Study reveals links between many pesticides and prostate cancer

US county-level data point to specific pesticides that may increase prostate cancer incidence and death

Wiley

Researchers have identified 22 pesticides consistently associated with the incidence of prostate cancer in the United States, with four of the pesticides also linked with prostate cancer mortality. The findings are published by Wiley online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society.

To assess county-level associations of 295 pesticides with prostate cancer across counties in the United States, investigators conducted an environment-wide association study, using a lag period between exposure and prostate cancer incidence of 10–18 years to account for the slow-growing nature of most prostate cancers. The years 1997–2001 were assessed for pesticide use and 2011–2015 for prostate cancer outcomes. Similarly, 2002–2006 were analyzed for pesticide use and 2016–2020 for outcomes.

Among the 22 pesticides showing consistent direct associations with prostate cancer incidence across both time-based analyses were three that had previously been linked to prostate cancer, including 2,4-D, one of the most frequently used pesticides in the United States. The 19 candidate pesticides not previously linked to prostate cancer included 10 herbicides, several fungicides and insecticides, and a soil fumigant.

Four pesticides that were linked to prostate cancer incidence were also associated with prostate cancer mortality: three herbicides (trifluralin, cloransulam-methyl, and diflufenzopyr) and one insecticide (thiamethoxam). Only trifluralin is classed by the Environmental Protection Agency as a “possible human carcinogen,” whereas the other three are considered “not likely to be carcinogenic” or have evidence of “non-carcinogenicity.”

“This research demonstrates the importance of studying environmental exposures, such as pesticide use, to potentially explain some of the geographic variation we observe in prostate cancer incidence and deaths across the United States,” said lead author Simon John Christoph Soerensen, MD, of Stanford University School of Medicine. “By building on these findings, we can advance our efforts to pinpoint risk factors for prostate cancer and work towards reducing the number of men affected by this disease.”

 

Additional information
NOTE: The information contained in this release is protected by copyright. Please include journal attribution in all coverage. A free abstract of this article will be available via the CANCER Newsroom upon online publication. For more information or to obtain a PDF of any study, please contact: Sara Henning-Stout, newsroom@wiley.com

Full Citation:
“Pesticides and Prostate Cancer Incidence and Mortality: An Environmental Wide Association Study.” Simon John Christoph Soerensen, David S. Lim, Maria E. Montez-Rath, Glenn M. Chertow, Benjamin I. Chung, David H. Rehkopf, and John T. Leppert. CANCER; Published Online: November 4, 2024 (DOI: 10.1002/cncr.35572).
URL Upon Publication: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/cncr.35572

University Media Representative’s Contact: Ahmad Zaki Sadeqi, MSc, MA; Communications Manager, Department of Urology, Stanford University School of Medicine; Email: azsadeqi@stanford.edu

About the Journal     
CANCER is a peer-reviewed publication of the American Cancer Society integrating scientific information from worldwide sources for all oncologic specialties. The objective of CANCER is to provide an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of information among oncologic disciplines concerned with the etiology, course, and treatment of human cancer. CANCER is published on behalf of the American Cancer Society by Wiley and can be accessed online. Follow CANCER on X @JournalCancer and Instagram @ACSJournalCancer, and stay up to date with the American Cancer Society Journals on LinkedIn.

About Wiley      
Wiley is one of the world’s largest publishers and a trusted leader in research and learning. Our industry-leading content, services, platforms, and knowledge networks are tailored to meet the evolving needs of our customers and partners, including researchers, students, instructors, professionals, institutions, and corporations. We empower knowledge-seekers to transform today’s biggest obstacles into tomorrow’s brightest opportunities. For more than two centuries, Wiley has been delivering on its timeless mission to unlock human potential. Visit us at Wiley.com. Follow us on Facebook, X, LinkedIn and Instagram.

