibly function like a type of escape mechanism.
“If a predator bites down on the tail, the armor might keep the teeth from sinking into the tissue beneath, which doesn’t detach,” he said. The outer skin and its complement of bone plating pull away from the tail when attacked, affording the mouse a quick escape.
Osteoderms in a mammal the spiny mouse Acomys and the independent evolution of dermal armor.
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
24-May-2023
Are search engines bursting the filter bubble?
Collaborative study of Google Search results finds that political ideology plays a bigger role than algorithms in user engagement with polarizing news content.
Political ideology and user choice – not algorithmic curation – are the biggest drivers of engagement with partisan and unreliable news provided by Google Search, according to a study coauthored by Rutgers faculty published in the journal Nature.
The study addressed a long-standing concern that digital algorithms learn from user preferences and surface information that largely agrees with users’ attitudes and biases. However, search results shown to Democrats differ little in ideology from those shown to Republicans, the researchers found. The ideological differences emerge when people decide which search results to click, or which websites to visit on their own.
Results suggest the same is true about the proportion of low-quality content shown to users. The quantity doesn’t differ considerably among partisans, though some groups – particularly older participants who identify as ‘strong Republicans’ – are more likely to engage with it.
“But what our findings suggest is that Google is surfacing this content evenly among users with different political views,” Ognyanova said. “To the extent that people are engaging with those websites, that’s based largely on personal political outlook.”
Despite the crucial role algorithms play in the news people consume, few studies have focused on web search – and even fewer have compared exposure (defined as the links users see in search results), follows (the links from search results people choose to visit), and engagement (all the websites that a user visits while browsing the web).
Part of the challenge has been measuring user activity. Tracking website visits requires access to people’s computers, and researchers have generally relied on more theoretical approaches to speculate how algorithms affect polarization or push people into “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers” of political extremes.
To address these knowledge gaps, researchers at Rutgers, Stanford and Northeastern universities conducted a two-wave study, pairing survey results with empirical data collected from a custom-built browser extension to measure exposure and engagement to online content during the 2018 and 2020 U.S. elections.
Researchers recruited 1,021 participants to voluntarily install the browser extension for Chrome and Firefox. The software recorded the URLs of Google Search results, as well as Google and browser histories, giving researchers precise information on the content users were engaging with, and for how long.
Participants also completed a survey and self-reported their political identification on a seven-point scale that ranged from “strong Democrat” to “strong Republican.”
Results from both study waves showed that a participant’s political identification did little to influence the amount of partisan and unreliable news they were exposed to on Google Search. By contrast, there was a clear relationship between political identification and engagement with polarizing content.
Platforms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter are technological black boxes: Researchers know what information goes in and can measure what comes out, but the algorithms that curate results are proprietary and rarely receive public scrutiny. Because of this, many blame the technology of these platforms for creating echo chambers and filter bubbles by systematically exposing users to content that conforms to and reinforces personal beliefs.
Ognyanova said the findings paint a more nuanced picture of search behavior.
“This doesn’t let platforms like Google off the hook,” she said. “They’re still showing people information that’s partisan and unreliable. But our study underscores that it is content consumers who are in the driver’s seat.”
JOURNAL
Nature
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Survey
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE TITLE
Users choose to engage with more partisan news than they are exposed to on Google Search
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
24-May-2023
“Segment-jumping” ridgecrest earthquakes explored in new study
Seismologists use supercomputer to reveal complex dynamics of multi-fault earthquake systems
IMAGE: PROPAGATION OF SEISMIC WAVES AND UNZIPPING OF FAULTS DURING THE RIDGECREST, CALIFORNIA, EARTHQUAKE. VISUALISATION OF 15 TB OF SIMULATION DATA ON A SUPERCOMPUTER BY GREG ABRAM AND FRANCESCA SAMSEL (TEXAS ADVANCED COMPUTING CENTER), AND ALICE GABRIEL (UC SAN DIEGO/LUDWIG MAXIMILIAN UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH)view more
CREDIT: CREDIT: GREG ABRAM AND FRANCESCA SAMSEL (TEXAS ADVANCED COMPUTING CENTER), AND ALICE GABRIEL (UC SAN DIEGO/LUDWIG MAXIMILIAN UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH)
On the morning of July 4, 2019, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck the Searles Valley in California’s Mojave Desert, with impacts felt across Southern California. About 34 hours later on July 5, the nearby city of Ridgecrest was struck by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake, a jolt felt by millions across the state of California and throughout neighboring communities in Arizona, Nevada, and even Baja California, Mexico.
