Dr Matthew Luskin, from UQ’s School of the Environment, and his team collated and analysed species population data from across the region, some of it collected with a network of cameras.

“Macaques and wild pigs are taking over Southeast Asia’s disturbed forests,” Dr Luskin said.

“Humans are largely to blame for this by altering forests with logging and establishing palm oil farms which provide food and ideal breeding conditions for these animals.

“We saw that wild boar and macaque numbers were 400 per cent higher in forests near the plantations than in untouched environments.

“These animals take full advantage of the farmland, raiding crops and thriving on calorie-rich foods.”

Setting and monitoring the camera traps provided Dr Luskin with an up-close experience of the exploding numbers.

“I encountered huge troops of macaques in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia — they were everywhere in the forest edges, following us and interfering with our equipment,” Dr Luskin said.

“At first it was frustrating but then was eerie as we became completely surrounded.”

Dr Luskin said there were significant human health risks in the rising pig and macaque populations.

“The wildlife origins of the COVID-19 pandemic show that mammals in human-modified ecosystems often host high pathogen loads and pose serious zoonotic disease risks,” he said.

“Both pigs and macaques are recognised as carriers of diseases that can be transmitted to people and they’re the most common species in a region considered to be the global zoonotic disease hotspot.”

Collaborator, Professor Carlos Peres from the University of East Anglia (UK), said abnormally high populations of wildlife species that are disease reservoirs often occur in human-modified tropical forests.

“This study again shows that densely settled rural areas in Southeast Asia may be a source of future human epidemics,” he said.

University of East Anglia and Southern University of Science and Technology (China) PhD candidate, Jonathan Moore, said the immediate effects of the population explosions could be seen on native flora in the affected regions.

“Both pigs and macaques trigger negative cascading impacts in these pristine ecosystems,” Mr Moore said.

“They kill the seeds and seedlings of native plants and eat bird and reptile eggs.

“The Malaysian pigs alone were found to reduce rainforest tree regeneration by 62 per cent.”

The researchers say action is needed to minimise population expansions of wild pigs and macaques.

“Efforts to manage the populations of these species have failed in the past because of their rapid reproductive capacity and public outcry,” Dr Luskin said.

“Nobody favours needless killing of wildlife but the negative social and ecological impacts from hyperabundant pest species does demand ethical and urgent management solutions.”

This is now mostly achieved via wired or invasive contact systems. However, these are either inconvenient or, for patients with burns or for infants with insufficient skin area, are unsuitable.

Scientists at the University of Sydney Nano Institute and the NSW Smart Sensing Network have now developed a photonic radar system that allows for highly precise, non-invasive monitoring.

The research is published today in Nature Photonics.

Using their newly developed and patented radar system, the researchers monitored cane toads and were able accurately to detect pauses in breathing patterns remotely. The system was also used on devices that simulate human breathing.

The scientists say this demonstrates a proof of principle for using photonic radar that could enable the vital-sign monitoring of multiple patients from a single, centralised station.

The University of Sydney Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) and lead for this research Professor Ben Eggleton said: “Our guiding principle here is to overcome comfort and privacy issues, while delivering highly accurate vital sign monitoring.”

An advantage to this approach is the ability to detect vital signs from a distance, eliminating the need for physical contact with patients. This not only enhances patient comfort but reduces the risk of cross-contamination, making it valuable in settings where infection control is crucial.

“Photonic radar uses a light-based, photonics system — rather than traditional electronics — to generate, collect and process the radar signals. This approach allows for very wideband generation of radio frequency (RF) signals, offering highly precise and simultaneous, multiple tracking of subjects,” said lead author Ziqian Zhang, a PhD student in the School of Physics.

“Our system combined this approach with LiDAR — light detection and ranging. This hybrid approach delivered a vital sign detection system with a resolution down to six millimetres with micrometre-level accuracy. This is suitable for clinical environments.”

Alternate approaches to non-contact monitoring have typically relied on optical sensors, using infrared and visible wavelength cameras.

“Camera-based systems have two problems. One is high sensitivity to variations in lighting conditions and skin colour. The other is with patient privacy, with high-resolution images of patients being recorded and stored in cloud computing infrastructure,” said Professor Eggleton who is also the co-Director of the NSW Smart Sensing Network.

Radio frequency (RF) detection technology can remotely monitor vital signs without the need for visual recording, providing built-in privacy protection. Signal analysis, including identification of health signatures, can be performed with no requirement for cloud storage of information.

Co-author Dr Yang Liu, a former PhD student in Professor Eggleton’s team, now based at EPFL in Switzerland, said: “A real innovation in our approach is complementarity: our demonstrated system has the capability to simultaneously enable radar and LiDAR detection. This has inbuilt redundancy; if either system encounters a fault, the other continues to function.”

Conventional RF radar systems, which rely entirely on electronics, have narrow RF bandwidth and therefore have lower-range resolution. This means they cannot separate closely located targets or distinguish them in a cluttered environment.

Relying solely on LiDAR, which uses much shorter light wavelengths, provides improved range and resolution, but has limited penetration abilities through objects such as clothes.

“Our proposed system maximises the utility of both approaches through integrating the photonic and radio frequency technologies,” Mr Zhang said.

Working with collaborators and partners in the NSW Smart Sensing Network, the researchers hope this research provides a platform to develop a cost-effective, high-resolution and rapid-response vital sign monitoring system with application in hospitals and corrective services.

“A next step is to miniaturise the system and integrate it into photonic chips that could be used in handheld devices,” Mr Zhang said.

Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a thread-like arrangement of 10 galaxies that existed just 830 million years after the big bang. The 3 million light-year-long structure is anchored by a luminous quasar — a galaxy with an active, supermassive black hole at its core. The team believes the filament will eventually evolve into a massive cluster of galaxies, much like the well-known Coma Cluster in the nearby universe.

“I was surprised by how long and how narrow this filament is,” said team member Xiaohui Fan of the University of Arizona in Tucson. “I expected to find something, but I didn’t expect such a long, distinctly thin structure.”

“This is one of the earliest filamentary structures that people have ever found associated with a distant quasar,” added Feige Wang of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the principal investigator of this program.

This discovery is from the ASPIRE project (A SPectroscopic survey of biased halos In the Reionization Era), whose main goal is to study the cosmic environments of the earliest black holes. In total, the program will observe 25 quasars that existed within the first billion years after the big bang, a time known as the Epoch of Reionization.

“The last two decades of cosmology research have given us a robust understanding of how the cosmic web forms and evolves. ASPIRE aims to understand how to incorporate the emergence of the earliest massive black holes into our current story of the formation of cosmic structure,” explained team member Joseph Hennawi of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Growing Monsters

Another part of the study investigates the properties of eight quasars in the young universe. The team confirmed that their central black holes, which existed less than a billion years after the big bang, range in mass from 600 million to 2 billion times the mass of our Sun. Astronomers continue seeking evidence to explain how these black holes could grow so large so fast.

“To form these supermassive black holes in such a short time, two criteria must be satisfied. First, you need to start growing from a massive ‘seed’ black hole. Second, even if this seed starts with a mass equivalent to a thousand Suns, it still needs to accrete a million times more matter at the maximum possible rate for its entire lifetime,” explained Wang.

“These unprecedented observations are providing important clues about how black holes are assembled. We have learned that these black holes are situated in massive young galaxies that provide the reservoir of fuel for their growth,” said Jinyi Yang of the University of Arizona, who is leading the study of black holes with ASPIRE.

Webb also provided the best evidence yet of how early supermassive black holes potentially regulate the formation of stars in their galaxies. While supermassive black holes accrete matter, they also can power tremendous outflows of material. These winds can extend far beyond the black hole itself, on a galactic scale, and can have a significant impact on the formation of stars.

“Strong winds from black holes can suppress the formation of stars in the host galaxy. Such winds have been observed in the nearby universe but have never been directly observed in the Epoch of Reionization,” said Yang. “The scale of the wind is related to the structure of the quasar. In the Webb observations, we are seeing that such winds existed in the early universe.”

These results were published in two papers in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on June 29.

The discovery was made by researcher Lorna Culverwell from the Department of Virology at the University of Helsinki. The new species was found amongst mosquito samples collected by Culverwell in summer 2022 in the coastal areas of Finland. One male specimen was identified after examining the genitalia and performing a DNA analysis.

“Only one specimen of this species was found, but I believe it to be unlikely that it would be the only one of its species in Finland,” says Culverwell.

No risk of infection in Finland

According to Culverwell, this discovery is an important addition to the mosquitoes recorded from Finland. Up-to-date knowledge about the different mosquito species and their distributions increases our understanding of which, if any, potential pathogens (e.g. viruses or parasites), the mosquitoes could spread now or in the future.

Culex modestus is known to spread West Nile virus, a flavivirus, in southern Europe, between birds and humans or birds and horses. In most human cases West Nile virus causes a mild infection with symptoms such as fever, headache and muscle pain. In some cases the virus may cause neurological disease. For now, West Nile virus has not been discovered in Finland.

“Finns shouldn’t be concerned about this mosquito discovery at this point. To date, no infections acquired in Finland have been discovered in humans or horses, but this finding is a reminder that we should be aware of which mosquito species are here. Knowing potential mosquito-borne diseases that these species are linked to elsewhere in the world helps us to better investigate how likely it would be for these infections to occur in the future,” says Culverwell.

Warming climate increases the need for insect information

Several mosquitoes in genus Culex maintain West Nile virus in bird populations, including Culex pipiens and Culex modestus. For transmission to humans to occur, usually a mosquito would first have to bite a bird carrying the virus, wait several days for the virus to enter their saliva, and then bite a human when they are infected. Sometimes the virus is inherited from female mosquitoes via their eggs.

“At present it is very unlikely for transmission of the virus to humans or horses as several species are required for a disease transmission cycle to occur. Firstly, there would need to be West Nile virus already present in the local or migratory birds in Finland. No virus has so far been reported, despite small scale screening of birds at some sites in Finland. Secondly, only one specimen of Culex modestus is so far known from one location in Finland. For transmission to occur, larger numbers of mosquitoes would be needed for the possibility of some of them to meet any infected birds, and then survive to bite any humans or horses several days afterwards,” says Culverwell.

Culverwell has collected more than 111,000 mosquito samples in Finland since 2012. According to her, it is uncertain how long Culex modestus has potentially occurred in Finland. It is also still unknown whether the area of discovery has a more established population of Culex modestus mosquitoes.

According to Culverwell, further research is now required on both bird and mosquito populations to assess both the short-term and long-term impacts of the discovery.

“A solid foundation of mosquito research in Finland is important because climate change will likely alter the number of mosquito species in the longer-term. Some may die out, but the chance of species from further south invading Finland will increase if the climate warms and winters become milder. Several species from southern Europe are able to transmit other disease-causing pathogens which are not yet found in Finland, so research should be kept up to maintain an understanding of which pathogens are found where, and whether they are a real or potential risk to human or animal health.”