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Journal

Cancer

DOI

10.1002/cncr.35572 

Article Title

Pesticides and Prostate Cancer Incidence and Mortality: An Environmental Wide Association Study

Article Publication Date

4-Nov-2024

Science between freedom and responsibility

Goethe University adopts paper on the tension between academic freedom, freedom of expression and social responsibility

 News Release 4-Nov-2024

Goethe University Frankfurt

FRANKFURT. The paper reaffirms Goethe University’s self-image as a place where different academic views meet and struggle to make available groundbreaking knowledge. “Science thrives on dialog, discussion and discourse with stakeholders both inside and outside of academia. This is especially true for our university, which was founded by Frankfurt’s urban society for its urban society. In such a culture, academics have to withstand the possibility that others may publicly contradict them or protest against their academic events – as long as such criticism or process remains within the confines of the law. That being said, whenever academic freedom is threatened by statements or actions, it falls upon us as a university to protect it,” explains Goethe University President Prof. Enrico Schleiff. “It is important to remember that academic freedom does not apply to every statement made or event organized by scientists: There are indeed cases where they express their private opinions, for example on fields for which they are no experts, or pursue purely results-oriented ideological goals with an event. Such instances fall outside the domain of academic freedom and therefore outside the university's sphere of influence.”

The paper was developed to provide a better basis for dealing with public criticism of and protests against public events organized by Goethe University academics. “Many debates are highly polarized. If we want to pursue science in dialog with society, we must neither shy away from nor avoid it,” explains Schleiff. “As professors, we are trained for scientific discourse. But we also have to learn how to deal with criticism and arguments that are not of a scientific nature and how to remain confident in emotionally heated situations.” That is why the university has set up new training courses, including in facilitation and communication, to strengthen scientists’ skills, also during confrontational moments.

The paper was drawn up by an expert commission headed by legal scholar Prof. Matthias Jahn. In legal terms, it has the character of an administrative regulation that specifies standards: By explaining the applicable law, it serves as a binding guideline for all university members. It cannot, however, account for every individual decision. “The university makes its infrastructure available to its researchers so they can pursue science, not to carry out on-scientific activities and formats. Determining whether or not this is the case requires a case-by-case consideration, which also accounts for the standards of the respective subject culture,” Jahn explains. “The university’s management is not permitted to control the content of science, and controversies about the way in which knowledge is gained and interpreted fall under the scientific community’s responsibility. However, the university management can decide, for example, not to make rooms available for an event that is not subject to academic freedom if this decision is organizationally safeguarded in such a manner that a structural threat to academic freedom can be excluded. If academics consider such a decision to be wrong, they have recourse to the courts.” The courts, in turn, have to consider the specifics of the university's self-conception, explains Jahn, who has worked at various higher regional courts on a part-time basis for two decades.

The paper also clarifies that although academic freedom is guaranteed extensively in Germany’s Basic Law, this is no blank check guarantee for limitless scientific practice: It is possible to impose restrictions in individual cases in favor of goods that are considered to have greater merit, such as fundamental and human rights, freedom of education for students or the personal rights of third parties. If this is the case, the consequences can be severe: “Violations of this obligation (...) can constitute misconduct”, the paper states.

The administrative regulation specifying the standard was adopted by Goethe University’s Executive Board following earlier debates in both the Senate and the University Council. The draft was also discussed with representatives of Frankfurt municipality.

The official wording of the new administrative regulation:
https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/160019691

 

Combining two simple tools could combat election misinformation

Cornell University

ITHACA, N.Y. – A popular new strategy for combatting misinformation doesn’t by itself help people distinguish truth from falsehood but improves when paired with reminders to focus on accuracy, finds new Cornell University-led research supported by Google.

Psychological inoculation, a form of “prebunking” intended to help people identify and refute false or misleading information, uses short videos in place of ads to highlight manipulative techniques common to misinformation, such as emotional language, false dichotomies and scapegoating. The strategy has already been deployed to millions of users of YouTube, Facebook and other platforms, and could be utilized after the U.S. presidential election.

In a series of studies involving nearly 7,300 online participants, an inoculation video about emotional language improved recognition of that technique – but did not improve people’s ability to discern true headlines from false ones, the researchers found. Participants’ ability to identify true information improved when the video was bookended with video clips prompting them to think about whether content was accurate, suggesting a combined approach could be more effective, the researchers said.

