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, April 23, 2021
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.
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.
###
Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.
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
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."
###
The research was partly supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
GLOBALIZATION MAKES CHINA RUN Xi calls for new world order as he warns against economic decoupling
BEIJING — Xi Jinping has called for a new world order, using a speech at China’s flagship business event to launch a veiled attack against U.S. global leadership and to warn against economic decoupling
“International affairs should be handled by everyone,” the Chinese president told the Boao Forum for Asia, an event billed as the country’s answer to the World Economic Forum in Davos. Last year’s summit was cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Xi did not name the U.S. in his 18-minute speech but he took aim at Washington’s efforts to decouple supply chains and bar the sale of critical American semiconductors and other high-tech goods to Chinese companies such as Huawei.
“The rules set by one or several countries should not be imposed on others, and the unilateralism of individual countries should not give the whole world a rhythm,” he said.
Xi made the comments just days after U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga committed to working together to oppose Chinese coercion in the South and East China seas.
Washington and other Western governments have also been highly critical of Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong and human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.
“Bossing others around and interfering in other countries’ internal affairs will not be well received,” Xi said
Despite the geopolitical tensions, U.S. businesses are eager to expand operations in China, which posted 18.3 per cent year-over-year economic growth in the first three months of 2021. U.S. banks in particular have been keen as Beijing gradually opens up its financial markets.
Western executives scheduled to participate in the four-day Boao Forum, which wraps up Wednesday, included Apple chief executive Tim Cook, Goldman Sachs president John Waldron, Tesla boss Elon Musk and Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone.
Xi also called for closer global co-operation on developing, manufacturing and distributing COVID-19 vaccines to improve access in developing countries.
“We want to make (the vaccine) truly accessible and affordable to people of all countries,” Xi said.
Chinese vaccines developed by Sinopharm, Sinovac and CanSino have already been produced in countries that have signed up to its Belt and Road Initiative, including Brazil, the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia.
Xi insisted that vaccines were global public goods and promised to provide more help for developing countries to overcome the pandemic and seek broader global co-operation in public health and traditional medicine.
Additional reporting by Nian Liu in Beijing
Financial Times
4/20/2021
Heartbeat can help detect signs of consciousness in patients after a coma
A novel diagnostic method for patients with disorders of consciousness
A new study conducted jointly by the University of Liege (Belgium) and the Ecole normale superieure - PSL (France) shows that heart brain interactions, measured using electroencephalography (EEG), provide a novel diagnostic avenue for patients with disorders of consciousness. This study is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Catherine Tallon-Baudry (ENS, CNRS) introduces : "The scientific community already knew that in healthy participants, the brain's response to heartbeats is related to perceptual, bodily and self-consciousness. We now show that we can obtain clinically meaningful information if we probe this interaction in patients with disorders of consciousness." In the past decades several important improvements for the diagnosis of these patients have been made, yet, it remains a big challenge to measure self-consciousness in these patients that cannot communicate.
For their study, the researchers included 68 patients with a disorder of consciousness. Fifty-five patients suffered from the minimally conscious state, and showed fluctuating but consistent signs of consciousness but were unable to communicate, and 13 patients in the unresponsive wakefulness state (previously called vegetative state) who do not show any behavioural sign of awareness. These patients were diagnosed using the coma recovery scale-revised, a standardized clinical test to assess conscious behaviour.
"As these patients suffered from severe brain injury, they might be unable to show behavioural signs of awareness. Therefore, we also based our diagnosis on the brain's metabolism as probe for consciousness. This is a state-of-the art neuroimaging technique that helps to improve the diagnosis of patients with disorders of consciousness. Although these scans are very informative, they can only be acquired in specialized centers," says Jitka Annen (GIGA Consciousness, ULiege).
The researchers recorded brain activity during resting state (i.e. without specific task or stimulation). They selected EEG segments right after a heartbeat and EEG segments at random timepoints (i.e. not time-locked to a heartbeat). They then used machine learning algorithms to classify (or diagnose) patients into the two diagnostic groups.
Diego Candia-Rivera (ENS) further comments: "EEG segments not locked to heartbeats were informative to predict if a patient was conscious or not, but EEG segments locked to heartbeats were more accurate in doing so. Our results indicate that the heartbeat evoked potential can give us supplementary evidence for the presence of consciousness."
It is important to note that the heartbeat evoked responses were more in accordance with the diagnosis based on brain metabolism than the diagnosis based on behavioural assessment. It seems therefore that the heartbeat evoked response can be used to measure a perspective of self-consciousness that is not assessed successfully using behavioural tools.
"The next challenge is to translate our findings to clinical applications so that all patients with disorders of consciousness can benefit from better diagnosis using widely available bedside assessment technologies," concludes Steven Laureys, head of GIGA Consciousness research unit and Centre du Cerveau (ULiege, CHU Liege).
###
Trajectories of Opioid Use Following First Opioid Prescription in Opioid-Naive Youths and Young Adults
QuestionWhat patterns of opioid prescribing exist following the first opioid prescription in a cohort of opioid-naive youths (aged 10-21 years)?
FindingsIn this cohort study including 189 477 youths, there were 2 distinct trajectories; and 65.3% of patients in the high-risk trajectory group filled opioids at 12 months compared with 13.1% in the low-risk trajectory. Differences between the 2 trajectories persisted beyond 12 months, with a greater proportion of both opioid fills and opioid use disorder diagnoses in the high-risk group.
MeaningAmong the highest-risk trajectory, even short and low-dose opioid prescriptions were associated with increased risk of persistent opioid use.
Abstract
ImportanceAlthough prescription opioids are the most common way adolescents and young adults initiate opioid use, many studies examine population-level risks following the first opioid prescription. There is currently a lack of understanding regarding how patterns of opioid prescribing following the first opioid exposure may be associated with long-term risks.
ObjectiveTo identify distinct patterns of opioid prescribing following the first prescription using group-based trajectory modeling and examine the patient-, clinician-, and prescription-level factors that may be associated with trajectory membership during the first year.
Design, Setting, and ParticipantsThis cohort study examined Pennsylvania Medicaid enrollees’ claims data from 2010 through 2016. Participants were aged 10 to 21 years at time of first opioid prescription. Data analysis was performed in March 2020.
Main Outcomes and MeasuresThis study used group-based trajectory modeling and defined trajectory status by opioid fill.
ResultsAmong the 189 477 youths who received an initial opioid prescription, 107 562 were female (56.8%), 81 915 were non-Latinx White (59.6%), and the median age was 16.9 (interquartile range [IQR], 14.6-18.8) years. During the subsequent year, 47 477 (25.1%) received at least one additional prescription. Among the models considered, the 2-group trajectory model had the best fit. Of those in the high-risk trajectory, 65.3% (n = 901) filled opioid prescriptions at month 12, in contrast to 13.1% (n = 6031) in the low-risk trajectory. Median age among the high-risk trajectory was 19.0 years (IQR, 17.1-20.0 years) compared with the low-risk trajectory (17.8 years [IQR, 15.8-19.4 years]). The high-risk trajectory received more potent prescriptions compared with the low-risk trajectory (median dosage of the index month for high-risk trajectory group: 10.0 MME/d [IQR, 5.0-21.2 MME/d] vs the low-risk trajectory group: 4.7 MME/d [IQR, 2.5-7.8 MME/d]; P < .001). The trajectories showed persistent differences with more youths in the high-risk trajectory going on to receive a diagnosis of opioid use disorder (30.0%; n = 412) compared with the low-risk group (10.1%; n = 4638) (P < .001).
Conclusions and RelevanceThis study’s results identified 2 trajectories associated with elevated risk for persistent opioid receipt within 12 months following first opioid prescription. The high-risk trajectory was characterized by older age at time of first prescription, and longer and more potent first prescriptions. These findings suggest even short and low-dose opioid prescriptions can be associated with risks of persistent use for
New data could inform youth-focused pandemic messaging
Polls of people aged 14 to 24 about masks, distancing and more show the importance of focusing communications on protecting others
Now that teens and young adults across the country account for an increasing share of COVID-19 cases, and many have become eligible for vaccination, several recently published studies based on polls of this age group provide insights into the kinds of messaging that might work best for both preventing transmission and vaccine uptake.
Using data from text-message polls of people between the ages of 14 and 24 taken at several points in 2020, researchers from the University of Michigan find a clear theme: that most young people are taking COVID-19 seriously and trying to follow public health guidance, and that many of them they are motivated by the desire to protect others.
The latest paper, in the Journal of Adolescent Health's May issue, finds that 86% of young people are moderately or very concerned about spreading COVID-19. The data come from the MyVoice poll, which allows open-ended answers to questions texted to a national sample of young people.
At the time the poll was taken, 89% said they wear masks or other face coverings all or most of the time - and the most common reason they gave was to prevent themselves from spreading the coronavirus.
But nearly 20% said that they made exceptions when they were near people they considered close contacts or part of their "pod," and 16% said they based their mask-wearing behavior on social cues, such as whether they felt they could trust that the people they were with had been cautious about potential sources of exposure.
Melissa DeJonckheere, Ph.D., the first author of the paper and an assistant professor in U-M's Department of Family Medicine, says, "By and large, youth thought they were doing the right thing and following face covering guidelines, even when making exceptions. At the time our data were collected, youth were engaged and concerned about their impact on others, and overall wanted to do their part."
Kao-Ping Chua, M.D., Ph.D., senior author and an assistant professor of pediatrics, says that the findings have implications for improving messaging to young people around COVID-19 vaccination, as well as mask use. "Public health campaigns should leverage youths' desire to protect others and not be the cause of spread. Youth may not be very strongly motivated to get a vaccine to protect themselves. A message like "Get a vaccine to protect your grandparents" might be more effective."
Two other recent MyVoice papers found similarly high percentages of youth reported following rules about social distancing for the most part, but making exceptions for close contacts including situations where young people seemed to be misinterpreting public health guidance. Protecting others was cited as the most common motivation for distancing and following other guidance.
Brazil prostitutes strike for first-line Covid shots Prostitutes in the city of Belo Horizonte in southeast Brazil have gone on strike for a week, demanding to be included in the group of front-line workers receiving priority coronavirus vaccines
Thousands of sex workers in the city have been forced by pandemic-related closure of hotels -- where they rented rooms to sell their services -- to solicit for clients on the street, they say.
"We are in the front line, moving the economy and we are at risk," Cida Vieira, president of the Association of Prostitutes of Minas Gerais state, told AFP. "We need to get vaccinated."
Vieira and other women held a protest Monday in a street lined with shuttered hotels where they used to ply their trade, waving placards declaring: "Sex workers are professionals" and "Sex work and health."
"We are part of the priority group because we deal with various types of people and our lives are at risk," said Lucimara Costa, one of the protesting prostitutes.
The government has prioritized health workers, teachers, the elderly, indigenous people and people with underlying health conditions for the first vaccination round.
It hopes to vaccinate these priority groups, some 77 million people, in the first half of 2021, but experts say this may drag into September due to the shortage of doses.
"We are a priority group, we are health educators, peer educators. We form part of that group, since we give information about STIs for men, distribute condoms..." said Vieira.
Like the rest of Brazil, Minas Gerais state has been battling a second pandemic wave, but the number of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, at 121, is among the lowest in the country.
The Covid-19 pandemic has claimed more than 332,000 lives in Brazil, a toll second only to the United States.
mel/js/mlr/caw AFP 2021-04-07
Hubble celebrates 31st birthday with giant star on the edge of destruction
IMAGE: IN CELEBRATION OF THE 31ST ANNIVERSARY OF THE LAUNCH OF THE NASA/ESA HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE, ASTRONOMERS AIMED THE CELEBRATED OBSERVATORY AT ONE OF THE BRIGHTEST STARS SEEN IN OUR GALAXY... view more
CREDIT: NASA, ESA AND STSCI
The giant star featured in this latest Hubble Space Telescope anniversary image is waging a tug-of-war between gravity and radiation to avoid self-destruction. The star, called AG Carinae, is surrounded by an expanding shell of gas and dust -- a nebula -- that is shaped by the powerful winds of the star. The nebula is about five light-years wide, which equals the distance from here to our nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
The huge structure was created from one or more giant eruptions several thousand years ago. The star's outer layers were blown into space, the expelled material amounting to roughly 10 times the mass of our Sun. These outbursts are typical in the life of a rare breed of star called a Luminous Blue Variable (LBV), a brief unstable phase in the short life of an ultra-bright, glamorous star that lives fast and dies young. These stars are among the most massive and brightest stars known. They live for only a few million years, compared to the roughly 10-billion-year lifetime of our own Sun. AG Carinae is a few million years old and resides 20 000 light-years away inside our Milky Way galaxy. The star's expected lifetime is between 5 million and 6 million years.
LBVs have a dual personality. They appear to spend years in semi-quiescent bliss and then they erupt in a petulant outburst, during which their luminosity increases -- sometimes by several orders of magnitude. These behemoths are stars in the extreme, far different from normal stars like our Sun. In fact AG Carinae is estimated to be up to 70 times more massive than our Sun and shines with the blinding brilliance of 1 million suns.
Major outbursts such as the one that produced the nebula featured in this image occur a few times during a LBV's lifetime. A LBV star only casts off material when it is in danger of self-destruction. Because of their massive forms and super-hot temperatures, luminous blue variable stars like AG Carinae are in a constant battle to maintain stability. It's an arm-wrestling contest between radiation pressure from within the star pushing outward and gravity pressing inward. This arm-wrestling match results in the star's expanding and contracting. The outward pressure occasionally wins the battle, and the star expands to such an immense size that it blows off its outer layers, like a volcano erupting. But this outburst only happens when the star is on the verge of coming apart. After the star ejects the material, it contracts to its normal (large) size, settles back down, and becomes stable again.
LBV stars are rare: fewer than 50 are known among the galaxies in our local group of neighbouring galaxies. These stars spend tens of thousands of years in this phase, a blink of an eye in cosmic time. Some are expected to end their lives in titanic supernova blasts, which enrich the Universe with the heavier elements beyond iron.
Like many other LBVs, AG Carinae remains unstable. It has experienced lesser outbursts that have not been as powerful as the one that created the present nebula. Although AG Carinae is semi-quiescient now, its searing radiation and powerful stellar wind (streams of charged particles) have been shaping the ancient nebula, sculpting intricate structures as outflowing gas slams into the slower-moving outer nebula. The wind is travelling at up to 1 million kilometres per hour, about 10 times faster than the expanding nebula. Over time, the hot wind catches up with the cooler expelled material, ploughs into it, and pushes it farther away from the star. This "snowplough" effect has cleared a cavity around the star.
The red material is glowing hydrogen gas laced with nitrogen gas. The diffuse red material at upper left pinpoints where the wind has broken through a tenuous region of material and swept it into space. The most prominent features, highlighted in blue, are filamentary structures shaped like tadpoles and lopsided bubbles. These structures are dust clumps illuminated by the star's light. The tadpole-shaped features, most prominent at left and bottom, are denser dust clumps that have been sculpted by the stellar wind. Hubble's sharp vision reveals these delicate-looking structures in great detail.
The image was taken in visible and ultraviolet light. Hubble is ideally suited for observations in ultraviolet light because this wavelength range can only be viewed from space.
###
More information:
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.
Each year in the month of April, ESA/Hubble uses the telescope's anniversary as an opportunity to develop special initiatives to engage and involve the public in this annual milestone. You can explore all of the ESA/Hubble 31st Anniversary initiatives that have been and will be announced here: ESAHubble.org/Hubble31. You can engage with ESA/Hubble's 31st anniversary activities on social media using #Hubble31.
The observations were conducted as part of the Hubble observing program 16434 (PI: Christopher Britt). They were taken with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 UVIS channel.
As Hubble celebrates it's 31st year of operations, below are some captivating facts about the famous observatory's achievements and impact:
Launched on 24 April 1990, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has made more than 1.5 million observations of about 48 000 celestial objects.
In its 31-year lifetime, the telescope has racked up more than 181 000 orbits around our planet, totaling over 7.2 billion kilometres.
Hubble observations have produced more than 169 terabytes of data, which are available to present and future generations of researchers.
Astronomers using Hubble data have published more than 18 000 scientific papers, with more than 900 of those papers published in 2020.
VR visualization supports research on molecular networks
A new VR platform enables the display of huge amounts of data. This can be helpful in the study of rare genetic defects, among other things.
CEMM RESEARCH CENTER FOR MOLECULAR MEDICINE OF THE AUSTRIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
IMAGE: GREEN-SCREEN COMPOSITION SHOWING A USER IMMERSED IN THE GENOME-SCALE MOLECULAR INTERACTION NETWORK. view more
CREDIT: SEBASTIAN PIRCH, PUBLISHED IN NATURE COMMUNICATIONS 2021.
Networks offer a powerful way to visualize and analyze complex systems. However, depending on the size and complexity of the network, many visualizations are limited. Protein interactions in the human body constitute such a complex system that can hardly be visualized. Jörg Menche, Adjunct Principal Investigator at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Professor at the University of Vienna and research group leader at Max Perutz Labs (Uni Wien/MedUni), and his team developed an immersive virtual reality (VR) platform that solves this problem. With the help of VR visualization of protein interactions, it will be possible in the future to better recognize correlations and identify those genetic aberrations that are responsible for rare diseases.
The larger and more complex networks are, the more difficult their visualization on the screen becomes. Conventional computer programs quickly reach their limits. This challenge was addressed by network scientist Jörg Menche and his research group at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. They developed a VR platform for exploring huge amounts of data and their complex interplay in a uniquely intuitive fashion.
The body as a network
The representation of complex data can be particularly important in the search for the cause of rare diseases, because the human body, with its approximately 20,000 proteins that are encoded in the human genome and interact with each other, represents a huge complex network. Whether movement or digestion - at the molecular level, all biological processes are based on the interaction between proteins. If the protein interactions are illustrated in a network, a barely representable picture of about 18,000 dots - proteins - and about 300,000 lines between these dots will be created. Menche and his research group used the virtual reality (VR) platform they developed to make this image "readable" and, in collaboration with St. Anna Children's Cancer Research, succeeded in making the entirety of protein interactions visible for the first time. This makes it possible to interactively explore the vast and complex network.
Approaching the cause of rare immune diseases
For their study, published in Nature Communications, first author Sebastian Pirch and Menche's research group identified connection patterns between different protein complexes in the human body and linked them to their biological functions. In addition, the scientists used global databases to identify specific protein complexes associated with a particular disease. "While conventional forms of representation would look like a proverbial 'hairball', the 3-dimensional representation enables the precise analysis and observation of the different protein complexes and their interactions," says study author Pirch. This can be particularly important in the identification of rare genetic defects and crucial for therapeutic measures. "On the one hand, our study represents an important proof of concept of our VR platform; on the other hand, it directly demonstrates the enormous potential of visualizing molecular networks," says project leader Menche. "Especially in rare diseases, severe immune diseases, protein complexes associated with specific clinical symptoms can be analyzed in more detail to develop hypotheses about their respective pathobiological mechanisms. This facilitates the approach to disease causes and subsequently the search for targeted therapeutic measures."
About the VR platform
The platform developed by Menche's research group is designed for maximum flexibility and extensibility. Key features include the import of user-defined code for data analysis, easy integration of external databases, and a high degree of design freedom for arbitrary elements of user interfaces. The researchers were able to draw on technology normally used in the development of 3D computer games, such as the globally popular game Fortnite. By publishing the source code, the researchers hope to convince other developers of the potential of virtual reality for analyzing scientific data.
###
The study "VRNetzer: A Virtual Reality Network Analysis Platform" was published in the journal Nature Communications on April 23, 2021. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22570-w.
Authors: Sebastian Pirch, Felix Müller, Eugenia Iofinova, Julia Pazmandi, Christiane V. R. Hütter, Martin Chiettini, Celine Sin, Kaan Boztug, Iana Podkosova, Hannes Kaufmann & Jörg Menche
Funding: This work was supported by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) through projects VRG15-005 and NXT19-008, and by an Epic MegaGrant.
Jörg Menche studied physics in Leipzig, Recife and Berlin. He did his PhD with Reinhard Lipowsky at the Max-Planck-Institute for Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam (Germany), and was a postdoctoral fellow with Albert-László Barabási at Northeastern University and at the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. He joined CeMM in 2015 as a Principal Investigator. In September 2020, he received a joint professorship at the Max Perutz Labs and the Faculty of Mathematics of the University of Vienna, and became CeMM Adjunct PI.
The mission of CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences is to achieve maximum scientific innovation in molecular medicine to improve healthcare. At CeMM, an international and creative team of scientists and medical doctors pursues free-minded basic life science research in a large and vibrant hospital environment of outstanding medical tradition and practice. CeMM's research is based on post-genomic technologies and focuses on societally important diseases, such as immune disorders and infections, cancer and metabolic disorders. CeMM operates in a unique mode of super-cooperation, connecting biology with medicine, experiments with computation, discovery with translation, and science with society and the arts. The goal of CeMM is to pioneer the science that nurtures the precise, personalized, predictive and preventive medicine of the future. CeMM trains a modern blend of biomedical scientists and is located at the campus of the General Hospital and the Medical University of Vienna. http://www.cemm.at
The Max Perutz Labs are a research institute established by the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna to provide an environment for excellent, internationally recognized research and education in the field of Molecular Biology. Dedicated to a mechanistic understanding of fundamental biomedical processes, scientists at the Max Perutz Labs aim to link breakthroughs in basic research to advances in human health. The Max Perutz Labs are located at the Vienna BioCenter, one of Europe's hotspots for Life Sciences, and host around 50 research groups, involving more than 450 scientists and staff from 40 nations. http://www.maxperutzlabs.ac.at
St. Anna CCRI is an internationally renowned multidisciplinary research institution with the aim to develop and optimize diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic strategies for the treatment of children and adolescents with cancer. To achieve this goal, it combines basic research with translational and clinical research and focus on the specific characteristics of childhood tumor diseases in order to provide young patients with the best possible and most innovative therapies. Dedicated research groups in the fields of tumor genomics and epigenomics, immunology, molecular biology, cell biology, bioinformatics and clinical research are working together to harmonize scientific findings with the clinical needs of physicians to ultimately improve the wellbeing of our patients. http://www.ccri.at, http://www.kinderkrebsforschung.at
