Rhynchosaurs are a little-understood group of roughly sheep-sized ancient reptiles that thrived during the Triassic Period, a time of generally warm climates and tough vegetation.

In the new study, the researchers studied specimens found in Devon and used CT scanning to see how the teeth wore down as they fed, and how new teeth were added at the backs of the tooth rows as the animals grew in size.

The findings, published today in Palaeontology, show that these early herbivores likely eventually starved to death in old age, the vegetation taking its toll on their teeth.

“I first studied the rhynchosaurs years ago,” said team-leader Professor Mike Benton from Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, “and I was amazed to find that in many cases they dominated their ecosystems. If you found one fossil, you found hundreds. They were the sheep or antelopes of their day, and yet they had specialized dental systems that were apparently adapted for dealing with masses of tough plant food.”

Dr Rob Coram, who discovered the Devon fossils, said: “The fossils are rare, but occasionally individuals were entombed during river floods. This has made it possible to put together a series of jaw bones of rhynchosaurs that ranged in age from quite young, maybe even babies, through adults, and including one particularly old animal, a Triassic old-timer whose teeth had worn right down and probably struggled to get enough nutrition each day.”

“Comparing the sequence of fossils through their lifetime, we could see that as the animals aged, the area of the jaws under wear at any time moved backwards relative to the front of the skull, bringing new teeth and new bone into wear,” said Thitiwoot Sethapanichsakul who studied the jaws as part of his MSc in Palaeobiology. “They were clearly eating really tough food such as ferns, that wore the teeth down to the bone of the jaw, meaning that they were basically chopping their meals by a mix of teeth and bone.”

“Eventually, though, after a certain age — we’re not sure quite how many years — their growth slowed down and the area of wear was fixed and just got deeper and deeper,” added Dr Coram. “It’s like elephants today — they have a fixed number of teeth that come into use from the back, and after the age of seventy or so they’re on their last tooth, and then that’s that.

“We don’t think the rhynchosaurs lived that long, but their plant food was so testing that their jaws simply wore out and presumably they eventually starved to death.”

The rhynchosaurs were an important part of the ecosystems on land during the Triassic, when life was recovering from the world’s greatest mass extinction, at the end of the preceding Permian Period. These animals were part of this recovery and setting the scene for new types of ecologies when first dinosaurs, and later mammals became dominant, as the modern world was being slowly constructed.

By comparing examples of earlier rhynchosaurs, such as those from Devon, with later-occurring examples from Scotland and Argentina, the team were also able to show how their dentitions evolved through time, and how their unique teeth enabled them to diversify twice, in the Middle and then in the Late Triassic. But in the end, climate change, and especially changes of available plants, seem to have enabled the dinosaurs to take over as the rhynchosaurs died out.

Currents can sometimes formulate into circular motions, forming a whirlpool-like phenomena. These are known as eddies, and they are prominent in areas where there are strong gradients in temperature, salinity, or velocity. Their rotating motion can cause nutrients from the colder, deeper waters to rise to the surface.

To investigate the role eddies play in determining the path of the ITF, an international research group has harnessed a high-resolution ocean general circulation model that reproduces eddies. The group featured researchers from Tohoku University, JAMSTEC, Kyushu University, the University of Hawai`i at Manoa, and the National Research and Innovation Agency of Indonesia.

Details of their research were reported in the Journal of Geophysical Research — Oceans on May 14, 2023.

The group’s model enabled them to calculate the transport of simulated particles in a daily-averaged flow field with eddies and a monthly-averaged flow field with smoothed eddy currents, respectively, and estimate the flow rate transported by the simulated particles.

In the Sulawesi Sea, which is situated along the northeastern coast of Borneo and also borders the southern Filipino island of Mindanao, the Sulu archipelago, and Sulawesi Island’s western coast, the group found that large flow fluctuations occur, and seawater circulates over a wider area for an extended period. Seawater also rises from the middle to near the surface, which may cause significant changes in the water when flowing through due to turbulent mixing.

On the eastern side of Sulawesi Island sits the Banda Sea, which surrounds the Maluku Islands and borders the islands of New Guinea and Timor. Here, the current fluctuation is slight, and the model predicted negligible influence from the eddies on the Indonesian Current.

“Our results indicate that the path and residence time of the ITF, along with the mixing process of seawater, must be appropriately reproduced by an ocean general circulation model to gain further insights into and better predict sea surface temperature fluctuations in each region of the Indonesian Archipelago,” points out Toshio Suga, professor of physical oceanography at Tohoku University’s Graduate School of Science and co-author of the paper.

