Violence-legitimizing verses in ABRAHAMIC religious scriptures increase support for lethal violence

A survey experiment among Christians, Muslims and Jews in seven countries shows the mobilizing potential of religious scripture

WZB BERLIN SOCIAL SCIENCE CENTER

Research News

 

IMAGE: THE GRAPH SHOWS RESULTS FOR SEVEN COUNTRIES: GERMANY, THE UNITED STATES, CYPRUS, LEBANON, ISRAEL, THE PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES, AND KENYA view more 

CREDIT: WZB

Extremist perpetrators of violence often quote verses from their religion's holy scriptures that authorize, or even prescribe, attacks on enemies of the faith. Abdullah H., the Syrian now on trial who stabbed a homosexual couple with a knife and killed a man in Dresden in October 2020, also testified that he had been inspired to commit the crime by a Quranic sura. However, whether the religious motivation that extremist perpetrators of violence emphasize is causally related to their actions is often doubted. Now, WZB researchers Ruud Koopmans and Eylem Kanol can prove for the first time that verses in religious scriptures that legitimize violence can increase support for killing enemies of the faith.

Together with Dietlind Stolle, a German-Canadian political scientist, they designed an experimental study in which they asked 8,000 Christians, Muslims, and Jews in seven countries (Germany, the United States, Cyprus, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and Kenya) whether or not they thought lethal violence against enemies of the faith was justified. Half of the respondents were asked the question without any introduction, while the other half were first presented with a quote from the Bible, Koran, or Torah that endorsed violence against alleged enemies of the faith.

The results show that reference to scriptural passages legitimizing violence significantly increased support for lethal violence in all three religions and in all seven countries (see graph). However, this effect was weaker among Jews and Christians than among Muslims. Across all seven countries, 9 percent of Christian believers supported violence without receiving a scriptural quote beforehand, against 12 percent among those who were given such a quote. Among Jewish believers, the figures were 3 and 7 percent, respectively. Among Muslims, 29 percent supported violence against enemies of the faith without and 47 percent with prior reference to a Quranic quote. In Germany, however, these figures were considerably lower: among German Christians, support for violence was 2 without and 3 percent with a biblical quotation; among German Muslims, 5 without and 16 percent with a Koran quotation (seeh graph).

The most important reason for the differences between the three religions, the researchers show, is the larger proportion of Muslim believers who adhere to a fundamentalist interpretation of their faith. Fundamentalist believers are characterized by the fact that they take the holy scriptures of their religion literally and consider them to be unambiguously valid in the present. Therefore, they are comparatively more susceptible to attempts to legitimize violence by referring to religious scriptural sources.

The findings have significance for countering religious extremism. "Religious causes and motivations must be taken seriously. Violence should not be reduced to socio-economic and psychological causes alone," says Ruud Koopmans, director at the WZB. The task of religious leaders and associations, he says, must be to actively counter fundamentalist interpretations of faith and to promote interpretations that take the historical and social context into consideration.

US and Iranian researchers collaborate on Lake Urmia restoration

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY

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IMAGE: IRAN'S LAKE URMIA -- A SISTER TO UTAH'S GREAT SALT LAKE -- HAS LOST NEARLY 95 PERCENT OF ITS VOLUME IN THE SPAN OF TWO DECADES. view more 

CREDIT: SOMAYEH SIMA

In a rare exchange, scientists and water resources engineers from Iran and Utah are collaborating on a bold scientific study to restore one of the world's largest saline lakes.

Lake Urmia -- a massive salt lake in Iran's northwest and a sister to Utah's Great Salt Lake -- has lost nearly 95 percent of its volume over the last two decades. As water levels drop, salinity spikes, threatening the lake's brine shrimp population and the flamingos and other bird species that depend on the shrimp for food. Lake levels are so low that at some coastal resorts, tourism boats must be pulled a kilometer (0.6 mile) or more from shore by tractor before reaching suitable depths. In addition, new land bridges are forming in the drying lake bed which allows mainland predators to threaten endangered mammals living in the southern islands. The vast, dry lakebed imposes a growing dust problem for the five million residents who live in the Lake Urmia basin. What's more, the area's ecotourism industry has collapsed, and now experts fear an environmental disaster awaits if drastic changes are not made.

