The researchers investigated how the plants of Tenerife differ in functional terms from plants from other parts of the world. They conducted extensive field research and measurements at over 500 sites using the most up-to-date methods of functional ecology. The sites were scattered all over the island at altitudes ranging from sea level to mountainous regions above 3,300 metres. The scientists recorded about 80% of Tenerife’s native seed plants, and surveyed eight plant characteristics: plant size, specific wood density, leaf thickness, absolute and specific leaf area, leaf dry matter, nitrogen concentration in leaf tissue, and seed weight. They compared their data with data on more than 2,000 plant species found on the mainland.

“Our study shows, for the first time and contrary to all expectations, that species groups that evolved on the Canary Islands do not contribute to the expansion of the breadth of different traits. This means they do not lead to more functional diversity,” explains the lead of the study, Professor Holger Kreft, and Göttingen University’s Biodiversity, Macroecology and Biogeography research group. Previous comparisons show that species occurring on islands can differ significantly from their relatives on the mainland. A well-known example is provided by the Galapagos giant tortoise: the species is only found on the Galapagos Islands and, as a result of adaptation to its environmental conditions, is much larger than tortoises from the mainland. The research team expected similar differences between island and mainland plants, but this was not the case. “Rather, we see that most species follow the constraints of the island climate. Thus, medium-sized, woody species develop. These tend to live with the limited resources and high risks of extinction on the island. That is, they grow slowly. The high functional diversity is mainly due to the species that are widespread on the island and the nearby mainland,” explains Kreft.

“At the beginning of our research, we assumed that island plants would show fundamental differences and would be characterised by rather limited diversity in terms of function due to their geographical isolation,” explains first author Dr Paola Barajas Barbosa. The results are part of her doctoral thesis, which she did at the University of Göttingen. She now does research at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research in Leipzig (iDiv). “We were all the more surprised to find that the plants of Tenerife have a comparatively high functional diversity.”

Thanks to mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor Baoxing Xu at the University of Virginia and his research team, nanofoam just received a big upgrade and protective sports equipment could, too. This newly invented design integrates nanofoam with “non-wetting ionized liquid,” a form of water that Xu and his research team now know blends perfectly with nanofoam to create a liquid cushion. This versatile and responsive material will give better protection to athletes and is promising for use in protecting car occupants and aiding hospital patients using wearable medical devices.

The team’s research was recently published in Advanced Materials.

For maximum safety, the protective foam sandwiched between the inner and outer layers of a helmet should not only be able to take one hit but multiple hits, game after game. The material needs to be cushiony enough to create a soft place for a head to land, but resilient enough to bounce back and be ready for the next blow. And the material needs to be resilient but not hard, because “hard” hurts heads, too. Having one material do all of these things is a pretty tall order.

The team advanced their work previously published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which started exploring the use of liquids in nanofoam, to create a material that meets the complex safety demands of high-contact sports.

“We found out that creating a liquid nanofoam cushion with ionized water instead of regular water made a significant difference in the way the material performed,” Xu said. “Using ionized water in the design is a breakthrough because we uncovered an unusual liquid-ion coordination network which made it possible to create a more sophisticated material.”

The liquid nanofoam cushion allows the inside of the helmet to compress and disperse the impact force, minimizing the force transmitted to the head and reducing the risk of injury. It also regains its original shape after impact, allowing for multiple hits and ensuring the helmet’s continued effectiveness in protecting the athlete’s head during the game.

“An added bonus,” Xu continued, “is that the enhanced material is more flexible and much more comfortable to wear. The material dynamically responds to external jolts because of the way the ion clusters and networks are fabricated in the material.”

“The liquid cushion can be designed as lighter, smaller and safer protective devices,” said associate professor Weiyi Lu, a collaborator from civil engineering at Michigan State University. “Also, the reduced weight and size of the liquid nanofoam liners will revolutionize the design of the hard shell of future helmets. You could be watching a football game one day and wonder how the smaller helmets protect the players’ heads. It could be because of our new material.”

In traditional nanofoam, the protection mechanism relies on material properties that react when it gets crunched, or mechanically deformed, such as “collapse” and “densification.” Collapse is what it sounds like, and densification is the severe deformation of foam on strong impact. After the collapse and densification, the traditional nanofoam doesn’t recover very well because of the permanent deformation of materials — making the protection a one-time deal. When compared to the liquid nanofoam, these properties are very slow (a few milliseconds) and cannot accommodate the “high-force reduction requirement,” which means it can’t effectively absorb and dissipate high-force blows in the short time window associated with collisions and impacts.

