Designing these magnets is not simple, especially when they must be precisely shaped to create complex, three-dimensional magnetic fields to control plasma instabilities. So it is appropriate that the new technique comes from scientists who design stellarators, cruller-shaped fusion devices that require such carefully constructed magnets. In other words, the PPPL scientists are using a stellarator computer code to envision the shape and strength of twisted tokamak magnets that can stabilize tokamak plasmas and survive the extreme conditions expected in a fusion reactor.

This insight could ease the construction of tokamak fusion facilities that bring the power of the sun and stars to Earth. “In the past, it was a journey of discovery,” said Nik Logan, a physicist at the DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who led the research while at PPPL. “You had to build something, test it , and use the data to learn how to design the next experiment. Now we can use these new computational tools to design these magnets more easily, using principles gleaned from years of scientific research.” The results have been reported in a paper published in Nuclear Fusion.

Fusion, the power that drives the sun and stars, combines light elements in the form of plasma — the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei — that generates massive amounts of energy. Scientists are seeking to replicate fusion on Earth for a virtually inexhaustible supply of power to generate electricity.

The findings could aid the construction of tokamaks by compensating for imprecision that occurs when a machine is translated from a theoretical design to a real-life object, or by applying precisely controlled 3D magnetic fields to suppress plasma instabilities. “The reality of building anything is that it isn’t perfect,” Logan said. “It has small irregularities. The magnets we are designing using this stellarator technique can both correct some of the irregularities that occur in the magnetic fields and control instabilities.” Doing so helps the magnetic field stabilize the plasma so potentially damaging bursts of heat and particles do not occur.

Logan and colleagues also learned that these magnets could act on the plasma even when placed at a relatively large distance of up to several meters from the tokamak’s walls. “That’s good news because the closer the magnets are to the plasma, the more difficult it is to design them to meet the harsh conditions near fusion reactors,” Logan said. “The more equipment we can place at a distance from the tokamak, the better.”

The technique relies on FOCUS, a computer code created mainly by PPPL physicist Caoxiang Zhu, a stellarator optimization scientist, to design complicated magnets for stellarator facilities. “When I was first building FOCUS as a postdoctoral fellow at PPPL, Nik Logan stopped by my poster presentation at an American Physical Society conference,” Zhu said. “Later we had a conversation and realized that there was an opportunity to apply the FOCUS code to tokamak projects.”

The collaboration between different subfields is exciting. “I’m happy to see that my code can be extended to a broader range of experiments,” Zhu noted. “I think this is a beautiful connection between the tokamak and stellarator worlds.”

Though long the number-two fusion facility behind tokamaks, stellarators are now becoming more widely used because they tend to create stable plasmas. Tokamaks are currently the first choice for a fusion reactor design, but their plasmas can develop instabilities that could damage a reactor’s internal components.

Presently, PPPL researchers are using this new technique to design and update magnets for several tokamaks around the world. The roster includes COMPASS-U, a tokamak operated by the Czech Academy of Sciences; and the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) facility.

“It’s a very practical paper that has practical applications, and sure enough we have some takers,” Logan said. “I think the results will be helpful for the future of tokamak design.”

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Materials provided by DOE/Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Original written by Raphael Rosen. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is a leading cause of death worldwide, leading to over 1.5 million fatalities annually. Approximately one-third of the global population is infected with the latent form of Mtb. Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) is widely used as a vaccine against tuberculosis but has a variable protection against neonatal and adult pulmonary TB. That protection can, however, range from zero to 80% among infants. Children are routinely vaccinated, yet Mtb dissemination into brain and tuberculosis meningitis continues to occur.

Purdue and Houston Methodist researchers have created this novel TB vaccine formulation by incorporating autophagy-mediated antigen presentation, which initiates an enhanced T cell response. Chinnaswamy Jagannath, professor of pathology and genomic medicine at the Houston Methodist Research Institute, which is an affiliate of Weill Cornell Medical College, showed that the novel formulation improves the development of tuberculosis-specific immune responses. Jagannath collaborates with Dr. Suresh Mittal, Distinguished Professor of Virology in Purdue’s College of Veterinary Medicine.

“Our vaccine approach is equally effective without or with prior vaccination with BCG,” Mittal said.

“It is vital since the majority of people in Mtb-endemic countries are already immunized with BCG,” Jagannath said.

Mittal’s lab studies delivery platforms for vaccines, and Jagannath’s lab used the nasal delivery route for this TB vaccine development.