“If you just tell people to watch out for things like emotional language, they’ll disbelieve true things that have emotional language as much as false things that have emotional language,” said Gordon Pennycook, associate professor of psychology. “Encouragingly, we found some synergy between these two approaches, and that means we may be able to develop more effective interventions.”

Pennycook is the first author of “Inoculation and Accuracy Prompting Increase Accuracy Discernment in Combination but Not Alone” under embargo until 5am ET on November 4, 2024 in Nature Human Behavior.

Prior studies involving members of the research team showed that inoculation videos helped people identify manipulative techniques in sample tweets. That raised hopes that a relatively simple intervention could be implemented on a large scale to “immunize” populations against potentially viral misinformation.

The new study investigated whether inoculation’s benefits carried over to more real-world conditions by helping people assess whether information was true or not.

In three initial studies, participants watched the same emotional language video used in the earlier study, which warns viewers to be wary, for example, of headlines referencing a “horrific” accident rather than a “serious” one, or a “disgusting” (versus “disagreeable”) ruling. They then reviewed real headlines – some true, some false – presented in one of two versions the researchers designed: either emotionally neutral or using charged language that could evoke fear or anger. For example, a true, low-emotion headline read, “NYC wants to ‘end the COVID era,’ declares vaccine as a requirement for its workers.” The evocative version read, “Thousands being forced to take the jab: NYC mandates vaccines for its workers.”

Replicating the earlier work, the less than two-minute inoculation video helped study participants flag manipulative content, particularly in high-emotion headlines. But that didn’t make them better at judging which information was accurate – even in the context most favorable for inoculation, when all false headlines contained highly emotional language, and all true headlines were neutral.

“When the task is made more difficult by intermixing actual true or false claims,” the authors wrote, “the video appears to lose its effectiveness as an ‘inoculation against misinformation.’”

A final pair of studies explored the potential benefits of so-called accuracy prompts – simple reminders about the importance of considering accuracy and the threat of misinformation. Like inoculation, accuracy prompts alone proved ineffective for helping people identify true versus false claims (unlike their past use where they successfully improved the news people share). But when the accuracy prompts were sandwiched around the inoculation video, study participants’ identification of true headlines (but not false ones) improved significantly, by up to 10%.

“This shows that combining two techniques that can be readily deployed at scale can boost people’s skills to avoid being misled,” said Stephan Lewandowsky, professor at the University of Bristol, England, and a co-author of the research.

The results have significant implications for the growing field of designing misinformation interventions, the researchers said, highlighting for industry actors and policymakers the importance of testing and deploying multiple interventions in tandem.

“If you’re going to run these interventions, you should probably begin them with a base reminder about accuracy,” Pennycook said. “Just getting people to think more about whether things are true will carry over – at least in the short term – to what they’re seeing and choices about what they would share online.”

In addition to Pennycook and Lewandowsky, co-authors are Adam Berinsky and David Rand ’04, professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Puneet Bhargava, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania; and Hause Lin, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT.  

Cornell University has dedicated television and audio studios available for media interviews. 

-30-  

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Journal

Nature Human Behaviour

DOI

10.1038/s41562-024-02023-2 

Article Title

Inoculation and accuracy prompting increase accuracy discernment in combination but not alone

Article Publication Date

4-Nov-2024

 

Multi-layered site in Tajikistan's Zeravshan Valley uncovered, offering new insights into human expansion

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

 

image: 

View on Zeravshan river valley from Soii Havzak

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Credit: Yossi Zaidner and Team

Hebrew University and National Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan uncover multi-layered site in Tajikistan's Zeravshan Valley, offering new insights into human expansion

[Hebrew University] In an important discovery, archaeologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the National Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan have uncovered a multi-layered archaeological site in the Zeravshan Valley, central Tajikistan, shedding rare light on early human settlement in the region. The findings from the site, known as Soii Havzak, provide crucial evidence that Central Asia played a vital role in early human migration and development.