Another downside of traditional nanofoam is that, when subjected to multiple small impacts that don’t deform the material, the foam becomes completely “hard” and behaves as a rigid body that cannot provide protection. The rigidness could potentially lead to injuries and damage to soft tissues, such as traumatic brain injury (TBI).

By manipulating the mechanical properties of materials — integrating nanoporous materials with “non-wetting liquid” or ionized water — the team developed a way to make a material that could respond to impacts in a few microseconds because this combination allows for superfast liquid transport in a nanoconfined environment. Also, upon unloading, i.e., after impacts, due to its non-wetting nature, the liquid nanofoam cushion can return to its original form because the liquid is ejected out of the pores, thereby withstanding repeated blows. This dynamic conforming and reforming ability also remedies the problem of the material becoming rigid from micro-impacts.

The same liquid properties that make this new nanofoam safer for athletic gear also offer a potential use in other places where collisions happen, like cars, whose safety and material protective systems are being reconsidered to embrace the emerging era of electric propulsion and automated vehicles. It can be used to create protective cushions that absorb impacts during accidents or help reduce vibrations and noise.

Another purpose that might not be as evident is the role liquid nanofoam can play in the hospital setting. The foam can be used in wearable medical devices like a smartwatch, which monitors your heart rate and other vital signs. By incorporating liquid nanofoam technology, the watch can have a soft and flexible foam-like material on its underside and help improve the accuracy of the sensors by ensuring proper contact with your skin. It can conform to the shape of your wrist, making it comfortable to wear all day. Additionally, the foam can provide extra protection by acting as a shock absorber. If you accidentally bump your wrist against a hard surface, the foam can help cushion the impact and prevent any harm to the sensors or your skin.

This is not your grandfather’s dairy farming strategy, notes lead researcher Melissa Cantor, assistant professor of precision dairy science in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences. Cantor noted that new technology is becoming increasingly affordable, offering farmers opportunities to detect animal health problems soon enough to intervene, saving the calves and the investment they represent.

IoT refers to embedded devices equipped with sensors, processing and communication abilities, software, and other technologies to connect and exchange data with other devices over the Internet. In this study, Cantor explained, IoT technologies such as wearable sensors and automatic feeders were used to closely watch and analyze the condition of calves.

Such IoT devices generate a huge amount of data by closely monitoring the cows’ behavior. To make such data easier to interpret, and provide clues to calf health problems, the researchers adopted machine learning — a branch of artificial intelligence that learns the hidden patterns in the data to discriminate between sick and healthy calves, given the input from the IoT devices.

“We put leg bands on the calves, which record activity behavior data in dairy cattle, such as the number of steps and lying time,” Cantor said. “And we used automatic feeders, which dispense milk and grain and record feeding behaviors, such as the number of visits and liters of consumed milk. Information from those sources signaled when a calf’s condition was on the verge of deteriorating.”

Bovine respiratory disease is an infection of the respiratory tract that is the leading reason for antimicrobial use in dairy calves and represents 22% of calf mortalities. The costs and effects of the ailment can severely damage a farm’s economy, since raising dairy calves is one of the largest economic investments.

“Diagnosing bovine respiratory disease requires intensive and specialized labor that is hard to find,” Cantor said. “So, precision technologies based on IoT devices such as automatic feeders, scales and accelerometers can help detect behavioral changes before outward clinical signs of the disease are manifested.”

In the study, data was collected from 159 dairy calves using precision livestock technologies and by researchers who performed daily physical health exams on the calves at the University of Kentucky. Researchers recorded both automatic data-collection results and manual data-collection results and compared the two.

In findings recently published in IEEE Access, a peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the researchers reported that the proposed approach is able to identify calves that developed bovine respiratory disease sooner. Numerically, the system achieved an accuracy of 88% for labeling sick and healthy calves. Seventy percent of sick calves were predicted four days prior to diagnosis, and 80% of calves that developed a chronic case of the disease were detected within the first five days of sickness.

“We were really surprised to find out that the relationship with the behavioral changes in those animals was very different than animals that got better with one treatment,” she said. “And nobody had ever looked at that before. We came up with the concept that if these animals actually behave differently, then there’s probably a chance that IoT technologies empowered with machine learning inference techniques could actually identify them sooner, before anybody can with the naked eye. That offers producers options.”

Contributing to the research were: Enrico Casella, Department of Animal and Dairy Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Melissa Cantor, Department of Animal Science, Penn State University; Megan Woodrum Setser, Department of Animal and Food Sciences, University of Kentucky; Simone Silvestri, Department of Computer Science, University of Kentucky; and Joao Costa, Department of Animal and Veterinary Sciences, University of Vermont.