“The great thing about this work with TB is that it can translate to other infectious diseases and possibly cancer immunotherapy,” Mittal said.

The innovators have worked with the Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization to patent their technology. The innovators and OTC are looking for partners to continue developing it. The next step for the vaccine formulation is to conduct a vaccine efficacy study in a nonhuman primate model. Mittal said the successful completion of the study will form the basis for a human trial, though no human trial is currently planned.

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Materials provided by Purdue University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

“If you pay attention to forecasts of how the climate will affect U.S. agriculture, the results are completely different. Some scientists predict it’s going to have a positive impact for the nation in the long run, some report it’s going to have a negative impact,” says study co-author Sandy Dall’Erba, professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics (ACE) and director of the Center for Climate, Regional, Environmental and Trade Economics (CREATE) at U of I.

Dall’Erba and Chang Cai, doctoral student in ACE and the paper’s lead author, take stock of all the academic literature that estimates the impact of climate change on U.S. farmland values and revenues, focusing on every U.S. county. The county-level scale is not only more accurate, the researchers say, but also important for regional policy makers, because they can make county-specific decisions in areas where climate change is anticipated to pose a serious challenge.

“There is not a single commodity that is produced all over the U.S. The only way we can really understand the relationship between climate and agriculture is that rather than focusing on a particular crop or livestock, we look at economic impacts,” Dall’Erba notes. “Looking at aggregated agricultural outcomes allows us to compare the situation across every county in the U.S.”

The researchers look at how studies group locations for analysis, and how such groupings affect the results.

“Early studies would assume one additional degree of Celsius or Fahrenheit in Arizona will have the exact same marginal effect on agriculture as one additional degree in Illinois, which makes very little sense because you’re looking on the one hand at a place that is quite used to high temperature and low precipitation, versus a place which is used to moderate temperature and much more precipitation,” Dall’Erba says.

Recently, studies have tried to differentiate results and estimate effects based on local conditions. A popular approach is to divide the U.S. into irrigated versus rainfed areas, roughly across a west/east partition along the 100^th meridian. While Illinois and Arizona would thus belong to different groups, Arizona and Montana would still be expected to experience similar marginal effects of weather.

Another method, which Dall’Erba has used in his own research, compares low- versus high-elevation areas, while a third approach is to group locations along state lines. Dall’Erba says researchers use the latter approach because it is straightforward to estimate and relevant for policy measures, but it does not produce very accurate results, since state lines rarely conform to atmospheric characteristics.

While all these approaches have some merit, they also have shortcomings.

“We discovered that results really do differ in terms of what the future impact of climate change will be if you choose one grouping versus another, especially in primary agricultural areas,” Cai explains. “We also found out that none of those groupings is better than any other in predicting what the future outcome will be.”

Cai and Dall’Erba recommend using one of three new statistical approaches that offer county-specific climate-impact estimates. All of these methods are driven by data and start without any assumptions on what the groups will look like. Instead, these methods analyze data to determine both the number of groups and who belongs to what group. These scientific techniques, called C-Lasso, causal forest algorithm, and geographically weighted regressions, have been used for analysis in other fields, such as the labor market and energy conservation, but they have not been used in climate change research before.

“You really let the data speak for themselves; you do not impose anything on your model. As soon as you start making choices on how one should group the observations, you’ve already guided your results in one direction. And then you’ll want to defend your choice. We’re hoping future researchers will be more cautious about a priori choices,” Dall’Erba explains.

Dall’Erba and Cai are already working on applying these new approaches to a comprehensive analysis of climate change and U.S. agricultural production. They expect to present their results in a forthcoming paper, and to guide the implementation of place-tailored climate change adaptation strategies.

Like many scientific endeavors, this one began with a simple observation. While attending a conference dinner at the Georgia Aquarium, physicist Arnold Mathijssen and his colleagues noticed that large schools of swimming fish seemed to be carrying small particles and debris in their wake. This happens because of hydrodynamic entrainment, a process where, as an object moves through liquid, it generates a flow and causes nearby objects to be dragged along with it.

“We were wondering, As the fish in the aquarium are swimming forward, does a particle also get dragged forwards, or is it pushed backwards by their tails?” says Mathijssen. “Our central question was if these guys move things forward or not, and the hypothesis was that, if we can see this happening in the aquarium, maybe this is applicable under a microscope as well.”