Known as the Ridgecrest earthquakes — the biggest earthquakes to hit California in more than 20 years — these seismic events resulted in extensive structural damage, power outages, and injuries. The M6.4 event in Searles Valley was later deemed to be the foreshock to the M7.1 event in Ridgecrest, which is now considered to be the mainshock. Both earthquakes were followed by a multitude of aftershocks.
Researchers were baffled by the sequence of seismic activity. Why did it take 34 hours for the foreshock to trigger the mainshock? How did these earthquakes “jump” from one segment of a geologic fault system to another? Can earthquakes “talk” to one another in a dynamic sense?
To address these questions, a team of seismologists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) led a new study focused on the relationship between the two big earthquakes, which occurred along a multi-fault system. The team used a powerful supercomputer that incorporated data-infused and physics-based models to identify the link between the earthquakes.
Scripps Oceanography seismologist Alice Gabriel, who previously worked at LMU, led the study along with her former PhD student at LMU, Taufiq Taufiqurrahman, and several co-authors. Their findings were published May 24 in the journal Nature online, and will appear in the print edition June 8.
“We used the largest computers that are available and perhaps the most advanced algorithms to try and understand this really puzzling sequence of earthquakes that happened in California in 2019,” said Gabriel, currently an associate professor at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Scripps Oceanography. “High-performance computing has allowed us to understand the driving factors of these large events, which can help inform seismic hazard assessment and preparedness.”
Understanding the dynamics of multi-fault ruptures is important, said Gabriel, because these types of earthquakes are typically more powerful than those that occur on a single fault. For example, the Turkey–Syria earthquake doublet that occurred on Feb. 6, 2023, resulted in significant loss of life and widespread damage. This event was characterized by two separate earthquakes that occurred only nine hours apart, with both breaking across multiple faults.
During the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes, which originated in the Eastern California Shear Zone along a strike-slip fault system, the two sides of each fault moved mainly in a horizontal direction, with no vertical motion. The earthquake sequence cascaded across interlaced and previously unknown “antithetic” faults, minor or secondary faults that move at high (close to 90 degrees) angles to the major fault. Within the seismological community, there remains an ongoing debate on which fault segments actively slipped, and what conditions promote the occurrence of cascading earthquakes.
The new study presents the first multi-fault model that unifies seismograms, tectonic data, field mapping, satellite data, and other space-based geodetic datasets with earthquake physics, whereas previous models on this type of earthquake have been purely data-driven.
“Through the lens of data-infused modeling, enhanced by the capabilities of supercomputing, we unravel the intricacies of multi-fault conjugate earthquakes, shedding light on the physics governing cascading rupture dynamics,” said Taufiqurrahman.
Using the supercomputer SuperMUC-NG at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Germany, the researchers revealed that the Searles Valley and Ridgecrest events were indeed connected. The earthquakes interacted across a statically strong yet dynamically weak fault system driven by complex fault geometries and low dynamic friction.
The team’s 3-D rupture simulation illustrates how the faults considered strong prior to an earthquake can become very weak as soon as there is fast earthquake movement and explain the dynamics of how multiple faults can rupture together.
“When fault systems are rupturing, we see unexpected interactions. For example, earthquake cascades, which can jump from segment to segment, or one earthquake causing the next one to take an unusual path. The earthquake may become much larger than what we would've expected,” said Gabriel. “This is something that is challenging to build into seismic hazard assessments.”
According to the authors, their models have the potential to have a “transformative impact” on the field of seismology by improving the assessment of seismic hazards in active multi-fault systems that are often underestimated.
“Our findings suggest that similar kinds of models could incorporate more physics into seismic hazard assessment and preparedness,” said Gabriel. “With the help of supercomputers and physics, we have unraveled arguably the most detailed data set of a complex earthquake rupture pattern.”
