Excerpt:

>Google mobility data suggest that San Francisco has had one of the slowest returns to in-person work since the pandemic when compared to over 50 major metropolitan areas — and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change in 2023.

>Google’s reports, which they stopped publishing in October 2022, are based on data from anonymous Google users who have their “Location History” setting turned on in their account, so may not be representative of all users.

>Google uses its location tracking and map directions data to quantify the places people are visiting. Those places are lumped into categories like “workplaces,” which includes places like offices and production facilities, and “retail and recreation” places.

>Trips to workplaces in San Francisco were still nearly 40% lower in October 2022 than in January 2020, according to data from Google’s COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports.

>In mid-April 2020, time spent in the workplace plummeted to 70% of what it was at the beginning of the year for San Francisco. Despite some growth, time spent in the workplace among these Google users in San Francisco was still 37% lower than pre-pandemic times as of October 2022.

>Meanwhile, other cities like New York and Los Angeles are 31% and 28% below pre-pandemic, respectively.

> 

>San Francisco’s chief economist Ted Egan said “there’s probably a certain amount of ‘only in San Francisco’ phenomenon that’s keeping people away from the workplace.”

>Still, these hollowed-out office spaces could have a large impact on the city’s financial outlook considering that the city’s downtown is a large source of revenue for the city. In 2021, office work contributed to three-quarters of the city’s GDP, according to Egan.

>“Almost nowhere in San Francisco is sales tax recovery to where it was before the pandemic after you adjust for inflation and it’s particularly bad in downtown,” Egan said. “We’re missing office workers, we’re missing residents and we’re missing hotel guests who were usually customers to those businesses.”

Adriana Rezal, 11 Jan. 2023, the San Francisco Chronicle (Hearst)

Excerpt:

>The space rock, known as 2023 BU, zoomed over the southern tip of South America [on 26 Jan. 2023], while it was only around 2,200 miles above the surface of the Earth.

>This is one of the closest approaches of an near-Earth object ever recorded. Data from NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies showed that the flyby of 2023 BU was the fourth-nearest of more than 35,000 past and future Earth close approaches in the 300-year period from 1900 to 2200.

>As the asteroid flew past our planet, astronomer Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project (VTP) managed to capture some images.

>The VTP is a service provided by the Bellatrix Astronomical Observatory in Ceccano, Italy, that operates and provides access to robotic, remotely operated telescopes.

>"We managed to capture this extraordinary footage, showing such an extremely close and fast asteroid," Masi told Newsweek.

>Masi captured the images with the "Elena" robotic telescope unit, which is capable of tracking the very fast motion of asteroids flying past Earth.

>The images used to create the time-lapse video were captured when 2023 BU was around 13,600 miles above the surface of our planet.

Aristos Georgiou, 27 Jan. 2023, Newsweek (Marc Benioff)

Excerpt:

>TikTok is grappling with an increasingly real prospect of being banned in the United States. This wouldn’t just be a mostly performative prohibition of installing the app on federal or state government-owned devices.

>The ban TikTok is now facing would forbid its China-based parent company, ByteDance, from doing business in the United States, which would block Apple and Google from hosting the TikTok app in their app stores.

>It wouldn’t make it illegal for you, the consumer, to use TikTok. It would just make it much harder to do so.

>ByteDance is spending a lot of money trying to convince detractors that it doesn’t take marching orders from China and that it wouldn’t give the Chinese government US user data or influence US users.

> 

>The company has spent millions building up and expanding its Washington, DC, presence, and more than $1 billion on “Project Texas,” an effort to rebuild the app on US servers in order to wall it off from ByteDance and China as much as possible, while also promising several layers of independent oversight and transparency.

>Accordingly, TikTok is getting more aggressive about making Project Texas’s case to politicians, public interest groups, academics, and the media after years of lying low and quietly trying to work out a deal that CFIUS [Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States] still has yet to officially agree to.

>The company briefed think tanks in late January, while TikTok’s lobbyists have also “swarmed” lawmakers’ offices, and the company is currently hiring several people for communications and policy positions on a state and federal level, according to the New York Times.

>The only thing that may have grown faster than TikTok’s popularity in the US is the company’s DC presence.

> 

>ByteDance spent just $270,000 on federal lobbyists in 2019, a year when TikTok agreed to a settlement with the FTC over children’s privacy law violations for a then-record fine of $5.7 million and when lawmakers started to raise concerns over its ties to China.