To answer the question, Max Planck Institute researchers Chenyu Jin, Yibo Chen, and Corinna Maass ran experiments using synthetic microswimmers, self-propelled droplets of oil and surfactant that are a model system for microscopic robots. Using their microswimmers, the researchers were able to measure the strength of the flows generated by an individual swimmer and the amount of material that an individual could carry with them as they travelled through a two-dimensional channel. Then, once the data were collected, Mathijssen and his group developed a theoretical model to help explain their findings.

One particular challenge for developing the model was devising a way to describe the effects of the walls of the microscopic channel because, unlike at the aquarium, this experiment was conducted in a confined space. “That confinement really affects the flows and, as a result, affects the total volume of stuff you can transport. There is quite a bit of literature in terms of modeling active particles, but it’s difficult to get it right in complex environments,” Mathijssen says.

Using their data and newly-developed model, the researchers found that the transport capacity of an individual microswimmer could be increased by 10-fold when they swam together inside a narrow channel. They also found that the entrainment velocity, or the speed at which particles move forwards, was much larger than initially anticipated.

Compared to a more open system, like the aquarium, having a confined channel seems to enhance the movement of particles, says Mathijssen. “If you are in a three-dimensional world, the energy you inject into your system gets spread out in all directions. Here, where it gets focused into a two dimensional plane, the strength of the flows is larger. It’s almost as if you have a wake at the front and the back, so the effect is twice as strong, effectively,” he says.

Another surprising finding was how powerful this effect could be even over long distances in a system like this one with a low Reynolds number, a value used by scientists to predict liquid flow patterns. Systems with low Reynolds numbers have smooth, laminar flow (like a waterfall), and those with high values are more turbulent.

“Here, the differences between the low and high Reynolds numbers is that, at low Reynolds numbers, these flows tend to be very long-ranged. Even if you are 10 body lengths away, these flows are still significant. At higher Reynolds numbers, that is not necessarily true because you get a lot of turbulence, and that disturbs this entrainment effect,” Mathijssen says.

The researchers think that this could be due to the front and back symmetry that occurs in a closed system. “At low Reynolds numbers, you have a pressure in front of the droplet, and that pressure is pushing the liquid forwards for a large distance,” says Mathijssen.

Future experiments will look at how this effect plays out in systems that have higher Reynolds numbers. It’s thought that fish rely on a similar phenomenon when they swim close behind each other in large schools, akin to cyclists drafting off one another in a peloton, so the researchers think that a similar effect might be happening in other systems as well.

And because the underlying physics described in this study applies to many others as well, these findings also have implications for a number of other fields, from designing drug-delivery systems, understanding how biofilms transport nutrients, and designing active materials, ones that have unique coatings or properties that imbue them with dynamic features.

“The grander picture in terms of physics is to see how individual active components can work together in order to give rise to a shared functionality, what we call emergent phenomena, at a macroscopic scale,” says Mathijssen. “And there, there is no rule book, there are no laws of physics as of yet that describe these systems that are out of equilibrium, so there are fundamental theoretical physics questions that remain to be answered.”

“This study provides a detailed picture of oil refining capacity and CO₂ emissions worldwide,” says Dabo Guan of Tsinghua University. “Understanding the past and future development trends of the oil refining industry is crucial for guiding regional and global emissions reduction.”

Climate change is one of the most fundamental challenges facing humanity today, and continuous expansion of fossil-fuel-based energy infrastructure may be one of the key obstacles in achieving the Paris Agreement goals. The oil refining industry plays a crucial role in both the energy supply chain and climate change. The petroleum oil refining industry is the third-largest stationary emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, contributing 6% of all industrial greenhouse gas emissions. In particular, CO₂ accounts for approximately 98% of greenhouse gases emitted by petroleum refineries.

In the new study, Guan and his collaborators developed a publicly available global inventory of CO₂ emissions from 1,056 oil refineries from 2000 to 2018. CO₂ emissions of the refinery industry were about 1.3 Gt in 2018. If all existing and proposed refineries operate as usual, without the adoption of any low-carbon measures, they could emit up to 16.5Gt of CO₂ from 2020 to 2030. Based on the findings, the authors recommend mitigation strategies, such as improving refinery efficiency and upgrading heavy oil-processing technologies, which could potentially reduce global cumulative emissions by 10% from 2020 to 2030. The inventory will be updated and improved in the future as more and better data become available.

