ECOFE (European Consortium for Open Field Experimentation), a network of agricultural resources at various locations around Europe, has been proposed by a group of scientists in order to do for agricultural science what CERN has done for nuclear research.
The organization would be a community of research stations across Europe — from an outpost in Sicily to a field in Scotland. Among the benefits looked forward to by the researchers behind the project are the ability to study a wide range of soil properties, atmospheric conditions, and temperatures, and, prospectively, the ability to finance more expensive equipment, which would be shared.
For example, open-field installations that allow researchers to study the effects of artificially elevated levels of carbon dioxide, would be a shared cost and a shared tool.
“Present field research facilities are aimed at making regional agriculture prosperous,” said co-author Hartmut Stützel of Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany. “To us, it is obvious that the ‘challenges’ of the 21st century–productivity increase, climate change, and environmental sustainability–will require more advanced research infrastructures covering a wider range of environments.”
The benefits of community research are also associated with potential downsides: researchers would have to sacrifice some of their scientific autonomy in order to focus on targeted research goals.
“It will be a rather new paradigm for many traditional scientists,” said Stützel but I think the communities are ready to accept this challenge and understand that research in the 21st century requires these types of infrastructures. We must now try to make political decision makers aware that a speedy implementation of a network for open field experimentation is fundamental for future agricultural research.
The report is titled “The Future of Field Trials in Europe: Establishing a Network Beyond Boundaries.” It was completed by Drs. Stutzel, Nicolas Bruggermann, and Dirk Inze, and was published in the journal Cell.
Chimpanzees played the trust game to find out the basis of individual preference for other chimps
Trust is the foundation of close relationships in the world of chimpanzees, according to anthropologists at Max Planck Institute.
“Humans largely trust only their friends with crucial resources or important secrets,” said Dr. Jan Engelmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. “In our study, we investigated whether chimpanzees show a comparable pattern and extend trust selectively toward those individuals they are closely bonded with. Our findings suggest that they do indeed, and thus that current characteristics of human friendships have a long evolutionary history and extend to primate social bonds.”
Previous studies of chimpanzee friendships had shown that the animals were attracted to sociable partners for friendships, and that they extended their favors to those they preferred. The Max Plank researchers wanted to know if the basis for this preference was “trust.”
Research situation of chimps
In order to find out, the researchers spent five months at Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Kenya. They set up an arena where the Sweetwaters chimps could play “the trust game” — a game in which two separated chimpanzees get to decide if their partner gets a delicious treat or a less savory one. The partner in turn has the opportunity to share some of their treat back with the one who pulled the rope that opened the door to the treat.
The best case scenario is considered to be that the chimp with the rope will provide the other with the tasty treat, and the other will share some with the first chimp.
Before the researchers put the chimps in the experimental setting, the researchers observed the chimpanzee group to decide for each chimp which other animal was their favorite and least favorite. These two would be paired up against the first chimp in the game.
Each chimp played 12 rounds of the game with each their favorite and least favorite group member.
The result was that chimps were ” significantly more likely to voluntarily place resources at the disposal of a partner, and thus to choose a risky but potentially high-payoff option, when they interacted with a friend as compared to a non-friend.”
Proportion of trust choices
Proportion of reciprocation
The researchers interpreted this finding to mean that chimpanzees show much greater trust when it comes to friends than non-friends.
“Human friendships do not represent an anomaly in the animal kingdom,” Engelmann said. “Other animals, such as chimpanzees, form close and long-term emotional bonds with select individuals. These animal friendships show important parallels with close relationships in humans. One shared characteristic is the tendency to selectively trust friends in costly situations.”
The report, “Chimpanzees Trust Their Friends,” was completed by Drs. Jan Maxim Engelmann and Esther Herrmann and was published in the journal Current Biology. View the research paper at this link.
Facebook’s AI hardware is now, like its software, open source, joining a broad movement towards outsourcing the world’s artificial intelligence intelligence. Facebook also stated it hoped independent AI technicians would develop deep learning tech superior to what the company currently uses, and that it would buy this technology.
The tech giant has developed deep learning technology, which it uses for Facebook-related functions like identifying faces in pictures and curating news feeds, but can also apply to a wide range of computing tasks.
Through the Open Compute Project, Facebook’s custom hardware designs — a GPU-based server called “Big Sur” — will join Google’s and others’ open source deep learning designs. The hope is that more workers will devote themselves to these projects and become familiar with using the technology.
Deep learning technology involves building computers that function similar to the neural networks of animal brains. The computers store masses of data, form neural networks between the data, and draw inferences from the data based on need.
Yann LeCun, head of the Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research lab, commented on the move to make the company’s AI open source, “This is a way of saying, ‘Look, here is what we use, here is what we need. If you make hardware better than this, we’ll probably buy it from you.'”
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department announced a new policing initiative this week to combat illegal drone operation in metropolitan areas.
The police drones will monitor no-fly zones, enforcing Japan’s drone legislation. Upon finding illegal activity, the drone squad will seek for the drone operator and order the drones to be grounded.
If the squad is not able to remove the drone from the air using this method, 10-foot long drone enforcers will be dispatched to collect the offending drones with large nets.
Japan also recently amended its Civil Aeronautics Law to limit the airspace of drones to 500 feet from the ground. Also, now in densely populated areas, all drones over 300 grams are banned.
The police force also has drone terrorism in mind in pursuing the program. The metropolitan police bureau recently told national media that such attacks were a possibility, and that the force hoped to defend Japan against any such scenario.
The potential for a serious attack in Japan was highlighted earlier this year, when an activist flew a drone carrying radioactive sand to the top of the office building of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The act was a protest against nuclear power, the man said, and no one was injured by the symbolic action.
The new drone squad will consist of dozens of trained officers and will begin operations later this month, according to police officials.
On Monday, the XPrize Foundation announced its latest competition: the $7 Million Shell Ocean Discovery XPrize, which aims to map the ocean floor in high resolution, and find sources of pollution autonomously. Teams will test their technologies in two rounds at two separate undisclosed locations, mapping a 500 square kilometer area of ocean floor in high resolution at depths of 2, and 4 kilometers; winners will receive a grand prize of $4 million.
An additional $1 million will be awarded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to teams that have technology capable of “sniffing out” specified objects through biological and chemical signals. Xprize claims that such technology could also help us learn about our own history, and find medical advancements to currently fatal diseases.
The competition was designed to create better maps, and expand our present knowledge of the oceans, as they are currently 95% unexplored, and remain as one of Earth’s last mysteries. We have mapped the moon, Venus, and Mars, all in much higher resolution than our own oceans. It is also estimated that two thirds of species in the ocean remain to be discovered.
Each of the 25 teams will try to create new, relatively low cost technology that can map the ocean floor, and identify archaeological, Biological, and geological features. Each team must prove their robotics can function efficiently at a depth of 2 and 4 kilometers, where there is no sunlight, high pressure, and temperatures below freezing. A bonus $1 million will go to any team that can make technology that can track chemical and biological signatures to find objects. Such technology could lead to many other discoveries and inventions, as well as helping to find sources of human-caused pollution and slow global warming.
Unlike land, the sea floor can’t be mapped in high resolution by satellite, since radar waves don’t pass through water. Satellites rely on precisely measuring the height of the ocean, and when enough data is collected, scientists can calculate the differences in the ocean surface caused by the landscape below the surface. This technology has given us a full map of the ocean to a resolution of 5 kilometers, which allows us to see the largest features, such as ocean trenches; leaving us with plenty of room for discovery under the water that covers two-thirds of our planet. We’ve mapped the entire surface of the moon at a resolution of 7 meters, and most of Mars and Venus at 100 meters.
XPrize is hopeful that the competition will usher a new era of ocean exploration, and help to better humanity through future innovation from it. The competition is the third of five multi-million dollar ocean based challenges to be created by 2020. The 10 year XPrize Ocean Initiative was created to address critical challenges in ocean exploration and technology; with the goal to make the oceans “healthy, valued, and understood”.
The Geminids — “the King of Meteor Showers” — will rain down around 100 to 150 multi-colored slow-moving streaks per hour this weekend, visible from anywhere, but the best views will be for those in the Northern Hemisphere.
The show will peak over the night of Sunday, December 13 — between midnight and morning with the highest activity between 2 and 3 a.m. There should be some meteors visible already at sunset, though. While the meteors will radiate from the southwest, there is no particular part of the sky where viewers need to focus their attention because the shower will be so high.
The Gemenids are famous not only for the frequency of meteors, but also their slow movement and the varied colors which are produced by the different chemical compounds burning in the sky.
The Gemenids are a relatively young shower — first observed 150 years ago. They originated from the 3200 Phaeton asteroid — one of only two major showers not originating from a comet.
“Virgin soil” hypothesis of African tuberculosis burden now challenged by new “European wave” hypothesis
Ethiopia is a hotspot for tuberculosis infection, ranking third among African countries and eighth in the world for TB burden according to the World Health Organization. But, say researchers who have analyzed the genomes of 66 TB strains and reported their findings in the Cell Press journal Current Biology Thursday, that’s most likely not because TB was absent in the country before Europeans made contact–the so-called “virgin soil hypothesis”–as had been proposed ever since colonial times. Rather, they suggest, Europeans may have introduced a new wave of disease spread by more virulent TB strains, which spread during the 20th century as countries of Sub-Saharan Africa grew increasingly urbanized.
The new genomic analysis finds a surprising amount of diversity amongst TB strains in Ethiopia. It also adds to evidence that Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium responsible for TB, originated in Africa.
“The diversity of M. tuberculosis in Ethiopia is considerably higher than is recorded in most other countries; the number of genotypes present in the population is large, and some of them have clear links with other global genotypes while others are specific to East Africa,” says Stefan Berg of the Animal and Plant Health Agency in Surrey, United Kingdom. “Before this project was initiated, this high diversity was not expected.”
“The diversity of M. tuberculosis complex in Ethiopia confirms the African origin of the disease and contradicts early notions that TB was not present in Africa before main European contact,” adds Iñaki Comas of FISABIO Public Health in Valencia, Spain. “However, it remains to be explained why high rates of infection among native people were observed after the contact.”
Topology Obtained by Bayesian Analyses as Described in Experimental Procedures – The report
The findings are part of a larger effort by Comas and Berg along with colleagues in Europe and Ethiopia to understand the high rates of TB and specifically extra-pulmonary TB–a less common form of the infection affecting areas of the body outside of the lungs–seen in Ethiopia.
In the new study, the researchers analyzed a broad sample of M. tuberculosis strains collected from infected people in Ethiopia. Their analysis shows that all of the strains collected trace back to a single common ancestor with a proposed origin in East Africa. The analysis also revealed a pattern of serial introductions of TB strains into Ethiopia in association with human migration and trade.
Although more work remains, the researchers “propose that increased TB mortality in Africa was driven by the introduction of European strains of M. tuberculosis alongside expansion of selected indigenous strains having biological characteristics that carry a fitness benefit in the urbanized settings of post-colonial Africa.”
Contour Maps Derived from PointEstimation of the Frequency of Each Line-age in the Different Sampling Locations – The report
The new evolutionary analyses shed light on past epidemics of TB. They might also help to understand global trends in TB infection and perhaps even better predict the future. “Understanding factors that may have influenced the current population structure of M. tuberculosis in Africa and worldwide can potential help predicting future trends in the disease epidemiology,” Berg says.
Comas says they would now like to sequence the bacteria along with their human hosts to further investigate the biological factors underlying high rates of extrapulmonary TB in Ethiopia, which may lead to new strategies for combatting this form of disease globally. They’d also like to explore whether certain human populations are more susceptible to certain bacterial strains.
The report, “Population Genomics of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in Ethiopia Contradicts the Virgin Soil Hypothesis for Human Tuberculosis in Sub-Saharan Africa” was published in the journal Current Biology.
By Joseph Caputo
With images from the report and WHO (WHO/P. Virot)
Many of the body’s processes follow a natural daily rhythm or so-called circadian clock, so there are certain times of the day when a person is most alert, when the heart is most efficient, and when the body prefers sleep. Even bacteria have a circadian clock, and in a December 10 Cell Reports study, researchers designed synthetic microbes to learn what drives this clock and how it might be manipulated.
“This is probably because cyanobacteria are naturally photosynthetic–they’re actually responsible for a large fraction of the photosynthesis in the ocean–and so whether the cell is energized or not is a good indication of whether it’s day or night,” he says. For photosynthetic bacteria, every night is a period of starvation, and it is likely that the circadian clock helps them grow during the day in order to prepare for nightfall.
Dr. Michael Rust
To make their discovery, Rust and his colleagues had to separate metabolism from light exposure, and they did this by using a synthetic biology approach to make photosynthetic bacteria capable of living on sugar rather than sunlight.
“I was surprised that this actually worked–by genetically engineering just one sugar transporter, it was possible to give these bacteria a completely different lifestyle than the one they have had for hundreds of millions of years,” Rust says. The findings indicate that the cyanobacteria’s clock can synchronize to metabolism outside of the context of photosynthesis. “This suggests that in the future this system could be installed in microbes of our own design to carry out scheduled tasks,” he says.
In a related analogy, engineers who developed electrical circuits found that synchronizing each step of a computation to an internal clock made increasingly complicated tasks possible, ultimately leading to the computers we have today. “Perhaps in the future we’ll be able to use synthetic clocks in engineered microbes in a similar way,” Rust says.
Other researchers have shown that molecules involved in the mammalian circadian clock are also sensitive to metabolism, but our metabolism is not so closely tied to daylight as the cyanobacteria’s. Therefore, our bodies’ clocks evolved to also sense light and dark.
“This is presumably why, in mammals, there are specialized networks of neurons that receive light input from the retina and send timing signals to the rest of the body,” Rust explains. “So, for us it’s clearly a mixture of metabolic cues and light exposure that are important.”
The bacteria that live inside of our guts, however, most likely face similar daily challenges as those experienced by cyanobacteria because we give them food during the day when we eat but not during the night. “It’s still an open question whether the bacteria that live inside us have ways of keeping track of time,” Rust says.
The report, “Controlling the Cyanobacterial Clock by Synthetically Rewiring Metabolism,” was published in Cell Reports.
Pretty much everything happening in the brain would fail without astrocytes. These star-shaped glial cells are known to have a critical role in synapse creation, nervous tissue repair, and the formation of the blood-brain barrier. But while we have decades of data in mice about these nervous system support cells, how relevant those experiments are to human biology (and the success of potential therapies) has been an open question.
In Neuron on December 10, Stanford researchers present the first functional and molecular comparison of human and mouse astrocytes, and while 85%-90% of the genes are similar, human astrocytes have unique genes and respond differently to neurotransmitters, particularly glutamate. This presumably means that, at the adult stage, human astrocytes, in contrast to mouse astrocytes, are better at detecting neuroactivity and adjusting their functions in response.
“We are only beginning to understand the unique properties of human astrocytes,” says first author Ye Zhang, a postdoctoral scholar in Stanford University School of Medicine’s Department of Neurobiology. “We found hundreds of genes expressed exclusively by human astrocytes, and future studies will likely reveal additional biological differences. Potentially, this work will help us recognize the role of these cells in biological disorders.”
Author Ye Zhang
The study of human astrocytes has faced issues related to access (samples of living tissue must be obtained from brain cancer or epilepsy surgeries or fetal tissue) and purification (breaking apart astrocytes away from other cells often killed them and many experiments ended in failure). Zhang, co-first author and graduate student Steven Sloan, and their faculty mentor, senior author and professor Ben Barres, overcame the technical challenges by developing an antibody-driven protocol that isolates astrocytes and keeps them alive in culture.