The study was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, Horizon Europe, the National Science Foundation, the German Research Foundation, and the Southern California Earthquake Center.
In addition to Gabriel and Taufiqurrahman, the study was co-authored by Duo Li, Thomas Ulrich, Bo Li, and Sara Carena of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany; Alessandro Verdecchia with McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany; and Frantisek Gallovic of Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic.
JOURNAL
Nature
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Computational simulation/modeling
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Not applicable
ARTICLE TITLE
Dynamics, interactions and delays of the 2019 Ridgecrest rupture sequence
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
24-May-2023
Chemical Insights Research Institute and the Campus Safety, Health, and Environmental Management Association publish guidance for the safe use of 3D printing in institutions of higher education
New resource provides best practices for the safe use of 3D printing and healthier indoor air quality
The availability of 3D printing has fostered creative and innovative learning experiences for many within the large population of students in higher education. There are roughly 17.3 million undergraduates in the U.S. alone. Because 3D printers are affordable compact, and user friendly, they can be found across campuses today—in offices, libraries, laboratories, hallways, residence halls, and classrooms. In a survey of CSHEMA members, the most common locations for 3D printing activities were campus makerspaces and labs. However, 20-40% of respondents indicated that 3D printers were found in libraries, offices, and student housing. Based on these results, 3D printers might be located where best practices around health and safety concerns may not be well understood.
According to Dr. Marilyn Black, vice president and senior technical advisor of CIRI, “While 3D printing offers tremendous educational opportunities, it has unintentional consequences of releasing hazardous volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and ultrafine particles into the air while operating. Recent toxicology research has shown that exposure to these emissions may contribute to cellular injury, inflammation, and oxidative damage to biomolecules that serve critical roles in living cells.”
CIRI teamed with CSHEMA to form a working group of health and safety experts from leading universities across the U.S. to develop guidance on the safe use of 3D printers. These experts brought together CIRI’s research knowledge with professionals having decades of applied experience with campus facilities and populations, to address the critical need for this benchmark Guidance Document. Years of 3D printing emissions research from CIRI has found that applying best practices and certain mitigation strategies can decrease the effect these emissions have on indoor air quality and protect users and observers from adverse acute and chronic health impacts of exposure.
“The publication of UL 200B empowers professionals by providing and encouraging best practices for safe use and managing safety and health considerations to maximize the benefits and innovative potential of 3D printing on campuses. UL 200B offers important risk management tools for campus EHS professionals,” said Beth Welmaker, president of CSHEMA and executive director of environmental health and safety at Nova Southeastern University.
Chemical Insights Research Institute (CIRI) of UL Research Institutes is a nonprofit organization dedicated to scientific research, publication, education, and communication on environmental exposures resulting from technologies and practices, their impact on human health, and processes for reducing health risks. CIRI provides actionable data and resources to help manufacturers, educators, healthcare providers, and consumers make informed environmental health decisions and risk reduction strategies for the protection of human health.
About Campus, Safety, Health, and Environmental Management Association (CSHEMA)
The mission of CSHEMA is to support and to educate campus-based Environmental Health and Safety professionals to empower and to improve the EHS profession in campus environments. CSHEMA’s core values are to uphold the honor, integrity, and dignity of the profession, promote inclusion and diversity in the profession, provide strong member services through ongoing needs assessment for campus-based EHS professionals, to provide advocacy on behalf of the profession as the voice of campus-based EHS, and to demonstrate commitment to practical and applicable solutions for the campus-based EHS professional, to continuous improvement and to education.
About UL Research Institutes
UL Research Institutes is a nonprofit research organization dedicated to advancing public safety through scientific discovery. Since 1894, our research has advanced our mission toward a safer, more secure, and sustainable future. Focused on global risks from fire mitigation and air quality to safe energy storage and digital privacy, we conduct rigorous independent research, analyze safety data and partner with experts to uncover and act on existing and emerging risks to human safety.