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Science Foundation.

While it has been well known that retinal cells use lactate during cell differentiation, the exact role that this process plays in early eye development was not previously understood.

The findings further the field’s understanding of the metabolic pathways underlying organ development, according to Guillermo Oliver, PhD, the Thomas D. Spies Professor of Lymphatic Metabolism, Director of the Feinberg Cardiovascular and Renal Research Institute Center for Vascular and Developmental Biology, and senior author of the study.

“For a long time, my lab has been interested in developmental biology. In particular, to characterize the molecular and cellular steps regulating early eye morphogenesis,” Oliver said. “For us, the question was: ‘How do these remarkable and critical sensory organs we have in our face start to form?'”

Nozomu Takata, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Oliver lab and first author of the paper, initially approached this question by developing embryonic stem cell-derived eye organoids, which are organ-like tissues engineered in a petri dish. Intriguingly, he observed that early mouse eye progenitors display elevated glycolytic activity and production of lactate. After introducing a glycolysis inhibitor to the cultured organoids, normal optic vesicle development halted, according to the study, but adding back lactate allowed the organoids to resume normal eye morphogenesis, or development.

Takata and his collaborators then compared those organoids to controls using genome-wide transcriptome and epigenetic analysis using RNA and ChIP sequencing. They found that inhibiting glycolysis and adding lactate to the organoids regulated the expression of certain critical and evolutionary conserved genes required for early eye development.

To validate these findings, Takata deleted Glut1 and Ldha, genes known for regulating glucose transport and lactate production from developing retinas in mouse embryos. The deletion of these genes arrested normal glucose transport specifically in the eye-forming region, according to the study.

“What we found was an ATP-independent role of the glycolytic pathway,” Takata said. “Lactate, which is a metabolite known as a waste product before, is really doing something cool in eye morphogenesis. That really tells us that this metabolite is a key player in organ morphogenesis and in particular, eye morphogenesis. I see this discovery as having broader implications, as likely also being required in other organs and maybe in regeneration and disease as well.”

Following this discovery, Takata said he plans to continue to take advantage of traditional and emerging developmental biology’s tools such as mouse genetics and stem cells-derived organoids to study the role of the glycolytic pathway and metabolism in the development of other organs.

The findings could also be useful in better understanding the direct effect that metabolites could have in regulating gene expression during organ regeneration and tumor development, Oliver said.

“Both regeneration and tumorigenesis involve developmental pathways that go awry in some occasions, or you need to reactivate,” Oliver said. “For many developmental processes, you need very strict transcriptional regulation. A gene is on or off at certain times, and when that goes wrong, that could lead to developmental defects or promote tumorigenesis. Now that we know that there are specific metabolites responsible for normal or abnormal gene regulation, this can broaden our thinking on approaches to therapeutic treatments.” Additional Feinberg faculty co-authors include Ali Shilatifard, PhD, the Robert Francis Furchgott Professor and chair of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics and director of the Simpson Querrey Institute for Epigenetics, Alexander Misharin, MD, PhD, associate professor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care, Jason M. Miska, PhD, assistant professor of Neurological Surgery and Navdeep Chandel, PhD, the David W. Cugell, MD, Professor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care and of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics.

The study was supported by an Illumina Next Generation Sequencing award

Plant diversity in nature is generally highest in tropical regions around the equator, with decreasing diversity closer to the poles. FSU Department of Geography Assistant Professor Xiao Feng and Purdue University Assistant Professor Daniel Park showed that the plant specimens housed in herbaria in Europe and North America are more comprehensive and diverse than the collections housed in the countries with more natural plant diversity.

By comparing modern finds with collection specimens, researchers can examine how a species has changed over time.

“People can’t travel back in time to observe what plants look like 100 years ago, but herbaria collections give us a way to examine the past,” Feng said. “If you’re a researcher from Brazil, for example, and you want to study what native plants were like a century ago, you may have to travel to another country to examine certain species.”

The researchers analyzed more than 85 million records from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and surveyed herbaria collections from around the world to document the origins and destinations of specimens collected between 1600 and 2021.

Their data suggest that between 1600 to 1945, Europe and North America were responsible for the majority of intercontinental collecting activities, amassing large amounts of specimens from Africa, Asia and South America.

