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)
Thursday, July 06, 2023
Internet searches for self-managed abortion after Roe v Wade overturned
About The Study: This study used Google Trends data to estimate public interest in self-managed abortions and whether this interest differs depending on the legality of abortion in a state.
Authors: Sean D. Young, Ph.D., of the University of California, Irvine, is the corresponding author.
Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.
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IMAGE: AN UNFLANGED MIGRANT ORANGUTAN MALE (ON THE LEFT SIDE) AND AN ADOLESCENT LOCAL ORANGUTAN FEMALE (ON THE RIGHT SIDE) ARE PEERING AT EACH OTHER. ORANGUTAN SPECIES: PONGO ABELIIview more
Orangutans are dependent on their mothers longer than any other non-human animal, nursing until they are at least six years old and living with her for up to three years more, learning how to find, choose, and process the exceedingly varied range of foods they eat. But how do orangutans that have left their mothers and now live far from their natal ranges, where the available foods may be very different, decide what to eat and figure out how to eat it? Now, an international team of authors has shown that in such cases, migrants follow the rule ‘observe, and do as the locals do’. The results are published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
“Here we show evidence that migrant orangutan males use observational social learning to learn new ecological knowledge from local individuals after dispersing to a new area,” said Julia Mörchen, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the University of Leipzig, in Germany, and the study’s lead author. “Our results suggest that migrant males not only learn where to find food and what to feed on from locals, but also continue to learn how to process these new foods.”
Mörchen and colleagues showed that migrant males learn this information through a behavior called ‘peering’: intensely observing for at least five seconds and from within two meters at a role model. Typically, peering orangutans faced the role model and showed signs of following his or her actions with head movements, indicating attentive interest.
Male orangutans migrate to another area after becoming independent, while females tend to settle close to their natal home range.
“What we don’t yet know is how far orangutan males disperse, or where they disperse to. But it’s possible to make informed guesses: genetic data and observations of orangutans crossing physical barriers such as rivers and mountains suggest long-distance dispersal, likely over tens of kilometers,” said Mörchen.
“This implies that during migration, males likely come across several habitat types and thus experience a variety of faunistic compositions, especially when crossing through habitats of different altitudes. Over evolutionary time, being able to quickly adapt to novel environments by attending to crucial information from locals, likely provided individuals with a survival advantage. As a result, this ability is likely ancestral in our hominin lineage, reaching back at least between 12 and 14 million years to the last common ancestor we share with orangutans.”
The authors analyzed 30 years of observations, collected by 157 trained observers, on 77 migrant adult males of the highly sociable Sumatran orangutan Pongo abelii at the Suaq Balimbing research station in Southwest Aceh, and 75 adult migrant males of the less sociable Bornean orangutan Pongo pygmaeus wurmbii at the Tuanan station in Central Kalimantan. They focused on every observation of peering behavior during 4,009 occasionswhen these males were within 50 meters of one or more neighbors, who could be adult females, juveniles, or adult males.
Peering by males was observed 534 times, occurring in 207 (5.2%) of these associations. In Suaq Balimbing, males most frequently peered at local females followed by at local juveniles, and least at adult males. In the less sociable population of Tuanan, the opposite held: males most frequently peered at adult males followed by immature orangutans, and least at adult females. Migrant males at Tuanan may lack opportunities to peer at local females, as females are known to avoid long associations with them in this population.
Migrant males then interacted more frequently with the peered-at food afterwards, putting into practice what they learned through peering.
“Our detailed analyses further showed that the migrant orangutan males in our study peered most frequently at food items that are difficult to process, or which are only rarely eaten by the locals: including foods that were only ever recorded to be eaten for a couple of minutes, throughout the whole study time,” said Dr Anja Widdig, a professor at the University of Leipzig and co-senior author of the study.
“Interestingly, the peering rates of migrant males decreased after a couple of months in the new area, which implies that this is how long it takes them to learn about new foods,” added Dr Caroline Schuppli, a group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, and co-senior author.
The authors cautioned that it’s still unknown how many times adult orangutans need to peer at a particular behavior to learn to master it. Observations suggest that depending on the complexity or novelty of the learned skill, adults may still use explorative behaviors on certain food items they first learned about through peering – possibly to figure out more details, strengthen and memorize the new information, or to compare the latter with previous knowledge.