This method also allowed the researchers to compare astrocytes in healthy tissue versus those coming from people with glioblastoma or epilepsy. It’s known from mouse studies that astrocytes become highly reactive in these diseases, but what this means remains unclear. Genes that produce both positive and negative effects are expressed during these active periods, and through this study, some of the good and bad genes in humans are beginning to be parsed out. The next step is to screen for drugs that can promote or quell the expression of specific genes.
Another surprising discovery was that astrocytes come in two distinct stages (progenitor and mature) and that early-stage astrocytes and brain cancer closely resemble one another. This brings up the possibility that brain cancer cells that originate from glial cells can be forced into a mature state and thus unable to divide. The authors note that this finding could not have been made without the use of fetal tissue.
“Such knowledge could not have been obtained without access to fetal tissue,” Zhang says. “We can’t guess the biology of human brains and neurodevelopmental disorders just by studying mouse brains.”
With their new method, Zhang and her colleagues hope to soon begin looking at the unique properties of human astrocyte cells in a range of disease types, including Alzheimer’s, ALS, stroke, injury, autism, and schizophrenia.
Mars will most likely develop rings similar to Saturn’s, when its largest moon, Phobos, gets close enough to break apart, according to a recently published study in Nature Geoscience. Mars would be the only inner planet with rings if this took place. Scientists predict it will happen in about 20 – 40 million years.
Unlike Earth’s moon, which is slowly moving away from us, Mars’s largest and inner most moon, Phobos, has been slowly moving towards its parent planet, and once close enough, will be torn into bits by Mars’s gravity. The aftermath of Phobos being torn apart may result in a large ring orbiting Mars, as well as bombarding Mars with meteors for years afterwards. The study concludes that it is far more likely that Phobos will break apart before making contact with Mars, creating rings around the red planet.
Phobos is the larger of Mars’s two moons, and is thought to be a “rubble planet” that is comprised of numerous rocks held together by gravity, to form a large clump with a crust only 100 meters thick, compared to Earth’s average 30 kilometer crust. Every 100 years Phobos orbits 2 metres closer to Mars, and is thought to break apart into thousands of small pieces over 20 million years from now, creating dense rings similar to Saturn’s.
Phobos is Mars’s largest moon, and is made up of thousands of boulders held together by gravity
All planets in our solar system have had rings at one point in time, including Earth, though most rings were too unstable to last very long, and either rained down as meteors, or flew out of orbit. Only the outer gas giant planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune have retained their rings, which will make Mars the only inner planet to have rings again, and will probably be the last time any terrestrial planet gains new rings.
The researchers also said that several missions to Phobos have been proposed, and could help us learn more about asteroids, plate tectonics, and make measurements to test their theories.
Late in 2013, a novel variant of the Ebola virus emerged in Western Africa to start what would become the largest human epidemic on record. In a study published December 9th in Cell Host & Microbe, researchers used genome sequencing to trace the introduction and spread of the virus in Liberia–the second worst-affected country.
The findings suggest that the Ebola virus spread to Liberia multiple times from neighboring countries early during the outbreak, but the majority of Liberian cases are attributable to a single introduction of the virus, which rapidly spread throughout the country and subsequently refueled the ongoing outbreak in Guinea.
“Genome sequencing has played an important role in identifying and confirming chains of transmission throughout this outbreak, in the absence of good epidemiological data. However, relatively few sequences have been determined from patients in Liberia, even though this country had the highest number of Ebola-related deaths,” says senior study author Gustavo Palacios of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). “By providing a detailed view into the ongoing spread and diversification of the Ebola virus, this study supports ongoing surveillance and isolation efforts and provides critical information for developing effective control strategies.”
The Ebola virus is transmitted to people from its reservoir host and spreads in the human population through human-to-human transmission. Since it was first discovered in 1976, the virus has mainly affected remote villages in Africa, limiting the number of deaths associated with Ebola virus disease (EVD) despite the 50% average fatality rate. However, the latest outbreak reached major urban areas in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and nearby countries, resulting in more than 28,000 reported cases and more than 11,000 deaths.
Dr. Gustavo Palacios
The World Health Organization declared that Ebola virus transmission in the human population had ended in Liberia on September 3rd and in Sierra Leone on November 7th of this year. Moreover, the last patient in Guinea, where the outbreak originated, tested negative for the Ebola virus twice as of November 22nd. “Despite encouraging signs of containment, the cluster of three confirmed cases of EVD that was recently reported in Liberia underscores the importance of robust surveillance measures to ensure the rapid detection of any reintroduction or re-emergence of the virus,” Palacios says.
Palacios and first author Jason Ladner of USAMRIID sequenced Ebola virus genomes from 139 EVD patients affected in the second, largest wave of the Liberian outbreak. They also analyzed 782 previously published sequences from throughout the Western African outbreak. Together, these samples span nearly one year of the epidemic, including the period during which 99% of the confirmed and probable cases were reported in Liberia.
While multiple early introductions of the Ebola virus from Guinea and/or Sierra Leone to Liberia were evident, the majority of Liberian cases were consistent with a single introduction in late May or early June 2014, around the start of the second wave of Liberian cases. Although infected individuals may have continued to enter Liberia from neighboring countries, surprisingly, these transmission chains did not substantially contribute to the Liberian portion of the outbreak.
Contact tracing has revealed at least three potential introductions of the Ebola virus to Liberia from Sierra Leone around the start of the second wave of Liberian cases. Analysis of the viral sequences suggests that one of these introductions, which has been linked to several EVD cases in Monrovia, including health care workers at Redemption Hospital, likely led to the largest wave of cases in Liberia.
Subsequently, the virus rapidly spread and diversified within Liberia. Moreover, reintroductions of the virus from Liberia served as an important source for the continuation of the ongoing Ebola outbreak in Guinea and its spread to Mali. “The widespread movement of the Ebola virus within Liberia, due to a high rate of migration in the country, is likely to have played an important role in the magnitude and longevity of the Liberian portion of the Ebola outbreak,” Ladner says. “Regular migration of infected individuals complicates surveillance and isolation efforts, which are critical for controlling Ebola outbreaks.”
Surprisingly, the study suggested that the Ebola virus did not appear to further adapt to humans during the outbreak, but additional research is needed to understand how the virus transitioned to humans at the beginning of the outbreak. Future efforts should also focus on exploring the public health implications of the findings. “A detailed investigation of Ebola virus control measures throughout Western Africa, in light of the movement patterns highlighted in our analysis, will be illustrative regarding the effectiveness of different management approaches,” Palacios says.
This work was supported by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Global Biosurveillance Technology Initiative, Global Emerging Infections System and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Additional support was received by the EU Seventh Framework Programme.
Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt is considering using technology to filter out internet content it checks for “hate and harassment”
Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet Inc (formerly called Google), published an opinion piece for the New York Times in which he expressed his thoughts on “the raw reality of the internet,” writing that Google “should build tools to de-escalate tensions on social media — sort of like spell-checkers, but for hate and harassment.”
Schmidt was writing in the context of comparing authoritarian governments with those of freer nations. “It’s our responsibility to demonstrate that stability and free expression go hand in hand,” Schmidt wrote.
He specified that the first to be targeted for hate-and-harassment-speech censorship should be social accounts for Islamic State and similar terrorist organizations.
He also said the technology he envisioned would “help those countering terrorist messages to find their voice.”
He cited “empowerment of the wrong people, and the wrong voices” in addition to “further degradation of poorly built societies” as important focus points for using the suggested tools.
Schmidt continued that “drowning out hate” was “within our reach.
“It’s up to us to make sure that when the young girl reading this in Indonesia on her tablet moves on from this page,” concluded Schmidt, “the Web that awaits her is a safe and vibrant place, free from coercion and conformity.”