The trend mostly persisted in the era after World War II, when decolonization efforts increased and more countries in Africa and Asia gained autonomy. Despite the growth of collections in South America, Oceania and Asia, the discrepancy of biodiversity collections persists. The international collections by Europe and North America continued to expand, and today they remain larger than those on other continents.

The discrepancy between where plant diversity exists in nature and where it is preserved and catalogued by scientists is a legacy of colonialism, the researchers said. The movement of plant specimens from the biodiverse tropics to temperate regions runs counter to the natural gradient of biodiversity, in which biodiversity increases as we move from polar to equatorial regions.

“Biodiversity is probably best studied where it occurs, and that’s not what has happened historically,” Park said. “A lot of the science that happens with these specimens is very globally relevant; however, as we note in our paper, the means of contributing to this science is not distributed globally, at least not yet.”

Some efforts are underway to address the disparities in access. One way collections have become more accessible is through digitization — gathering data and images from specimens for storage and sharing in a digital format. Regional, national and international groups are improving databases and increasing the amount of digitized specimens shared online. One example is iDigBio, a project organized by FSU, University of Florida and other institutions.

But digitization is still in its infancy, and there are many cases where access to physical specimens is necessary for the work researchers want to complete. Investments in infrastructure and training in previously colonized countries would also help to address disparities.

Park said acknowledging the role Indigenous people played in the collection and study of specimens and improving the information herbaria have about their plants is a good starting place. In many cases, herbaria don’t have a full accounting of their collections. Understanding exactly how many items exist and their origin is key, he said.

This paper was an effort to better understand the scope of the issue and to involve researchers from places where herbaria collections are lacking. Feng and Park led a team of more than 50 authors from 39 countries for this work.

The research team interviewed 320 households about their use and the benefits of the main types of land. These include virgin forests, fragments of forest, vanilla agroforestry systems, woody fallow land, herbaceous fallow land and rice fields. The interviews show that virgin forests and forest fragments are important for water regulation, for example. Fallow land and vanilla agroforestry systems provide food, medicine and fodder. People collect the most plants from woody fallow areas, which are then used for firewood and charcoal, for instance. In contrast, they use plants from forest fragments for building and weaving. Fallow land — contrary to the widespread belief that it is of little value — makes a major contribution to rural households in Madagascar in terms of health, food and energy supply, as well as animal feed and as a source of building materials.

The results have important findings for nature conservation: “It is important not just to consider the conservation of the impressive diversity of species on Madagascar, but also the benefits of this species richness for the local population,” says first author Dr Estelle Raveloaritiana, whose PhD research was part of this project. Dr Annemarie Wurz, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Marburg, and Professor Teja Tscharntke, at Göttingen University’s Agroecology Group, add: “Nature conservation should take into account the interests of the local population, at the same time as biodiversity-friendly, diverse land management, when designing conservation and development strategies.”

The findings led by Dr Roberto Feuda, from the Neurogenetic group in the Department of Genetics and Genome Biology and other colleagues from the University of Leicester and the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), have now been published in Nature Communications.

Dr Feuda said: “We’ve known for a long time that monoamines like serotonin, dopamine and adrenaline act as neuromodulators in the nervous system, playing a role in complex behaviour and functions like learning and memory, as well as processes such as sleep and feeding.

“However, less certain was the origin of the genes required for the production, detection, and degradation of these monoamines. Using the computational methods, we reconstructed the evolutionary history of these genes and show that most of the genes involved in monoamine production, modulation, and reception originated in the bilaterian stem group.

“This finding has profound implications on the evolutionary origin of complex behaviours such as those modulated by monoamines we observe in humans and other animals.”

The authors suggest that this new way to modulate neuronal circuits might have played a role in the Cambrian Explosion — known as the Big Bang — which gave rise to the largest diversification of life for most major animal groups alive today by providing flexibility of the neural circuits to facilitate the interaction with the environment.

Dr Feuda added: “This discovery will open new important research avenues that will clarify the origin of complex behaviours and if the same neurons modulate reward, addiction, aggression, feeding, and sleep.”

Gravitational lensing is a dramatic example of Einstein’s general theory of relativity in action. A celestial body such as a galaxy cluster is sufficiently massive to distort spacetime, which causes the path of light around the object to be visibly bent as if by a vast lens. Gravitational lensing can also magnify distant objects, allowing astronomers to observe objects that would otherwise be too faint and too far away to be detected.

It can also distort the images of background galaxies, turning them into streaks of light. The first hints of gravitational lensing are already visible in this image as bright arcs which mingle with the throng of galaxies in eMACS J1353.7+4329.

