Engaging in regular moderate to vigorous physical activity at age 11 was associated with better mental health between the ages of 11 and 13, the study found.

Physical activity was also associated with reduced hyperactivity and behavioural problems, such as loss of temper, fighting with other children, lying, and stealing, in young people.

Researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh, Strathclyde, Bristol, and Georgia in the United States explored data from the Children of the 90s study (also known as the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children; ALSPAC). They looked at the levels of physical activity of 4755 11-year-olds which was measured using devices.

The devices recorded levels of moderate physical activity — typically defined as brisk walking or cycling — as well as vigorous activity which boosts heart rate and breathing, such as aerobic dancing, jogging or swimming.

The young people and their parents reported on their levels of depressive symptoms from age 11 and at age 13 years. Participants’ parents and teachers were also quizzed about the young people’s general behaviour and emotional difficulties.

In analysing the impact of moderate to vigorous exercise on the young people’s mental health and behaviour, the team also considered factors such as age, sex and socio-economic status.

They found that higher levels of moderate or intense physical activity had a small but detectable association with decreases in depressive symptoms and emotional difficulties.

Regular exercise had a small but detectable association with reduced behavioural problems, even after controlling for other possible influences, the study found.

The findings suggest regular moderate and intense physical activity may have a small protective influence on mental health in early adolescence, researchers say.

Dr Josie Booth, of the University of Edinburgh’s Moray House School of Education and Sport, said: “This study adds to the increasing evidence base about how important physical activity is for all aspects of young people’s development — it can help them feel better, and do better at school. Supporting young people to lead healthy active lives should be prioritised.”

Researchers say the study is the first to offer such a comprehensive approach to examining mental health and exercise in young people.

Professor John Reilly, at the University of Strathclyde, said: “While it might seem obvious that physical activity improves mental health the evidence for such a benefit in children and young people has been scarce, so the study findings are important. The findings are also important because levels of moderate-to-vigorous intensity activity globally are so low in pre-teens globally — less than a third achieve the 60 minutes per day recommended by the WHO and UK Health Departments.”

The study is published in Mental Health and Physical Activity.

The research was funded by the Bupa Foundation. Researchers used data from the Children of the 90s study, also known as the ALSPAC birth cohort, based at the University of Bristol. The study is a long-term health-research project that enrolled more than 14,000 pregnant women in 1991 and 1992.

Children of the 90s has been following the health and development of the parents and their children in detail and is currently recruiting the children and the siblings of the original children into the study. It receives core funding from the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust and the University of Bristol.

Over eight years, the FlyLight Project Team and collaborators dissected, labeled, and imaged the neurons of more than 74,000 fruit fly brains, taken from more than 5,000 different genetically modified fly strains.

Now, these images are being made freely available, enabling scientists to quickly and easily find the neurons they need to test theories about how the nervous system works.

The release of the images February 23 in the journal eLife is the culmination of years of effort and contributions from dozens of Janelians, starting in 2012. It demonstrates Janelia’s commitment to creating free resources useful to the entire scientific community. It also highlights the research campus’s mission to take on projects that can’t be accomplished in a traditional research environment where these long-term efforts are often not funded or incentivized.

“It is a great resource for the community,” says Geoffrey Meissner, who was the project scientist for FlyLight and the first author of the new paper in eLife. “It’s very squarely in Janelia’s mission, and it highlights the Project Teams as a concept — of doing these big things beyond the scale of what a lab could reasonably do — and really emphasizes the open science aspect of Janelia’s goals. We want to go the extra mile to make it available to everybody, to make it easy, to make it more comprehensive.”

Using fruit flies for neuroscience research

The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is a staple of neuroscience research. Scientists use genetically engineered fruit flies to target the expression of certain neurons, allowing researchers to understand which brain cells control certain behaviors.

Scientists were using fruit flies to understand the nervous system when Janelia opened in 2006, but researchers did not have tools precise enough to implicate individual neurons.

That led Janelia to create the FlyLight Project Team, which set out to create genetically engineered flies that scientists could use to home in on specific neurons with more precision. In 2012, Janelia released the first generation of those fly strains, the Generation 1 GAL4 driver lines, along with microscopy images showing where in the brain specific neurons resided.

But the Generation 1 lines were still too imprecise for some neuroscience research. So FlyLight developed strains of fruit flies from these GAL4 lines using the Split-GAL4 approach that enabled scientists to identify single neurons or single cell types in the fly brain.

Since they were developed, the Split-GAL4 lines and the Split-GAL4 system have been used by researchers worldwide. But figuring out how to create a specific Split-GAL4 needed for an experiment can be challenging. To do this, researchers first need to label neurons of interest in GAL4 lines — a task that can be difficult for a single researcher.