Led by Prof. Yossi Zaidner of the Institute of Archaeology at Hebrew University and Dr. Sharof Kurbanov from the National Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan, the research, published in Antiquity, revealed a rich array of stone tools, animal bones, and ancient vegetation that date back to various periods between 20,000 and 150,000 years ago.

"It turns out that the Zeravshan Valley, known primarily as a Silk Road route in the Middle Ages, was a key route for human expansion long before that—between 20,000 and 150,000 years ago," explained Prof. Zaidner. "This region may have served as a migration route for  several human species, such as modern Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, or Denisovans, which may have coexisted in this area, and our research aims to uncover who were the humans that inhabited these parts of the Central Asia and the nature of their interactions."

The archaeological team excavated three areas at Soii Havzak, unearthing layers of human activity. The well-preserved remains offer valuable clues to the ancient climate and environment, as well as the potential for discovering human remains that could identify which human species inhabited the region.

"The preservation of organic materials, such as burnt wood remains, as well as bones, is remarkable. This allows us to reconstruct the region's ancient climate and provides hope that further excavations might reveal clues about human biology in the region," said Prof. Zaidner. "This is crucial for understanding the development of human populations and behavior in Central Asia."

The research has broader implications for the study of human evolution and migration, particularly in understanding how ancient human groups may have interacted with each other. The team believes that Soii Havzak location in the mountainous corridor of Central Asia may have served as a significant transition point for human populations, enabling the spread of early humans across vast regions.

"We hope that ongoing research at this site will reveal new insights into how different human groups—like modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans—may have interacted in this region," said Prof. Zaidner. "This discovery is a significant step toward understanding ancient human history in Central Asia and marks an important collaboration between international scientific teams."

The excavation at Soii Havzak will continue over the coming years, with further digs planned to explore deeper layers and conduct more in-depth analyses of the findings. The research is expected to deepen our understanding of human development in Central Asia, potentially transforming the historical narrative of human migration and interaction in this critical region.

Bones and stone artifacts discovered during the excavations at Soii Havzak

Stone artifacts from Soii Havzak

Soii Havzak site during excavations

Soii Havzak site during excavations

Credit

Yossi Zaidner and Team

Journal

Antiquity

DOI

10.15184/aqy.2024.149 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Soii Havzak: a new Palaeolithic sequence in Zeravshan Valley, central Tajikistan

Article Publication Date

4-Nov-2024

 

Reconstructing ancient climate provides clues to climate change

New research from Case Western Reserve University also challenges timing of Andes mountains uplift

Case Western Reserve University

CLEVELAND—As the Earth faces unprecedented climate change, a look into the planet’s deep past may provide vital insights into what may lie ahead.

Knowledge of the natural world millions of years ago is fragmented, but a 15-year study of a site in Bolivia by an international team led by Case Western Reserve University provides a comprehensive view of an ancient ecosystem when the Earth was much warmer than today.

A synthesis of the team’s in-depth research was published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.

The site, known as the Quebrada Honda Basin (QHB) in the Andes mountains in southern Bolivia, encompasses a time period 13 million years ago during the Miocene Epoch. During the Miocene, the Earth’s climate rebounded from the cooling of the prior epoch, with global temperatures and mammal biodiversity markedly increasing.

Globally, temperatures were 3-4 degrees Celsius warmer than today. Understanding ecosystems of the past helps predict what might happen in the future due to human-related climate change.

“Sites like this one in Bolivia are essential for helping us calibrate climate models,” said Darin Croft, professor of anatomy at Case Western Reserve’s School of Medicine, who led the QHB team. “Our understanding of climate change is based on models, and those models are based on information from the past. We are getting into uncharted territory in terms of climate, and you have to go deeper in time to get conditions that are similar.”

The site is 11,500 feet (3,500 meters) above sea level. When its fossils accumulated, it was lower, but exactly how much has been a matter of debate. Previous studies using geochemistry concluded that the Miocene QHB was relatively high, close to 10,000 feet (3,000 meters).

But the current publication favors warmer temperature and lower elevation, likely less than 3,000 feet (1,000 meters), meaning the Andes uplift happened more recently in geologic time than previously thought.