The data in this image are drawn from an observing project called Monsters in the Making, which used two of Hubble’s instruments to observe five exceptional galaxy clusters at multiple wavelengths. These multi-wavelength observations were made possible by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys.

The astronomers behind these observations hope to lay the groundwork for future studies of vast gravitational lenses with next-generation telescopes such as the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope.

In research published today in the British Journal of Psychiatry, researchers led by UNSW Sydney and the affiliated Black Dog Institute found that more than one in five participants achieved total remission from their symptoms after a month of bi-weekly injections, while a third had their symptoms improve by at least 50 per cent. The study was a collaboration between six academic clinical mood disorder units in Australia and one in New Zealand and was funded by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).

“For people with treatment-resistant depression — so those who have not benefitted from different modes of talk-therapy, commonly prescribed antidepressants, or electroconvulsive therapy — 20 per cent remission is actually quite good,” lead researcher Professor Colleen Loo says.

“We found that in this trial, ketamine was clearly better than the placebo — with 20 per cent reporting they no longer had clinical depression compared with only 2 per cent in the placebo group. This is a huge and very obvious difference and brings definitive evidence to the field which only had past smaller trials that compared ketamine with placebo.”

How the trial worked

The researchers recruited 179 people with treatment-resistant depression. All were given an injection of either a generic form of ketamine that is already widely available in Australia as a drug for anaesthesia and sedation — or placebo. Participants received two injections a week in a clinic where they were monitored for around two hours while acute dissociative and sedative effects wore off — usually within the first hour. The treatment ran for a month and participants were asked to assess their mood at the end of the trial and one month later.

As a double-blind trial, neither participants nor researchers administering the drug were aware which patients received generic ketamine or placebo, to ensure psychological biases were minimised. Importantly, a placebo was chosen that also causes sedation, to improve treatment masking. Midazolam is a sedative normally administered before a general anaesthetic, while in many previous studies the placebo was saline.

“Because there are no subjective effects from the saline, in previous studies it became obvious which people were receiving the ketamine and which people received placebo,” Prof. Loo says.

“In using midazolam — which is not a treatment for depression, but does make you feel a bit woozy and out of it — you have much less chance of knowing whether you have received ketamine, which has similar acute effects.”

Other features of the recent trial that set it apart from past studies included accepting people into the trial who had previously received electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

“People are recommended ECT treatment for their depression when all other treatments have been ineffective,” Prof. Loo says.

“Most studies exclude people who have had ECT because it is very hard for a new treatment to work where ECT has not.”

Another difference about this trial was that the drug was delivered subcutaneously (injected into the skin) rather than by drip, thus greatly reducing time and medical complexity. The study is also the largest in the world to date that compares generic ketamine with placebo in treating severe depression.

Much more affordable

Apart from the positive results, one of the standout benefits of using generic ketamine for treatment-resistant depression is that it is much cheaper than the patented S-ketamine nasal spray currently in use in Australia. Where S-ketamine costs about $800 per dose, the generic ketamine is a mere fraction of that, costing as little as $5, depending on the supplier and whether the hospital buys it wholesale. On top of the cost for the drug, patients need to pay for the medical care they receive to ensure their experience is safe — which at Black Dog Institute clinics, comes to $350 per session.

“With the S-ketamine nasal spray, you are out of pocket by about $1200 for every treatment by the time you pay for the drug and the procedure, whereas for generic ketamine, you’re paying around $300-350 for the treatment including the drug cost,” Prof. Loo says.

She adds that for both S-ketamine and generic ketamine treatments, the positive effects often wear off after a few days to weeks, so ongoing treatment may be required, depending on someone’s clinical situation. But the prohibitive costs of the drug and procedure make this an unsustainable proposition for most Australians.

“This is why we’re applying for a Medicare item number to fund this treatment now, because it’s such a powerful treatment.

“And if you consider that many of these people might spend many months in hospital, or be unable to work and are often quite suicidal, it’s quite cost effective when you see how incredibly quickly and powerfully it works. We’ve seen people go back to work, or study, or leave hospital because of this treatment in a matter of weeks.”

The researchers will next be looking at larger trials of generic ketamine over longer periods, and refining the safety monitoring of treatment.

Participating trial sites

• UNSW / Black Dog Institute
• Royal Prince Alfred Hospital / University of Sydney
• NeuroCentrix Research Institute
• Royal Adelaide Hospital / University of Adelaide
• Monash Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre / Monash University
• University of Otago
• Gold Coast University Hospital

Institutions of non-site collaborators

• Deakin University
• University of Newcastle
• The George Institute for Global Health
• University of Western Australia