The study also showed that the average output of global oil refineries gradually increased from 2000 to 2018, in terms of barrels per day. But the results varied by refinery age group. Specifically, the average capacity of young refineries, which are mainly distributed in Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, increased significantly from 2000 to 2018, while the average capacity of refineries older than 19 years remained stable. “Given the greater committed emissions brought about by the long remaining operating time of young refineries, there is an urgent need for these refineries to adopt low-carbon technologies to reduce their CO₂ emissions,” Guan says. “As for middle-aged and old refineries, improving operational efficiency, eliminating the backward capacity, and speeding up the upgrading of refining configuration are the key means to balance growing demand and reducing CO₂ emissions.”

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the UK Natural Environment Research Council.

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Materials provided by Cell Press. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

As high blood pressure puts you at high risk of having a heart attack or stroke (cardiovascular disease), it’s important to keep track of your blood pressure. People over the age of 18 are advised to have a blood pressure check at least every two years.

Given the impact of this global health challenge, there is a clear need for strategies to reduce the prevalence and severity of high blood pressure, and exercise is one such strategy. While aerobic and dynamic resistance exercise appear effective at reducing blood pressure, a new study led by UNSW Medicine & Health researchers has revealed isometric resistance training (IRT) as an emerging mode of exercise demonstrating effectiveness in reducing office blood pressure. Office blood pressure refers to your pressure when taken during a GP visit, for example. It is taken at one time-period, usually when you’re sitting down.

What is isometric resistance training?

IRT is a type of strength training. During IRT, the muscles produce force but do not change length. For example, pushing against a wall or holding a ‘plank’. This is different to more traditional strength training like a squat or a push up or where muscles shorten and lengthen during the movement.

Currently, IRT is not recommended by several international guidelines for the management of high blood pressure. This was mostly due to concerns over its safety because the static nature of IRT causes blood pressure to increase markedly during exercise, particularly when performed using large muscle groups or at high intensity, compared to traditional strength exercise such as lifting weights or aerobic exercise such as walking or cycling.

However, lead authors of the study Mr Harrison Hansford and Dr Matthew Jones, both accredited exercise physiologists at the School of Health Sciences said their research showed IRT to be safe.

“We were interested in how IRT reduced blood pressure in people with high blood pressure. We also wanted to know whether IRT was safe. We found that IRT was very safe and caused meaningful changes in blood pressure — almost as much as what you’d expect to see with blood pressure lowering medications,” explained Dr Jones.

He said exercise is important for the management of high blood pressure, but the researchers acknowledged many Australians were physically inactive, with ‘lack of time’ commonly cited as a reason.

“IRT is a time-efficient means of reducing blood pressure, needing only 12 minutes a day, two to three days per week to produce the effects we found in our review.”

“While the studies included in our review normally used a specialised handgrip device, it’s possible we would see the same effects simply by asking participants to make a fist and squeeze it at a certain intensity for the prescribed amount of time. This means IRT could easily be performed while participants are sitting down watching TV,” said Dr Jones.

“We also found IRT caused improvements in other measures of blood pressure including central blood pressure (the pressure in the heart’s largest artery — the aorta, and an important predictor of cardiovascular disease) and to a lesser extent ambulatory blood pressure (average blood pressure across a 24-hour period), neither of which had previously been reviewed.”

Although previous studies had shown IRT as being effective for lowering office blood pressure, the studies had not comprehensively examined the safety of IRT.

IRT is accessible and easy to perform

Dr Jones said IRT is a very accessible and easy to perform intervention. He highlighted how exciting it was to know such a simple intervention could have such a strong effect on reducing blood pressure — the leading risk factor for mortality, globally.

“It’s particularly exciting for people who may have difficulty performing more ‘traditional’ exercise such as walking, cycling or strength training knowing they have another exercise type in their toolkit to help manage their high blood pressure.”

Dr Jones noted the research team were surprised there were not increased risks of adverse events in older adults.

“In fact, there were actually lower rates of adverse events in older adults, making it a very appealing mode of exercise, especially in those with mobility restrictions who may not be able to do other exercises like aerobic or dynamic resistance training.”

Dr Jones acknowledged research limitations in terms of the studies included in the scientific literature review, which were not always of ‘high quality’. This means the research team cannot be entirely confident in their results. Dr Jones also acknowledged relatively few studies examined lower body IRT, or IRT using different doses and intensities. Therefore, it is still unclear how different types and doses of IRT may affect results, and whether these would also be safe.