>ByteDance and TikTok spent $2.61 million on federal lobbyists in 2020, hiring people with connections to Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike (some were former lawmakers themselves).

>That spending nearly doubled to $5.18 million in 2021, and grew again to about $5.5 million in 2022, according to publicly available data. In late 2021, TikTok signed a lease for its first DC office. In April 2022, it grabbed an additional floor.

>That October, it hired Jamal Brown, who was the press secretary for Biden’s presidential campaign and then the deputy press secretary for the Pentagon, as a policy communications director.

>While ByteDance has spent a lot on federal lobbying, some of its peers — Meta and Amazon, for instance — still spend a lot more. Meta, for instance, spent over $19.15 million on lobbying in 2022, and Amazon spent $21.38 million.

Sara Morrison, 26 Jan. 2023, Vox.com (Vox Media)

Findings in title quoted from the linked paper^1 in Nature Ecology & Evolution and an Italian-language summary^2 by ANSA news agency.

From the linked paper:^1

>Pleistocene archaeology records the changing behaviour and capacities of early hominins.

>These behavioural changes, for example, to stone tools, are commonly linked to environmental constraints.

>Simbiro III level C, in the upper Awash valley of Ethiopia, allows us to test this assumption in its assemblage of [575] stone tools made only with obsidian, dated to more than 1.2 million years (Myr) old.

>Following the deposition of an accumulation of obsidian cobbles by a meandering river, hominins began to exploit these in new ways, producing large tools with sharp cutting edges.

>We show through statistical analysis that this was a focused activity, that very standardized handaxes were produced and that this was a stone-tool workshop.

>We argue that at Simbiro III, hominins were doing much more than simply reacting to environmental changes; they were taking advantage of new opportunities, and developing new techniques and new skills according to them.

>[The 575 of 578] standardized obsidian handaxes provide ample evidence of the repetitive use of fully mastered skills.

>[The early hominins] creatively solved through convergent thinking technological problems such as effectively detaching and shaping large flakes of the unusually brittle and cutting volcanic glass.

^1 Mussi M., et al. A surge in obsidian exploitation more than 1.2 million years ago at Simbiro III (Melka Kunture, Upper Awash, Ethiopia). Nature Ecology & Evolution (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01970-1

^2 Officina artigianale di 1,2 mln di anni fa scoperta in Etiopia, 20 Jan. 2023, https://www.ansa.it/sardegna/notizie/2023/01/20/officina-artigianale-di-12-mln-di-anni-fa-scoperta-in-etiopia_9c0dda4f-c7f8-4fd4-9cbd-3fbce9af0a20.html

>kilkonie

>That means it's not plagiarism when I use its work as it's not an author. Nice!

Did you read the linked content? From it:

>AI writing software can amplify social biases like sexism and racism and has a tendency to produce “plausible bullshit” — incorrect information presented as fact. (See, for example, CNET’s recent use of AI tools to write articles. The publication later found errors in more than half of those published.)

>mrstubali

>More predictable behavior from goons who haven't been paid off yet.

>Ladies and gentlemen, the message of education and publisher racket: "Hey, don't reference where you actually got your information from." Dude we're in for a wild ride in the next 5-10 years.

In my excerpt comment, quoted from the linked content:

>Arguments against giving AI authorship is that software simply can’t fulfill the required duties, as Skipper and Nature Springer explain.

>“When we think of authorship of scientific papers, of research papers, we don’t just think about writing them,” says Skipper.

>“There are responsibilities that extend beyond publication, and certainly at the moment these AI tools are not capable of assuming those responsibilities.”

>Software cannot be meaningfully accountable for a publication, it cannot claim intellectual property rights for its work, and cannot correspond with other scientists and with the press to explain and answer questions on its work.

Further reading:

Tools such as ChatGPT threaten transparent science; here are our ground rules for their use, 24 Jan. 2023, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00191-1

James Vincent, 26 Jan. 2023, The Verge (Vox Media)

Excerpt:

>“We felt compelled to clarify our position: for our authors, for our editors, and for ourselves,” Magdalena Skipper, editor-in-chief of Springer Nature’s flagship publication, Nature, tells The Verge.

>“This new generation of LLM tools — including ChatGPT — has really exploded into the community, which is rightly excited and playing with them, but [also] using them in ways that go beyond how they can genuinely be used at present.”

>The company announced this week that software like ChatGPT can’t be credited as an author in papers published in its thousands of journals.

> 

>Arguments against giving AI authorship is that software simply can’t fulfill the required duties, as Skipper and Nature Springer explain.

>“When we think of authorship of scientific papers, of research papers, we don’t just think about writing them,” says Skipper.

>“There are responsibilities that extend beyond publication, and certainly at the moment these AI tools are not capable of assuming those responsibilities.”

>Software cannot be meaningfully accountable for a publication, it cannot claim intellectual property rights for its work, and cannot correspond with other scientists and with the press to explain and answer questions on its work.

>ChatGPT and earlier large language models (LLMs) have already been named as authors in a small number of published papers, pre-prints, and scientific articles.

Further reading:

Tools such as ChatGPT threaten transparent science; here are our ground rules for their use, 24 Jan. 2023, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00191-1

Findings in title quoted from the linked summary^1 about a paper^2 in The Economic Journal.

From the linked summary^1 released by the University of Copenhagen:

>The study minutely details the spread of 29 ground-breaking military technologies in all independent states in the period 1820-2010 (see box) as well as the form of government in these states.

>Based on statistical analysis of the data, the study establishes connections between states’ access to specific weapons, their economy and form of government.

>“In short, the more protesters a regime can kill using as few resources as possible, the stronger it will be.

>“But this is the first scientific study to show that regimes’ access to weapons do have a systematic, measurable effect on democratisation,” says Associate Professor Asger Mose Wingender from the Department of Economics, who conducted the study together with Professor Jacob Gerner Hariri from the Department of Political Science.

>The extensive study has taken seven years to complete. The survey of the spread of weapons technology alone contains 596,443 data points. Furthermore, the study includes a comprehensive survey of weapons history.

From the paper^2 by J.G. Hariri and A.M. Wingender:

>We collect a new, comprehensive data set tracking the adoption of 29 groundbreaking military technologies in all independent states in the period 1820–2010. Each technology represents a discrete improvement in the capacity to inflict violence.

>Based on these data, we first show that military technology spreads faster across borders than economic modernisation.

>We proceed to show that the swift diffusion of military technology impeded democratisation. To this end, we estimate linear probability models of democratisation in a panel of autocracies with a measure of military technology derived from our data set as the main explanatory variable.

^1 Modern arms technologies help autocratic rulers stay in power, 25 Jan. 2023, https://politicalscience.ku.dk/about/news/2023/modern-arms-technologies-help-autocratic-rulers-stay-in-power/

^2 Jacob Gerner Hariri, Asger Mose Wingender, Jumping the Gun: How Dictators Got Ahead of Their Subjects, The Economic Journal, Volume 133, Issue 650, February 2023, Pages 728–760, https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueac073

Excerpt:

>The twin findings from the Tomio Maruyama Tumulus last November can be classified as national treasures, experts say, with the discovery of the shield-shaped mirror being the first of its kind.

>The shield-shaped mirror is 64 cm in length, 31 cm in width at most, and weighs 5.7 kilograms.

>The latest sword has markings of a sheath and handle, and together, its length measures 2.6 meters, more than dominating the last longest dako sword discovered at around 85 cm.

>"(These discoveries) indicate that the technology of the Kofun period (300-710 AD) are beyond what had been imagined, and they are masterpieces in metalwork from that period," said Kosaku Okabayashi, the deputy director for Nara Prefecture's Archaeological Institute of Kashihara.

> 

>He called their discoveries a breakthrough in the research of the period, named for the "kofun" tomb mounds built for members of the ruling class.

>Mirror and shields are considered to be tools to protect the dead from evil spirits. The sword is thought to have been enlarged to increase its power, and the possibility of its use as a battle tool is low, they said.

>Riku Murase, 32, who was on the excavation team that discovered the objects, said the sword's length was so astounding that his team initially thought it was several swords. He also thought they had found a unique bronze plate.

>"It was my dream to dig up a mirror. Who knew that it would be something so incredible," he said.

>The Tomio Maruyama burial mound, the largest in Japan at 109 m in diameter and dating back to the late 4th century, is thought to have belonged to a powerful individual supporting the Yamato rulers of the time.

Kyodo, 25 Jan. 2023.

Note: solved, thanks.

Note: it seems that direct links to doi.org and PNAS are being automatically removed. I’ll send a modmail.

Findings in title quoted from the linked summary^1 and its hyperlinked article^2 in PNAS.

From the linked summary:^1

>In the PNAS study, the researchers looked at 96 Anolis cristatellus lizards from three regions of Puerto Rico—San Juan, Arecibo, and Mayagüez—comparing lizards living in urban centers with those living in forests surrounding each city.

>They first confirmed that the lizard populations in the three regions were genetically distinct from one another, so any similarities they found among lizards across the three cities could be attributed to urbanization.

>They then measured their toe pads and legs and found that urban lizards had significantly longer limbs and larger toe pads with more specialized scales on their toes, supporting their earlier research that these traits have evolved to enable urban lizards to thrive in cities.

>To understand the genetic basis of these trait differences, the researchers conducted several genomic analyses on exomic DNA, the regions of the genome that code for proteins.

>They identified a set of 33 genes found in three regions of the lizard genome that were repeatedly associated with urbanization across populations, including genes related to immune function and metabolism.

> 

>“Urbanization impacts roughly two-thirds of the Earth and is expected to continue to intensify, so it’s important to understand how organisms might be adapting to changing environments,” said Kristin Winchell, assistant professor of biology at NYU and the study’s first author.

>“In many ways, cities provide us with natural laboratories for studying adaptive change, as we can compare urban populations with their non-urban counterparts to see how they respond to similar stressors and pressures over short periods of time.”

^1 Urban Lizards Share Genomic Markers Not Found in Forest-Dwellers, 9 Jan. 2023, New York University.

^2 Winchell K., et al. Genome-wide parallelism underlies contemporary adaptation in urban lizards. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2023. 120 (3) e2216789120. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2216789120

ETA at 04:01 UTC: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2216789120

>hazpat

>The entire hypothesis is based around an individual with 4 spikes making it to adulthood.... since the malformed trident didnt impede survival it must be used in combat? at first glance, these look like they would also work great at disturbing mud in front of themselves while foraging...

From the linked summary^1 released by U.K.’s Natural History Museum:

>This suggests that a role in feeding or digging is unlikely, because the changes the fourth tine causes to the overall shape of the trident would have made it more difficult to use for these purposes, limiting the individual's chance of survival.

^1 Unique trilobite trident could be the oldest evidence of male sexual combat, Ashworth J., 16 Jan. 2023.

Findings in title quoted from the linked summary^1 and peer-reviewed journal article.^2

From the linked summary^1 released 16 Jan. 2023 by the U.K.’s Natural History Museum:

>Fighting for mates may be a behaviour that dates back over 400 million years.

>A unique specimen suggests that male Walliserops trilobites fought each other using trident-like structures to win the opportunity to mate with females.

>Co-author Professor Richard Fortey OBE FRS, who is a Scientific Associate at the Museum, says, “The extraordinary Devonian trilobite Walliserops carried a unique, giant trident on its head, the purpose of which has long been a mystery.”

>“We now believe that it was used for jousting between males striving for dominance. The evolution of sexually motivated competition in animals is hundreds of millions of years older than we thought.”

> 

>The researchers analysed the shape of the Walliserops tridents and compared them to the weapons of beetles to try and understand how they might have been used. They found the trident shape was most similar to beetles that try to tip over their opponents with shovel-like weapons.

>When the trilobites were alive 400 million years ago, it is believed they used their tridents to prod at each other before attempting to get underneath their rival and turn them over.

>While any trilobites that did get flipped were not necessarily stuck, the amount of time it could have taken to right themselves would have allowed victorious males the opportunity to mate with females.

>The trilobite at the centre of this study stands out from many other Walliserops specimens held in museums because of its unique trident.

>Instead of having three points, or tines, it is the only known individual to have grown four. The tines are all broadly equivalent in size and there is no sign of injury, which suggests it was born with four as a result of genetic mutation.

>Even more important than the four-tined trident itself is the fact that the specimen is fully grown. By making it to adulthood, it shows that the feature that makes it different from other trilobites didn't have a significant impact on its chances of survival.

^1 Unique trilobite trident could be the oldest evidence of male sexual combat, 16 Jan. 2023, https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2023/january/unique-trilobite-trident-could-be-oldest-evidence-male-sexual-combat.html

^2 Gishlick A. and Fortey R. Trilobite tridents demonstrate sexual combat at 400 Mya. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2023. 120 (4) e2119970120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2119970120

Thanks to the moderators of r/science, for their time and work.

Title uses quotes from the linked article^1 published 22 Nov. 2022 in Antiquity.

Excerpt:

>Climate change is affecting archaeological sites and landscapes around the world. Increased rainfall, more frequent extreme weather events, higher temperatures and rising seas not only create new risks but also exacerbate existing vulnerabilities and threats.

>Building on an earlier Antiquity article that explored climate change and arctic archaeology (Hollesen et al. 2018), this special section provides a global perspective on the impact of climate change on archaeological sites and landscapes and how archaeologists and cultural heritage managers are responding.

>This article introduces the following three contributions, outlining their main findings to provide an overview of the various challenges around the world, and highlighting current gaps in knowledge and future research opportunities.

> 

>Although this special section can only touch upon some of the many potential effects of climate change on archaeological resources around the world, it seeks to demonstrate the scale and complexity of the situation with which we are confronted.

>With climate change threatening an uncalculated number of archaeological sites, totalling perhaps millions globally (Heilen et al. 2018; Dawson et al. 2020), it seems reasonable to question whether current management practices and mechanisms will be able to respond to a situation that is so demanding.

>There are no easy solutions and time is limited. Thus, if we are to respond meaningfully, there is an urgent need to develop new methods and strategies that can tackle the problem head on. As suggested in this special section, and in other recent articles (e.g. Heilen et al. 2018; Hollesen et al. 2018), the first step is to determine where these impacts will occur and which types of sites will be the most affected.

>[The] vulnerability of archaeological sites can only be understood when the interactions between climate change and other factors, such as landscape modification, urbanisation and water management, are also considered.

> 

>Even if archaeologists and planners in years to come are equipped with tools efficient enough to pin-point the most vulnerable sites, they will still be faced with difficult decisions: which sites should be saved, and which sites should be allowed to decay?

>Climate change is accelerating, amplifying existing risks and creating new ones, the consequences of which could be devastating for the global archaeological record.

^1 Hollesen, J. (2022) “Climate change and the loss of archaeological sites and landscapes: a global perspective,” Antiquity. Cambridge University Press, 96(390), pp. 1382–1395. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2022.113.

Findings in title quoted from the linked summary by Manuel Ansede, 16 Jan. 2023, EL PAÍS.

Excerpt:

>The gene editing techniques that have revolutionized medicine since 2016 could also be used to treat common heart diseases, the number one cause of death in humans, according to a study published recently by one of the world’s leading scientists, Eric Olson, from the US.

>His team was able to modify two letters – or bases – of the approximately 3 billion that make up the DNA of a mouse. This change was enough to silence a protein linked to multiple cardiovascular problems.

>Olson is cautious, but highlights the potential advantages of this new strategy: since heart cells last a lifetime, it is only a matter of making the change once.

>Olson, from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, talked about his research to EL PAÍS via videoconference from Dallas, Texas, accompanied by a Spanish colleague from his laboratory, biologist Xurde Menéndez Caravia, co-author of the new study, who explained that the results of the first proof of concept are very promising.

> 

>The technique appears to be safe in mice; now, what comes next is to explore the possible long-term effects.

>The researchers modified the recipe for a protein called CaMKII delta, whose hyperactivation causes various cardiovascular problems such as arrhythmias, heart failure or damage to the heart muscle after a myocardial infarction.

>By changing two letters in the recipe, the resulting protein is not hyperactivated. Olson’s team used this technique in mice with cardiac damage after a heart attack, a phenomenon known as ischemia-reperfusion injury. The organs of the rodents recovered their function after the genetic editing of their cells.

>“As a therapy aimed at large population groups, it would be a revolution. We are talking about myocardial infarctions: potentially millions of people could be treated with this technique,” says Menéndez Caravia.

Lebek S., et al. Ablation of CaMKIIδ oxidation by CRISPR-Cas9 base editing as a therapy for cardiac disease. Science (2023). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ade1105

Excerpt:

>Ngārimu Blair, deputy chair for Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei people, said the tribe had only a handful of significant artefacts left, after most were lost in successive waves of looting by early “treasure hunters”, urbanisation and displacement.

>“We have so very few of these taonga and treasures left in our possession,” he said. “When something like this comes up where we’re both excited, but also that sorrowful that we lost so much.”

>The Sotheby’s auctions, which close in a week, include a carved pounamu (greenstone) club, or “mere”. It was originally given by Ngāti Whātua chief Pāora Tūhaere to a British vice-admiral in 1886, on condition it remained in the man’s family, according to a newspaper report at the time.

>As the mere has now passed out of the family’s hands it should be returned, Blair said, and the tribe hoped a future buyer would consider repatriating it.

>“We hope those involved in this auction understand Tūhaere’s people are not extinct nor relics, and we are inextricably linked still to this taonga,” he said.

> 

>Other New Zealand artefacts being sold by Sotheby’s this week include a Tewhatewha staff, and the remains of extremely rare New Zealand birds – the leg bones of the now-extinct four-metre (12ft) tall moa, and a brooch made from the beak of a huia, a wattlebird believed to be extinct since 1907.

>Sotheby’s has sold a number of high-value Māori artefacts, including some of unknown provenance. In 2019, an Arawa tekoteko carving sold for US$740,000 (£‎608,000). The auction description noted that it was “a major Māori sculpture” but said it had “no remaining trace of its original provenance”.

>In 2014, the sale of a carving valued at NZ$3.1m caused controversy in New Zealand, with academics and tribal authorities calling for the government to work for its return.

>The auction comes as international museums, governments and private collectors wrestle with the question of ownership of Indigenous artefacts – particularly those obtained through colonisation, looting or war.

Tess McClure in Auckland, 12 Jan. 2023.

Findings in title quoted from linked summary released by the University of Missouri.

Excerpt:

>In a new study, a team of astronomers led by Haojing Yan at the University of Missouri used data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Early Release Observations and discovered 87 galaxies that could be the earliest known galaxies in the universe.

>The finding moves the astronomers one step closer to finding out when galaxies first appeared in the universe — about 200-400 million years after the Big Bang, said Yan, associate professor of physics and astronomy at MU and lead author on the study.

>“Finding such a large number of galaxies in the early parts of the universe suggests that we might need to revise our previous understanding of galaxy formation,” Yan said. “Our finding gives us the first indication that a lot of galaxies could have been formed in the universe much earlier than previously thought.”

>In the study, the astronomers searched for potential galaxies at “very high redshifts.” Yan said the concept of redshifts in astronomy allows astronomers to measure how far away distant objects are in the universe — like galaxies — by looking at how the colors change in the waves of light that they emit.

> 

>The JWST was critical to this discovery because objects in space like galaxies that are located at high redshifts — 11 and above — can only be detected by infrared light, according to Yan. This is beyond what NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope can detect because the Hubble telescope only sees from ultraviolet to near-infrared light.

>“JWST, the most powerful infrared telescope, has the sensitivity and resolution for the job,” Yan said. “Up until these first JWST data sets were released [in mid-July 2022], most astronomers believed that the universe should have very few galaxies beyond redshift 11.

>“At the very least, our results challenge this view. I believe this discovery is just the tip of the iceberg because the data we used only focused on a very small area of the universe.

>“After this, I anticipate that other teams of astronomers will find similar results elsewhere in the vast reaches of space as JWST continues to provide us with a new view of the deepest parts of our universe.”

Haojing Yan et al. First Batch of z ≈ 11–20 Candidate Objects Revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope Early Release Observations on SMACS 0723-73. The Astrophysical Journal Letters 942 L9 (2023). https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/aca80c

Findings in title quoted from the summary released by the University of York, U.K., 11 Jan. 2023.

Excerpt:

>Researchers have uncovered how some bacteria use electrical spikes to overcome antibacterial drugs, potentially leading to ‘superbugs’ that are resistant to antibiotics.

>The study, led by a team at the University of York and Peking University, reveals how bacteria – many of which result in debilitating diseases – exhibit short-lived electrical spikes very similar to those found in nerve cells, and use these to help evade the killing effects of antibiotics.

>The research is an important step forward in understanding how actively growing bacteria exhibit transient electrical spikes across their cell membranes, and how these spikes are associated with an increased ability to survive the killing effects of antibiotics, the authors of the study say.

> 

>Co-lead author of the study, Professor Mark Leake, from the Physics of Life group at the University of York, said: “Our study suggests that when bacteria are actively growing, such as during an infection, they exhibit short-lived spikes in the electrical voltage across their cell membranes.

>"We find that cells which have larger and more frequent spikes can literally spit out antibiotics via these channels before they have a chance to kill the cell.”

>The study may solve the puzzle of how some bacteria known as ‘persisters’ can in effect resuscitate themselves after a treatment of antibiotics is stopped and go on to grow new infectious colonies.

>The team developed new used fluorescent dyes to act as high-precision voltage sensors that are inserted directly into the bacteria’s genetic code. Using laser fluorescence microscopy on these cells allowed the team to observe these voltage spikes directly for the first time on individual cells.