The team found fossils of many different types: bones and teeth of mammals and other vertebrates, microscopic plant remains, ancient soils and tracks and traces of insects and other invertebrates. Cold-blooded animals found at the site—a giant tortoise, a side-necked turtle and a very large snake—suggest the site's elevation when these animals lived was less than 1,000 meters, based on modern-day distributions of closely related species.

The team concluded that the QHB was a dry forest or wooded savanna with palms and bamboos—which grow at lower elevations—with no similarity to any modern ecosystem. First author Caroline Strömberg, biology professor at the University of Washington, studied fossilized phytoliths, microscopic pieces of silica found in the cell walls of plants, characteristic of the types of vegetation they come from. She compared the fossilized phytoliths with those found in contemporary vegetation to identify the mix of plants at the site.

Layers of volcanic ash and magnetic signatures in rocks allowed the fossils to be accurately dated. The diversity of preserved material allowed Croft’s team to make detailed reconstructions of the plants and animals and their living conditions. The team named 13 new species of fossil mammals based on remains from the site, including marsupials, hoofed mammals, rodents and armadillos. Most of the species have not been found anywhere else in South America and have no modern descendants.

“Nature has a wide variety of body plans, often much greater than the limited variety we see today,” said Russell Engelman, a Case Western Reserve biology graduate student who worked on the mammal fossils.

Other coauthors include: Beverly Saylor, professor of earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Case Western Reserve; Angeline Catena, geology professor at Diablo Valley Community College in Pleasant Hill, Calif.; Daniel Hembree, professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of Tennessee; and Federico Anaya, geology professor at Universidad Autonóma Tomás Frías in Potosí, Bolivia.

Between 2007 and 2017, Croft and Anaya led six international teams to the QHB, funded primarily by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Six years after Croft’s second NSF grant ended, the findings are still yielding data and publications.

“Field paleontology is a really good investment for the NSF, because the dividends far outweigh the costs,” said Croft, who’s seeking funding to study another Bolivian Miocene site of a similar age but over a longer time-period.

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An artist's rendering of a new mammal species, hemihegotherium, found at Quebrada Honda.

Credit

By Velizar Simeonovski, copyright Darin Croft

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Journal

Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

The flora, fauna, and paleoenvironment of the late Middle Miocene Quebrada Honda Basin, Bolivia (Eastern Cordillera, Central Andes)

Article Publication Date

1-Nov-2024

 

Sea-level rise could affect fresh water availability

Europe's leading ocean experts launch advice for governments

Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research

 

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Ocean and Fresh Water: clean and safe waters available to all communities

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Credit: EMB

A new publication launched by leading European Ocean scientists, titled Navigating the Future VI (NFVI), highlights our lack of understanding of saltwater intrusion into coastal freshwater systems under current and future climate scenarios, and its impacts for coastal communities. How much salt water is reaching those systems? Are climate change impacts such as higher sea levels, and warmer weather leading to increased use of underground freshwater reserves, making that intrusion more likely? Written by a team of experts from the marine sciences, the Navigating the Future VI makes it clear that we can no longer consider and manage the Ocean and fresh water separately. Water resilience has already been identified as a key focus for the new European Commission college of Commissioners, and as they start their official hearings, we highlight the important role of the Ocean in ensuring it.

 
“We humans are heavily reliant on clean freshwater, but we still exert severe pressure on this crucial commodity. Global warming causes rising sea levels, which are pushing seawater further inland into rivers, wetlands and underground freshwater reserves, with negative effects on water quality. Moreover, human activities generate waste streams with cocktails of hazardous chemicals that enter the global water cycle, making their way from freshwater reservoirs to the Ocean. Freshwater and the Ocean are intimately connected and affect each other; we need to understand how in order to sustainably use both components of the global water cycle”, says Dr. Peter Kraal of NIOZ Sea Research, co-lead of the chapter on fresh water and the Ocean.