“There is a clear need for a large, high-quality randomised controlled trials to better assess the effect of IRT on blood pressure. To conduct such a study would be a clear goal for the future. It would also be useful to study how different types and doses of IRT affect results, and whether this differs between males and females, so this would also be a goal of future research.”

The first process is called capacitation, which alters the physiology of each spermatozoa, changing the membrane of the head to help it penetrate the hard, outer layer of an egg — the zona pellucida — and chemistry in the tail to generate greater motility, the ability to move and swim.

The second process is acrosome reaction (AR), a chemical action that involves releasing enzymes in the spermatozoa’s head that further boost penetration of the zona pellucida.

Both processes are essential to successful fertilization of an egg, and AR is time-dependent: It cannot take place too early or too late. Indeed, premature AR has been associated with idiopathic (spontaneous) male infertility.

Neither process, however, is well understood in terms of the underlying molecular mechanisms involved. In a new paper, publishing August 19, 2021 in the journal eLife, a team of researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine detail how GIV/Girdin, a ubiquitous signaling molecule plays a critical role in male fertility, orchestrating capacitation and AR to promote sperm motility, survival and fertilization success.

Specifically, the research team, led by senior author Pradipta Ghosh, MD, professor in the departments of Medicine and Cellular and Molecular Medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine, found that GIV — a member of the G protein family that serve as molecular switches inside cells, transmitting and fine-tuning signals — regulates the activity of enzymes that turn on and turn off the processes of capacitation and AR.

“The findings demonstrate how GIV orchestrates distinct signaling programs in sperm that separated by space and time, effectively supporting capacitation while inhibiting premature AR,” said Ghosh. “As a result, GIV plays an essential role in male fertility.”

Infertility affects an estimated 8 to 12 percent of couples globally, with males being a primary or contributing factor in roughly half of all cases, according to published studies. Causes of male infertility are multiple, but roughly 25 percent involve either sperm transport disorders or idiopathic factors in sperm with no apparent dysfunction.

“GIV is required for male fertility, and low levels of GIV transcripts in men is invariably associated with infertility,” said Ghosh. “We’ve found evidence that GIV may perform different roles in the capacitation of sperm, findings that shed new light on both how defective GIV-signaling might be used as a potential marker for male infertility and how inhibitors of GIV-dependent signaling inhibit fertility by reducing sperm motility and viability and by promoting premature acrosome reaction.

“The latter, ironically enough, may be a promising strategy for development of a male contraceptive pill specifically targeting sperm.”

Co-authors include: Sequoyah Reynoso, Vanessa Castillo, Gajanan D. Katkar, Inmaculada Lopez-Sanchez, Sahar Taheri, Celia R. Espinoza, Christina Rohena, Debashis Sahoo and Pascal Gagneux, all at UC San Diego.

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Materials provided by University of California – San Diego. Original written by Scott La Fee. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The fossils, belonging to an arthropod known as Leanchoilia, confirm the presence — predicted by earlier studies in genetics and developmental biology of insect and spider embryos — of an extreme frontal domain of the brain that is not segmented and is invisible in modern adult arthropods. Despite being invisible, this frontal domain gives rise to several crucial neural centers in the adult arthropod brain, including stem cells that eventually provide centers involved in decision-making and memory. This frontal domain was hypothesized to be distinct from the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain seen in living arthropods, and it was given the name prosocerebrum, with “proso” meaning “front.”

Described in a paper published today in the journal Current Biology, the fossils provide the first evidence of the existence of this discrete prosocerebral brain region, which has a legacy that shows up during the embryonic development of modern arthropods, according to paper lead author Nicholas Strausfeld, a Regents Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Arizona.

“The extraordinary fossils we describe are unlike anything that has been seen before,” Strausfeld said. “Two nervous systems, already unique because they are identically preserved, show that half a billion years ago this most anterior brain region was present and structurally distinct before the evolutionary appearance of the three segmental ganglia that denote the fore-, mid- and hindbrain.”

The term ganglion refers to a system of networks forming a nerve center that occurs in each segment of the nervous system of an arthropod. In living arthropods, the three ganglia that mark the three-part brain condensed together to form a solid mass, obscuring their evolutionary origin as segmented structures.