"We're at the tipping point," said professor and lead author Somayeh Sima of Tarbiat Modares University in Iran. "Every single step matters. We have to take action now." Sima's work will be used to update Iran's $1 billion Lake Urmia Restoration Program. In 2018, she traveled to Utah on a visiting scholarship from the Semnani Family Foundation to collaborate with Utah State University water resources professor David Rosenberg who studies integrated water management and water conservation in Western U.S. river basins, including rivers that feed the Great Salt Lake. Prof. Wayne Wurtsbaugh, Sarah Null, and Karin Kettenring from the USU Quinney College of Natural Resources also collaborated in the limnology and ecology parts of this multidisciplinary research.

The team synthesized 40 years of data to define eight metrics that define the health of Lake Urmia and its many ecosystems. Their findings were published in the latest edition of the Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies. One key finding shows that setting a target water level will not necessarily solve Lake Urmia's problems.

"We can't say that restoring the lake to some magic number will improve the overall situation," said Rosenberg. "Instead, we need to consider how the lake's ecosystem services are interconnected and how a varying lake level will impact those systems over time."

"We have to embrace lake level variability and focus our restoration efforts where it makes sense," Sima added. "Restoration is not an easy task. It is everyone's responsibility, and we'll need public support to make meaningful change."

The problems facing Lake Urmia are not unique to Iran. Water levels at the Great Salt Lake are also at their lowest in recent years, and similar problems of land bridges, dust, changes in salinity, and ecological damage have experts concerned.

To promote transparency and reproducibility in science and encourage further collaborations, the researchers published their article open access (free to readers) and shared their data and code on the HydroShare.org repository.

"This partnership between U.S. and Iranian researchers is valuable because we have so much in common on this topic, said Sima. "Only together can we begin to understand how to solve these problems."

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Seismicity on Mars full of surprises, in first continuous year of data

SEISMOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA

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The SEIS seismometer package from the Mars InSight lander has collected its first continuous Martian year of data, revealing some surprises among the more than 500 marsquakes detected so far.

At the Seismological Society of America (SSA)'s 2021 Annual Meeting, Savas Ceylan of ETH Zürich discussed some of the findings from The Marsquake Service, the part of the InSight ground team that detects marsquakes and curates the planet's seismicity catalog.

Marsquakes differ from earthquakes in a number of ways, Ceylan explained. To begin with, they are much smaller than earthquakes, with the largest event recorded at teleseismic distances around magnitude 3.6. SEIS is able to detect these small events because the background seismic noise on Mars can be much lower than on Earth, without the constant tremor produced by ocean waves.

"For much of a Martian year, from around sunset until early hours, the Martian atmosphere becomes very quiet, so there is no local noise either," he said. "Additionally, our sensors are optimized and shielded for operating under severe Martian conditions, such as extremely low temperatures and the extreme diurnal temperature fluctuations on the red planet."

Marsquakes also come in two distinct varieties: low-frequency events with seismic waves propagating at various depths in the planet's mantle, and high-frequency events with waves that appear to propagate through the crust. "In terms of how the seismic energy decays over time, the low-frequency events appear to be more like earthquakes" in which the shaking dies away relatively quickly, Ceylan said, "while the high-frequency events are resembling moonquakes" in persisting for longer periods.

The vast majority of the events are high-frequency and occur at hundreds of kilometers of distance from the lander. "It is not quite clear to us how these events could be confined to only high frequency energy while they occur at such large distances," he said. "On top of that, the frequency of those events seems to vary over the Martian year, which is a pattern that we do not know at all from Earth."

Only a handful of marsquakes have clear seismic phase arrivals--the order in which the different types of seismic waves arrive at a location--which allows researchers to calculate the direction and distance the waves come from. All these marsquakes originate from a sunken area of the surface called Cerberus Fossae, about 1800 kilometers away from the InSight Lander.

Cerberus Fossae is one of the youngest geological structures on Mars, and may have formed from extensional faulting or subsidence due to dike emplacement. Recent studies suggest extension mechanism may be the source of the Cerberus Fossae quakes, Ceylan noted, "howe

DeepShake uses machine learning to rapidly estimate earthquake shaking intensity

SEISMOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA

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A deep spatiotemporal neural network trained on more than 36,000 earthquakes offers a new way of quickly predicting ground shaking intensity once an earthquake is underway, researchers report at the Seismological Society of America (SSA)'s 2021 Annual Meeting.

DeepShake analyzes seismic signals in real time and issues advanced warning of strong shaking based on the characteristics of the earliest detected waves from an earthquake.

DeepShake was developed by Daniel J. Wu, Avoy Datta, Weiqiang Zhu and William Ellsworth at Stanford University.

The earthquake data used to train the DeepShake network came from seismic recordings of the 2019 Ridgecrest, California sequence. When its developers tested DeepShake's potential using the actual shaking of the 5 July magnitude 7.1 Ridgecrest earthquake, the neural network sent simulated alerts between 7 and 13 seconds prior to the arrival of high intensity ground shaking to locations in the Ridgecrest area.

The authors stressed the novelty of using deep learning for rapid early warning and forecasting directly from seismic records alone. "DeepShake is able to pick up signals in seismic waveforms across dimensions of space and time," explained Datta.

DeepShake demonstrates the potential of machine learning models to improve the speed and accuracy of earthquake alert systems, he added.

"DeepShake aims to improve on earthquake early warnings by making its shaking estimates directly from ground motion observations, cutting out some of the intermediate steps used by more traditional warning systems," said Wu.

Many early warning systems first determine earthquake location and magnitude, and then calculate ground motion for a location based on ground motion prediction equations, Wu explained.

"Each of these steps can introduce error that can degrade the ground shaking forecast," he added.

To address this, the DeepShake team turned to a neural network approach. The series of algorithms that make up a neural network are trained without the researcher identifying which signals are "important" for the network to use in its predictions. The network learns which features optimally forecast the strength of future shaking directly from the data.

"We've noticed from building other neural networks for use in seismology that they can learn all sorts of interesting things, and so they might not need the epicenter and magnitude of the earthquake to make a good forecast," said Wu. "DeepShake is trained on a preselected network of seismic stations, so that the local characteristics of those stations become part of the training data."

"When training a machine learning model end to end, we really think that these models are able to leverage this additional information to improve accuracy," he said.

Wu, Datta and their colleagues see DeepShake as complementary to California's operational ShakeAlert, adding to the toolbox of earthquake early warning systems. "We're really excited about expanding DeepShake beyond Ridgecrest, and fortifying our work for the real world, including fail-cases such as downed stations and high network latency," added Datta.

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New alloy can directly reduce the weight of heat removal systems by a third

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY MISIS

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The new alloys created by NUST MISIS scientists in cooperation with LG Electronics will help reduce the weight of radiators and heat removal systems in electric vehicles and consumer electronics by one third. The research results are published in the Journal of Magnesium and Alloys.

According to experts, with the development of electronics the problem of efficient heat removal is becoming more and more acute -- with an increase in the productivity of equipment, heat generation also grows. Reducing the temperature directly affects the prolongation of the devices' life cycle. This is especially important for household appliances, electric vehicles, LED panels.

Scientists from NUST MISIS, in collaboration with LG Electronics, have created new high-heat-conductivity magnesium alloys that differ from their counterparts in increased reliability and low cost, and in addition, they can significantly reduce the weight of devices.

"Traditionally, aluminum is used for heat removal, but it turns out to be too massive for modern gadgets. Reducing the weight of devices can significantly reduce energy consumption during operation, as well as reduce greenhouse emissions during transportation, which is becoming increasingly important today. The use of our alloys will reduce the weight of heat-removing elements by a third without losing effciency," said Vyacheslav Bazhenov, associate professor at the Department of Foundry Technology & Artistic Processing of Materials at NUST MISIS.

One of the problems in the operation of magnesium alloys, as noted by scientists, is their ability to catch fire in the air. Due to the addition of calcium and yttrium, scientists managed to significantly increase the ignition temperature, so that new materials can be used in various gadgets without restrictions.

"We wanted to create alloys with a low cost, so we were almost not using expensive elements, which are usually alloyed with magnesium -- neodymium, lanthanum, thorium etc. As a result, we had alloys of two compositions: the cheapest -- alloyed with silicon, zinc and calcium (Mg-Si-Zn-Ca) (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213956720300049) with high thermal conductivity and medium strength, and somewhat more expensive -- alloyed with zinc, yttrium and zirconium (Mg -- Zn -- Y -- Zr) (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213956721000128) with high strength and slightly lower thermal conductivity," said Vyacheslav Bazhenov.

Based on the results of the work, LG Electronics registered patents for a high-heat-conducting magnesium alloy (Mg-Si-Zn-Ca) developed at NUST MISIS and a radiator made of it in the USA, the European Union, Korea and China.

Currently, the research team is working on new compositions of magnesium-based alloys, which can provide high strength and corrosion resistance along with low cost and high thermal conduct

High Dose of vitamin D fails to improve condition of moderate to severe COVID-19 patients

A clinical trial was conducted with 240 patients who were given 200,000 IU of vitamin D3 on admission to hospital. The supplementation did not reduce length of stay or affect the proportion requiring intensive

FUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO

Research News

 

IMAGE: THE SUPPLEMENTATION OF VITAMIN D3 DID NOT REDUCE LENGTH OF STAY OR AFFECT THE PROPORTION REQUIRING INTENSIVE CARE. view more 

CREDIT: ROSA PEREIRA

By Karina Toledo | Agência FAPESP – Can a high dose of vitamin D administered on admission to hospital improve the condition of patients with moderate or severe COVID-19? The answer is no, according to a Brazilian study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

The article reports a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial, the kind of study considered the gold standard to evaluate drug efficacy. It was conducted with FAPESP’s support by researchers at the University of São Paulo’s Medical School (FM-USP), who recruited 240 patients treated at Hospital das Clínicas (HC), the hospital complex run by FM-USP, and the Ibirapuera field hospital in São Paulo City in June-August 2020.

“In vitro studies or trials with animals had previously shown that in certain situations vitamin D and its metabolites can have anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial effects, as well as modulating the immune response. We decided to investigate whether a high dose of the substance could have a protective effect in the context of an acute viral infection, reducing either the inflammation or the viral load,” Rosa Pereira, principal investigator for the project, told Agência FAPESP.

The volunteers were randomly divided into two groups, one of which was given vitamin D3 in a single dose of 200,000 units (IU) dissolved in a peanut oil solution. The other group was given only the peanut oil solution. All participants were treated according to the standard protocol for hospital treatment of the disease, which includes administration of antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs.

The main purpose was to see if acute supplementation would affect the length of hospital stay for these patients, but the researchers also wanted to find out whether it would mitigate the risks of admission to the intensive care unit (ICU), intubation and death.

No significant difference between the groups was observed for any of these clinical outcomes. According to Pereira, the study was designed above all to assess the impact on hospital stay and a larger number of volunteers would be needed to achieve a scientifically acceptable estimate of the effect on mortality.

“So far we can say there’s no indication to administer vitamin D to patients who come to the hospital with severe COVID-19,” she said.

For Bruno Gualano, a researcher at FM-USP and penultimate author of the article, the findings show that at least for now there is no “silver bullet” for the treatment of COVID-19. “But that doesn’t mean continuous use of vitamin D can’t have beneficial effects of some kind,” he said.

Ideal dose

Pereira is currently leading a study at FM-USP to find out whether subjects with sufficient circulating levels of vitamin D combat infection by SARS-CoV-2 better than those with insufficient levels of the nutrient.

The ideal level of vitamin D in the blood and the daily supplementation dose vary according to age and overall health, she explained. Older people and patients with chronic diseases including osteoporosis should have more than 30 nanograms per milliliter of blood (ng/mL). For healthy adults, 20 ng/mL is an acceptable threshold.

“The ideal approach is case-by-case analysis, if necessary dosing the substance periodically by means of blood work, with supplementation if a deficiency is detected,” Pereira said.

The article “Effect of a single high dose of vitamin D3 on hospital length of stay in patients with moderate to severe COVID-19” can be read at: jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2776738.

Critical understanding of why and how solid-state batteries

THE FARADAY INSTITUTION

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Researchers from the Faraday Institution's SOLBAT project have made a significant step in understanding how and why solid-state batteries (SSBs) fail. A paper, published in Nature Materials on 22 April, provides answers to one important piece of the scientific puzzle.

To make step changes in electric vehicle (EV) battery range and safety at a lower cost, new battery chemistries that are "beyond lithium ion" must be developed. SSBs are one such promising technology, but mass market adoption has been held back by several key technical challenges that cause the battery to fail when charged and discharged.

SSBs can short circuit after repeating charging and discharging. One well-recognised cause of battery failure is the growth of dendrites, branching networks of lithium that grow through the solid electrolyte during charging of a battery. Solving these two challenges could potentially usher in a new era of SSB-powered electric vehicles.

Researchers in the Materials, Chemistry and Engineering Science Departments at the University of Oxford, collaborating with Diamond Light Source and the Paul Scherrer Institut in Switzerland have generated strong evidence supporting one of two competing theories regarding the mechanism by which lithium metal dendrites grow through ceramic electrolytes leading to short circulates at high rates of charge.

Researchers used an imaging technique similar to that used in medical CAT scanners - X-ray computed tomography - coupled with spatially mapped X-ray diffraction, to visualise and characterise the growth of cracks and dendrites deep within an operating solid-state battery.

Conical pothole-like cracks first form in the electrolyte adjacent to the plated lithium anode. The crack propagates along a path where the porosity is above the average value of the ceramic. Metallic lithium is then deposited along the crack and this ingress drives the propagation of the cracks by widening the crack from the rear. The crack front propagates ahead of the lithium deposition, and lithium is not present at the crack tip. Only later, when lithium plates along the entire crack, does the cell finally short circuit.

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Travel paths of primates show how their minds work

How primates get from A to B gives vital information about their cognitive evolution, say researchers in a new study looking at the travel paths of animals in the wild.

OXFORD BROOKES UNIVERSITY

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IMAGE: TRAVEL PATHS OF A RANGE OF PRIMATES view more 

CREDIT: OXFORD BROOKES UNIVERSITY

How primates get from A to B gives vital information about their cognitive evolution, say researchers in a new study looking at the travel paths of animals in the wild. Using data from 164 wild primate populations, the global survey examines the mental abilities that primates, including ourselves, use to know where and when to travel in the most efficient way.

A birds eye view

Co-author Miguel de Guinea, expert in Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University commented: "Imagine looking down on a huge outdoor market from high in the sky, perhaps from a drone hovering quietly above. The people below move in different ways. Some wander haphazardly among the stalls: they are learning what's available but are clearly not busy. Others take bee-line routes across the market to a destination they obviously wanted to reach, then, after buying what they need, head back in much the same way.

"If you could distinguish individuals, and watch them on many occasions, these patterns are likely to change, sometimes dependent on fruit and vegetables in season. We would also begin to learn about social aspects, as networks of repeated contacts show who is friendly with whom. We can get a good idea of people's knowledge, their needs, their ability to think ahead and how they learn over time - just from watching their travel paths. The same observations have been made by the research team using data from GPS devices and in-field studies of wild primates, giving us fascinating information about their development."

Travel decision-making adds to picture

The original data was gathered from small GPS devices, used routinely in primate fieldwork: sometimes these are attached to the animals themselves, but in many studies a researcher follows the animals, usually noting a rich variety of background information on what they are doing and for how long.

The international team developed a conceptual framework to highlight ways in which these data can be analysed. Currently, primate cognition is studied by comparing measures such as brain size, or conducting experiments with artificial problems to primates in captivity. The evidence from travel decision-making amongst wild populations will enhance these approaches and give a fuller picture of the cognitive development of these species.

An urgent vision for primate research

Lead-author Karline Janmaat from the University of Amsterdam said: "Our ultimate dream is to set up a consortium to support data sharing and collaboration among primatologists. Hopefully this attracts MSc and PhD students from around the world to share and compare their collected data to these existing datasets."

The researchers say that further research is urgent, because so many species are now threatened with extinction in the wild. Since 1970, two-thirds of all vertebrate populations have been lost, and large, day-living animals like primates have been significantly impacted.

Miguel de Guinea stressed: "Time is fast running out - if we don't act now we may never be able to understand the drivers of cognitive evolution. By applying our research methodology and findings we can make use of previously collected valuable data from wild populations and apply that to our understanding of the cognitive evolution of primate species."

The research Using natural travel paths to infer and compare primate cognition in the wild is published in iScience.

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Climate-friendly microbes chomp dead plants without releasing heat-trapping methane

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

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IMAGE: TENGCHONG YUNNAN HOT SPRINGS IN CHINA, WHERE SOME OF THE NEWLY DESCRIBED BROCKARCHAEOTA WERE COLLECTED. view more 

CREDIT: JIAN-YU JIAO/SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY

The tree of life just got a little bigger: A team of scientists from the U.S. and China has identified an entirely new group of microbes quietly living in hot springs, geothermal systems and hydrothermal sediments around the world. The microbes appear to be playing an important role in the global carbon cycle by helping break down decaying plants without producing the greenhouse gas methane.

"Climate scientists should take these new microbes into account in their models to more accurately understand how they will impact climate change," said Brett Baker, assistant professor at The University of Texas at Austin's Marine Science Institute who led the research published April 23 in Nature Communications.

The new group, which biologists call a phylum, is named Brockarchaeota after Thomas Brock, a pioneer in the study of microbes that live in extreme environments such as the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park. Sadly, Brock died April 4. His research led to a powerful biotech tool called PCR, which is used, among other things, in gene sequencing and COVID-19 tests.

"The description of these new microbes from hot springs is a fitting tribute to Tom's legacy in microbiology," Baker added.

So far, Brockarchaeota have not been successfully grown in a laboratory or imaged under a microscope. Instead, they were identified by painstakingly reconstructing their genomes from bits of genetic material collected in samples from hot springs in China and hydrothermal sediments in the Gulf of California. Baker and the team used high-throughput DNA sequencing and innovative computational approaches to piece together the genomes of the newly described organisms. The scientists also identified genes that suggest how they consume nutrients, produce energy and generate waste.

"When we looked in public genetic databases, we saw that they had been collected all around the world but described as 'uncultured microorganisms,'" said Valerie De Anda, first author of the new paper, referring to specimens collected by other researchers from hot springs in South Africa and Wyoming's Yellowstone, and from lake sediments in Indonesia and Rwanda. "There were genetic sequences going back decades, but none of them were complete. So, we reconstructed the first genomes in this phylum and then we realized, wow, they are around the world and have been completely overlooked."

The Brockarchaeota are part of a larger, poorly studied group of microbes called archaea. Until now, scientists thought that the only archaea involved in breaking down methylated compounds--that is, decaying plants, phytoplankton and other organic matter--were those that also produced the greenhouse gas methane.

"They are using a novel metabolism that we didn't know existed in archaea," said De Anda. "And this is very important because marine sediments are the biggest reservoir of organic carbon on Earth. These archaea are recycling carbon without producing methane. This gives them a unique ecological position in nature."

A phylum is a broad group of related organisms. To get a sense of just how large and diverse phyla are, consider that the phylum Chordata alone includes fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals and sea squirts. The phylum Arthropoda, which accounts for about 80% of all animals, includes insects, arachnids (such as spiders, scorpions and ticks) and crustaceans (crabs, lobsters, shrimp, and other tasty sea denizens).