Critical questions

This publication provides governments, policymakers and funders with robust, independent scientific advice on future seas and Ocean research. The NFVI Ocean and Fresh Water chapter presents the many linkages and pathways between the Ocean and freshwater systems, and highlights the key unanswered questions:

• To what extent is salt water from the Ocean intruding into our terrestrial freshwater reserves?
• What dangerous microorganisms could climate change release into our water as we see more rainfall, and melting of ice and permafrost?
• What pathways are there for waterborne pollutants to reach the Ocean and us?
• Can some pollutants extracted from wastewater be re-used?
• How do we design policies that can deal with new emerging pollutants and new knowledge about them?

 

 

About NFVI

NFVI was written by experts from the European Marine Board, an independent non-governmental advisory body that represents more than 10,000 marine scientists across Europe. The publication focuses on the critical role the Ocean plays in the wider Earth system. The working group (operating from October 2022 – October 2024) comprises 33 experts from 16 European countries, covering a wide range of marine natural and social science backgrounds and career levels.

The document can be access at: https://www.marineboard.eu/publications/nfvi

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Method of Research

Survey

Article Title

Ocean and Fresh Water_chapter of Navigating the Future VI

 

Pusan National University researcher unveil that Mondays and New Year’s Day have highest suicide risk

Researchers investigated temporal variations in suicide risk across multiple countries, revealing crucial insights for improved prevention strategies

Pusan National University

 

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The study reveals that Mondays and New Year’s Day have the highest suicide risk across multiple countries. These findings can guide more effective and targeted action plans for preventing suicides.

 

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Credit: Whanhee Lee from Pusan National University

Suicide is a pressing global public health concern, claiming around 700,000 lives in 2019 according to the World Health Organization, making it the fourth leading cause of death among young people aged between 15 and 29 years. Understanding the mechanisms of suicide is, therefore, essential for creating effective prevention strategies.

Research has shown that suicide rates vary with the time of the year. Several studies have also reported short-term variations based on the day of the week and holidays. The “broken-promise effect theory” has been widely adapted to explain these variations. This theory states that people may postpone suicides in hopes of a new beginning when a cycle ends, such as on weekends or at the end of the year, while they may feel more vulnerable and hopeless at the start of a new cycle, such as on Mondays or New Year’s Day. However, these findings cannot be generalized, as existing studies mainly focus on Western countries.

To address this gap, an international research team consisting of Whanhee Lee (Assistant Professor, the School of Biomedical Convergence Engineering at Pusan National University, South Korea), Cinoo Kang (Doctoral Student, the Graduate School of Public Health, Seoul National University, South Korea), Yoonhee Kim (Associate Professor, Department of Global Environmental Health, The University of Tokyo, Japan), and the Multi-City multi-Country (MCC) Collaborative Research Network investigated short-term variations in suicide risk concerning the days of the week and national holidays across various countries.

“Applying a unified approach to various countries allows us to provide comparable results and better understand how suicide risk changes across different timescales and diverse cultures,” explains Dr. Lee. Their study was published in The BMJ on October 23rd 2024.

The researchers used an advanced statistical technique called standardized two-stage time series analysis to investigate suicide risk patterns. They analyzed data from 740 locations across 26 countries, gathered from the Multi-country Multi-city Collaborative Research Network database. This dataset comprised 1.7 million suicide cases, including daily suicide counts along with daily mean temperature data spanning from January 1971 to December 2019.

The results revealed that suicide risk was highest on Mondays across all countries, though the effect of weekends varied. New Year’s Day was associated with an increase in suicide risk in all countries, while Christmas showed a mixed pattern. Although there was an overall decreasing trend in suicide risk on other national holidays, the risk tended to increase after these holidays in most countries. Notably, the findings also showed that men are more vulnerable to variations related to the day of the week and New Year’s Day compared to women.

Highlighting the importance of this study, Dr. Lee remarks “Our findings provide a better understanding of the temporal variations in suicide, which can lead to better evidence based-suicide theories.”

We hope that this large-scare study can lead to timely interventions, potentially saving countless lives.

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Reference

Title of original paper: Association of holidays and the day of the week with suicide risk: multicountry, two stage, time series study

Journal: The BMJ

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2024-077262 

 

About the institute

Pusan National University, located in Busan, South Korea, was founded in 1946 and is now the No. 1 national university of South Korea in research and educational competency. The multi-campus university also has other smaller campuses in Yangsan, Miryang, and Ami. The university prides itself on the principles of truth, freedom, and service, and has approximately 30,000 students, 1200 professors, and 750 faculty members. The university is composed of 14 colleges (schools) and one independent division, with 103 departments in all.

Website: https://www.pusan.ac.kr/eng/Main.do

 

About the author

Dr. Whanhee Lee is an Assistant Professor at the School of Biomedical Convergence Engineering at Pusan National University. He has a Ph.D. in Public Health (Biostatistics major) from Seoul National University and his main research interests include climate change, air pollution, health disparities, and planetary health. He can be reached at whanhee.lee@pusan.ac.kr.

Lab website: https://www.whanheelee.com/

ORCID id: ORCID id: 0000-0001-5723-9061

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Journal

The BMJ

DOI

10.1136/bmj-2024-077262 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Association of holidays and the day of the week with suicide risk: multicountry, two stage, time series study

Article Publication Date

23-Oct-2024

COI Statement

All authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form at URL www.icmje.org/disclosure-of-interest/ and declare: support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Italian Ministry of University and Research; no financial relationships with any organizations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous three years; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work. Ethics approval Ethics approval was not required. This study did not include plans to recruit participants and only used pre-existing datasets. All data used in this study were pre-recorded and completely de-identified

 

Genome of the aurochs decoded

University of Cologne

The results of an international study describe the genetic development of the aurochs (Bos primigenius), the wild ancestor of domestic cattle, during and after the Ice Age. The central European subspecies was determined by means of gene sequencing. For this study, samples were used that were collected in the framework of Collaborative Research Centre ‘Our Way to Europe’ at the University of Cologne. The results of the study ‘The genomic natural history of the aurochs’ were published in Nature.

Back in 2014, Professor Dr Andreas Zimmermann and his colleague Dr Birgit Gehlen from the University of Cologne’s Department of Prehistoric Archaeology had ten aurochs individuals dated at the Cologne Accelerator Mass Spectrometer (CologneAMS). The bones were excavated in the 1980s in Bedburg-Königshoven in what was then an open-cast brown coal mine. “They were contaminated by the preservative used at the time, which led to inconsistent and largely incorrect data,” explained Gehlen. “The new dating within the framework of the CRC resulted in an age of approximately 11,700 years. This makes Bedburg-Königshoven one of the rare sites of the earliest Holocene in central Europe, an epoch that lasts from 11,700 years ago to the present day.”

The dating to the earliest Mesolithic period and the relatively large number of aurochs bones – including some larger skull fragments – aroused the interest of Dr Amelie Scheu from the Palaeogenetic Working Group at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She took samples from the ten aurochs. It turned out that the aDNA (ancient DNA) of two individuals was so well preserved that they were suitable for deep sequencing and further analyses. These were carried out in the following years as part of a project at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland.

The study revealed overall large genomic differences between the European aurochs, the North Asian aurochs and the South Asian ancestor that persisted throughout the last Ice Age, at least since the last common ancestor of eastern and western Bos primigenius approximately 90,000 years ago. After the peak of the last Ice Age, aurochs from the Iberian Peninsula recolonized central Europe. A period of migration and mixing began about 11,700 years ago with the significant climatic improvements at the beginning of the Holocene.

The results of the study also confirm earlier assumptions that people in the Stone Age rarely captured and isolated aurochs, and only within a specific historical time window. In addition, European domesticated cattle can be traced back to a small number of individuals from the wild ancestors in the Middle East around 11,000 years ago. This finding suggests that aurochs were kept by humans, including intentional feeding. It was therefore not a passive, gradual process, but a targeted domestication within a relatively short period of time.

“With the help of the samples from Bedburg-Königshoven, the genome of the central European aurochs could be fully decoded for the first time. It is now possible to better understand the history of European and Asian wild cattle and today’s domestic cattle,” said Dr Birgit Gehlen.

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Journal

Nature

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Animal tissue samples

Article Title

The genomic natural history of the aurochs