Global warming’s progression is expected to change the ITF. Such changes could have profound repercussions for water temperatures in the Indonesia Archipelago and the Indian Ocean, El Niño and the Indian Ocean Dipole, and the frequency and scale of marine heatwaves that affect marine ecosystems and local weather. Therefore, it is vital to predict accurately such phenomena.

Looking ahead, the group hopes to improve the accuracy of future predictions by clarifying the degree to which eddies impact the path and residence time of the ITF, something quantitatively linked to the determination of water temperature in these areas.

The discovery of these 12,000 -year-old aerophones is extremely rare — in fact, they are the first to be discovered in the Near East. The “flutes,” made from the bones of a small waterfowl, produce a sound similar to certain birds of prey (Eurasian sparrowhawk and common kestrel) when air is blown into them.

The choice of bones used to make these instruments was no accident — larger birds, with bigger bones that produce deeper sounds, have also been found at the site. The Natufians, the Near Eastern civilisation that occupied this village between 13,000 and 9,700 BC, deliberately selected smaller bones in order to obtain the high-pitched sound needed to imitate these particular raptors. The instruments may have been used for hunting, music or to communicate with the birds themselves. Indeed, it is clear that the Natufians attributed birds with a special symbolic value, as attested by the many ornaments made of talons found at Eynan-Mallaha.

The village, located on the shores of Lake Hula, was home to this civilisation throughout its 3,000 years of existence. It is therefore of vital importance in revealing the practices and habits of a culture at the crossroads between mobile and sedentary lifestyles, and the transition from a predatory economy to agriculture. This work² was supported by the Fyssen Fondation and the ministère des Affaires étrangères.

Notes

1. The team is co-directed by Laurent Davin (post-doctoral researcher at the Fyssen Fondation) and José-Miguel Tejero (University of Vienna, University of Barcelona) and includes scientists from the Centre de recherche français à Jérusalem (CNRS/Aix-Marseille Université/ministère de la Culture), the laboratoire Technologie et ethnologie des mondes préhistoriques (CNRS/Université Panthéon-Sorbonne/Université Paris Nanterre), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Institute of Archaeology), Israel Antiquities Authority, Virginia Commonwealth University (Department of Forensic Science), École Nationale Vétérinaire (Laboratoire d’Anatomie comparée, Nantes), the laboratoire Archéologies et sciences de l’Antiquité (CNRS/ministère de la Culture/Université Panthéon-Sorbonne/Université Paris Nanterre) and the l’Institut d’ethnologie méditerranéenne, européenne et comparative (CNRS/Université Aix-Marseille).
2. Excavation of the Eynan-Mallaha site is still ongoing, under the direction of CNRS researcher Fanny Bocquentin and Israel Antiquities Authority researcher Lior Weisbrod.

Throughout nature, at all scales, you can find examples of chirality — or handedness. Imagine trying to eat a sandwich with two hands that were not enantiomers — non-superimposable mirror images — of each other. Consider the pharmacological disasters caused by administering the wrong drug enantiomer or, at a subatomic scale, the importance of the concept of parity in particle physics. Now, thanks to a new study led by researchers at Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, we know that phonons can also possess this property.

A phonon is a quasiparticle that describes the collective vibrational excitations of the atoms in a crystal lattice; imagine it as the Irish Riverdance of the atoms. Physicists have predicted that if phonons can demonstrate chirality they could have important implications on the fundamental physical properties of materials. With the rapid rise in recent years of research into topological materials that exhibit curious electronic and magnetic surface properties, interest in chiral phonons has grown. Yet, experimental proof for their existence has remained elusive.

What makes phonons chiral is the steps of their dance. In the new study, the atomic vibrations dance a twist that moves forwards like a corkscrew. This corkscrew motion is one of the reasons there has been such a drive to discover the phenomenon. If phonons can revolve in this way, like the coil of wire that forms a solenoid, perhaps they could create a magnetic field in a material.

A new slant on the problem

It is this possibility that motivated the group of Urs Staub at PSI, who led the study. “It is because we are at the juncture between ultrafast X-ray science and materials research that we could approach the problem from a different angle,” he says. The researchers are interested in manipulating chiral modes of materials using chiral light — light that is circularly polarised.

It was using such light that the researchers could make their proof. Using quartz, one of the best-known minerals whose atoms — silicon and oxygen — form a chiral structure, they showed how circularly polarised light coupled to chiral phonons. To do this, they used a technique known as resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) at the Diamond Light Source in the UK. This was complemented with supporting theoretical descriptions of how the process would create and enable the detection of chiral phonons from groups at the ETH Zurich (Carl Romao and Nicola Spaldin) and MPI Dresden (Jeroen van den Brink).

“It doesn’t usually work like this in science!”

In their experiment, circularly polarised light shines on quartz. The photons of light possess angular momentum, which they transfer to the atomic lattice, launching the vibrations into their corkscrew motion. The direction that the phonons revolve depends on the intrinsic chirality of the quartz crystal. As the phonons revolve, they release energy in the form of scattered light, which can be detected.

Imagine standing on a roundabout and throwing a Frisbee. If you throw the Frisbee with the same direction of movement as the roundabout, you would expect it to whizz. Throw it the other way and it will spin less, as the angular momentum of the roundabout and the Frisbee will cancel out. In the same way, when the circularly polarised light twists the same way as the phonon it excites, the signal is enhanced, and chiral phonons could be detected.

A well-planned experiment, careful theoretical calculations, and then something strange happened: almost everything went according to plan. As soon as they analysed the results, the difference in response as the chirality of the light flipped was undeniable.

“The results were convincing almost immediately, especially when we compared the difference with the other quartz enantiomers,” remembers PSI scientist and publication first-author Hiroki Ueda. Sitting at his computer to analyse the data, Ueda was the first person to see the results: “I kept checking my analysis codes to make sure it was true.” Staub emphasises, “It’s not normal! It doesn’t usually work like this in science!”

Beautifully simple

During the quest for chiral phonons, there have been several false alarms. Will this settle the debate? “Yes, I think so, that’s the beauty of this piece of work,” believes Staub, whose opinion was shared by the referees at Nature. “Because it’s simple, and beautiful and straightforward. It’s obvious. It’s so simple, it’s obvious that this is the chiral motion.”

While our Jupiter is far away from the sun, hot Jupiters are gas giant planets that closely orbit stars outside our solar system for an orbital period of less than 10 days. Previous studies suggested they rarely have any nearby companion planets, leading scientists to believe that hot Jupiters formed and evolved through a violent process that expelled other planets from the area as they moved closer to their host stars. The research team’s findings reveal that hot Jupiters do not always orbit alone.

“Our research shows that at least a fraction of hot Jupiters cannot form through a violent process,” said Songhu Wang, assistant professor of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences. “This is a significant contribution to advance our understanding of hot Jupiter formation, which can help us learn more about our own solar system.”

Wang presented the results of the research at the June 2023 meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Researchers analyzed the full, four-year data set for hot and warm Jupiters from NASA’s Kepler Mission. Warm Jupiters have a longer orbital period that ranges from 10 to 300 days. Researchers used transit timing variations to determine that at least 12% of hot Jupiters and 70% of warm Jupiters have a nearby planetary companion orbiting their host stars.

Wang and his collaborators combined their results with existing observational constraints to propose a new framework for explaining the evolution of hot and warm Jupiters and why some have companion planets. They determined that the makeup of hot and warm Jupiter systems depends on the occurrence of gas giants in the system, which impacts how much the planets interact and migrate.

The findings provide a launching point into future research about exoplanets and our solar system’s planets.

“The ultimate goal for astronomers is to set our solar system into the bigger picture — ‘Are we unique?'” Wang said. “This helps us to understand why we don’t have a hot Jupiter in our solar system.”

Additional collaborators are Dong-Hong Wu, lecturer in the Department of Physics at Anhui Normal University, and Malena Rice, 51 Pegasi b Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and incoming professor at Yale University.

Wang has long been interested in the configurations and demographics of exoplanets. He uses observational research to try to understand their dynamics and origins, helping astronomers better understand how our solar system fits into a larger cosmic context.

The primary way that the United States has protected its fisheries is through the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which was modernized in 1996 to foster the long-term biological and economic sustainability of marine fisheries. However, the reauthorization of this act has been stalled in Congress for a decade, as some politicians blame the law for being too stringent, leading to what they call “underfishing.”

The University of Delaware’s Kimberly Oremus recently served as a lead author on a paper published in Science that examined U.S. fishing policy. The paper found that the Magnuson-Stevens Act is not constraining most fisheries, and that there are various other reasons that lead to certain fish species being less fished.

Oremus, assistant professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy, and Eyal Frank, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, served as the lead authors on the paper.

The researchers examined two decades of data on 170 U.S. fish stocks. These 170 managed fish stocks represent 85% of the U.S. marine commercial fish landings.

In the study, Oremus, Frank, and their other co-authors examined the assertion of critics of U.S. fishing law that it is too stringent and unnecessarily leaves too many fish in the water.

They found that the main reason about half of the fish stocks in the U.S. are considered “underfished” is due to pure economics — fishers are not harvesting the fish because there is not enough demand for them.

Just four fish species — the Eastern Bering Sea walleye pollock, Atlantic sea scallop, Gulf of Mexico brown shrimp and Gulf of Mexico white shrimp — make up the majority of the revenue of those stocks that the researchers characterized as potentially less utilized and fished. Of those, the majority of the revenue came from just one species: the walleye pollock, the catch of which is not constrained by the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

Other, healthy fish stocks are being left in the water because they could not be profitably caught without also catching other fish species that are depleted.

“Some healthy stocks are constrained by the Magnuson-Stevens Act because they are often caught with other stocks that are depleted,” Oremus said. “Some stocks are constrained by other laws such as the Marine Mammal Protection Act or the Pacific Halibut Treaty with Canada. Some stocks are constrained by both market forces and policies, such as our Gulf of Mexico shrimp stocks that are struggling to compete with the price of imported shrimp coming from less regulated countries.”

While political rhetoric has focused on laws that protect fisheries — such as the Magnuson-Stevens Act — as the main culprit in underfishing, the researchers said it is important to take a nuanced view of the picture and view fisheries on a case-by-case basis.

“Targeting the Magnuson-Stevens Act will not change some of these outcomes,” Frank said. “It is important to understand the multitude of factors involved. Simply relaxing fishery management targets under the law will most likely fail to increase utilization in many of the marine fisheries that appear to be underutilized at face value.”

With changes to the environment and overfishing still a big concern in other parts of the world, it is critical to have science-based fisheries laws in place in order to sustain fish stocks moving forward, Oremus said.

“On average, we find that less fished stocks were less fished six years before the law was passed in 1996, and their share of revenue has remained steady from 1990-2015,” Oremus said. “Though no law is perfect, the law appears to be attempting to balance the needs of fishers, other stakeholders, and the long-term conservation of the resource.”

A multi-institution research team including Cornell University has developed a new suite of computational genetic tools to address the genetic effects of interbreeding between humans of non-African ancestry and Neanderthals that took place some 50,000 years ago. (The study applies only to descendants of those who migrated from Africa before Neanderthals died out, and in particular, those of European ancestry.)

In a study published in eLife, the researchers reported that some Neanderthal genes are responsible for certain traits in modern humans, including several with a significant influence on the immune system. Overall, however, the study shows that modern human genes are winning out over successive generations.

“Interestingly, we found that several of the identified genes involved in modern human immune, metabolic and developmental systems might have influenced human evolution after the ancestors’ migration out of Africa,” said study co-lead author April (Xinzhu) Wei, an assistant professor of computational biology in the College of Arts and Sciences. “We have made our custom software available for free download and use by anyone interested in further research.”

Using a vast dataset from the UK Biobank consisting of genetic and trait information of nearly 300,000 Brits of non-African ancestry, the researchers analyzed more than 235,000 genetic variants likely to have originated from Neanderthals. They found that 4,303 of those differences in DNA are playing a substantial role in modern humans and influencing 47 distinct genetic traits, such as how fast someone can burn calories or a person’s natural immune resistance to certain diseases.

Unlike previous studies that could not fully exclude genes from modern human variants, the new study leveraged more precise statistical methods to focus on the variants attributable to Neanderthal genes.

While the study used a dataset of almost exclusively white individuals living in the United Kingdom, the new computational methods developed by the team could offer a path forward in gleaning evolutionary insights from other large databases to delve deeper into archaic humans’ genetic influences on modern humans.

“For scientists studying human evolution interested in understanding how interbreeding with archaic humans tens of thousands of years ago still shapes the biology of many present-day humans, this study can fill in some of those blanks,” said senior investigator Sriram Sankararaman, an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “More broadly, our findings can also provide new insights for evolutionary biologists looking at how the echoes of these types of events may have both beneficial and detrimental consequences.”

The other co-lead author on the study is Christopher Robles, postdoctoral researcher at UCLA. Additional authors are UCLA doctoral student Ali Pazokitoroudi; Andrea Ganna of Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Alexander Gusev and Arun Durvasula of Harvard Medical School; Steven Gazal of USC; Po-Ru Loh of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; and David Reich of Harvard University.

The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, with additional funding from an Alfred P Sloan Research Fellowship and a gift from the Okawa Foundation. Other authors received funding support from the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, the John Templeton Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the Next Generation Fund at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

The same study also found that taurine supplements can slow down the aging process in worms, mice, and monkeys and can even extend the healthy lifespans of middle-aged mice by up to 12%.

The study was published June 8 in Science.

“For the last 25 years, scientists have been trying to find factors that not only let us live longer, but also increase healthspan, the time we remain healthy in our old age,” says the study’s leader, Vijay Yadav, PhD, assistant professor of genetics & development at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

“This study suggests that taurine could be an elixir of life within us that helps us live longer and healthier lives.”