Morning “larks” tend to be more religious than “night owls”, with links to conscientiousness and life satisfaction
Religiosity and conscientiousness may impact link between morning preference and life satisfaction
Godless owls, devout larks: Religiosity and conscientiousness are associated with morning preference and (partly) explain its effects on life satisfaction
IMAGE: MORE MORNING-ORIENTED INDIVIDUALS MAY BENEFIT FROM HIGHER PSYCHOLOGICAL WELLBEING THANKS TO BOTH PERSONALITY CHARACTERISTICS AND ATTITUDES TOWARD RELIGION.view more
A new analysis suggests that being religious may contribute to a previously established link between preferring to wake up early and having higher life satisfaction, and this relationship may, in turn, be influenced by a person’s level of conscientiousness. Joanna Gorgol and colleagues at the University of Warsaw, Poland, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on May 24.
Around the world, some people prefer to wake up early in the morning, others prefer to stay up late, and many people fall somewhere in between. Prior research has linked being a “morning person” to having higher life satisfaction and to being more conscientious. Prior research has also uncovered associations between being religious and having higher life satisfaction and conscientiousness, suggesting the possibility that religiosity might contribute to the relationship between being a morning person and having more life satisfaction.
To better understand the interplay between preference for mornings, conscientiousness, religiosity, and life satisfaction, Gorgol and colleagues conducted two survey-based analyses of Polish adults, one with 500 participants and the other with 728 participants. Both groups completed questionnaires to evaluate their preference for mornings, their life satisfaction, and their level of conscientiousness. One group was asked about their belief in God and the other about their level of religiosity in general.
The survey results reaffirmed that being a morning person is associated with higher conscientiousness and life satisfaction. The results also suggested that being religious is associated with a preference for mornings.
Further analysis suggested that a higher level of religiousness among morning people could at least partially statistically account for the association between morning preference and higher life satisfaction. In turn, that relationship appeared to be statistically affected by conscientiousness.
On the basis of their findings, the researchers speculate that morning people tend to be more conscientious, making them more likely to be religious, and their religiosity may contribute to greater life satisfaction. Nonetheless, they note that their study did not actually confirm any cause-and-effect relationships and did not account for sociodemographic traits of the participants, so further research will be needed
The authors add: “The association between ‘morningness-eveningness’ and satisfaction with life might stem, at least in part, from higher religiosity among morning-oriented individuals. It means that more morning-oriented individuals may benefit from higher psychological wellbeing thanks to both personality characteristics and attitudes toward religion.”
Citation: Gorgol J, Łowicki P, Stolarski M (2023) Godless owls, devout larks: Religiosity and conscientiousness are associated with morning preference and (partly) explain its effects on life satisfaction. PLoS ONE 18(5): e0284787. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0284787
Author Countries: Poland
Funding: Data collection for study 1 was supported by grant no. 2014/13/DHS6/02951 by the National Science Center, Poland (awarded to Maciej Stolarski). Data collection for study 2 was supported by the Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, from the funds awarded by the Ministry of Education and Science in the form of a subsidy for the maintenance and development of research potential in 2022 (501-D125-01-1250000 zlec. 5011000190) (awarded to Joanna Gorgol). Paweł Łowicki was supported by the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP). The funders had no role in study design, data collection, and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Godless owls, devout larks: Religiosity and conscientiousness are associated with morning preference and (partly) explain its effects on life satisfaction
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
24-May-2023
OCEANS
Scientists provide first field observations of coccolithophore osmotrophy
IMAGE: A SCANNING ELECTRON MICOSCROPE IMAGE OF MICHAELSARSIA ELEGANS, A TYPE OF COCCOLITHOPHORE SAMPLED FROM 95M DEEP IN THE SARGASSO SEA. THIS TYPE OF COCCOLITHOPHORE, THE RESEARCHERS BELIEVE, IS AN EXAMPLE OF A MIXOTROPH THAT HAS EVOLVED SPECIFIC ADAPTATIONS TO ACQUIRE CARBON IN DIFFERENT WAYS.view more
CREDIT: COLIN FISCHER, BIGELOW LABORATORY FOR OCEAN SCIENCES
Coccolithophores, a globally ubiquitous type of phytoplankton, play an essential role in the cycling of carbon between the ocean and atmosphere. New research from Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences shows that these vital microbes can survive in low-light conditions by taking up dissolved organic forms of carbon, forcing researchers to reconsider the processes that drive carbon cycling in the ocean. The findings were published this week in Science Advances.
The ability to extract carbon from the direct absorption of dissolved organic carbon is known as osmotrophy. Though scientists had previously observed osmotrophy by coccolithophores using lab-grown cultures, this is the first evidence of this phenomenon in nature.
The team, led by Senior Research Scientist William Balch, undertook their experiments in populations of coccolithophores across the northwest Atlantic Ocean. They measured the rate at which phytoplankton fed on three different organic compounds, each labeled with chemical markers to track them. The dissolved compounds were used by the coccolithophores as a carbon source for both the organic tissues that comprise their single cells as well as the inorganic mineral plates, called coccoliths, which they secrete around themselves. Uptake of the organic compounds was slow compared to the rate at which phytoplankton can take up carbon through photosynthesis. But it wasn’t negligible.
“The coccolithophores aren’t winning any ‘growth race’ by taking-up these dissolved organic materials,” Balch said. “They are just eking out an existence, but they can still grow, albeit slowly.”
Plants, like coccolithophores, typically acquire their carbon for growth from inorganic forms of carbon extracted from the atmosphere like carbon dioxide and bicarbonate through photosynthesis. When coccolithophores die, they sink, carrying all that carbon down to the ocean floor where it can be remineralized or buried, effectively sequestering it for millions of years. This process is called the biological carbon pump.
As part of a parallel process called the alkalinity pump, coccolithophores also convert bicarbonate molecules in surface water into calcium carbonate — essentially limestone — that forms their protective coccoliths. Again, when they die and sink, all that dense inorganic carbon is ballasted to the seafloor. Some of it then dissolves back into bicarbonate, thus ‘pumping’ alkalinity from the surface to depth.
But the new evidence suggests that coccolithophores aren’t just using these inorganic forms of carbon near the surface. They’re also taking up dissolved organic carbon, the largest pool of organic carbon in the sea, and fixing some of it into their coccoliths, which ultimately sink into the deep ocean. This suggests that the uptake of these free-floating organic compounds is another step in both the biological and alkalinity pumps that drive the transport of carbon from the ocean surface to depths below.
“There’s this big dissolved organic carbon source in the ocean that we always assumed wasn’t really related to the carbonate cycle in the sea,” Balch said. “Now we’re saying that some fraction of the carbon that is going to depth is really coming from that enormous pool of dissolved organic carbon.”
This is the third and final paper published as part of a three-year National Science Foundation-funded project. The overall effort was inspired by a decades-old dissertation by William Blankley, a graduate student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Balch’s alma mater. In the 1960s, Blankley was able to grow coccolithophores in the dark for 60 days feeding them glycerol, one of the organic compounds used in the present study. Unfortunately, he died before his research could be published. The fact that Blankley’s findings could be reproduced all these years later with new technology, Balch said, is credit to the quality of that early work.
The real challenge of the most recent study, though, was to undertake that research outside of a controlled lab environment. The team had to devise a method to measure these organic compounds in seawater — at ambient concentrations orders of magnitude lower than the Blankley experiments — and then track how they were being taken up by wild coccolithophores.
“When you culture phytoplankton in the lab, you can grow as much as you want. But in the ocean, you take what you get,” Balch said. “The challenge was finding a signal in all the noise to say, proof positive, that it was coccolithophores taking up these organic molecules into their coccoliths.”
Though the current project is complete, Balch said the next step is to examine whether coccolithophores are able to take up other organic compounds found in seawater at the same rate as the three tested thus far. Though the coccolithophores were using the three dissolved compounds at slow rates in these experiments, there are thousands of other organic molecules in seawater that they could potentially absorb. If they are using more of them, this finding may prove to be an even more significant step in understanding the global carbon cycle.
Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences is an independent, nonprofit research institute located in East Boothbay, Maine. From the Arctic to the Antarctic, Bigelow Laboratory scientists use innovative approaches to study the foundation of global ocean health and unlock its potential to improve the future for all life on the planet. Learn more at bigelow.org, and join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