Fossils of Brain Tissue are Extremely Rare

Discovered in deposits of the Kaili formation — a geological formation in the Guizhou province of southwest China — the fossilized remains of Leanchoilia date back to the Cambrian period, about 508 million years ago. The Kaili fossils occur in sedimentary rock that has high concentrations of iron, the presence of which probably helped preserve soft tissue, which subsequently was replaced by carbon deposits.

“The Kaili fossils open a window for us to glimpse the body plan evolution of animals that lived more than half a billion years ago,” said the paper’s first author, Tian Lan of the Guizhou Research Center for Palaeobiology at Guizhou University in China. “For the first time, we now know that arthropod fossils of the Kaili formation have the potential to preserve neural tissue that show us the primitive brain of the early stem arthropod existing at the dawn of the animal world.”

“Nervous systems, as other soft tissues, are difficult to fossilize,” added co-author Pedro Martinez of the Universitat de Barcelona and Institut Catalá in Barcelona, Spain. “This makes the study of the early evolution of neural systems a challenging task.”

The fossils also shed new light on the evolutionary origin of two separate visual systems in arthropod evolution: pairs of front-facing eyes or sideward looking eyes, the descendants of which are still present in species living today.

Many arthropods, including insects and crustaceans, have a distinct bilateral pair of faceted compound eyes and another set of less obvious eyes — with more primitive architecture — known as nauplius eyes, or ocelli. These are structurally similar to the principal eyes of spiders and scorpions. These simpler eyes correspond to the prosocerebrum’s forward eyes in Leanchoilia, in line with evidence obtained by previous studies analyzing gene expression patterns during embryonic development of living arthropods.

Leanchoilia‘s sideward eyes, on the other hand, relate to the protocerebrum, which is the segmental ganglion defining the arthropod forebrain, lying just behind the prosocerebrum. In living arthropods, the protocerebrum provides the compound eyes of insects and crustaceans, or the lateral single-lens eyes of arachnids, centipedes and millipedes. The visual centers serving those eyes also belong to the brain’s protocerebral region.

Strausfeld explained that in living arthropods, the protocerebrum, or forebrain, has incorporated — in a way, swallowed up — the ancient centers provided by the prosocerebrum, so that it is no longer discernible as a distinct anatomical entity.

The fossils are so well-preserved that they demonstrate that in addition to frontward eyes, the prosocerebrum has also given rise to ganglia associated with the labrum, or “upper lip,” of modern arthropods. The fossils also confirm an earlier hypothesis suggesting that the labrum must have originally evolved from the grasping appendages of Radiodonta, a group of stem-arthropods that were top predators during the Cambrian period.

“When compared with other, similar fossil material belonging to more advanced lineages, the organization of the Leanchoilia brain demonstrates that the ganglionic arrangement of the early brain underwent condensation and fusion of its components, which explains why in living species the prosocerebrum cannot be individually distinguished,” Strausfeld said.

Implications for Brain Evolution in Vertebrates

In addition to closing a century-old gap in the understanding of arthropod brain evolution, the findings have important implications for the early evolution of vertebrate brains, Strausfeld said.

Although simple, fishlike animals existed at the same time as these now-fossilized arthropods, there are no convincing fossils of their brains and, thus, neither fossil evidence nor anatomical evidence for a prosocerebrum in vertebrates. Yet, modern studies show that genes defining the fore- mid- and hindbrains of, for example, mice correspond to genes defining the three ganglionic divisions of the arthropod brain. And in vertebrates, certain crucial centers involved in decision making and in learning and memory have some genetic correspondences with the higher centers in the arthropod brain, which originated in the ancient arthropod prosocerebrum.

Thus, it is plausible that even earlier than the Cambrian period, possibly even before the evolution of segmentally organized body plans, the common ancestor of both vertebrates and invertebrates possessed basic circuits for simple cognition and decision making. And while an ancient prosocerebral-like brain might have been present in the very early ancestors of vertebrates, no such fossil has even suggested evidence for a discrete, nonsegmental domain.

“Nevertheless, one can reasonably speculate that vertebrates have embedded in their ‘modern’ brains parts of an ancient, non-segmented brain that has so far only been demonstrable in an early arthropod, such as Leanchoilia,” Strausfeld said.

Additional co-authors on the study are Yuanlong Zhao of the Guizhou Research Center for Palaeobiology at Guizhou University in Guiyang, China; Fangchen Zhao of the State Key Laboratory of Palaeobiology and Stratigraphy of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing, China; and You He of Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility.