“When you’re approaching a big tree with a power struggle from far away, you’ll first hear a lot of acorn woodpeckers calling very distinctly, and see birds flying around like crazy,” says first author Sahas Barve, currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “When you get closer, you can see that there are a dozen or more coalitions of three or four birds fighting and posturing on branches. One group has to beat all the others to win a spot in the territory, which is really, really rare in animals — even in fantasy novels it usually boils down to one army against the other.”

The chaos of the battles makes studying behavior using direct observation difficult. But Barve and his team had an advantage: they used new radio telemetry technology that allowed them to track the birds’ locations down to the minute. With radio tags, which “sit like a rock-climbing harness with a fanny pack on the woodpecker’s back,” the researchers could learn how much time was spent fighting at the power struggles and where the warriors came from.

Power struggles for co-breeding positions in oak trees with “granaries” — large acorn storage structures built by the birds consisting of acorns stuffed into thousands of individual holes in the bark — involve fighting coalitions formed by groups of non-breeding brothers or sisters from neighboring territories. The radio tag data showed that some birds return day after day and fight for ten hours at a time. “We didn’t think it could be that long because they have to be away from their home territory,” says Barve. “When do they eat? We still don’t know.”

The researchers hypothesized that woodpeckers would fight the hardest for territories closest to their current home, but found that deciding to fight may depend on more complex social cues as they recruit members to join their coalition. “These birds often wait for years, and when there’s the right time and they have the right coalition size, they’ll go and give it their all to win a really good territory,” he says.

The woodpeckers’ complex social behavior also extends to the other group that comes to power struggles: the spectators. “We never really paid attention to them because we were always fixated on the birds that were actually fighting,” Barve says. “We often forget that there are birds sitting on trees watching nearby.” His team found that the biggest battles can attract more than 30 birds, or a third of all woodpeckers in the area, with some traveling more than three kilometers to “come with popcorn and watch the fight for the biggest mansion in the neighborhood.”

The radio tag data also showed that the spectators spend up to an hour a day watching the fights, despite many already having breeding position granaries of their own. For them, the benefits of social information must outweigh the costs of leaving their home territory unattended for considerable amounts of time. Acorn woodpeckers have tight social networks and know everyone’s place due to frequent travels to other territories. “If anything is disruptive to that, or if anything weird happens, they want to go check it out,” he says. “The spectators are probably as interested in the outcome as the fighter is, although the warriors benefit more directly.”

There’s still a lot researchers don’t know about the acorn woodpeckers’ complex social structures, but radio telemetry provides a glimpse into their unique social behaviors. “They potentially have friendships, and they probably have enemies,” Barve says. “With our radio tag data, we can tell when two birds are at the same place at the same time. The next step is to try and understand how their social networks are shaped, and how they vary across the year.”

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Researchers have now developed a statistical model that uses genomic data to accurately predict whether a patient with Barrett’s esophagus has a high or low risk of developing cancer.

Genomics and statistics come together

Researchers at the University of Cambridge, EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), and collaborators sequenced genomes from biopsies routinely collected from patients with Barrett’s esophagus. These patients are monitored for early signs of esophageal cancer. The researchers used the data to look for differences between patients who were ultimately diagnosed with cancer and those who were not. The data were used to develop a statistical model measuring each patient’s individual risk. The research was published in Nature Medicine.

Other recent cancer studies have shown that genomic mutations leading to cancer may occur many years before a patient is diagnosed with the disease. Being able to identify these mutations could provide a new route to early diagnosis and treatment.

Using genomic data from 88 patients with Barrett’s esophagus, the researchers identified half of the patients who were diagnosed with esophageal cancer as ‘high risk’ more than eight years before diagnosis. The numbers went up to 70% two years before diagnosis. Equally important, the model also accurately predicted patients who were at a very low risk of developing cancer.

“One of the unique things about this study was the richness of the data provided by colleagues at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge,” explains Moritz Gerstung, Group Leader at EMBL-EBI. “These patients have been in surveillance for over 15 years, so overall we had over 800 samples, taken over time and from different areas of the esophagus. This allowed us to measure in great detail what type of genomic changes occur and how these trajectories differ between patients with and without cancer. Without such thorough surveillance programmes, this study wouldn’t have been possible.”

The benefit of early detection

Although people with Barrett’s esophagus are at considerably higher risk of developing esophageal cancer than the general population, only 1 patient in 300 will be diagnosed with cancer per year. Nevertheless, they all have to go through intrusive monitoring procedures every two years. This surveillance can be uncomfortable, stressful, and time-consuming for the patients, and it places an additional burden on the healthcare system.

“The benefit of our method is twofold,” explains Sarah Killcoyne, Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at EMBL-EBI. “The patients who have high-risk Barrett’s, which is likely to become cancerous, can receive treatment earlier. And individuals who have something that looks genetically stable, and unlikely to develop into the disease, do not need to undergo such intense surveillance. The hope is that our method can help improve early detection and treatment, and decrease unnecessary treatment for low-risk patients, without compromising patient safety.”

These results mean that patients at greatest risk can be treated immediately, rather than conducting repeated biopsies until early signs of cancer are found. Conversely, patients with low risk and stable disease can be monitored less frequently. Overall, the authors estimate that monitoring can be reduced for 50% of patients with Barrett’s esophagus.

“This is an exciting example of how a collaboration between computational biologists and clinician scientists can bring new insights into an important clinical problem,” says Rebecca Fitzgerald, Professor of Cancer Prevention and MRC Programme Leader at the University of Cambridge. “Esophageal cancer is devastating when it is diagnosed late, but early intervention can be performed endoscopically and spare patients unnecessary chemotherapy and removal of their esophagus. Similar approaches could be extended to other cancer types in the future.”

According to the authors, the next steps are to refine the method, ideally by analysing data from more patients. It is also important to bring in clinical information and improve the model’s accuracy. Eventually, this will lead to clinical trials to show that this model is useful in clinical practice for patients currently in surveillance.

Now, well into the 21st century, researchers led by the University of Cambridge have detected remnants of the pioneer personality in US populations of once inhospitable mountainous territory, particularly in the Midwest.

A team of scientists algorithmically investigated how landscape shapes psychology. They analysed links between the anonymised results of an online personality test completed by over 3.3 million Americans, and the “topography” of 37,227 US postal — or ZIP — codes.

The researchers found that living at both a higher altitude and an elevation relative to the surrounding region — indicating “hilliness” — is associated with a distinct blend of personality traits that fits with “frontier settlement theory.”

“The harsh and remote environment of mountainous frontier regions historically attracted nonconformist settlers strongly motivated by a sense of freedom,” said researcher Friedrich Götz, from Cambridge’s Department of Psychology.

“Such rugged terrain likely favoured those who closely guarded their resources and distrusted strangers, as well as those who engaged in risky explorations to secure food and territory.”

“These traits may have distilled over time into an individualism characterised by toughness and self-reliance that lies at the heart of the American frontier ethos” said Götz, lead author of the study.

“When we look at personality across the whole United States, we find that mountainous residents are more likely to have psychological characteristics indicative of this frontier mentality.”

Götz worked with colleagues from the Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences, Austria, the University of Texas, US, the University of Melbourne in Australia, and his Cambridge supervisor Dr Jason Rentfrow. The findings are published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

The research uses the “Big Five” personality model, standard in social psychology, with simple online tests providing high-to-low scores for five fundamental personality traits of millions of Americans.

The mix of characteristics uncovered by study’s authors consists of low levels of “agreeableness,” suggesting mountainous residents are less trusting and forgiving — traits that benefit “territorial, self-focused survival strategies.”

Low levels of “extraversion” reflect the introverted self-reliance required to thrive in secluded areas, and a low level of “conscientiousness” lends itself to rebelliousness and indifference to rules, say researchers.

“Neuroticism” is also lower, suggesting an emotional stability and assertiveness suited to frontier living. However, “openness to experience” is much higher, and the most pronounced personality trait in mountain dwellers.

“Openness is a strong predictor of residential mobility,” said Götz. “A willingness to move your life in pursuit of goals such as economic affluence and personal freedom drove many original North American frontier settlers.”

“Taken together, this psychological fingerprint for mountainous areas may be an echo of the personality types that sought new lives in unknown territories.”

The researchers wanted to distinguish between the direct effects of physical environment and the “sociocultural influence” of growing up where frontier values and identities still hold sway.

To do this, they looked at whether mountainous personality patterns applied to people born and raised in these regions that had since moved away.

The findings suggest some “initial enculturation” say researchers, as those who left their early mountain home are still consistently less agreeable, conscientious and extravert, although no such effects were observed for neuroticism and openness.

The scientists also divided the country at the edge of St. Louis — “gateway to the West” — to see if there is a personality difference between those in mountains that made up the historic frontier, such as the Rockies, and eastern ranges e.g. the Appalachians.

While mountains continue to be a “meaningful predictor” of personality type on both sides of this divide, key differences emerged. Those in the east are more agreeable and outgoing, while western ranges are a closer fit for frontier settlement theory.

In fact, the mountainous effect on high levels of “openness to experience” is ten times as strong in residents of the old western frontier as in those of the eastern ranges.

The findings suggest that, while ecological effects are important, it is the lingering sociocultural effects — the stories, attitudes and education — in the former “Wild West” that are most powerful in shaping mountainous personality, according to scientists.

They describe the effect of mountain areas on personality as “small but robust,” but argue that complex psychological phenomena are influenced by many hundreds of factors, so small effects are to be expected.

“Small effects can make a big difference at scale,” said Götz. “An increase of one standard deviation in mountainousness is associated with a change of around 1% in personality.”

“Over hundreds of thousands of people, such an increase would translate into highly consequential political, economic, social and health outcomes.”