Our brains appear uniquely tuned for musical pitch

Music listening concept

In the eternal search for understanding what makes us human, scientists found that our brains are more sensitive to pitch, the harmonic sounds we hear when listening to music, than our evolutionary relative the macaque monkey. The study, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, highlights the promise of Sound Health, a joint project between the NIH and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts that aims to understand the role of music in health.

"We found that a certain region of our brains has a stronger preference for sounds with pitch than macaque monkey brains," said Bevil Conway, Ph.D., investigator in the NIH's Intramural Research Program and a senior author of the study published in Nature Neuroscience. "The results raise the possibility that these sounds, which are embedded in speech and music, may have shaped the basic organization of the human brain."

The study started with a friendly bet between Dr. Conway and Sam Norman-Haignere, Ph.D., a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute for Mind, Brain, and Behavior and the first author of the paper.

At the time, both were working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Conway's team had been searching for differences between how human and monkey brains control vision only to discover that there are very few. Their brain mapping studies suggested that humans and monkeys see the world in very similar ways. But then, Dr. Conway heard about some studies on hearing being done by Dr. Norman-Haignere, who, at the time, was a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Josh H. McDermott, Ph.D., associate professor at MIT.

"I told Bevil that we had a method for reliably identifying a region in the human brain that selectively responds to sounds with pitch," said Dr. Norman-Haignere.

That is when they got the idea to compare humans with monkeys. Based on his studies, Dr. Conway bet that they would see no differences.

To test this, the researchers played a series of harmonic sounds, or tones, to healthy volunteers and monkeys. Meanwhile, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to monitor brain activity in response to the sounds. The researchers also monitored brain activity in response to sounds of toneless noises that were designed to match the frequency levels of each tone played.

At first glance, the scans looked similar and confirmed previous studies. Maps of the auditory cortex of human and monkey brains had similar hot spots of activity regardless of whether the sounds contained tones.

However, when the researchers looked more closely at the data, they found evidence suggesting the human brain was highly sensitive to tones. The human auditory cortex was much more responsive than the monkey cortex when they looked at the relative activity between tones and equivalent noisy sounds.

"We found that human and monkey brains had very similar responses to sounds in any given frequency range. It's when we added tonal structure to the sounds that some of these same regions of the human brain became more responsive," said Dr. Conway. "These results suggest the macaque monkey may experience music and other sounds differently. In contrast, the macaque's experience of the visual world is probably very similar to our own. It makes one wonder what kind of sounds our evolutionary ancestors experienced."

Further experiments supported these results. Slightly raising the volume of the tonal sounds had little effect on the tone sensitivity observed in the brains of two monkeys.

Finally, the researchers saw similar results when they used sounds that contained more natural harmonies for monkeys by playing recordings of macaque calls. Brain scans showed that the human auditory cortex was much more responsive than the monkey cortex when they compared relative activity between the calls and toneless, noisy versions of the calls.

"This finding suggests that speech and music may have fundamentally changed the way our brain processes pitch," said Dr. Conway. "It may also help explain why it has been so hard for scientists to train monkeys to perform auditory tasks that humans find relatively effortless."

Earlier this year, other scientists from around the U.S. applied for the first round of NIH Sound Health research grants. Some of these grants may eventually support scientists who plan to explore how music turns on the circuitry of the auditory cortex that make our brains sensitive to musical pitch.

Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

Fruit fly

Scientists have known insects experience something like pain since 2003, but new research published today from Associate Professor Greg Neely and colleagues at the University of Sydney proves for the first time that insects also experience chronic pain that lasts long after an initial injury has healed.

The study in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances offers the first genetic evidence of what causes chronic pain in Drosophila (fruit flies) and there is good evidence that similar changes also drive chronic pain in humans. Ongoing research into these mechanisms could lead to the development of treatments that, for the first time, target the cause and not just the symptoms of chronic pain.

"If we can develop drugs or new stem cell therapies that can target and repair the underlying cause, instead of the symptoms, this might help a lot of people," said Associate Professor Neely, whose team of researchers is studying pain at the Charles Perkins Centre with the goal of developing non-opioid solutions for pain management.

Pain and insects

"People don't really think of insects as feeling any kind of pain," said Associate Professor Neely. "But it's already been shown in lots of different invertebrate animals that they can sense and avoid dangerous stimuli that we perceive as painful. In non-humans, we call this sense 'nociception', the sense that detects potentially harmful stimuli like heat, cold, or physical injury, but for simplicity we can refer to what insects experience as 'pain'."

"So we knew that insects could sense 'pain', but what we didn't know is that an injury could lead to long lasting hypersensitivity to normally non-painful stimuli in a similar way to human patients' experiences."

What is chronic pain?

Chronic pain is defined as persistent pain that continues after the original injury has healed. It comes in two forms: inflammatory pain and neuropathic pain.

The study of fruit flies looked at neuropathic 'pain', which occurs after damage to the nervous system and, in humans, is usually described as a burning or shooting pain. Neuropathic pain can occur in human conditions such as sciatica, a pinched nerve, spinal cord injuries, postherpetic neuralgia (shingles), diabetic neuropathy, cancer bone pain, and in accidental injuries.

Testing pain in fruit flies

In the study, Associate Professor Neely and lead author Dr Thang Khuong from the University's Charles Perkins Centre, damaged a nerve in one leg of the fly. The injury was then allowed to fully heal. After the injury healed, they found the fly's other legs had become hypersensitive. "After the animal is hurt once badly, they are hypersensitive and try to protect themselves for the rest of their lives," said Associate Professor Neely. "That's kind of cool and intuitive."

Next, the team genetically dissected exactly how that works.

"The fly is receiving 'pain' messages from its body that then go through sensory neurons to the ventral nerve cord, the fly's version of our spinal cord. In this nerve cord are inhibitory neurons that act like a 'gate' to allow or block pain perception based on the context," Associate Professor Neely said. "After the injury, the injured nerve dumps all its cargo in the nerve cord and kills all the brakes, forever. Then the rest of the animal doesn't have brakes on its 'pain'. The 'pain' threshold changes and now they are hypervigilant."

"Animals need to lose the 'pain' brakes to survive in dangerous situations but when humans lose those brakes it makes our lives miserable. We need to get the brakes back to live a comfortable and non-painful existence."

In humans, chronic pain is presumed to develop through either peripheral sensitisation or central disinhibition, said Associate Professor Neely. "From our unbiased genomic dissection of neuropathic 'pain' in the fly, all our data points to central disinhibition as the critical and underlying cause for chronic neuropathic pain."

"Importantly now we know the critical step causing neuropathic 'pain' in flies, mice and probably humans, is the loss of the pain brakes in the central nervous system, we are focused on making new stem cell therapies or drugs that target the underlying cause and stop pain for good."

Small horned dinosaur from China, a Triceratops relative, walked on two feet

Many dinosaur species are known from scant remains, with some estimates suggesting 75% are known from five or fewer individuals. Auroraceratops rugosus was typical in this regard when it was named in 2005 based upon a single skull from the Gobi Desert in northwestern China. But that is no longer the case.

In the intervening years, scientists have recovered fossils from more than 80 individual Auroraceratops, bringing this small-bodied plant-eater into the ranks of the most completely known dinosaurs. It is now one of the few very early horned dinosaurs known from complete skeletons. In a collection of articles appearing as Memoir 18 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology this week, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Gansu Agricultural University, and other institutions describe the anatomy, age, preservation, and evolution of this large collection of Auroraceratops.

Their analysis places Auroraceratops, which lived roughly 115 million years ago, as an early member of the group Ceratopsia, or horned dinosaurs, the same group to which Triceratops belongs. In contrast to Triceratops, Auroraceratops is small, approximately 49 inches (1.25 meters) in length and 17 inches (44 cm) tall, weighing on average 34 pounds (15.5 kilograms). While Auroraceratops has a short frill and beak that characterize it as a horned dinosaur, it lacks the "true" horns and extensive cranial ornamentation of Triceratops.

"When I first saw this animal back in 2004, I knew instantly it was a new kind that had never been seen before and was very excited about it," says paleontologist Peter Dodson, senior author on the work and a professor with appointments in Penn's School of Veterinary Medicine and School of Arts and Sciences. "This monograph on Auroraceratops is long-awaited."

In 2005, Dodson and his former students Hai-Lu You and Matthew Lamanna named Auroraceratops (in Latin, "dawn's horned face") in honor of Dodson's wife, Dawn Dodson. You, along with fellow Chinese scientist Da-Qing Li -- both authors on the current work -- and collaborators followed up on the discovery, identifying more than 80 additional examples of the species, from near-hatchlings to adults.

Eric Morschhauser, lead author who is now on the faculty at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, completed his Ph.D. under Dodson at Penn, focused on characterizing Auroraceratops using this robust dataset.

Auroraceratops represents the only horned dinosaur in the group Neoceratopsia (the lineage leading to and including the large bodied ceratopsians such as Triceratops) from the Early Cretaceous with a complete skeleton. This exclusiveness is significant, the researchers say, because horned dinosaurs transitioned from being bipedal, like their ancestors, to being the large rhinoceros-like quadrupedal animals most people think of as horned dinosaurs during the later parts of the Cretaceous.

"Before this study," says Morschhauser, "we had to rely on Psittacosaurus, a more distantly related and unusual ceratopsian, for our picture of what the last bipedal ceratopsian looked like."

Auroraceratops preserves multiple features of the skeleton, like a curved femur and long, thin claws, that are unambiguously associated with walking bipedally in some dinosaurs.

"It can now provide us with a better picture of the starting point for the changes between bipedal and quadrupedal ceratopsians," adds Morschhauser.

Peter Dodson is a professor of anatomy in the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine's Department of Biomedical Sciences and a professor of paleontology in the School of Arts and Sciences' Department of Earth and Environmental Science.

A material way to make Mars habitable

Mars north pole illustration 

People have long dreamed of re-shaping the Martian climate to make it livable for humans. Carl Sagan was the first outside of the realm of science fiction to propose terraforming. In a 1971 paper, Sagan suggested that vaporizing the northern polar ice caps would "yield ~10 s g cm-2 of atmosphere over the planet, higher global temperatures through the greenhouse effect, and a greatly increased likelihood of liquid water."

Sagan's work inspired other researchers and futurists to take seriously the idea of terraforming. The key question was: are there enough greenhouse gases and water on Mars to increase its atmospheric pressure to Earth-like levels?

In 2018, a pair of NASA-funded researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder and Northern Arizona University found that processing all the sources available on Mars would only increase atmospheric pressure to about 7 percent that of Earth - far short of what is needed to make the planet habitable.

Terraforming Mars, it seemed, was an unfulfillable dream.

Now, researchers from the Harvard University, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, and the University of Edinburgh, have a new idea. Rather than trying to change the whole planet, what if you took a more regional approach?

The researchers suggest that regions of the Martian surface could be made habitable with a material -- silica aerogel -- that mimics Earth's atmospheric greenhouse effect. Through modeling and experiments, the researchers show that a two to three-centimeter-thick shield of silica aerogel could transmit enough visible light for photosynthesis, block hazardous ultraviolet radiation, and raise temperatures underneath permanently above the melting point of water, all without the need for any internal heat source.

The paper is published in Nature Astronomy.

"This regional approach to making Mars habitable is much more achievable than global atmospheric modification," said Robin Wordsworth, Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Department of Earth and Planetary Science. "Unlike the previous ideas to make Mars habitable, this is something that can be developed and tested systematically with materials and technology we already have."

"Mars is the most habitable planet in our Solar System besides Earth," said Laura Kerber, Research Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "But it remains a hostile world for many kinds of life. A system for creating small islands of habitability would allow us to transform Mars in a controlled and scalable way."

The researchers were inspired by a phenomenon that already occurs on Mars.

Unlike Earth's polar ice caps, which are made of frozen water, polar ice caps on Mars are a combination of water ice and frozen CO2. Like its gaseous form, frozen CO2 allows sunlight to penetrate while trapping heat. In the summer, this solid-state greenhouse effect creates pockets of warming under the ice.

"We started thinking about this solid-state greenhouse effect and how it could be invoked for creating habitable environments on Mars in the future," said Wordsworth. "We started thinking about what kind of materials could minimize thermal conductivity but still transmit as much light as possible."

The researchers landed on silica aerogel, one of the most insulating materials ever created.

Silica aerogels are 97 percent porous, meaning light moves through the material but the interconnecting nanolayers of silicon dioxide infrared radiation and greatly slow the conduction of heat. These aerogels are used in several engineering applications today, including NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers.

"Silica aerogel is a promising material because its effect is passive," said Kerber. "It wouldn't require large amounts of energy or maintenance of moving parts to keep an area warm over long periods of time."

Using modeling and experiments that mimicked the Martian surface, the researchers demonstrated that a thin layer of this material increased average temperatures of mid-latitudes on Mars to Earth-like temperatures.

"Spread across a large enough area, you wouldn't need any other technology or physics, you would just need a layer of this stuff on the surface and underneath you would have permanent liquid water," said Wordsworth.

This material could be used to build habitation domes or even self-contained biospheres on Mars on Mars.

"There's a whole host of fascinating engineering questions that emerge from this," said Wordsworth.

Next, the team aims to test the material in Mars-like climates on Earth, such as the dry valleys of Antarctica or Chile.

Wordsworth points out that any discussion about making Mars habitable for humans and Earth life also raises important philosophical and ethical questions about planetary protection.

"If you're going to enable life on the Martian surface, are you sure that there's not life there already? If there is, how do we navigate that," asked Wordsworth. "The moment we decide to commit to having humans on Mars, these questions are inevitable."

New virus found in one-third of all countries may have coevolved with human lineage

In 2014, a virus called crAssphage that infects bacteria was discovered as part of the body's intestinal environment. Now, a new study has investigated the origin and evolution of this virus, which may have coevolved with human lineage.

Published in Nature Microbiology, a recent study shows that the virus was found in the sewage of more than one-third of the world's countries. Additionally, the makeup of the virus can vary depending on in which country and city someone resides.

"The virus is both highly abundant in the human gut and represents an entirely new viral family. With this study, we were able to expand our understanding of the diversity and evolutionary history of the human microbiome globally," said Kyle Bibby, co-author of the study and associate professor and Wanzek Collegiate Chair in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences. "Our team at Notre Dame has been evaluating the potential uses of this newly identified virus and is developing it as an alternative to E. coli or other fecal indicator bacteria that are not specific to humans, as an indicator of fecal pollution."

The research was completed through a global collaboration of more than 115 scientists from 65 countries, allowing for the collection of a significant amount of sequencing data. This information was sampled from a variety of volunteers and from sewage samplings around the world. Genetic material data were also collected from primates as well as three pre-Columbian Andean mummies and a Tyrollean glacier mummy, which had 5,300-year-old intestinal content.

"We are in debt to all the amazing colleagues around the world who helped us explore the global diversity of this unique virus," said Robert Edwards, project lead and professor of computer science and biology from San Diego State University. "This is truly a world first in the global scope and nature of the project."

Bibby's research on the virus was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Ancient epigenetic changes silence cancer-linked genes

An epigenetic change, a form of DNA control, that deactivates some genes linked to cancer late in human development has been conserved for more than 400 million years, new research led by the Garvan Institute of Medical Research suggests.

Researchers uncovered that genes turned on in some cancers in humans also exist in zebrafish -- but are 'silenced' within just hours of fertilisation. The study sheds new light on how our epigenetics can regulate genes, some of which are linked to cancer development later in life, over large evolutionary distances. It also uncovers significant differences between how the epigenome 'resets itself' in zebrafish and human embryos, which may guide future studies on epigenetic inheritance.

"We've shown that we have conserved this embryonic event that switches off genes linked to cancers in humans," says Dr Ozren Bogdanovic, Head of the Developmental Epigenomics Laboratory, who led the study. "It's intriguing and we still don't know why it's happening, but it suggests just how important to human health it is to keep these genes silenced."

The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.

An unexpected relative

At first glance, humans and zebrafish (a tiny species of fish native to South Asia) hardly seem related -- in fact, our common evolutionary ancestor dates back more than 400 million years.

But genetically, zebrafish and humans are not so different -- we share around 70% of protein-producing genes. The Garvan-led team set out to investigate how conserved the epigenetic changes, that control how DNA is 'read', are during the development of an embryo.

Genes are in part controlled by methylation -- tags on DNA that 'block' genes from being read.

The researchers first isolated primordial germ cells, the precursor cells of sperm and egg, from developing zebrafish embryos and generated whole genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS) data -- a snapshot of all the DNA methylation in the cell.

The zebrafish genome's father figure

The team uncovered fundamental differences in how DNA is methylated in mammalian and zebrafish embryos.

In humans, these DNA methylation tags are mostly 'swept clean' when a sperm fertilises an egg, and then gradually methylated again, to ensure the embryo can develop correctly. Instead, zebrafish embryos retain the methyl group pattern of the father.

In this study, the researchers found that primordial germ cells of zebrafish do not reset their methylation patterns either, but inherit paternal DNA methylation patterns. This contrasts with findings in mammalian primordial germ cells, which undergo a second 'sweep cleaning' of their DNA methylation tags. The researchers say this finding sheds light on the molecular principles of germline development and highlights zebrafish as a useful experimental model to study how epigenetic signatures are inherited throughout generations.

Further, the researchers screened how DNA is methylated in zebrafish embryos, at four stages of development. They discovered 68 genes that were methylated and turned off early during embryonic development, within 24 hours of fertilisation.

"What was interesting is that most of these genes belong to a group called cancer testis antigens," says Dr Ksenia Skvortsova, co-first author of the study. "Our work shows that these are some of the very first genes that are 'silenced', or targeted by DNA methylation, in both zebrafish and mammals."

Fresh insight on an ancient mechanism

The genes that code for cancer testis antigens, or CTAs for short, are only active in the male testis, but are turned off in all other tissues, in humans. For an unknown reason, CTA genes are turned on again in some cancers, such as melanomas.

"Mammals and fish have very different strategies when it comes to developing an embryo," says Dr Bogdanovic. "But in spite of these very different strategies, it appears that the control of CTA genes are conserved throughout evolution."

While the work sheds new light on our evolution, it may have potential to impact the future of human health. Drugs which target CTAs are already being investigated as a potential therapy for cancers. The current study provides more evidence on how significant CTAs are, and how tightly controlled they have been over the course of evolution.

Every cell type in our body, including sperm and egg, has a unique pattern of DNA methylation marks -- chemical tags on the DNA that regulate gene activity.

During the first week after fertilisation, humans and other mammals 'reset' their DNA methylation patterns, allowing the embryo to develop and differentiate into different cell types. Another wave of DNA methylation resetting takes place in the primordial germ cells of the embryo, precursors of sperm and egg cells, between the third and seventh week of development in humans. However, it remained elusive to date whether the principles of epigenetic resetting are evolutionary conserved across all vertebrates.

Ancient genomics pinpoint origin and rapid turnover of cattle in the Fertile Crescent

The keeping of livestock began in the Ancient Near East and underpinned the emergence of complex economies and then cities. Subsequently, it is there that the world's first empires rose and fell. Now, ancient DNA has revealed how the prehistory of the region's largest domestic animal, the cow, chimes with these events.

An international team of geneticists, led by those from Trinity College Dublin, have deciphered early bovine prehistory by sequencing 67 ancient genomes from both wild and domestic cattle sampled from across eight millennia.

"This allowed us to look directly into the past and observe genomic changes occurring in time and space, without having to rely on modern cattle genetic variation to infer past population events," said Postdpoctoral Researcher at Trinity,Marta Verdugo, who is first author of the article that has just been published in leading international journal, Science.

The earliest cattle are Bos taurus, with no ancestry from Bos indicus, or zebu -- herds which were from a different origin in the Indus Valley.

"However, a dramatic change occurred around 4,000 years ago when we detect a widespread, wholesale influx of zebu genetics from the east," added Verdugo.

The rapid influx that occurred at this point -- despite Near Eastern Bos taurus and zebu having coexisted for previous millennia -- may be linked to a dramatic multi-century drought that was experienced across the greater Near East, referred to as the 4.2-thousand years ago climate event. At this time the world's first empires in Mesopotamia and Egypt collapsed and breeding with arid-adapted zebu bulls may have been a response to changing climate by ancient herders.

Professor of Population Genetics at Trinity, Dan Bradley, said: "This was the beginning of the great zebu diaspora that continues to the present day -- descendants of ancient Indus Valley cattle are herded in each continental tropics region today."

Sequencing Near Eastern wild cattle, or aurochs, also allowed the team to unpick the domestication of this most formidable of beasts. Whereas their similarity to the early cattle of Anatolia concurs with a primary origin there, it is clear that different local wild populations also made significant additional genetic contributions to herds in Southeast Europe and also in the southern Levant, adding to the distinctive make up of both European and African populations today.

"There is a great power in ancient genomics to uncover new, unforeseen tales from our ancient history," added Professor Bradley.

This research was funded by a European Research Council Advanced Grant awarded to Professor Dan Bradley.

Paleontology: New light on cichlid evolution in Africa

A collaborative research project carried out under the auspices of the GeoBio-Center at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich has developed an integrative approach to the classification of fossil cichlids, and identified the oldest known member of the Tribe Oreochromini.

Cichlids (Cichlidae) are a group of small to medium-sized fish that are ubiquitous in freshwater habitats in the tropics. They are particularly notable in exhibiting a wide range of morphological and behavioral specializations, such as various modes of parental care, including mouthbrooding. Some species (mainly members of the genus Tilapia) have achieved fame as culinary delicacies and are of considerable economic significance. Cichlids have undergone rapid diversification in Africa, which is home to at least 1100 species. This process has been especially prominent in the Great Lakes in East Africa's Rift Valley (Lakes Tanganyika, Malawi and Victoria), where it is referred to as the East African Radiation.

"Cichlid diversification in East Africa has become a central paradigm in evolutionary biology. As a consequence, dating the onset of the process and understanding the mechanisms that drive it are issues of great interest to evolutionary biologists and paleobiologists," says LMU paleontologist Professor Bettina Reichenbacher, who is also member of the GeoBio-Center at LMU. Fossils from the area provide the sole source of direct evidence that would allow one to determine the timing and trace the course of lineage diversification within the group. However, the search for cichlid fossils has proven to be both arduous and extremely time-consuming. Indeed, only about 20 fossil species of cichlids from Africa have yet been formally described.

In a study that appears in the online journal Scientific Reports, a team of researchers led by Bettina Reichenbacher now describes a new fossil cichlid, which the authors assign to the new genus Oreochromimos. The name derives from the fact that the specimens, which the team discovered in Central Kenya, show similarities to members of the Tribe Oreochromini (hence the element 'mimos', meaning 'mimic', in the genus name), which are widely distributed in Africa today. "Determining whether or not the fossils could be assigned to any of the extant cichlid lineages was particularly challenging," says Stefanie Penk, first author of the study and a doctoral student in Reichenbacher's group. The difficulties are rooted in the great diversity of the modern cichlid fauna in Africa, and the fact that even distantly related species may be morphologically very similar to each other. "The architecture of the skeleton in cichlids is pretty conservative. All of them have a similar basic form, which undergoes very little change during speciation," Reichenbacher explains. In collaboration with Dr. Ulrich K. Schliewen, co-author of the new paper, Curator of Fishes at the Bavarian State Collection for Zoology in Munich (SNSB-ZSM) and also a member of the GeoBio-Center at LMU, the team adopted the 'best-fit approach' to the classification of the fossil specimens. This requires comparison of the fossil material with all the relevant modern lineages of cichlids. In light of their contemporary diversity, that might seem an impossible task. But thanks to Schliewen's knowledge -- and the range of comparative material represented in the collection under his care -- the strategy succeeded.

A unique glimpse of the past

Reichenbacher and colleagues recovered the Oreochromimosmaterial from a fossil-fish Lagerstätte in Kenya's Tugen Hills, which lie within the Eastern Branch of the East African Rift System. This site provides a unique window into the region's past. The volcanic and sedimentary rocks deposited here date back 5-20 million years. They were overlain by younger material and subsequently uplifted to altitudes of as much as 2000 m by tectonic forces. As a result, the fossil-bearing rocks exposed in the Tugen Hills are either inaccessible to exploration or have been lost to erosion in other parts of Africa. Consequently, the strata here contain a unique assemblage of fossils. Undoubtedly the best known finds so far excavated are the 6-million-year-old remains of a hominin species, which has been named Orrorin tugenensis(orrorin means 'original man' in the local language).

But cichlid fossils are also among the paleontological treasures preserved in these sedimentary formations -- and they are at the heart of Reichenbacher's Kenya Project, which began in 2011. The material collected so far was recovered in cooperation with Kenya's Egerton University, and is now on loan to LMU's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences for further study.

The Oreochromimos specimens are about 12.5 million years old, which makes this genus the oldest known fossil representative of the Tribe Oreochromini. It therefore qualifies as the oldest fossil clade yet assigned to the Haplotilapiini, the lineage which gave rise not only to most of the species that constitute the present-day diversity of African cichlids, but also to the East African Cichlid Radiation in the Great Lakes of the Rift Valley. With their use of an innovative approach to comparative systematics, the authors of the new study have provided a basis for the taxonomic assignment of future finds of fossil cichlid material. "With the aid of this dataset, it will be possible to classify fossil cichlids much more reliably than before and thus to shed new light on their evolutionary history," says Bettina Reichenbacher.

More farmers, more problems: How smallholder agriculture is threatening the western Amazon

A verdant, nearly roadless place, the Western Amazon in South America may be the most biologically diverse place in the world. There, many people live in near isolation, with goods coming in either by river or air. Turning to crops for profit or sustenance, farmers operate small family plots to make a living.

Unfortunately, these farmers and their smallholder agriculture operations pose serious threats to biodiversity in northeastern Peru, according to a team of researchers led by Princeton University.

After conducting a large-scale study of birds and trees, the researchers found that human activities are destroying this tropical forest wilderness -- and the problem will likely only get worse. Their findings were recently published in the journal Conservation Biology.

Many scientists have assumed the impacts of small-scale farming are not too harmful to wildlife, at least not compared with the wholesale clearing of forests for pastures and soybean fields, which is happening in the Eastern Amazon. But this study shows how the far less intrusive actions of small-scale farmers are nonetheless deadly to biodiversity.

"Smallholder agriculture turns out to be a very serious threat to biodiversity, closer in impact to clearing the forests for cattle pastures than we had imagined." said David Wilcove, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, public affairs, and the Princeton Environmental Institute. "What's worse is that smallholder agriculture is the dominant form of land-use change in Western Amazonia, and it is likely to get more widespread in the coming decades."

"We wanted to know how tropical biodiversity responds to smallholder agriculture across the wide range of different forest habitats that typify tropical forest landscapes, and the Western Amazon is a good place to ask these questions," said lead author Jacob Socolar, a 2016 graduate alumnus who conducted the work as a Ph.D. student in Wilcove's lab. He is now a postdoctoral researcher with the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and the University of Sheffield.

"We called the paper, 'overlooked biodiversity loss' because the situation at the landscape scale is worse than we would've guessed by studying one habitat at a time," he said. Socolar and Wilcove teamed up with botanist Elvis Valderrama Sandoval from the Universidad Nacional de la Amazonía Peruana.

The team conducted their fieldwork in the Amazonian lowlands of Loreto Department in Peru. There, they focused on four habitats -- upland forests, floodplain forests, white-sand forests and river islands -- where slash-and-burn agriculture is taking place. They also looked at relatively untouched areas of forest as a basis for comparison.

They sampled birds and trees, two groups they felt would be complementary in how they would respond to changes across the land. Likewise, birds are Socolar's expertise, and Sandoval is a skilled botanist.

Sampling birds can be difficult, Socolar said, especially in this region of Peru, which harbors the greatest number of bird species per acre of anywhere on earth. In 10-minute increments, Socolar recorded all of the bird species in the area based on sight or sound. His final count was 455 bird species, making it among the richest single-observer point-count datasets ever assembled.

Trees are just as tricky, given there are well over 1,000 species in the Peruvian landscape. In their field experiment, the team was able to identify 751 tree species on their study sites.

Different patterns emerged for the birds and trees, creating a seeming contradiction that became a feature of the study, Socolar explained.

In the slashed-and-burned areas, the team found many species of birds. In fact, the farmed sites sometimes had more species than the comparable intact sites. When all sites were tallied, however, the intact sites turned out to have significantly more bird species than the disturbed ones, because all disturbed sites shared a limited pool of species, while intact sites varied in their species composition across different forest habitats.

Trees, on the other hand, exhibited a far less subtle pattern: there were simply far fewer tree species persisting on the cleared land than in the intact forests, and this held even after the scientists used statistical tests to account for the fact that disturbed sites have fewer individual trees than intact forests. With the reduction in the number of tree species in the disturbed sites, the scientists predict there will be fewer insects and other small animals as well, which could have major impacts to the ecosystem.

The results have significant conservation policy implications. First, this area of the Amazon will probably not remain relatively roadless forever, Socolar said, and with more roads will come more farmers. This means it's important to carefully manage remote, protected areas to ensure that ongoing infrastructure development does not cause them to be overrun by smallholders. Given the majority of these farmers are poor, there could also be opportunities to link conservation with efforts to improve rural development and decrease poverty.

"Even though smallholder agriculture supports high biodiversity at small spatial scales, we cannot lose vigilance regarding the overall threat posed by smallholder expansion," Socolar said. "If we do, we pay a price in extinctions. We want this study to serve as a larger warning. It's probably not just a fluke of the Amazon -- these findings could extend to other habitats. We're lucky to work in a place where there is still plenty of land to go around for both farming and conservation. Being proactive is possible, moral and reasonable."

Impacts of selective logging on Congo's intact forest landscapes

A new study says that the tropical forests of Western Equatorial Africa (WEA) -- which include significant stands of Intact Forest Landscapes (IFLs) -- are increasingly coming under pressure from logging, poaching, and associated disturbances.

The tropical forests of WEA are comprised of significant stands of IFLs, which are forest and associated mosaics lacking overt human disturbance such as infrastructure. The vast majority of IFLs found in the Republic of Congo are located in the north of the country, which is also inhabited by extraordinary biodiversity, including chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) and western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla). Forests of northern Congo are also comprised of timber-rich stands, the exploitation of which is a big driver of the region's economy and development.

Publishing in the journal Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, researchers from Lincoln Park Zoo, Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), and Washington University in St. Louis, found that logging road construction had accelerated over the last two decades and has led to a dramatic decline of IFLs. Increased human immigration and degradation of natural resources follows in the wake of such road expansion.

The researchers, together with Park authorities, documented the first instances of elephant poacher incursions in Goualougo Triangle region of Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park (NNNP) -- considered the most pristine block of rainforest remaining in the entire Congo Basin. This coincided with the arrival of roads and active logging in adjacent forest. Increased access to IFLs that facilitates illegal hunting raises concern and increases challenges for authorities tasked with protecting wildlife across WEA.

As part of a regional monitoring effort, researchers partnered with local government officials and the timber company working in the region to assess ape abundances in relation to habitat characteristics and human-caused disturbances, comparing IFLs and non-IFL areas in the Sangha Trinational landscape, a transboundary UNESCO World Heritage site in the Republic of Congo, Cameroon and Central African Republic.

They found that IFLs had higher tree densities and less terrestrial vegetation than logged habitats. Results also indicate few ape resources were exploited in the areas logged twice and areas with tree stems removed had higher abundances of ape preferred terrestrial herbs, which may contribute to ape survival prospects. In addition, they found that chimpanzees and gorillas occur at high densities in both IFLs and as non-IFLs. Differences in the lower abundance of large trees in exploited forest were however identified to coincide with differences in ape resource use. The chimpanzee tree nesting niche was reduced in non-IFLs, as night nests were constructed significantly closer to the ground than in IFLs.

Importantly, the study combined data collected at local scales with larger regional satellite monitoring efforts. The identification of erroneously classified IFLs in the Kabo logging concession in this investigation highlights how verifying remotely sensed information is necessary to ensure accuracy. To identify other less visible human-caused impacts, researchers assessed direct and indirect impacts of road expansion and illegal hunting on wildlife in these remote areas. They urge that the results of biodiversity assessments and strategic aspects of long-term protection should be taken into account when developing reduced impact logging (RIL) guidelines in non-certified and certified logging concessions like those bordering the NNNP.

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) demands adherence to practices that include protecting biological, environmental service, social and cultural values that are significant or critically important. Such values should also be taken into consideration when identifying conservation set asides. For example, the majority of the remaining IFLs in the Kabo concession is within the Djeke Triangle, which is contiguous but outside the boundaries of the Ndoki National Park in the Central African Republic and the NNNP in the Republic of Congo. Thus, this area is a strategic location for curbing future poaching incursions into both protected areas. It also comprises the home ranges of gorillas habituated to human presence for scientific study and tourism development.

"With only eight percent of forests within Western Equatorial Africa remaining intact and on the decline, the preservation of such habitats should be a priority," said David Morgan lead author of the research and conservation scientist at Lincoln Park Zoo.

Emma Stokes, WCS's Regional Director for Central Africa, said: "Intact Forests are important not only for elephants, chimpanzees, and gorillas, but also for climate regulation, indigenous cultures and overall ecosystem health; their loss has a disproportionate impact on the surrounding area."

Flood prediction model developed

The duration of floods can be determined by river flow, precipitation and atmospheric blocking. Now an international team of researchers led by Nasser Najibi and Naresh Devineni at The City College of New York is offering a novel physically based Bayesian network model for inference and prediction of flood duration. The model also accurately examines the timescales of flooding.

Conceptualized by Najibi and tested on the Missouri River Basin, the statistical model is based on data in the area from the last 50 years. They found that long duration floods first require high flow conditions in rivers created by recurrent high intensity rainfall events, which is then followed by a large stable long-lived low-pressure system -- a storm cell. These conditions may then result in large-scale devastating floods. In shorter duration floods, however, this land-atmospheric coupling is negligible thus explaining why not all storms result in widespread flooding.

"It is possible to predict the duration of floods by coupling atmospheric dynamics and land surface conditions in the watershed," summed up Najibi, a PhD candidate majoring in civil and environmental engineering (water resources engineering) in CCNY's Grove School of Engineering.

On the benefits of this new development, Najibi and Devineni said they are are able to mitigate potential risk imposed by longer duration floods on critical infrastructure systems such as flood control dams, bridges and power plants. It is also possible to predict how long the duration of flooding and inundation will be.

Najibi and his team plan to expand their study, which appeared in the Nature research journal npj Climate and Atmospheric Science, across the United States. This work is part of Devineni's DOE Early Career project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Devineni is an associate professor in the Grove School and NOAA CREST. Other collaborators in the research include Mengqian Lu (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) and Rui A. P. Perdigão (Universtät Wien, Austria/ University of Lisbon, Portugal).

Tracking down climate change with radar eyes

Over the past 22 years, sea levels in the Arctic have risen an average of 2.2 millimeters per year. This is the conclusion of a Danish-German research team after evaluating 1.5 billion radar measurements of various satellites using specially developed algorithms.

"The Arctic is a hotspot of climate change," explains Prof. Florian Seitz of the German Geodetic Research Institute at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). "Due to rising temperatures, the glaciers of Greenland are receding. At the same time sea ice is melting. Every year, billions of liters of meltwater are released into the ocean." The enormous volumes of fresh water released in the Arctic not only raise the sea level, they also have the potential to change the system of global ocean currents -- and thus, our climate.

But how fast do sea levels rise? And precisely what effect does this have? To answer these questions, climatologists and oceanographers require specific measurements over as long a period as possible.

In a collaborative effort, researchers from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and from the TUM have now documented sea-level changes in the Arctic over more than two decades. "This study is based on radar measurements from space via so-called altimetry satellites and covers the period from 1991 to 2018. Thus, we have obtained the most complete and precise overview of the sea level changes in the Arctic Ocean to date. This information is important in terms of being able to estimate future sea levels associated with climate change," says Stine Kildegaard Rose, Ph.D., researcher at Space DTU.

Finding water with algorithms

"The challenge lies in finding the water signals in the measured data: Radar satellites measure only the distance to the surface: Albeit, vast areas of the Arctic are covered with ice, which obscures the seawater," explains Dr. Marcello Passaro. The TUM researcher has developed algorithms to evaluate radar echoes reflected from the water where it reaches the surface through cracks in the ice.

Using these algorithms, Passaro processed and homogenized 1.5 billion radar measurements from the ERS-2 and Envisat satellites. On the basis of the signals tracked at the TUM, the DTU team worked on the post-processing of these data and added the measurements collected by the current CryoSat radar mission.

From monthly averages to a climate trend

The researchers created a map with lattice points to represent the monthly sea level elevations for the period between 1996 and 2018. The sum of the monthly maps reveals the long-term trend: The Arctic sea level rose by an average of 2.2 millimeters per year.

There are, however, significant regional differences. Within the Beaufort Gyre, north of Greenland, Canada and Alaska, sea levels rose twice as fast as on average -- more than 10 centimeters in 22 years. The reason: The low-salinity meltwater collects here, while a steady east wind produces currents that prevent the meltwater from mixing with other ocean currents. Along the coast of Greenland, on the other hand, the sea level is falling -- on the west coast by more than 5 mm per year, because the melting glaciers weaken the attractive force of gravity there.

"The homogenized and processed measurements will allow climate researchers and oceanographers to review and improve their models in the future," concludes Passaro.

Thirty years of unique data reveal what's really killing coral reefs

Coral reefs are considered one of the most threatened ecosystems on the planet and are dying at alarming rates around the world. Scientists attribute coral bleaching and ultimately massive coral death to a number of environmental stressors, in particular, warming water temperatures due to climate change.

A study published in the international journal Marine Biology, reveals what's really killing coral reefs. With 30 years of unique data from Looe Key Reef in the lower Florida Keys, researchers from Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute and collaborators have discovered that the problem of coral bleaching is not just due to a warming planet, but also a planet that is simultaneously being enriched with reactive nitrogen from multiple sources.

Improperly treated sewage, fertilizers and top soil are elevating nitrogen levels, which are causing phosphorus starvation in the corals, reducing their temperature threshold for "bleaching." These coral reefs were dying off long before they were impacted by rising water temperatures. This study represents the longest record of reactive nutrients and algae concentrations for coral reefs anywhere in the world.

"Our results provide compelling evidence that nitrogen loading from the Florida Keys and greater Everglades ecosystem caused by humans, rather than warming temperatures, is the primary driver of coral reef degradation at Looe Key Sanctuary Preservation Area during our long-term study," said Brian Lapointe, Ph.D., senior author and a research professor at FAU's Harbor Branch.

A key finding from the study is that land-based nutrient runoff has increased the nitrogen:phosphorus ratio (N:P) in reef algae, which indicates an increasing degree of phosphorus limitation known to cause metabolic stress and eventually starvation in corals. Concentrations of reactive nitrogen are above critical ecosystem threshold levels previously established for the Florida Keys as are phytoplankton levels for offshore reefs as evidenced by the presence of macroalgae and other harmful algal blooms due to excessive levels of nutrients.

Researchers gathered data from 1984 to 2014 and collected seawater samples during wet and dry seasons. Lapointe and collaborators from the University of Georgia and the University of South Florida also monitored the living coral and collected abundant species of seaweed (macroalgae) for tissue nutrient analysis. They monitored seawater salinity, temperature and nutrient gradients between the Everglades and Looe Key. They wanted to better understand how nitrogen traveled from the Everglades downstream to the coral reefs of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, which now has the lowest amount of coral cover of any reefs in the wider Caribbean region.

Data revealed that living coral cover at Looe Key Sanctuary Preservation Area declined from nearly 33 percent in 1984 to less than 6 percent in 2008. The annual rate of coral loss varied during the study, but increased from 1985 to 1987 and 1996 to 1999 following periods of heavy rainfall and increased water deliveries from the Everglades. Between 1991 to 1995, significant increases in Everglades runoff and heavy rainfall resulted in increases of reactive nitrogen and phytoplankton levels at Looe Key above levels known to stress and cause die-off of coral reefs. Despite reduced Everglades flows, the water quality has not yet recovered to the levels of the 1980s.

Nitrogen loading to the coast is predicted to increase by 19 percent globally simply as a result of changes in rainfall due to climate change, which suggests the need for urgent management actions to prevent further degradation.

"The future success of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan will rely on recognizing the hydrological and nitrogen linkages between the Everglades, Florida Bay and the Florida Keys," said Lapointe. "The good news is that we can do something about the nitrogen problem such as better sewage treatment, reducing fertilizer inputs, and increasing storage and treatment of stormwater on the Florida mainland."

The impact of local land-based nitrogen contributions from sewage treatment plants that service 76,000 year-round residents and an estimated 3.8 million tourists annually is currently being mitigated by completion of centralized wastewater collection and advanced wastewater treatment plants and nutrient removal facilities throughout the Florida Keys.

According to the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, ocean-related activities associated with coral reefs add more than $8.5 billion each year and 70,400 jobs to the local economy in southeast Florida.

"The Bonaire coral reefs in the Caribbean Netherlands is a great example of effective nitrogen pollution mitigation. These coral reefs are beginning to recover following the construction of a new sewage treatment plant in 2011, which has significantly reduced nitrogen loading from septic tanks," said Lapointe.

The study's co-authors are Rachel A. Brewton and Laura W. Herren of FAU's Harbor Branch; James W. Porter, Ph.D., emeritus professor of ecology at the University of Georgia; and Chuanmin Hu, Ph.D., of the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida.

"Citing climate change as the exclusive cause of coral reef demise worldwide misses the critical point that water quality plays a role, too," said Porter. "While there is little that communities living near coral reefs can do to stop global warming, there is a lot they can do to reduce nitrogen runoff. Our study shows that the fight to preserve coral reefs requires local, not just global, action."

New study on citrus greening disease

Orange juice is a staple on many breakfast tables, but the future availability of citrus products is threatened by the global spread of huanglongbing (HLB), also known as citrus greening disease.

Knowing which environmental conditions are suitable for disease transmission and where those conditions occur is vital for crop management. A new study published by researchers at Virginia Tech with a team of international researchers in Journal of Applied Ecology investigates the thermal suitability for transmission of citrus greening with implications for surveillance and prevention.

The bacterium responsible for causing citrus greening prevents the formation of commercially viable fruit and is transmitted by an insect called the Asian citrus psyllid.

Both the pathogen and the insect vector have been spreading in recent years, devastating regions famous for high citrus production and threatening the future of the citrus industry. As citrus greening becomes an increasing threat to growers worldwide, the future of the industry may depend on identifying locations that do not have a high risk of production collapse.

Led by Rachel Taylor of the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) in the United Kingdom, the team of researchers behind the study created a mathematical model to calculate how suitability for citrus greening transmission depends on temperature and mapped how this translates into areas where the disease could become established.

"Our suitability maps can be used to underpin risk-based surveillance and prevention to ensure resources to fight citrus greening are applied in the best locations," Taylor said.

Disease transmission dynamics are largely dependent on temperature, both for successful replication of the HLB bacterium and survival of psyllid vectors. The model was built with data collected under laboratory conditions, directly incorporating the effects and limitations of environmental temperature into the estimate of suitability.

"Although the approach is fairly simple, we've shown in other systems that we can make surprisingly accurate predictions," said coauthor Leah Johnson, assistant professor in Department of Statistics in the College of Science at Virginia Tech.

The model predicts that successful infection of host plants can occur between 16?C and 33?C, with peak transmission at around 25?C. Using this information of the temperature limits for disease spread, the authors were able to make maps of global suitability, showing how many months of the year have temperature conditions that would place citrus groves at risk for infection with HLB. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many regions with nearly year-round suitability for citrus greening include some of the citrus-growing areas hit hardest by the disease, including Brazil and South-East Asia.

This work provides critical information for citrus production and crop management moving into the future. "Translating these models into maps helps communicate our findings to citrus stakeholders and creates a baseline for thinking about potential climate change impacts," said coauthor Sadie Ryan, from the University of Florida.

Some locations identified by the model as suitable for transmission for half of the year, such as California and the Iberian Peninsula, are currently free of citrus greening. In these areas known for high citrus production, preventing the establishment of the disease vector through increased surveillance and management may help prevent the devastating effects that citrus greening has had on other growers.

"We hope that this model can be a useful planning tool for growers and policymakers dealing with HLB," said Johnson, who is also an affiliated faculty member of the Global Change Center, an arm of the Fralin Life Sciences Institute at Virginia Tech.

Comprehensive review of the future of CRISPR technology in crops

CRISPR is often thought of as "molecular scissors" used for precision breeding to cut DNA so that a certain trait can be removed, replaced, or edited, but Yiping Qi, assistant professor in Plant Science & Landscape Architecture at the University of Maryland, is looking far beyond these traditional applications in his latest publication in Nature Plants. In this comprehensive review, Qi and coauthors in his lab explore the current state of CRISPR in crops, and how scientists can use CRISPR to enhance traditional breeding techniques in nontraditional ways, with the goal of ensuring global food and nutritional security and feeding a growing population in the face of climate change, diseases, and pests.

With this new paper, Qi highlights recent achievements in applying CRISPR to crop breeding and ways in which these tools have been combined with other breeding methods to achieve goals that may not have been possible in the past. He aims to give a glimpse of what CRISPR holds for the future, beyond the scope of basic gene editing.

"When people think of CRISPR, they think of genome editing, but in fact CRISPR is really a versatile system that allows you to home in on a lot of things to target, recruit, or promote certain aspects already in the DNA," says Qi. "You can regulate activation or suppression of certain genes by using CRISPR not as a cutting tool, but instead as a binding tool to attract activators or repressors to induce traits."

Additionally, Qi discusses the prospect of recruiting proteins that can help to visualize DNA sequences, and the potential for grouping desirable traits together in the genome. "I call this gene shuffling," says Qi. "This is designed to move very important trait genes close to each other to physically and genetically link them so they always stick together in traditional crossbreeding, making it much easier to select for crops with all the traits you want."

These are just some of the examples of future directions Qi hopes to cultivate and draw more attention to with this paper. "I hope this review [in Nature Plants] will open eyes to show that there is a lot to be offered by CRISPR, going beyond the current status of genome editing, but also outside of just editing to see where the whole field can lead down the road."

This includes the process of taking CRISPR applications in animals and humans and applying them to crops in ways that haven't been done before. For example, CRISPR technology has already enhanced screenings for genes and traits in human health by using a library of tens of thousands of guide molecules that are tailored for targeting selected gene sets at the genome scale. This system could be potentially used in plants to screen for traits that contribute to disease and pest resistance, resiliency, and crop yield. "This not only helps with breeding, but also helps categorize gene functioning much more easily," says Qi. "Mostly, these studies have been done in human cells, and crops are lagging behind. I see that as one future aspect of where plant science can harness some of these different applications, and my lab has already been doing some of this work."

Qi's lab has published multiple original research papers this year that highlight some of the differences for CRISPR applications in human and plant cells. Earlier this year in Molecular Plant, Qi, his graduate student, interns, and collaborators published findings testing the targeting scope and specificity of multiple CRISPR Cas9 variants. Qi's team sought to prove or disprove claims made in humans about the fidelity and specificity of these tools in rice. "Not all claims that are made for CRISPR functionality in humans and animals are going to be true or applicable in plants, so we are looking at what works and what we can do to optimize these tools for crops."

Another recent paper in BMC Biology as part of a collaborative research effort investigated temperature as a method of improving efficiency of CRISPR Cas12a genome editing in rice, maize, and Arabidopsis, which was found to need higher than ambient temperatures to boost editing efficiency. "Human cells are always maintained at higher temperature which may be optimal for CRISPR to work, but is pretty hot for plants," says Qi. "We have to explore how that temperature plays a role for CRISPR applications in other species."

Qi also published the first ever book dedicated entirely to Plant Genome Editing with CRISPR Systems, highlighting cutting-edge methods and protocols for working with CRISPR in a variety of crops.

"This book is really gathering together specific applications for many different plant systems, such as rice, maize, soybeans, tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce, carrots -- you name it -- so that people working in their own plant of interest may find some chapters quite relevant. It is designed as a protocol book for use in the lab, so that anybody new to the field should be able to figure out how to work with CRISPR in their particular plant." Qi was contacted by the publisher in the United Kingdom, Humana Press, to produce and edit the book. It was released earlier this year as part of the Methods in Molecular Biology book series, a prominent and respected series in the field.

"How to feed the world down the road -- that's what motivates me every day to come to work," says Qi. "We will have 10 billion people by 2050, and how can we sustain crop improvement to feed more people sustainably with climate change and less land? I really think that technology should play a big role in that."

Flies may also spread disease among monkeys and apes

People the world over have a good sense that we do not want flies landing on our food. Research has justified that disgust, showing that flies associated with humans and their livestock spread a diversity of pathogens. Researchers have now shown that such fly associations also exist in highly mobile non-human primate groups as they move kilometers every day through the rainforest.

The researchers first looked at fly densities inside and outside groups of wild sooty mangabeys and chimpanzees in Tai National Park, Ivory Coast, finding many more flies in primate social groups than outside them. First author Jan Gogarten then carried out a quirky experiment to understand how this high density of flies was maintained, marking over 1,700 flies with nail polish in a group of mangabeys. To their surprise, the researchers recaptured these colorful flies in the mangabey group up to two weeks later and nearly a kilometer and a half from where they were marked. "These surprising results suggest there is a high density fly cloud following monkeys as they move kilometers each day through the forest," says Gogarten.

Given that monkeys and apes have flies buzzing around them in high density swarms, the team set out to test whether flies pose a disease risk like they do for humans. Indeed, nearly seven percent of flies in the mangabey group contained high concentrations of anthrax (Bacillus cereus biovar anthracis). It was possible to culture anthrax from these flies, confirming the viability of this pathogen. Previous research by the team has shown that anthrax is responsible for nearly forty percent of all animal deaths in Taï National Park, suggesting that these fly associations may pose a major risk to primates. Flies also contained the DNA of the bacterium Treponema pallidum pertenue, which causes yaws disease in humans and infects mangabeys in this ecosystem causing horrific lesions. "This study is the first to show that flies actively track primates in the forest and in doing so expose them to dangerous bacterial pathogens," says Wittig. "These experiments suggest that fly associations represent an understudied cost of sociality and that flies are a nuisance that not only affects humans at their summer picnics, but exist more broadly in monkey and great ape populations," says Leendertz.

There is a silver-lining to these findings -- while a pathogen carrying fly swarm clearly represents bad news for these primates, they are a useful tool for monitoring the health of these populations, providing much needed data about the pathogens circulating in wildlife without necessitating the darting of wild animals, which always poses a risk to both researchers and wildlife.

Black plastics could create renewable energy

Research from Swansea University has found how plastics commonly found in food packaging can be recycled to create new materials like wires for electricity -- and could help to reduce the amount of plastic waste in the future.

While a small proportion of the hundreds of types of plastics can be recycled by conventional technology, researchers found that there are other things that can be done to reuse plastics after they've served their original purpose.

The research, published in The Journal for Carbon Research, focuses on chemical recycling which uses the constituent elements of the plastic to make new materials.

While all plastics are made of carbon, hydrogen and sometimes oxygen, the amounts and arrangements of these three elements make each plastic unique. As plastics are very pure and highly refined chemicals, they can be broken down into these elements and then bonded in different arrangements to make high value materials such as carbon nanotubes.

Dr Alvin Orbaek White, a Sêr Cymru II Fellow at the Energy Safety Research Institute (ESRI) at Swansea University said: "Carbon nanotubes are tiny molecules with incredible physical properties. The structure of a carbon nanotube looks a piece of chicken wire wrapped into a cylinder and when carbon is arranged like this it can conduct both heat and electricity. These two different forms of energy are each very important to control and use in the right quantities, depending on your needs.

"Nanotubes can be used to make a huge range of things, such as conductive films for touchscreen displays, flexible electronics fabrics that create energy, antennas for 5G networks while NASA has used them to prevent electric shocks on the Juno spacecraft."

During the study, the research team tested plastics, in particular black plastics, which are commonly used as packaging for ready meals and fruit and vegetables in supermarkets, but can't be easily recycled. They removed the carbon and then constructed nanotube molecules from the bottom up using the carbon atoms and used the nanotubes to transmit electricity to a light bulb in a small demonstrator model.

Now the research team plan to make high purity carbon electrical cables using waste plastic materials and to improve the nanotube material's electrical performance and increase the output, so they are ready for large-scale deployment in the next three years.

Dr Orbaek White said: "The research is significant as carbon nanotubes can be used to solve the problem of electricity cables overheating and failing, which is responsible for about 8% of electricity is lost in transmission and distribution globally.

"This may not seem like much, but it is low because electricity cables are short, which means that power stations have to be close to the location where electricity is used, otherwise the energy is lost in transmission.

"Many long range cables, which are made of metals, can't operate at full capacity because they would overheat and melt. This presents a real problem for a renewable energy future using wind or solar, because the best sites are far from where people live."