To help, the FlyLight team used a technique called MultiColor FlpOut (MCFO), developed by Aljoscha Nern, a senior scientist in the Rubin Lab, to label individual neurons in Generation 1 GAL4 driver lines. Generating the more than 70,000 detailed images now being released required over 11 years of imaging time on 8 confocal microscopes.

Janelia’s Scientific Computing team created a freely available tool called NeuronBridge that allows researchers to search the MCFO-labeled images, along with other light and electron microscopy data, to home in on neurons of interest. It also enables researchers to predict the Split-GAL4 combinations they will need for their experiments.

“FlyLight made a lot of images, but without our close collaboration with Scientific Computing, it would just be terabytes of data sitting on a hard drive that nobody could do anything with. They played a key role in making it usable for people,” says Meissner, who is now senior manager of Project Pipeline Support, which continues to offer FlyLight pipelines to Janelia labs.

A worldwide resource

The publication in eLife marks the official release of the images, but neuroscientists all over the world have already been taking advantage of the data since their initial release in 2020.

The latest effort builds on Janelia’s reputation for developing tools that facilitate fruit fly research.

“The general feeling is that for anybody doing fly neuroscience who wants to target a neuron and learn something about it, the best way is using the GAL4 lines characterized by FlyLight,” Meissner says.

“Lava tubes and caves would make perfect habitats for astronauts because you don’t have to build a structure; you are shielded from harmful cosmic radiation, so all you need to do is make it pretty and cozy,” said Wolfgang Fink, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UArizona.

Fink is lead author of a new paper in Advances in Space Research that details a communication network that would link rovers, lake landers and even submersible vehicles through a so-called mesh topology network, allowing the machines to work together as a team, independently from human input. According to Fink and his co-authors, the approach could help address one of NASA’s Space Technology Grand Challenges by helping overcome the limited ability of current technology to safely traverse environments on comets, asteroids, moons and planetary bodies. In a nod to the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel,” the researchers named their patent-pending concept the “Breadcrumb-Style Dynamically Deployed Communication Network” paradigm, or DDCN.

A fairy tale inspires the future

“If you remember the book, you know how Hansel and Gretel dropped breadcrumbs to make sure they’d find their way back,” said Fink, founder and director of the Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory at Caltech and UArizona. “In our scenario, the ‘breadcrumbs’ are miniaturized sensors that piggyback on the rovers, which deploy the sensors as they traverse a cave or other subsurface environment.”

Continuously monitoring their environment and maintaining awareness of where they are in space, the rovers proceed on their own, connected to each other via a wireless data connection, deploying communication nodes along the way. Once a rover senses the signal is fading but still within range, it drops a communication node, regardless of how much distance has actually passed since it placed the last node.

“One of the new aspects is what we call opportunistic deployment — the idea that you deploy the ‘breadcrumbs’ when you have to and not according to a previously planned schedule,” Fink said.

All the while, there is no need for input from the mother rover; each subordinate rover will make that determination on its own, Fink added. The system can work in one of two ways, Fink explained. In one, the mother rover acts as a passive recipient, collecting data transmitted by the rovers doing the exploration. In the other, the mother rover acts as the orchestrator, controlling the rovers’ moves like a puppet master.

Machines take over

The new concept dovetails with the tier-scalable reconnaissance paradigm devised by Fink and colleagues in the early 2000s. This idea envisions a team of robots operating at different command levels — for example, an orbiter controlling a blimp, which in turn controls one or more landers or rovers on the ground. Already, space missions have embraced this concept, several with participation by UArizona researchers. For example, on Mars, the Perseverance rover is commanding Ingenuity, a robotic helicopter. A concept for another mission, which ultimately was not selected for funding, proposed sending an orbiter carrying a balloon and a lake lander to study one of the hydrocarbon seas on Saturn’s moon Titan. The breadcrumb approach takes the idea one step further by providing a robust platform allowing robotic explorers to operate underground or even submerged in liquid environments. Such swarms of individual, autonomous robots could also aid in search and rescue efforts in the wake of natural disasters on Earth, Fink said.

Fink said the biggest challenge, apart from getting the rovers inside the subsurface environment in the first place, is to retrieve the data they record underground and bring it back to the surface. The DDCN concept allows a team of rovers to navigate even convoluted underground environments without ever losing contact to their “mother rover” on the surface. Outfitted with a light detection and ranging system, or lidar, they could even map out cave passages in all three dimensions, not unlike the drones that can be seen exploring an alien spacecraft in the movie “Prometheus.”

“Once deployed, our sensors automatically establish a nondirected mesh network, which means each node updates itself about each node around it,” said Fink, who first detailed the DDCN concept in a proposal to NASA in 2019.

“They can switch between each other and compensate for dead spots and signal blackouts,” added Mark Tarbell, paper co-author and senior research scientist in Fink’s laboratory. “If some of them die, there still is connectivity through the remaining nodes, so the mother rover never loses connection to the farthest node in the network.”

Mission of no return

The robust network of communication nodes ensures all the data collected by the robotic explorers make it back to the mother rover on the surface. Therefore, there is no need to retrieve the robots once they have done their job, said Fink, who published the idea of using groups of expendable mobile robotic surface probes as early as 2014.

“They’re designed to be expendable,” he said. “Instead of wasting resources to get them into the cave and back out, it makes more sense to have them go as far as they possibly can and leave them behind once they have fulfilled their mission, run out of power or succumbed to a hostile environment.”

“The communication network approach introduced in this new paper has the potential to herald a new age of planetary and astrobiological discoveries,” said Dirk Schulze-Makuch, president of the German Astrobiological Society and author of many publications on extraterrestrial life. “It finally allows us to explore Martian lava tube caves and the subsurface oceans of the icy moons — places where extraterrestrial life might be present.”

The proposed concept “holds magic,” according to Victor Baker, a UArizona Regents Professor of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences, Geosciences and Planetary Sciences.”The most amazing discoveries in science come about when advances in technology provide both first-time access to a thing or place and the means of communicating what is thereby discovered to creative minds that are seeking understanding,” Baker said.

Exploring hidden ocean worlds

In places that call for submersible robots, the system could consist of a lander — either floating on a lake, as might be the case on Titan, or sitting on the ice atop a subsurface ocean like on Europa — that is connected to the submarine, for example through a long cable. Here the communication nodes would act as repeaters, boosting the signal in regular intervals to prevent it from degrading. Importantly, Fink pointed out, the nodes have the capabilities to gather data themselves — for example measuring pressure, salinity, temperature and other chemical and physical parameters — and to ingest the data into the cable connecting back to the lander.

“Imagine you make it all the way to Europa, you melt your way through miles of ice, make it down to the subsurface ocean, where you find yourself surrounded by alien life, but you have no way of getting data back to the surface,” he said. “That’s the scenario we need to avoid.”

Having developed the rovers and the communication technology, Fink’s group is now working on building the actual mechanism by which the rovers would deploy the communication nodes.

“Basically, we’re going to teach our ‘Hansels’ and ‘Gretels’ how to drop the breadcrumbs so they add up to a functioning mesh communication network,” Fink said.

In a study published today in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the researchers say that 11 minutes a day (75 minutes a week) of moderate-intensity physical activity — such as a brisk walk — would be sufficient to lower the risk of diseases such as heart disease, stroke and a number of cancers.

Cardiovascular diseases — such as heart disease and stroke — are the leading cause of death globally, responsible for 17.9 million deaths per year in 2019, while cancers were responsible for 9.6 million deaths in 2017. Physical activity — particularly when it is moderate-intensity — is known to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer, and the NHS recommends that adults do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity activity a week.

To explore the amount of physical activity necessary to have a beneficial impact on several chronic diseases and premature death, researchers from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge carried out a systematic review and meta-analysis, pooling and analysing cohort data from all of the published evidence. This approach allowed them to bring together studies that on their own did not provide sufficient evidence and sometimes disagreed with each other to provide more robust conclusions.

In total, they looked at results reported in 196 peer-reviewed articles, covering more than 30 million participants from 94 large study cohorts, to produce the largest analysis to date of the association between physical activity levels and risk of heart disease, cancer, and early death.

The researchers found that, outside of work-related physical activity, two out of three people reported activity levels below 150 min per week of moderate-intensity activity and fewer than one in ten managed more than 300 min per week.

Broadly speaking, they found that beyond 150 min per week of moderate-intensity activity, the additional benefits in terms of reduced risk of disease or early death were marginal. But even half this amount came with significant benefits: accumulating 75 min per week of moderate-intensity activity brought with it a 23% lower risk of early death.

Dr Soren Brage from the MRC Epidemiology Unit said: “If you are someone who finds the idea of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity a week a bit daunting, then our findings should be good news. Doing some physical activity is better than doing none. This is also a good starting position — if you find that 75 minutes a week is manageable, then you could try stepping it up gradually to the full recommended amount.”

Seventy-five minutes per week of moderate activity was also enough to reduce the risk of developing cardiovascular disease by 17% and cancer by 7%. For some specific cancers, the reduction in risk was greater — head and neck, myeloid leukaemia, myeloma, and gastric cardia cancers were between 14-26% lower risk. For other cancers, such as lung, liver, endometrial, colon, and breast cancer, a 3-11% lower risk was observed.

Professor James Woodcock from the MRC Epidemiology Unit said: “We know that physical activity, such as walking or cycling, is good for you, especially if you feel it raises your heart rate. But what we’ve found is there are substantial benefits to heart health and reducing your risk of cancer even if you can only manage 10 minutes every day.”