In July 2020, Baker, De Anda and others suggested the possible existence of several new phyla among the archaea, including Brockarchaeota, in a review article in Nature Microbiology. This latest study adds more than a dozen new species to Brockarchaeota, describes their metabolism and demonstrates that they are indeed a distinctly new phylum.

In addition to breaking down organic matter, these newly described microbes have other metabolic pathways that De Anda speculates might someday be useful in applications ranging from biotechnology to agriculture to biofuels.

CAPTION

Location of samples from which Brockarchaeota genomes (orange) and 16S rRNA gene sequences (blue) have been recovered. The size of the circle corresponds to the total number of Brockarchaeota-related sequences in each location.

CREDIT

University of Texas at Austin

The study's co-corresponding authors are Baker and Wen-Jun Li from Sun Yat-Sen University and Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (China). The other authors are Lin-xing Chen and Jillian F. Banfield from the University of California, Berkeley; Nina Dombrowski formerly in Baker's lab at UT Austin and now at Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research and Utrecht University; Zheng-Shuang Hua from Sun Yat-Sen University (China) and Dartmouth College; and Hong-Chen Jiang from China University of Geosciences.

This work was funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation, China's Ministry of Science and Technology and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. The sequencing was partially conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute.

CAPTION

Tibetan hot spring, where some of the newly described Brockarchaeota were collected.

CREDIT

En-Min Zhou/Yunnan University

Citizen science data tracks battle of birds vs bacteria

CORNELL UNIVERSITY

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ITHACA, N.Y. - House finches are locked in a deadly cycle of immunity and new strains of bacterial infection in battling an eye disease that halved their population when it first emerged 25 years ago, according to new research from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

House finch eye disease causes red, swollen, watery or crusty eyes. Afflicted birds can recover, but may die because they cannot see well enough to find food or avoid predators. The latest analyses, based on the observations of Project FeederWatch participants from eight Northeast states, addresses the long-term impact of the disease on house finch populations and points to the role of the finch immune system in the bird vs. bacteria battle.

"We have an escalating arms race," said Cornell Lab researcher Wesley Hochachka, first author of "Host Population Dynamics in the Face of an Evolving Pathogen," which published April 5 in the Journal of Animal Ecology. "Finches who become infected but survive acquire some immunity to that version of the bacteria and its predecessors. The bacteria evolve to get around the strengthened finch immunity. Then birds acquire immunity to the latest strain, and the cycle keeps repeating.

The study's authors believe that acquired immunity - when the immune system creates antibodies in response to an infection - is actually driving the arms race between the birds and the bacteria. They said imperfect acquired immunity, just like imperfect vaccines against human pathogens, creates the conditions needed to favor the proliferation of new strains of the bacteria that can overcome immunity acquired against existing strains of bacteria.

Immunity can also develop through genetic changes to the house finches, but this would be a relatively slow process, requiring multiple years for genetically novel and resistant finches to become widespread. In contrast, genetic changes to the bacteria can proliferate within hours - so fast that populations of house finches can't possibly evolve a defense quickly enough.

"We should really pay more attention to the role that acquired immunity can play in the dynamics of disease in any animal," Hochachka said. "Interactions can be much more complicated when both the host and the disease are able to change rapidly."

The overall house finch population was cut in half during the initial outbreak when the bacteria jumped to finches from poultry in 1994. House finch populations now are mostly stable at their current, lower level.

Hochachka said that's surprising because typically in other tracked animal diseases, either the animal populations rebound or fluctuate widely following the initial disease outbreak. But he thinks the finch population is not likely to return to pre-disease levels.

The finch eye disease dynamic has parallels to human health and the use of vaccines to give people acquired immunity to diseases. Here also, imperfect immunity - vaccines that do not provide perfect protection - are believed to accelerate the spread of new strains of pathogens against which vaccines are ineffective.

"The emergence of new diseases is going to keep happening," Hochachka said. "We just have to develop methods and systems for dealing with it as best we can when a lethal disease appears."

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The research was partly supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.