An unflanged migrant orangutan male feeding on leaves from a tree fern, Akar Pakis Sarang Burung (Drynaria sparsisora). Orangutan species: Pongo abelii
CREDIT
Julia Mörchen, SUAQ Project, www.suaq.org
A flanged migrant orangutan male feeding on Rotan Tikus leaves (Flagellaria indica), Orangutan species: Pongo abelii
CREDIT
Guilhem Duvot, SUAQ Project, www.suaq.org
An unflanged migrant orangutan male feeding on Rotan Tikus leaves (Flagellaria indica) Orangutan species: Pongo abelii
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS HEALTH SCIENCE CENTER AT HOUSTON
IMAGE: UTHEALTH HOUSTON RESEARCHERS OBSERVED AS A BRAIN TUMOR PATIENT, WHO IS ALSO A MUSICIAN, UNDERWENT AN AWAKE CRANIOTOMY WHILE PLAYING A MINI-KEYBOARD PIANO.view more
CREDIT: PHOTO PROVIDED BY ELLIOT MURPHY, PHD
Distinct, though neighboring, areas of the brain are activated when processing music and language, with specific sub-regions engaged for simple melodies versus complex melodies, and for simple versus complex sentences, according to research from UTHealth Houston.
The study, led by co-first authors Meredith McCarty, PhD candidate in the Vivian L. Smith Department of Neurosurgery with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, and Elliot Murphy, PhD, postdoctoral research fellow in the department, was published recently in iScience. Nitin Tandon, MD, professor and chair ad interim of the department in the medical school, was senior author.
The research team used the opportunity provided during an awake craniotomy on a young musician with a tumor in the brain regions involved in language and music. The patient heard music and played a mini-keyboard piano to map his musical skills, heard and repeated sentences and heard descriptions of objects that he then named to map his language. Musical sequences were melodic or not melodic and differed in complexity, while auditory recordings of sentences differed in syntactic complexity.
Direct brain recordings with electrodes placed on the brain surface mapped out the location and characteristics of brain activity during music and language. Small currents were passed into the brain to localize regions critical for language and music perception and production.
"This allowed us not just to obtain novel insights into the neurobiology of music in the brain, but to enable us to protect these functions while performing a safe, maximal resection of the tumor,” said Tandon, the Nancy, Clive and Pierce Runnels Distinguished Chair in Neuroscience of the Vivian L. Smith Center for Neurologic Research and the BCMS Distinguished Professor in Neurological Disorders and Neurosurgery with McGovern Medical School and a member of the Texas Institute for Restorative Neurotechnologies (TIRN) at UTHealth Houston.
“If we look purely at basic brain activation profiles for music and language, they often look pretty similar, but that’s not the full story,” said McCarty, who is also a graduate research assistant at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Houston Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and a member of TIRN. “Once we look closer at how they assemble small parts into larger structures, some striking neural differences can be detected.”
Language and music involve the productive combination of basic units into structures. However, researchers wanted to study whether brain regions sensitive to linguistic and musical structure are co-localized, or exist in the same physical space.
“The unparalleled, high resolution of intracranial electrodes allows us to ask the kinds of questions about music and language processing that cognitive scientists have long awaited answers for, but were unable to address with traditional neuroimaging methods,” said Murphy, a member of TIRN. “This work also truly highlights the generosity of patients who work closely with researchers during their stay at the hospital.”
Overall, they found shared temporal lobe activity for music and language, but when examining features of melodic complexity and grammatical complexity, they discovered different temporal lobe sites to be engaged. Therefore, music and language activation at the basic level is shared, however when the researchers examined comparing basic melodies vs. complex melodies, or simple sentences versus complex sentences, different areas show distinct sensitivities.
Specifically, cortical stimulation mapping of the posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG) disrupted music perception and production, along with speech production. The pSTG and posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) activated for language and music. While pMTG activity was modulated by musical complexity, pSTG activity was modulated by syntactic complexity.
Tandon resected the patient’s mid-temporal lobe tumor at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center. At his four-month follow-up, the patient was confirmed to have fully preserved musical and language function, without evidence of deterioration.
The study was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NS098981), part of the National Institutes of Health.
Co-authors on the study included Xavier Scherschligt; Oscar Woolnough, PhD; Cale Morse; and Kathryn Snyder, all with the Vivian L. Smith Department of Neurosurgery at McGovern Medical School and TIRN. Tandon is also a faculty member at the MD Anderson UTHealth Houston Graduate School, and Snyder is a student at the school. Bradford Mahon, PhD, with the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, also contributed.