The researchers calculated that if everyone in the studies had done the equivalent of at least 150 min per week of moderate-intensity activity, around one in six (16%) early deaths would be prevented. One in nine (11%) cases of cardiovascular disease and one in 20 (5%) cases of cancer would be prevented.

However, even if everyone managed at least 75 min per week of moderate-intensity physical activity, around one in ten (10%) early deaths would be prevented. One in twenty (5%) cases of cardiovascular disease and nearly one in thirty (3%) cases of cancer would be prevented.

Dr Leandro Garcia from Queen’s University Belfast said: “Moderate activity doesn’t have to involve what we normally think of exercise, such as sports or running. Sometimes, replacing some habits is all that is needed. For example, try to walk or cycle to your work or study place instead of using a car, or engage in active play with your kids or grand kids. Doing activities that you enjoy and that are easy to include in your weekly routine is an excellent way to become more active.”

The research was funded by the Medical Research Council and the European Research Council.

What counts as moderate-intensity physical activity?

Moderate-intensity physical activity raises your heart rate and makes you breathe faster, but you would still be able to speak during the activity. Examples include:

• Brisk walking
• Dancing
• Riding a bike
• Playing tennis
• Hiking

John Bates, the senior author of a new study in the journal Royal Society Open Science reporting on the hybrid, first encountered the unusual bird while doing fieldwork in Peru’s Cordillera Azul National Park, which protects an outer ridge on the eastern slopes of Andes mountains. Since the area is isolated, it would make sense for a genetically distinct population to emerge there. “I looked at the bird and said to myself, ‘This thing doesn’t look like anything else.’ My first thought was, it was a new species,” says Bates, a curator of birds at Chicago’s Field Museum.

When Bates and colleagues gathered more data about the specimen in the Field Museum’s Pritzker DNA Lab, however, the results surprised everyone. “We thought it would be genetically distinct, but it matched Heliodoxa branickii in some markers, one of the pink-throated hummingbirds from that general area of Peru,” says Bates. If it was H. branickii, it didn’t make sense for the bird to have gold throat feathers; in the hummingbird family, it’s rare for members of the same species to have dramatically different throat colors.

The initial run of DNA sequencing looked at mitochondrial DNA, a type of genetic material that only gets passed down through the mother. That mitochondrial DNA gave a clear result matching H. branickii; the researchers then analyzed the bird’s nuclear DNA, which includes contributions from both parents. This time, the DNA showed similarities to both H. branickii and its cousin, H. gularis. It wasn’t half branickii and half gularis, though — one of its ancestors must have been half-and-half, and then later generations mated with more branickii birds.

The question remained how two pink-throated bird species could produce a non-pink-throated hybrid. The study’s first author, Field Museum senior research scientist Chad Eliason, says the answer lies in the complex ways in which iridescent feather colors are determined.

“It’s a little like cooking: if you mix salt and water, you kind of know what you’re gonna get, but mixing two complex recipes together might give more unpredictable results,” says Eliason. “This hybrid is a mix of two complex recipes for a feather from its two parent species.”

Feathers get their base color from pigment, like melanin (black) and carotidnoids (red and yellow). But the structure of feathers’ cells and the way light bounces off them can also produce something called structural color. Color-shifting iridescence is a result of structural color.

The researchers used an electron microscope to examine the throat feather structure on a subcellular level, and an analytical technique called spectroscopy to measure how light bounces off the feathers to produce different colors. They found subtle differences in the origin of the parents’ colors, which explain why their hybrid offspring produced a totally different color.

“There’s more than one way to make magenta with iridescence,” says Eliason. “The parent species each have their own way of making magenta, which is, I think, why you can have this nonlinear or surprising outcome when you mix together those two recipes for producing a feather color.”

While this study helps explain the strange coloration of one unusual bird, the researchers say that it opens the door to more questions about hybridization.

Separate species are generally defined as lineages that are genetically distinct and don’t interbreed with each other; hybrids break that rule. Sometimes hybrids are weird one-offs or are sterile, like mules; in other cases, hybrids can form new species. It’s not clear how common hummingbird hybrids like the one in this study are, but the researchers speculate that hybrids like this one might contribute to the diversity of structural colors found across the hummingbird family tree.

“Based on the speed of color evolution seen in hummingbirds, we calculated it would take 6-10 million years for this drastic pink-gold color shift to evolve in a single species,” says Eliason.

Co-author Mark Hauber at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign adds that “this study gives us clues about the nanostructural basis of evolutionary shifts in color.”

This study was contributed to by Bates’s and Eliason’s Field Museum colleagues Jacob Cooper (now at the University of Kansas), Shannon Hackett, Erica Zahnle, Dylan Maddox, and Taylor Hains, as well as Tatiana Paqueño Saco (Peruvian Ministry of Natural Resources) and Mark Hauber (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).