Anti-aging molecules within us

Over the past two decades, efforts to identify interventions that improve health in old age have intensified as people are living longer and scientists have learned that the aging process can be manipulated.

Many studies have found that various molecules carried through the bloodstream are associated with aging. Less certain is whether these molecules actively direct the aging process or are just passengers going along for the ride. If a molecule is a driver of aging, then restoring its youthful levels would delay aging and increase healthspan, the years we spend in good health.

Taurine first came into Yadav’s view during his previous research into osteoporosis that uncovered taurine’s role in building bone. Around the same time, other researchers were finding that taurine levels correlated with immune function, obesity, and nervous system functions.

“We realized that if taurine is regulating all these processes that decline with age, maybe taurine levels in the bloodstream affect overall health and lifespan,” Yadav says.

Taurine declines with age, supplementation increases lifespan in mice

First, Yadav’s team looked at levels of taurine in the bloodstream of mice, monkeys, and people and found that the taurine abundance decreases substantially with age. In people, taurine levels in 60-year-old individuals were only about one-third of those found in 5-year-olds.

“That’s when we started to ask if taurine deficiency is a driver of the aging process, and we set up a large experiment with mice,” Yadav says.

The researchers started with close to 250 14-month-old female and male mice (about 45 years old in people terms). Every day, the researcher fed half of them a bolus of taurine or a control solution. At the end of the experiment, Yadav and his team found that taurine increased average lifespan by 12% in female mice and 10% in males. For the mice, that meant three to four extra months, equivalent to about seven or eight human years.

Taurine supplements in middle age improves health in old age

To learn how taurine impacted health, Yadav brought in other aging researchers who investigated the effect of taurine supplementation on the health and lifespan in several species.

These experts measured various health parameters in mice and found that at age 2 (60 in human years), animals supplemented with taurine for one year were healthier in almost every way than their untreated counterparts.

The researchers found that taurine suppressed age-associated weight gain in female mice (even in “menopausal” mice), increased energy expenditure, increased bone mass, improved muscle endurance and strength, reduced depression-like and anxious behaviors, reduced insulin resistance, and promoted a younger-looking immune system, among other benefits.

“Not only did we find that the animals lived longer, we also found that they’re living healthier lives,” Yadav says.

At a cellular level, taurine improved many functions that usually decline with age: The supplement decreased the number of “zombie cells” (old cells that should die but instead linger and release harmful substances), increased survival after telomerase deficiency, increased the number of stem cells present in some tissues (which can help tissues heal after injury), improved the performance of mitochondria, reduced DNA damage, and improved the cells’ ability to sense nutrients.

Similar health effects of taurine supplements were seen in middle-aged rhesus monkeys, which were given daily taurine supplements for six months. Taurine prevented weight gain, reduced fasting blood glucose and markers of liver damage, increased bone density in the spine and legs, and improved the health of their immune systems.

Randomized clinical trial needed

The researchers do not know yet if taurine supplements will improve health or increase longevity in humans, but two experiments they conducted suggest taurine has potential.

In the first, Yadav and his team looked at the relationship between taurine levels and approximately 50 health parameters in 12,000 European adults aged 60 and over. Overall, people with higher taurine levels were healthier, with fewer cases of type 2 diabetes, lower obesity levels, reduced hypertension, and lower levels of inflammation. “These are associations, which do not establish causation,” Yadav says, “but the results are consistent with the possibility that taurine deficiency contributes to human aging.”

The second study tested if taurine levels would respond to an intervention known to improve health: exercise. The researchers measured taurine levels before and after a variety of male athletes and sedentary individuals finished a strenuous cycling workout and found a significant increase in taurine among all groups of athletes (sprinters, endurance runners, and natural bodybuilders) and sedentary individuals.

“No matter the individual, all had increased taurine levels after exercise, which suggests that some of the health benefits of exercise may come from an increase in taurine,” Yadav says.

Only a randomized clinical trial in people will determine if taurine truly has health benefits, Yadav adds. Taurine trials are currently underway for obesity, but none are designed to measure a wide range of health parameters.

Other potential anti-aging drugs — including metformin, rapamycin, and NAD analogs — are being considered for testing in clinical trials.

“I think taurine should also be considered,” Yadav says. “And it has some advantages: Taurine is naturally produced in our bodies, it can be obtained naturally in the diet, it has no known toxic effects (although it’s rarely used in concentrations used ), and it can be boosted by exercise.

“Taurine abundance goes down with age, so restoring taurine to a youthful level in old age may be a promising anti-aging strategy.”