THE ALLIANCE OF BIOVERSITY INTERNATIONAL AND THE INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR TROPICAL AGRICULTURE
IMAGE: STUDY LEAD AUTHOR PAUL SOREMI IN THE FIELD.view more
CREDIT: MARIA FERNANDA ALVAREZ
Livestock, the petroleum industry and landfills are all leading producers of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. But another significant but less well known contributor is one of the world’s most popular crops: rice. Rice plants transport methane from the flooded rice field into the atmosphere. A new paper from researchers at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT has found that it is possible to lower emissions by developing new varieties of rice.
According to the World Bank, rice farming is responsible for 10% of global methane emissions and is also a contributor to nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide emissions. Despite this, greenhouse gas emissions from rice systems, particularly in the Latin America and the Caribbean region, has been a largely untapped research area for the reduction of global emissions.
The team explored the genetic influences on methane emissions and highlighted the need to exploit and further develop hybrids that take advantage of differences in roots and other above-ground plant anatomy on methane emissions.
María Fernanda Álvarez, rice programme leader at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT and one of the authors of the paper, explained that although the higher yielding hybrids they studied have a higher absolute methane emissions than current varieties, they produce similar methane per grain of rice. This implies that by adopting rice hybrids, farmers can achieve food security goals without significantly increasing the methane emission per grain of rice compared to lower yielding varieties.
“We must acknowledge that it's not easy to reduce methane emissions and maintain productive rice systems, but our results suggest that there is hope,” Álvarez said.
Reducing Rice Emissions
When soil is flooded, as in rice production, this produces low-oxygen (anaerobic) conditions in which methane-producing bacteria thrive.
The rice plant uses aerenchyma, a spongy chimney-like plant tissue, to allow oxygen to move down into the roots and the methane-producing bacteria in the soil are using the same tube to send methane up into the atmosphere.
Paul Abayomi S. Soremi, the paper’s first author and currently a lecturer at the Federal University of Agriculture in Abeokuta, Nigeria, explained that under submerged conditions, the roots of plants in general and rice in particular are responsible for taking up and expelling gasses, including methane.
“The challenges to decrease methane emission through the expression of aerenchyma include the non-availability of adequate and up-to-date equipment to characterize aerenchyma, huge consumables requirement and inadequate human capacity,” he said, “This requires huge financial investment.”
Soremi explained that this aspect of methane transfer has not been fully investigated.
“There is a dearth of appropriate information on the optimization of aerenchyma to decrease methane emission under submerged conditions,” he said.
A Lower Emissions Future
Ngonidzashe Chirinda, a professor of sustainable tropical agriculture at Morroco’s Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, a co-author of the paper and an expert in the greenhouse gas impact of agriculture said that further research into the physiology of the plants was needed to develop the next generation of low-emissions varieties.
Chirinda explains that while there are no “silver bullets” when it comes to rice farming emissions, the hope is to get community buy-in and even potentially certify the emissions reductions in the future so that farmers are compensated for lowering emissions while maintaining or increasing their harvest.
“To scale up, you need to incentivise the farmers to implement the good practices and if you can get a rice that is low emitting, but high yielding, they can achieve both goals,” Chirinda said, “Everyone wins: the farmer wins, the environment wins and the future wins.”
IMAGE: CONVERSION OF Β-PINENE INTO PARACETAMOL AND IBUPROFENview more
CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF BATH
Common drugs such as paracetamol and ibuprofen can be made from a chemical from pine trees instead of crude oil products.
Turpentine is a waste product from the paper industry and is usually burned to generate energy.
Around 350,000 tonnes of turpentine is generated in the world – enough to supply the global demand for paracetamol and ibuprofen (~100,000 tonnes).
New method converts one of the components of turpentine (β-pinene) into a range of valuable chemical starting blocks for perfumes, plastics and pharmaceuticals including paracetamol and ibuprofen.
Turpentine is a biorenewable, sustainable starting material that could replace crude oil products, and is not subject to price fluctuations of crude oil.
A team of scientists, from the University of Bath’s Department of Chemistry and Institute for Sustainability have found a way to create two of the world’s most common painkillers, paracetamol and ibuprofen, out of a compound found in pine trees, which is also a waste product from the paper industry.
It is perhaps not widely known that many common pharmaceuticals are manufactured using chemical precursors derived from crude oil, presenting a niche sustainability challenge as the world targets Net Zero.
The research team from Bath has developed a method of creating a range of pharmaceutical precursors from biorenewable β-pinene, a component of turpentine which is a waste by-product from the paper industry (annual production >350,000 tonnes).
They successfully converted β-pinene into two everyday painkillers, paracetamol and ibuprofen, which are produced on ~100,000 tonne scales annually.
They also successfully synthesised a range of other precursor chemicals from turpentine, including 4-HAP (4-hydroxyacetophenone), which is the precursor of drugs including beta-blockers and the asthma inhaler drug, salbutamol, as well as others widely used for perfumes and in cleaning products.
They hope that this more sustainable “biorefinery” approach could replace the need for crude oil products in the chemical industry.
Dr Josh Tibbetts, Research Associate in the University’s Department of Chemistry, said: “Using oil to make pharmaceuticals is unsustainable – not only is it contributing to rising CO2 emissions, but the price fluctuates dramatically as we are greatly dependent on the geopolitical stability of countries with large oil-reserves, and it is only going to get more expensive.
“Instead of extracting more oil from the ground, we want to replace this in the future with a ‘bio-refinery’ model.
“Our turpentine-based biorefinery model uses waste chemical by-products from the paper industry to produce a spectrum of valuable, sustainable chemicals that can be used in a wide range of applications from perfumes to paracetamol.”
Instead of putting chemicals in a large reactor to create separate batches of product, the method uses continuous flow reactors, meaning production can be uninterrupted and easier to scale up.
Whilst the process in its current form may be more expensive than using oil-based feedstocks, consumers may be prepared to pay a slightly higher price for more sustainable pharmaceuticals that are completely plant-derived.
The research, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, is published in the journal ChemSusChem. https://doi.org/10.1002/cssc.202300670
Biorenewable paracetamol produced by the team.
CREDIT
University of Bath
Flow reactor used in the synthesis of paracetamol where starting materials are flowed through in a continuous process to give a constant stream of products.
A new study finds that most phosphorus stakeholders – representing a wide swath of industry, agriculture, environmental and policy interests – have significant doubts about the long-term sustainability of existing phosphorus management systems. The study underscores the complex challenges facing policymakers and other decision-makers as they attempt to ensure our continued access to a critical resource that is finite and largely non-renewable.
Phosphorus is a naturally occurring element which is used in a wide variety of industrial sectors. For example, phosphorus is a key ingredient in agricultural fertilizers, contributing to food production on a global scale. However, phosphorus runoff also contributes to major water quality issues, such as the formation of oxygen-free “dead zones.”
“From an industry standpoint, the fertilizer, agriculture, mining, food processing and chemical manufacturing sectors all have a stake in phosphorus – it’s an incredibly important resource,” says Khara Grieger, corresponding author of the study and an assistant professor of environmental health and risk assessment at North Carolina State University. “Phosphorus stakeholders also include policymakers, wastewater treatment facilities and environmental groups who are concerned about the adverse impacts that mismanaged phosphorus has on our water quality.
“If we want to develop systems and policies that ensure long-term sustainability of phosphorus resources, we have to understand the needs, wants and concerns of relevant stakeholders,” Grieger says. “However, to date, very little has been done to understand and document how phosphorus stakeholders view phosphorus sustainability or what challenges they perceive related to ensuring sustainable phosphorus systems more broadly.”
To address this lack of information, the researchers collected survey data from 96 stakeholders involved in various aspects of phosphorus management. These study participants represent a wide variety of industry, environmental, agricultural and policy interests and have expertise in many different aspects of phosphorus management.
The researchers found that 30.2% of study participants felt that current practices regarding “the mining, use, transport, recovery, recycling or disposal of phosphorus and materials containing phosphorus” was completely unsustainable. Another 45.8% of study participants felt these practices were only slightly sustainable – which was one step up from unsustainable. Meanwhile, 14.6% felt that the practices were neither sustainable nor unsustainable, and only 4.2% of respondents felt the practices were “very sustainable.”
“If there are two key takeaway messages here, one of them is that there is very real concern among the majority of phosphorus stakeholders about the sustainability of this essential resource,” says Grieger, who is also a co-director of knowledge transfer of the National Science Foundation’s Science and Technologies for Phosphorus Sustainability (STEPS) Center headquartered at NC State. “The other takeaway is that there is no silver bullet for addressing this challenge – the needs and concerns across stakeholder groups are too varied and tend to be context and site-specific.”
However, when researchers asked study participants about what is needed to advance phosphorus sustainability, three items stood out.
“More than 50% of respondents reported that new, improved or different regulations are needed; improved management practices and procedures are needed; and new or improved technologies are needed,” Grieger says. “And the respondents who highlighted those three areas of need ran the gamut across interest groups.
“While the challenges here are thorny ones, we found this aspect of the study encouraging – because the STEPS Center is focused on addressing needs related to both technologies and management practices. And these results suggest there is support for our work in both areas.”
The paper, “What are stakeholder views and needs for achieving phosphorus sustainability?,” is published open access in the journal Environment Systems and Decisions. The paper was co-authored by Ashton Merck and Alison Deviney, who are both postdoctoral researchers at NC State; and by Anna Marshall: associate professor of sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
The work was done with support from the STEPS Center, which is a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center funded by NSF grant 2019435. The STEPS Center focuses on addressing phosphorus sustainability challenges by integrating research across the physical, life, social and economic sciences.
Researchers have been testing real-life Batman-style gadgets to eradicate moth pests from greenhouses, including bat-inspired flying drones that hunt down and destroy moths – but new research reveals that the noise from drones can alter moth flight behaviour.
“The idea of using drones as an alternative solution to eliminating moths all started in the bedroom of one of the co-owners of the PATS startup company,” says Dayo Jansen, a PhD student from student from Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands. “He was fed up with all the mosquitoes keeping him awake and he made a drone that hunts down mosquitoes.”
Building on this idea, PATS is now creating drones and other animal-inspired technology to eradicate moth pests from large-scale plant and crop greenhouses.
While the drones are effective at removing moths, new research by Mr Jansen shows that the noise of their flight affects the moth’s flying behaviours. “After analysing the sounds, we found that it produces ultrasound in the same range as a bat would be, the moth's natural predator,” says Mr Jansen. “Some moths still ignore the noise and get eliminated quickly, but for the moths that do get scared, we doubled down on the sound with our speakers by creating an environment where some of the moths would cease to fly.”
To detect when a moth is flying in the greenhouse, Mr Jansen uses an infrared camera that can differentiate the moths from other flying insects based on wingbeat frequency and size. “This makes sure we only attack moths and not the bumblebees that are used for pollination” he says. “The moment a moth flies into detection range, a drone will spin up and hunt the moth down.”
However, several moth species behave quite erratically in response to the drones. “I study these erratic responses and try to find ways to predict the moth’s actions in the future and let the drone move where the moth is bound to go,” says Mr Jansen.
Part of this research involves playing ultrasonic noises through speakers to influence the moth’s flight behaviour. “We find out what sound each moth species is most scared of, making them cease their flight as a whole,” says Mr Jansen. “We do this firstly by figuring out which bat hunts the moth species that we want to tackle and secondly, study the tympanic hearing organ of the moths to find the sounds that they’re most sensitive to.
During the experimental setup, when a moth enters the camera’s vision, the speaker plays bursts of ultrasound and the moth’s flight behaviour is tracked – this was repeated 850 times. The behaviour of the moths was then compared to control setups where the speakers would not play ultrasound after detecting the moths.
They found that the moth behaviours fell into an array of categories, from which diving to the ground was found to be most common, causing the moths to erratically fly into the crops instead of finding a partner for reproduction. “For certain moth species we found that this has the effect of them not even flying anymore and therefore quickly diminishing their flight activity in our systems,” explains Mr Jansen.
“It has become increasingly difficult to counter agricultural pests,” says Mr Jansen. “Due to climate change, newer pest species are being introduced in previously inhabitable areas, and monoculture has become a standard in a lot of greenhouses. Greenhouse owners tend to specialize on a singular crop which has the added risk that when a suitable pest species enters the greenhouse, it finds itself in pest heaven and reproduces uncontrollably fast.
The current way of dealing with greenhouse pest infestation is often to use a tremendous number of unsustainable pesticides, but these systems hope to drive development towards futuristic and bio-inspired solutions that make pesticides a thing of the past.
Currently, the camera vision recognition system (PATS-C) is available and currently active in around 250 greenhouses across Europe. The bat-inspired drone hunting system (PATS-X) is being trialled with first customers and is to be released by the end of 2023.
“With my research we aim to dive deep into some of the most common and harmful species in the European greenhouses and make sure our systems are ready for a tailored approach against them,” concludes Mr Jansen. “We hope to illustrate the positive effect that comes from bridging the gap between biologists, engineers and industry.”