Xin Jin, et al. Sensitive bacterial Vm sensors revealed the excitability of bacterial Vm and its role in antibiotic tolerance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2208348120

Radojčić, et al. Trends in antipsychotic prescribing to children and adolescents in England: cohort study using 2000–19 primary care data. Lancet Psychiatry (2023). https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(22)00404-7

Findings in title from the linked summary released by the University of Manchester, 10 Jan. 2023:

>The proportion of children and adolescents prescribed antipsychotics in English general practice doubled from 0.06% to 0.11% between 2000 and 2019, find researchers at The University of Manchester’s Centre for Women’s Mental Health.

>The drugs, which have a tranquillising effect, are frequently used in adults to treat major mental illness, such as schizophrenia.

>However, they can be associated with substantial side-effects such as sexual dysfunction, infertility, and weight gain leading to diabetes.

> The National Institute for Clinical Excellence has approved the use of some antipsychotics in under 18’s with psychosis or with severely aggressive behaviour from conduct disorder.

>However the study, published in the Lancet Psychiatry, suggests they are prescribed for an increasingly broad range of reasons - the most common being autism.

>[The] increasing use of antipsychotics is a cause for concern, argue the researchers, given that their safety in children, who are still rapidly developing, has not been established.

> 

>Dr Matthias Pierce, senior research fellow at the University of Manchester’s Centre for Women’s Mental Health jointly lead the study.

>He said: “This study demonstrates a concerning trend in antipsychotic prescribing in children and adolescents. We do not think the changes in prescribing necessarily relate to changes in clinical need; rather, it may be more likely to reflect changes in prescribing practice by clinicians.

>“However, this study will help clinicians to evaluate the prescribing of antipsychotics to children more fully and will encourage them to consider better access to alternatives.”

Chirenti, C., Dichiara, S., Lien, A. et al. Kilohertz quasiperiodic oscillations in short gamma-ray bursts. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05497-0

Findings in title quoted from the linked summary released by NASA, 9 Jan. 2023.

Excerpt:

>A neutron star forms when the core of a massive star runs out of fuel and collapses. This produces a shock wave that blows away the rest of the star in a supernova explosion.

>Neutron stars typically pack more mass than our Sun into a ball about the size of a city, but above a certain mass, they must collapse into black holes.

>Both the Compton data and computer simulations revealed mega neutron stars tipping the scales by 20% more than the most massive, precisely measured neutron star known – dubbed J0740+6620 – which weighs in at nearly 2.1 times the Sun’s mass.

>Superheavy neutron stars also have nearly twice the size of a typical neutron star, or about twice the length of Manhattan Island.

> 

>Computer simulations of these mergers show that gravitational waves exhibit a sudden jump in frequency – exceeding 1,000 hertz – as the neutron stars coalesce.

>These signals are too fast and faint for existing gravitational wave observatories to detect. But [lead author] Chirenti and her team reasoned that similar signals could appear in the gamma-ray emission from short GRBs.

>The mega neutron stars spin nearly 78,000 times a minute – almost twice the speed of J1748–2446ad, the fastest pulsar on record. This rapid rotation briefly supports the objects against further collapse, allowing them to exist for just a few tenths of a second, after which they proceed to form a black hole faster than the blink of an eye.

>While no gamma-ray QPOs materialized in the Swift and Fermi bursts, two short GRBs recorded by Compton’s Burst And Transient Source Experiment (BATSE) on July 11, 1991, and Nov. 1, 1993, fit the bill.

Banner: Merging neutron stars, illustrated here, produce a blast of gamma rays when they come together and collapse into a black hole. Observations of two bursts by NASA's Compton mission indicate that before their final collapse, the objects briefly form a single supersized neutron star. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab. Editor: Francis Reddy

Findings in title quoted from the lead author’s summary, “Happy rather than sad music soothes newborns” in The Conversation, 5 Jan. 2023.

Excerpt:

>Our team looked at how music affected healthy newborns, who were carried to term. First, we wanted to select a music piece that was really happy, and another that was really sad.

>Two experimenters collected and listened to hundreds of lullabies and children’s songs and selected 25 of these that sounded happy or sad. Only six of these were sung in English (Simple Simon, Humpty Dumpty, Hey Diddle Diddle, Little Miss Muffet, Ding Dong Bell, Little Bo Beep) while the others were in various other languages.

>A French lullaby entitled Fais Dodo (by Alexandra Montano and Ruth Cunningham) was found to be the saddest, while a German song, Das singende Känguru (by Volker Rosin), was ranked the happiest.

>We played these two songs in random order – along with a silent control period – to 32 babies in a first experiment.

>We also analysed how 20 behaviours, such as crying, yawning, sucking, sleeping and limb movements changed millisecond by millisecond during the music pieces and the silence, respectively.

> 

>In a second experiment, we recorded the heart rates of 66 newborn infants while they were listening to these two songs or silence.

>Perhaps the most striking results was that babies started to downshift to sleep during happy music, but not to sad music or when there was no music.

>Also, they showed a decrease in their heart rates during happy music but not during sad music or silent periods, suggesting they were getting calmer.

>In response to both happy and sad music, babies also moved their eyes less frequently and and there were longer pauses between their movements compared with the silence period. This might mean that both types of music had some calming effect on the babies compared with no music, but happy music was the best.

>Our results suggest that newborns thus do react to emotions in music, and that responses to music are present at birth.

Nagy, E., Cosgrove, R., Robertson, N. et al. Neonatal Musicality: Do Newborns Detect Emotions in Music?. Psychological Studies 67, 501–513 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12646-022-00688-1

Finding in title is quoted from the abstract in the research paper, https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.80808:

>In their natural environment, most bacteria preferentially live as complex surface-attached multicellular colonies called biofilms. Biofilms begin with a few cells adhering to a surface, where they multiply to form a mature colony.

>In Caulobacter crescentus biofilms, extracellular DNA (eDNA) is released upon cell death and prevents newborn cells from joining the established biofilm.

>Thus, eDNA promotes the dispersal of newborn cells and the subsequent colonization of new environments.

>Thus, a programmed cell death mechanism using an O2-regulated TAS stimulates dispersal away from areas of a biofilm with decreased O2 availability and favors colonization of a new, more hospitable environment.

... and from the linked summary released by Université de Montréal:

>”We showed that Caulobacter uses a programmed cell death mechanism that causes some cells to sacrifice themselves when the conditions inside the biofilm deteriorate,” said team member Cécile Berne, the lead author of the study.

>“Known as a toxin-antitoxin system, this mechanism uses a toxin that targets a vital function and its associated antidote, the antitoxin,” she said. “The toxin is more stable than the antitoxin and when programmed cell death is initiated, the amount of antitoxin is reduced, resulting in cell death.’’

>“Using a combination of genetics and microscopy, we showed that the toxin-antitoxin system is activated when oxygen becomes sparse as the biofilm becomes larger and cells compete for the available oxygen,’’ Berne added.

>The resulting death of a subset of cells releases DNA, which promotes the dispersal of their live siblings to potentially more hospitable environments, thereby preventing overcrowding that would further reduce environmental quality in the biofilm.

>“The downside is that the biofilm lifestyle is also a strategy used by pathogenic bacteria to become more resistant to antibiotics,” said Brun.

Finding in title is quoted from the abstract in the research paper, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abq7675

>The orientations of complexes built between 1100 and 750 BCE, in particular, represent the earliest evidence of the use of the 260-day calendar, centuries earlier than its previously known use in textual records.

... and from the linked content by Brian Handwerk, 6 Jan. 2023:

>Newly uncovered ruins along Mexico’s southern Gulf Coast appear to have been designed in alignment with the ancient timekeeping system.

>Aerial surveys using lidar technology revealed that hundreds of architectural complexes were aligned to facilitate timed observations of the rising and setting sun, moon and other celestial objects in line with this 260-day cycle.

>Scientists had suspected that the calendar, which is tied to cycles of maize agriculture and human reproduction, dated back this far.

>But the earliest documented evidence for its use was a glyph depicting “7 Deer,” one of the days in the calendar, as part of a third-century B.C.E. mural in Guatemala.

> 

>Since these cultures didn’t leave written records from earlier periods, scientists have found it exceedingly difficult to establish proof of prior calendar use—until this new large-scale discovery.

>These monumental assemblages of plazas, pyramids and platforms, some stretching more than half a mile, indicate the 260-day cycle was likely of central importance to the Olmec, Maya and other cultures since at least the key period of time around 1000 B.C.E.—when more widespread maize agriculture began to take hold in the region.

>“It is obvious that the orientations reflect a complex worldview in which astronomical knowledge conditioned by practical concerns was intertwined with religious concepts,” says co-author Ivan Šprajc, who studies Mesoamerican archaeology and archaeoastronomy at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.