𝐃𝐄𝐁𝐀𝐁𝐑𝐀𝐓 𝐉𝐄𝐍𝐀

Get Access to Food Stamp Support!

2023-07-30T13:28:00.001+05:30

Enter your information now to get started.

Known previously as "food stamps," the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) can help you pay for food if you have a low income. Each month, SNAP benefits are added to an electronic benefit transfer (EBT) card to use when you shop for food

👉 Click Me To Submit Your Info

#USA #America #AmericaTheGreat #NorthDakota #NorthCarolina

#California #Connecticut #Minnesota #Texas

#Alaska #Montana #Illinois #Oklahoma #Maine #Nebraska #Washington #Kentucky #Colorado #Vermont #Massachusetts #Louisiana #Oregon #SouthDakota #Arizona

#Maryland #NewJersey #Delaware #Alabama

#Arkansas #Florida #Georgia #Hawaii #Idaho

#Indiana #Kansas #Michigan #Mississippi

#Missouri #Nevada #NewHampshire #NewYork #Ohio #Pennsylvania #RhodeIsland

#SouthCarolina #Tennessee #Utah #Virginia

#WestVirginia #Wisconsin #Wyoming #Iowa

#NewMexico #MakeAmericaGreatAgain

Install and Open an Account in the Bright App!

2023-07-30T13:00:00.001+05:30

Install the app and open an account.

get out of debt, forever.

Refinance those high APR credit cards

APR
From 9%

Grows with you

No impact to credit score to check your rates

No origination fees

Refinance those high APR credit cards

APR

From 9%

Grows with you

No impact to credit score to check your rates

No origination fees

Bright Credit

Refinance high-interest credit card debt

No origination fees

Grows with you

No impact on credit score to check your rates

Bright Builder

Build Credit with payment history

0% APR. No interest fees

Reported to major bureaus

No minimum credit score needed to apply

A payment system for all your cards.

Pay on time with one app

No more math.

Avoid late fees.

Pay off debt up to 4x faster.

Always safe.

With world-class security.

Bright uses bank-level security with 256-bit encryption for security. We also only use your data for transactions you've approved. That's it. Nothing more.

Real humans. 24/7. By email or chat.

One-on-one help, with 93% customer rating

Everything made easy!

All for less than $10 a month!

Pay off high-interest cards faster. Stay Debt Free and build credit. Get Bright Builder, Smart Assistant and Personalized Financial Plans

👉 Click Here To Download

#USA #America #france #switzerland #Italy #Germany #india #Italy #Spain #UnitedKingdom #Sweeden #Denmark #Belgium #Poland #Finland #EuropeanUnion

Krakatoa: The World’s Mightiest Explosion

2021-08-25T22:46:00.001+05:30

August 27, 1883 — The biggest explosion the world has ever known – an estimated 13,000 times greater than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima – happened on this day as eruptions of the Krakatoa volcano reached their climax.

The noise of the explosion was heard 3,000 miles (4,800km) away; five cubic miles (21 km^3) of rock and ash were projected 50 miles (80.5km) into the air; 120 foot (36.5m) tsunamis were created; and 36,000 people lost their lives.

The island of Krakatoa (originally Krakatau) featured three linked volcanic peaks on an area about three miles wide and 5.5 miles long (9 by 5km) in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra.

The first signs of trouble brewing came on May 20, 1883 when the passing German ship Elizabeth reported a seven-mile high cloud of ash and dust above the island. Sightings of volcanic activity were confirmed by other ships over the following two months.

Thunderous rumblings, incandescent clouds and natural fireworks lighting the night sky not only brought hordes of sightseers, but prompted people on nearby islands to hold festivals.

All such activity came to an abrupt end at 1.06pm on August 26 when the first of a series of increasingly violent explosions occurred, and at 2pm a cloud of black ash rose 17 miles (27km) into the sky.

By the following morning – August 27 – Krakatoa’s three craters had been raging for more than 14 hours. Then starting at 5.30am came a series of four monumental explosions.

The third of them, at 10.02am, was so loud that it was heard nearly 2,000 miles (3,200km) away in Perth, Western Australia, and 3,000 miles (4,800km) away in Mauritius. This was the loudest noise the world had ever known, the equivalent of 200 megatons of TNT – 13,000 times the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

The colossal series of explosions propelled ash to a height of 50 miles (80km) into the sky. Of the estimated 36,400 deaths, at least 31,000 were caused by tsunamis created when two-thirds of Krakatoa island was engulfed by water and disappeared.

Terrified people on nearby islands tried to flee when a tidal wave 120 feet (36.5m) high and moving at an estimated 300 miles (480km) per hour bore down upon them. As it hit the coast of Java it travelled about 15 miles (24km) inland, obliterating the town of Anyer.

Then came the pyroclastic flows. This fluidised mixture of hot rock fragments, hot gases and entrapped air moves at high speed – as much as 100 miles (160km) per hour – with temperatures reaching 600 to 700°C.

An estimated 4,500 people in their path were burned to death as the flows, stretching possibly 40 miles (64km), roared over land and sea.

The eruptions diminished rapidly after the fourth massive explosion and by the morning of August 28, Krakatoa was silent. But by then two-thirds of the island had been destroyed, vanishing under the waves. Small eruptions, mostly of mud, continued until October.

Fine dust from the explosions drifted around the Earth, causing spectacular sunsets for a number of months but also forming an atmospheric veil that lowered global temperatures by several degrees.

Further volcanic activity over the years led to the creation of a new island at the same location. It is called Anak Krakatau – Indonesian for “Child of Krakatoa” and it emerged in 1927 from the caldera left by the 1883 catastrophe.

Eruptions have continued there, most recently in each year from 2009 to 2012, and then a major event in December 2018. The eruption of Anak Krakatoa in 2018 caused a landslide and a tsunami with waves between 16 to 43 feet (five to 13m) high.

The water penetrated the coasts of Java and Sumatra as far as 1,082 feet (330m), bringing death to 427 people who were caught completely off guard.

** After it was pointed out to producers of the 1968 American disaster movie, ‘Krakatoa, East of Java’, that the island is, in fact, west of Java, they decided at first to leave the title unchanged and not substitute ‘West’ for ‘East”. It was thought, apparently, that the original title sounded more exotic. The problem was later solved by simply renaming the film ‘Volcano’.

Eudoxus of Cnidus

2020-08-05T19:37:00.001+05:30

Lived c. 400 — c. 347 BC

Eudoxus made momentous advances in mathematics; he was the world’s greatest mathematician before Archimedes.

Eudoxus founded mathematical astronomy when he created the first mathematical model of the universe, expressing the movement of the heavens in the language of spherical geometry. In doing so he turned physical reality into something more abstract offering a new vantage point from which we could study the universe.

Eudoxus was responsible for the far-reaching theory of proportion expounded in Book V of Euclid’s Elements: Eudoxus gives the first rigorous definition of what today we call real numbers – the set that includes both rational and irrational numbers.

Eudoxus developed the method of exhaustion, giving future mathematicians such as Archimedes a potent tool to calculate areas and volumes. A forerunner of integral calculus, the method of exhaustion allowed Eudoxus to prove the formulas for cone and pyramid volumes. It is the basis of Book XII of Euclid’s Elements.

Elements was a compilation and synthesis of all known mathematics. Eudoxus may have provided more of its contents than any other single person.

Biography – Eudoxus’s Odyssey

Biographical details about Eudoxus are sketchy and must be treated cautiously. What is certain is that he was born about 2,400 years ago and his lifetime coincides approximately with Plato’s and Aristotle’s.

What we know about Eudoxus relies heavily on Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, written by Diogenes Laërtius six centuries after Eudoxus lived. Laërtius often did not have access to primary sources, and the works he based his story of Eudoxus on have been lost.

A few snippets about Eudoxus are found in the works of other ancient writers, such as Proclus.

Eudoxus was probably born between 410 and 400 BC. His birthplace was Cnidus, a city originally founded by the Spartans. The city’s ruins can still be seen on the Mediterranean coast of south-west Turkey, near the Greek island of Kos.

We do not know what Eudoxus looked like, but we know he lived for 53 years. His father’s name was Aeschines.

In his early 20s, Eudoxus left Cnidus on a quest for knowledge – his own odyssey.
Eudoxus learned mathematics in the school of Archytas, one of the greatest mathematicians of his day, in Tarentum, now in southern Italy.
He learned the art of healing in the school of Philistion of Locri in Sicily.
At age 23, he visited Athens to attend lectures by Plato. To save money he roomed in the port of Piraeus and made a 14 mile round trip on foot each day of his two month stay.
Back in Cnidus he raised money from his friends to travel again – ancient crowdfunding! His friends recognized something in the young man that made him worthy of their trust and support.
In about 381 BC, Eudoxus traveled to the city of Heliopolis in Egypt for 16 months. There he was taught astronomy by Egyptian priests in their observatories. Like them, he shaved off ALL of his hair, including his eyebrows.
The next stage of his odyssey took Eudoxus to the shores of the sea of Marmaris and the city of Cyzicus, whose ruins lie in modern Turkey. He was now regarded as a wise teacher.
From Cyzicus he traveled south to the city of Mylasa and joined the court of King Mausolus. The king ruled over the region of Caria, which included Eudoxus’s hometown. King Mausolus became eternally famous when the astounding mausoleum he built at Halicarnassus became one of the seven wonders of the ancient world – we get the word mausoleum from the king’s name. Eudoxus now founded his own school.
In about 368 BC, aged somewhere in the region of 32-42, Eudoxus took his school to Athens.
From Athens, Eudoxus’s final move took him home to Cnidus. The people of his hometown quickly voted him into office as one of the city’s governors.
At some point in his life Eudoxus married, but we do not know his wife’s name. He fathered a son: Aristagoras, and three daughters: Actis, Philtis and Delphis.
None of Eudoxus’s work survive. We know some of his achievements because of acknowledgements, citations, and references made by the likes of Aristotle, Archimedes, and Hipparchus.
Plato’s Planet Puzzle – Modelling the Heavens
The great philosopher Plato insisted that the planets must move in a uniform, orderly way around Earth. Yet anyone who studied their movements had to admit that they did not seem uniform and orderly. For a start, retrograde motion was perplexing.
Plato challenged the mathematicians and philosophers of Greece to explain the planets’ movements.
Eudoxus responded to Plato by constructing a mathematical model of the solar system. He pictured a central spherical Earth surrounded by a series of 27 nested or concentric rotating spheres.

The outermost sphere carried the fixed stars
Each of the five known planets was carried by four interacting spheres
The sun and moon were each carried by three interacting spheres
Eudoxus gave each rotating sphere its own axis of rotation and these axes pointed in different directions. Different rotation speeds of the spheres could explain the seemingly irregular movements of the planets in the sky.

It was a glorious idea – the first mathematical model of the universe in history. And it succeeded in producing retrograde motion. However, when the numbers it produced were matched against actual planetary movements, there was a mismatch. For all its brilliance, the model did not work. However, the idea inspired generations of Greek philosophers.
In an effort to produce a model like Eudoxus’s that worked, Aristotle ended up with a model consisting of over 50 spheres. However, the spheres could never account for the known fact that the moon and the planets’ sizes changed as they moved along their orbits. The Greeks realized this meant that sometimes the moon and planets were closer to Earth than at other times and that, without serious modifications, the spheres idea was wrong. Later, Hipparchus abandoned the spheres model in favor of one that explained why the planets’ distances from Earth changed.

Today’s scholars disagree among themselves about the precise details of Eudoxus’s model. We do not know whether Eudoxus believed his spheres really existed or if he proposed them as imaginary aids to calculation.

A century after Eudoxus, Aristarchus hit the nail on the head when he said that all the planets including Earth orbit the sun. Sadly his idea fell on deaf ears. It took close to two millennia before Nicolaus Copernicus resurrected it.
Proportions and Real Numbers – A Giant Leap for Mathematics
Scholars believe that Eudoxus was responsible for the far-reaching rules of proportion contained in Book V of Euclid’s Elements. The rules give us the first relatively rigorous definition of what today we call real numbers – the set that includes both rational and irrational numbers – and a means of dealing with them consistently.

There is a legend that in earlier times Pythagoreans were horrified when they discovered numbers that could not be written as a ratio of whole numbers – in other words irrational numbers, like √2. The legend is echoed in our continuing use of irrational to mean insane or senseless.

Eudoxus’s statement of proportion rescued mathematics from this, perhaps legendary, dead end. Thomas Heath wrote:

Heath“The greatness of the new theory itself needs no further argument when it is remembered that the definition of equal ratios in Euclid Book V, Definition 5 corresponds exactly to the modern theory of irrationals due to Dedekind, and that it is word for word the same as Weierstrass’s definition of equal numbers.”
THOMAS HEATH
A History of Greek Mathematics, Vol. I, 1921
In fact Dedekind, who published his work more than 22 centuries after Eudoxus, said his advances were inspired by Eudoxus’s concepts:

Heath“…this conception from ancient times represents the origin of my theory as well as the theory of Mr. Bertrand and of some other… attempts to introduce irrational numbers into arithmetic.”
RICHARD DEDEKIND
Letter to Rudolf Lipschitz, October 1876

Dedekind pointed out that his theory was more complete than Eudoxus’s because his contained the principle of continuity.
Proto-calculus – The Method of Exhaustion
The Method of Exhaustion was the Ancient Greek forerunner of integral calculus. It involved summing ever smaller magnitudes to obtain results ever closer to the true result.

The Ancient Greek mathematician Antiphon proposed a ‘method of exhaustion’ to find the area of a circle. His method was:

Take a regular polygon, such as a triangle, whose area is easily calculated.
Place it inside a circle, with its vertices touching the circle’s circumference. There will be a considerable difference between the area of the triangle and the circle that encloses it.
Now double the number of sides of the polygon to a hexagon. There is now less of a difference between the hexagon’s area and the circle’s area.
Continue the process for polygons with 12 sides, 24 sides, etc. until the area of the regular polygon of known area is almost identical to the circle’s. You have now exhausted the process and calculated the area of the circle with high accuracy.
Proposition 1 in Euclid’s Elements Book X provides the rigorous mathematical justification of the method of exhaustion. The scholarly consensus is that Proposition 1 is Eudoxus’s work. Proposition 1 begins with the statement below, which is then proved:
The method of exhaustion can be used to find lengths, areas and volumes. It is used in Book XII of Euclid’s Elements to prove, for example, that the area of a circle is proportional to its diameter squared, and also to prove the formulas for volumes of cones and pyramids.

The method of exhaustion is generally completed by a contradiction. The true area is assumed to be greater than area X, and this is proven to be false. The true area is then assumed to be less than area X, and this is also shown to be false. Hence the true area is equal to area X.

The Volumes of Cones and Pyramids
Archimedes tells us that:

the volume of a cone is one-third that of the cylinder with the same base and height
the volume of a pyramid is one-third that of the prism with the same base and height
He says these results were found first by Democritus and the first proofs were published by Eudoxus.

Archimedes made excellent use of the method of exhaustion himself. For example, he used it to compute π to an accuracy of better than one part in 10,000 – his approximate value of 22/7 was used until the digital age.

Observatory
In later life, after returning to Cnidus, Eudoxus established an observatory.

The End
Eudoxus died at age 53, leaving a legacy of major progress in mathematics. He does not seem to have been born wealthy, but as a young man he was regarded so highly that his friends raised money to send him on travels in search of knowledge. In middle-age, he remained popular enough to be elected to serve as a governor when he returned to his hometown.

Aristotle was alive in the same era as Eudoxus, therefore what he said about his character is likely to be true:

aristotle“Eudoxus thought pleasure was the good because he saw all things, both rational and irrational, aiming at it… His arguments were credited more because of the excellence of his character than for their own sake; he was thought to be remarkably self-controlled, and therefore it was thought that he was not saying what he did say as a friend of pleasure, but that the facts really were so.”
ARISTOTLE, TRANSLATED BY W. D. ROSS
Nicomachean Ethics, Book 10

“Two unequal magnitudes being set out, if from the greater there be subtracted a magnitude greater than its half, and from that which is left a magnitude greater than its half, and if this process be repeated continually, there will be left some magnitude which will be less than the lesser magnitude set out.”

EUDOXUS

Euclid’s Elements Book X

Unequal neutron-star mergers create unique 'bang' in simulations

2020-08-05T19:20:00.001+05:30

When two incredibly dense collapsed neutron stars combine to form a black hole, strong gravitational waves emerge from the impact," said David Radice, assistant professor of physics and of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and a member of the research team. "We can now pick up these waves using detectors like LIGO in the United States and Virgo in Italy. A black hole typically swallows any other radiation that could have come out of the merger that we would be able to detect on Earth, but through our simulations, we found that this may not always be the case."

The research team found that when the masses of the two colliding neutron stars are different enough, the larger companion tears the smaller apart. This causes a slower merger that allows an electromagnetic "bang" to escape. Astronomers should be able to detect this electromagnetic signal, and the simulations provide signatures of these noisy collisions that astronomers could look for from Earth.

The research team, which includes members of the international collaboration CoRe (Computational Relativity), describe their findings in a paper appearing online in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"Recently, LIGO announced the discovery of a merger event in which the two stars have possibly very different masses," said Radice. "The main consequence in this scenario is that we expect this very characteristic electromagnetic counterpart to the gravititational wave signal."

After reporting the first detection of a neutron-star merger in 2017, in 2019, the LIGO team reported the second, which they named GW190425. The result of the 2017 collision was about what astronomers expected, with a total mass of about 2.7 times the mass of our sun and each of the two neutron stars about equal in mass. But GW190425 was much heavier, with a combined mass of around 3.5 solar masses and the ratio of the two participants more unequal -- possibly as high as 2 to 1.

While a 2 to 1 difference in mass may not seem like a large difference, only a small range of masses is possible for neutron stars," said Radice.

Neutron stars can exist only in a narrow range of masses between about 1.2 and 3 times the mass of our sun. Lighter stellar remnants don't collapse to form neutron stars and instead form white dwarfs, while heavier objects collapse directly to form black holes. When the difference between the merging stars gets as large as in GW190425, scientists suspected that the merger could be messier -- and louder in electromagnetic radiation. Astronomers had detected no such signal from GW190425's location, but coverage of that area of the sky by conventional telescopes that day wasn't good enough to rule it out.

To understand the phenomenon of unequal neutron stars colliding, and to predict signatures of such collisions that astronomers could look for, the research team ran a series of simulations using Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's Bridges platform and the San Diego Supercomputer Center's Comet platform -- both in the National Science Foundation's XSEDE network of supercomputing centers and computers -- and other supercomputers.

The researchers found that as the two simulated neutron stars spiraled in toward each other, the gravity of the larger star tore its partner apart. That meant that the smaller neutron star didn't hit its mbrore massive companion all at once. The initial dump of the smaller star's matter turned the larger into a black hole. But the rest of its matter was too far away for the black hole to capture immediately. Instead, the slower rain of matter into the black hole created a flash of electromagnetic radiation.

The research team hopes that the simulated signature they found can help astronomers using a combination of gravitational-wave detectors and conventional telescopes to detect the paired signals that would herald the breakup of a smaller neutron star merging with a larger.

The simulations required an unusual combination of computing speed, massive amounts of memory, and flexibility in moving data between memory and computation. The team used about 500 computing cores, running for weeks at a time, over about 20 separate instances. The many physical quantities that had to be accounted for in each calculation required about 100 times as much memory as a typical astrophysical simulation.

"There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the properties of neutron stars," said Radice. "In order to understand them, we have to simulate many possible models to see which ones are compatible with astronomical observations. A single simulation of one model would not tell us much; we need to perform a large number of fairly computationally intensive simulations. We need a combination of high capacity and high capability that only machines like Bridges can offer. This work would not have been possible without access to such national supercomputing resources."

COVID-19 lockdown caused 50 percent global reduction in human-linked Earth vibrations

2020-08-05T19:08:00.001+05:30

The lack of human activity during lockdown caused human-linked vibrations in the Earth to drop by an average of 50% between March and May 2020.

This quiet period, likely caused by the total global effect of social distancing measures, closure of services and industry, and drops in tourism and travel, is the longest and most pronounced quiet period of seismic noise in recorded history.

The new research, led by the Royal Observatory of Belgium and five other institutions around the world including Imperial College London, showed that the dampening of 'seismic noise' caused by humans was more pronounced in more densely populated areas.

The relative quietness allowed researchers to listen in to previously concealed earthquake signals, and could help us differentiate between human and natural seismic noise more clearly than ever before.

Anthropause

Measured by instruments called seismometers, seismic noise is caused by vibrations within the Earth, which travel like waves. The waves can be triggered by earthquakes, volcanoes, and bombs -- but also by daily human activity like travel and industry.

Although 2020 has not seen a reduction in earthquakes, the drop in human-caused seismic noise is unprecedented. The strongest drops were found in urban areas, but the study also found signatures of the lockdown on sensors buried hundreds of metres underground and in more remote areas.

Human-generated noise usually dampens during quiet periods like over the Christmas/New Year period and Chinese New Year, and during weekends and overnight. However, the drop in vibrations caused by COVID-19 lockdown measures eclipse even those seen during these periods.

Some researchers are dubbing this drop in anthropogenic (human-caused) noise and pollution the 'anthropause'.

Co-author Dr Stephen Hicks, from Imperial's Department of Earth Science and Engineering, said: "This quiet period is likely the longest and largest dampening of human-caused seismic noise since we started monitoring the Earth in detail using vast monitoring networks of seismometers.

"Our study uniquely highlights just how much human activities impact the solid Earth, and could let us see more clearly than ever what differentiates human and natural noise."

This is the first global study of the impact of the coronavirus anthropause on the solid Earth beneath our feet."

To gather the data, researchers looked at seismic data from a global network of 268 seismic stations in 117 countries and found significant noise reductions compared to before any lockdown at 185 of those stations. Beginning in China in late January 2020, and followed by Europe and the rest of the world in March to April 2020, researchers tracked the 'wave' of quietening between March and May as worldwide lockdown measures took hold.

The largest drops in vibrations were seen in the most densely populated areas, like Singapore and New York City, but drops were also seen in remote areas like Germany's Black Forest and Rundu in Namibia. Citizen-owned seismometers, which tend to measure more localised noise, noted large drops around universities and schools around Cornwall, UK and Boston, USA -- a drop in noise 20 per cent larger than seen during school holidays. Countries like Barbados, where lockdown coincided with the tourist season, saw a 50 per cent decrease in noise. This coincided with flight data that suggested tourists returned home in the weeks before official lockdown.

Listening in

Over the past few decades, seismic noise has gradually increased as economies and populations have grown.

The drastic changes to daily life caused by the pandemic have provided a unique opportunity to study their environmental impacts, such as reductions in emissions and pollution in the atmosphere. The changes have also given us the opportunity to listen in to the Earth's natural vibrations without the distortions of human input.

The study reports the first evidence that previously concealed earthquake signals, especially during daytime, appeared much clearer on seismometers in urban areas during lockdown.

The researchers say the lockdown quietening could also help them differentiate between human-caused noise and natural signals that might warn of upcoming natural disasters.

Lead author Dr Thomas Lecocq from the Royal Observatory of Belgium said: "With increasing urbanisation and growing global populations, more people will be living in geologically hazardous areas. It will therefore become more important than ever to differentiate between natural and human-caused noise so that we can 'listen in' and better monitor the ground movements beneath our feet. This study could help to kick-start this new field of study."

The study's authors hope that their work will spawn further research on the seismic lockdown, as well as finding previously hidden signals from earthquakes and volcanoes.

The lockdowns caused by the coronavirus pandemic may have given us a glimmer of insight into how human and natural noise interact within the Earth. We hope this insight will spawn new studies that help us listen better to the Earth and understand natural signals we would otherwise have missed."

29,000 years of Aboriginal history

2020-07-28T17:06:00.001+05:30

Radiocarbon dating of shell middens -- remnants of meals eaten long ago -- capture a record of Aboriginal occupation that extends to around 29,000 years, confirming the location as one of the oldest sites along the 2500km river to become the oldest River Murray Indigenous site in South Australia.

In the first comprehensive survey of the region, one of the oldest Indigenous sites along Australia's longest river system has been discovered. The results, published in Australian Archaeology, used radiocarbon dating methods to analyse river mussel shells from a midden site overlooking the Pike River floodplain downstream of Renmark.

"These results include the first pre-Last Glacial Maximum ages returned on the River Murray in South Australia and extend the known Aboriginal occupation of the Riverland by approximately 22,000 years," says Flinders University archaeologist and PhD candidate Craig Westell.

More than 30 additional radiocarbon dates were collected in the region, spanning the period from 15,000 years ago to the recent present. Together, the results relate Aboriginal people to an ever-changing river landscape, and provide deeper insights into how they responded to these challenges.

The period represented by the radiocarbon results brackets the Last Glacial Maximum (commonly known as the last Ice Age) when climatic conditions were colder and drier and when the arid zone extended over much of the Murray-Darling Basin. The river and lake systems of the basin were under stress during this time.

In the Riverland, dunes were advancing into the Murray floodplains, river flows were unpredictable, and salt was accumulating in the valley.

The ecological impacts witnessed during one of the worst droughts on record, the so-called Millennium Drought (from late 1996 extending to mid-2010), provides an idea of the challenges Aboriginal people may have faced along the river during the Last Glacial Maximum, and other periods of climate stress, researchers conclude.

"These studies show how our ancestors have lived over many thousands of years in the Riverland region and how they managed to survive during times of hardship and plenty," says RMMAC spokesperson Fiona Giles.

"This new research, published in Australian Archaeology, fills in a significant geographic gap in our understanding of the Aboriginal occupation chronologies for the Murray-Darling Basin," adds co-author Associate Professor Amy Roberts.

The dating, which was undertaken at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) and Waikato University, forms part of a much larger and ongoing research program led by Associate Professor Amy Roberts which is undertaking a broad-ranging investigation of past and contemporary Aboriginal connections to the Riverland region.

A tiny ancient relative of dinosaurs and pterosaurs discovered

2020-07-28T17:00:00.001+05:30

Dinosaurs and flying pterosaurs may be known for their remarkable size, but a newly described species from Madagascar that lived around 237 million years ago suggests that they originated from extremely small ancestors. The fossil reptile, named Kongonaphon kely, or "tiny bug slayer," would have stood just 10 centimeters (or about 4 inches) tall. The description and analysis of this fossil and its relatives, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may help explain the origins of flight in pterosaurs, the presence of "fuzz" on the skin of both pterosaurs and dinosaurs, and other questions about these charismatic animals.

There's a general perception of dinosaurs as being giants," said Christian Kammerer, a research curator in paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and a former Gerstner Scholar at the American Museum of Natural History. "But this new animal is very close to the divergence of dinosaurs and pterosaurs, and it's shockingly small."

Dinosaurs and pterosaurs both belong to the group Ornithodira. Their origins, however, are poorly known, as few specimens from near the root of this lineage have been found. The fossils of Kongonaphon were discovered in 1998 in Madagascar by a team of researchers led by American Museum of Natural History Frick Curator of Fossil Mammals John Flynn (who worked at The Field Museum at the time) in close collaboration with scientists and students at the University of Antananarivo, and project co-leader Andre Wyss, chair and professor of the University of California-Santa Barbara's Department of Earth Science and an American Museum of Natural History research associate.

"This fossil site in southwestern Madagascar from a poorly known time interval globally has produced some amazing fossils, and this tiny specimen was jumbled in among the hundreds we've collected from the site over the years," Flynn said. "It took some time before we could focus on these bones, but once we did, it was clear we had something unique and worth a closer look. This is a great case for why field discoveries -- combined with modern technology to analyze the fossils recovered -- is still so important."

"Discovery of this tiny relative of dinosaurs and pterosaurs emphasizes the importance of Madagascar's fossil record for improving knowledge of vertebrate history during times that are poorly known in other places," said project co-leader Lovasoa Ranivoharimanana, professor and director of the vertebrate paleontology laboratory at the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar. "Over two decades, our collaborative Madagascar-U.S. teams have trained many Malagasy students in paleontological sciences, and discoveries like this helps people in Madagascar and around the world better appreciate the exceptional record of ancient life preserved in the rocks of our country."

Kongonaphon isn't the first small animal known near the root of the ornithodiran family tree, but previously, such specimens were considered "isolated exceptions to the rule," Kammerer noted. In general, the scientific thought was that body size remained similar among the first archosaurs -- the larger reptile group that includes birds, crocodilians, non-avian dinosaurs, and pterosaurs -- and the earliest ornithodirans, before increasing to gigantic proportions in the dinosaur lineage.

"Recent discoveries like Kongonaphon have given us a much better understanding of the early evolution of ornithodirans. Analyzing changes in body size throughout archosaur evolution, we found compelling evidence that it decreased sharply early in the history of the dinosaur-pterosaur lineage," Kammerer said.

This "miniaturization" event indicates that the dinosaur and pterosaur lineages originated from extremely small ancestors yielding important implications for their paleobiology. For instance, wear on the teeth of Kongonaphon suggests it ate insects. A shift to insectivory, which is associated with small body size, may have helped early ornithodirans survive by occupying a niche different from their mostly meat-eating contemporaneous relatives.

The work also suggests that fuzzy skin coverings ranging from simple filaments to feathers, known on both the dinosaur and pterosaur sides of the ornithodiran tree, may have originated for thermoregulation in this small-bodied common ancestor. That's because heat retention in small bodies is difficult, and the mid-late Triassic was a time of climatic extremes, inferred to have sharp shifts in temperature between hot days and cold nights.

Sterling Nesbitt, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech and a Museum research associate and expert in ornithodiran anatomy, phylogeny, and histological age analyses, is also an author on this study.

This study was supported, in part, by the National Geographic Society, a Gerstner Scholars Fellowship from the Gerstner Family Foundation and the Richard Gilder Graduate School, the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, and a Meeker Family Fellowship from the Field Museum, with additional support from the Ministry of Energy and Mines of Madagascar, the World Wide Fund for Nature (Madagascar), University of Antananarivo, and MICET/ICTE (Madagascar).

Hyksos, 15th Dynasty rulers of Ancient Egypt, were an internal takeover

2020-07-28T16:35:00.001+05:30

The Hyksos were a foreign dynasty that ruled parts of Egypt between approximately 1638-1530 BCE, the first instance of Egypt being ruled by individuals of a foreign origin. The common story is that the Hyksos were invaders from a far-off land, but this idea has been drawn into question. Archaeological evidence does link Hyksos culture with an origin in the Near East, but exactly how they rose to power is unclear.

In this study, Stantis and colleagues collected enamel samples from the teeth of 75 humans buried in the ancient Hyksos capital city of Tell el-Dab'a in the northeast Nile Delta. Comparing ratios of strontium isotopes in the teeth to environmental isotope signatures from Egypt and elsewhere, they assessed the geographic origins of the individuals who lived in the city. They found that a large percentage of the populace were non-locals who immigrated from a wide variety of other places. This pattern was true both before and during the Hyksos dynasty.

This pattern does not match the story of a sudden invasion from a single far-off land, but of a multi-cultural region where one internal group -- the Hyksos -- eventually rose to power after living there for generations. This is the first study to use archaeological chemistry to address the origins of the Hyksos rulers, but the authors note that more investigations and broader chemical techniques will be needed to identify the specific ancestries of the Hyksos and other non-local residents of Egypt.

Stantis adds: "Archaeological chemistry, specifically isotopic analysis, shows us first-generation migration during a time of major cultural transformations in ancient Egypt. Rather than the old scholastic theories of invasion, we see more people, especially women, migrating to Egypt before Hyksos rule, suggesting economic and cultural changes leading to foreign rule rather than violence."

Foxes have been eating humans' leftovers for 42,000 years

2020-07-28T16:31:00.001+05:30

Foxes love leftovers. In the wild, foxes regularly feed on scraps left behind by larger predators like bears and wolves, but the closer foxes live to human civilization, the more of their diet is made up of foods that humans leave behind. In this study, Baumann and colleagues hypothesized that if this commensal relationship goes back to ancient times, then foxes might be useful indicators of human impact in the past.

The authors compared ratios of Carbon and Nitrogen isotopes between the remains of various herbivores, large carnivores, and red and Arctic foxes from several archaeological sites in southwest Germany dating to the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic. At sites older than 42,000 years, when Neanderthals sparsely occupied the region, fox diets were similar to their local large carnivores. But in the younger sites, as Homo sapiens became common in the area, foxes developed a more unique diet consisting largely of reindeer, which are too big for foxes to hunt but which are known to have been important game for ancient humans of the time.

These results suggest that during the Upper Palaeolithic, these foxes made a shift from feeding on scraps left by local large predators to eating food left behind by humans. This indicates that foxes' reliance on human food goes back a good 42,000 years. The authors propose that, with further studies investigating this fox-human relationship, ancient fox diets may be useful indicators of human impact on ecosystems over time.

"Dietary reconstructions of ice-age foxes have shown that early modern humans had an influence on the local ecosystem as early as 40,000 years ago. The more humans populated a particular region, the more the foxes adapted to them."

Alaska is getting wetter: That's bad news for permafrost and the climate

2020-07-28T16:25:00.001+05:30

The study, published today in Nature Publishing Group journal Climate and Atmospheric Science, is the first to compare how rainfall is affecting permafrost thaw across time, space, and a variety of ecosystems. It shows that increased summer rainfall is degrading permafrost across the state.

As Siberia remains in the headlines for record-setting heat waves and wildfires, Alaska is experiencing the rainiest five years in its century-long meteorological record. Extreme weather on both ends of the spectrum -- hot and dry versus cool and wet -- are driven by an aspect of climate change called Arctic amplification. As the earth warms, temperatures in the Arctic rise faster than the global average.

While the physical basis of Arctic amplification is well understood, it is less known how it will affect the permafrost that underlies about a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, including most of Alaska. Permafrost locks about twice the carbon that is currently in the atmosphere into long-term storage and supports Northern infrastructure like roads and buildings; so understanding how a changing climate will affect it is crucial for both people living in the Arctic and those in lower latitudes.

"In our research area the winter has lost almost three weeks to summer," says study lead author and Fairbanks resident Thomas A. Douglas, who is a scientist with the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory. "This, along with more rainstorms, means far more wet precipitation is falling every summer."

Over the course of five years, the research team took 2750 measurements of how far below the land's surface permafrost had thawed by the end of summer across a wide range of environments near Fairbanks, Alaska. The five-year period included two summers with average precipitation, one that was a little drier than usual, and the top and third wettest summers on record. Differences in annual rainfall were clearly imprinted in the amount of permafrost thaw.

More rainfall led to deeper thaw across all sites. After the wettest summer in 2014, permafrost didn't freeze back to previous levels even after subsequent summers were drier. Wetlands and disturbed sites, like trail crossings and clearings, showed the most thaw. Tussock tundra, with its deep soils and covering of tufted grasses, has been found to provide the most ecosystem protection of permafrost. While permafrost was frozen closest to the surface in tussock tundra, it experienced the greatest relative increase in the depth of thaw in response to rainfall, possibly because water could pool on the flat surface. Forests, especially spruce forests with thick sphagnum moss layers, were the most resistant to permafrost thaw. Charlie Koven, an Earth system modeler with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, used the field measurements to build a heat balance model that allowed the team to better understand how rain was driving heat down into the permafrost ground.

The study demonstrates how land cover types govern relationships between summer rainfall and permafrost thaw. As Alaska becomes warmer and wetter, vegetation cover is projected to change and wildfires will disturb larger swathes of the landscape. Those conditions may lead to a feedback loop between more permafrost thaw and wetter summers.

In the meantime, rainfall -- and the research -- continue. Douglas says, "I was just at one of our field sites and you need hip waders to get to areas that used to be dry or only ankle deep with water. It is extremely wet out there. So far this year we have almost double the precipitation of a typical year."

"This study adds to the growing body of knowledge about how extreme weather -- ranging from heat spells to intense summer rains -- can disrupt foundational aspects of Arctic ecosystems," says Merritt Turetsky, Director of the University of Colorado Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) and a coauthor of the study. "These changes are not occurring gradually over decades or lifetimes; we are watching them occur over mere months to years."

South Atlantic anomalies existed 8 - 11 million years ago

2020-07-28T16:20:00.001+05:30

The South Atlantic Anomaly is an area characterized by a significant reduction in the strength of Earth's magnetic field compared with areas at similar geographic latitudes. Here, protection from harmful radiation from space is reduced. The most significant signs of this are technical malfunctions aboard satellites and spacecraft.

In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Liverpool paleomagnetic researchers analysed the record of Earth's magnetic field which is preserved in igneous rocks from the island Saint Helena which lies in the midst of the South Atlantic Anomaly.

The geomagnetic records from the rocks covering 34 different volcanic eruptions that took place between eight and 11 million years ago revealed that at these occurrences the direction of the magnetic field for St Helena often pointed far from the North pole, just like it does today.

The Earth's magnetic field, or the geomagnetic field, not only gives us the ability of navigating with a compass, but also protects our atmosphere from charged particles coming from the sun, called solar wind. However, it is not completely stable in strength and direction, both over time and space, and it has the ability to completely flip or reverse itself with substantial implications.

The South Atlantic Anomaly is a topic of debate between scientists in this field. Besides the fact that it causes damages to space technology, it also raises the question of where it comes from and whether it represents the start of the total weakening of the field and a possible upcoming pole reversal.

Lead author of the paper, University of Liverpool PhD student Yael Engbers, said: "Our study provides the first long term analysis of the magnetic field in this region dating back millions of years. It reveals that the anomaly in the magnetic field in the South Atlantic is not a one-off, similar anomalies existed eight to 11 million years ago.

"This is the first time that the irregular behaviour of the geomagnetic field in the South Atlantic region has been shown on such a long timescale. It suggests that the South Atlantic Anomaly is a recurring feature and probably not a sign of an impending reversal.

"It also supports earlier studies that hint towards a link between the South Atlantic Anomaly and anomalous seismic features in the lowermost mantle and the outer core. This brings us closer to linking behaviour of the geomagnetic field directly to features of the Earth's interior"

New native Hawaiian land snail species discovered, first in 60 years

2020-07-28T16:03:00.001+05:30

Pacific island land snails are among the world's most imperiled wildlife, with more recorded extinctions since 1600 than any other group of animals. Hawaii's once-teeming land snail scene of more than 750 species has shrunk by more than half, ravaged by habitat loss and invasive species such as rats, Jackson's chameleons and the carnivorous rosy wolf snail.

Auriculella gagneorum, a small candy-striped snail from Oahu's Waianae Mountains, represents the first new species of a living Hawaiian land snail described in 60 years. The species "brings that little glimmer of hope that this isn't all a depressing story," said the study's lead author Norine Yeung, malacology curator at the Bishop Museum.

A team of researchers found A. gagneorum during a large-scale, decade-long survey of land snails that spanned 1,000 sites throughout the Hawaiian Islands. They then used the Bishop Museum's collection of land snails to match individuals collected during the survey to unidentified specimens from the 1940s.

"This is a happy story where we discovered a snail that is still around," Yeung said. "There are so many things in our collection that we can no longer find in the wild. But in this snail's case, we can finally put a name to it and describe it, which is huge for the conservation of this species."

The tree-dwelling snail shows pronounced variation in coloring, from burnished tiger's-eye patterning to dramatic sable and white stripes. At less than two-tenths of an inch long, "you might be able to fit a dozen on your fingernail," said study co-author John Slapcinsky, collection manager of invertebrate zoology at the Florida Museum of Natural History

Land snails play a crucial role as decomposers and fungivores in Hawaii's ecosystems, essentially "our first recyclers," Yeung said.

The researchers deposited a selection of A. gagneorum snails in Hawaii's captive breeding program, with the goal of increasing their numbers and returning them to the wild. They named the species in honor of the late Hawaiian naturalists Betsy and Wayne Gagne, who were "powerhouses for conservation," Yeung said. "They cared about the whole ecosystem, whether it was a tiny little bug or plants or one of Hawaii's charismatic, beautiful forest birds."

The team's survey also produced new records of three snail species last documented in the 1950s and others feared extinct, as well as nearly 30 new species. The researchers failed to find two species, A. auricula and A. minuta, whose populations may have died out.

But while the status of Hawaii's land snails is dire, it's too early to despair, said Slapcinsky, who gamely struggled through skin-ripping raspberry thickets and nearly slid off a cliff while sieving for snails.

"People used to think it wasn't even worth studying Hawaiian land snails because they were all extinct. Now we know they're not," he said. "If we work at it, there's still a chance to do something about it. That's why it's important to be out there surveying, finding the remaining populations of these species."

Yeung said previous reports estimated that 90% of Hawaii's land snails were extinct, but the team's survey shows that about 300 species still survive in remote, isolated parts of the Hawaiian Islands.

The challenge now is trying to identify all of these because we have lost a lot of experts, and a lot of these snails are super tiny," she said. "If you're not a trained malacologist, the small brown snails might all look the same to you. But when you take a closer look at their shells, bodies and genetics, these little things are all different and can be tied to different valleys and ridges. When one species turns out to be three, we can run into problems with conservation."

The researchers used a combination of physical characteristics and DNA to describe the new species. While its shell size and shape mimic A. perpusilla snails from the Koolau Range on east Oahu, molecular evidence shows A. gagneorum is more closely related to A. tenella, a slender, high-spired snail from the Waianae Range in the west.

A. gagneorum belongs to a long-overlooked group of snails known as Auriculellinae. The majority of attention and conservation efforts have focused on the larger, more colorful snails in the subfamily Achatinellinae, Lonesome George, the last known snail of its species, being the most famous example. While an entire genus of Achatinellinae is listed under the Endangered Species Act, the smaller, less obvious snails in the subfamily Auriculellinae remain understudied and unprotected, Slapcinsky said.

"We're not bemoaning that Achatinellinae are getting attention. They do need help," he said. "What we're concerned about is that these other things are getting ignored."

Meanwhile, the team pushes forward in its analysis of a decade's worth of data and many new species descriptions. Afterwards, the researchers can turn their attention to the evolution and ecology of Hawaii's land snails, traditionally considered by native Hawaiians as important symbols and good omens that represent change, romance and song.

"The diversity is amazing, the species are amazing, and there are so many evolutionary stories you could tell," Yeung said, describing malacology as a "wide-open frontier."

"But first we have to identify these snails. If you ask about their habitat and life history, it's like, I wish I could tell you. Right now, I can just tell you this is a different species and put a name on it. It's hard work, but it's so gratifying."

3D hand-sensing wristband signals future of wearable technology

2020-07-28T15:23:00.001+05:30

The bracelet, called FingerTrak, can sense and translate into 3D the many positions of the human hand, including 20 finger joint positions, using three or four miniature, low-resolution thermal cameras that read contours on the wrist. The device could be used in sign language translation, virtual reality, mobile health, human-robot interaction and other areas, the researchers said.

"This was a major discovery by our team -- that by looking at your wrist contours, the technology could reconstruct in 3D, with keen accuracy, where your fingers are," said Cheng Zhang, assistant professor of information science and director of Cornell's new SciFi Lab, where FingerTrak was developed. "It's the first system to reconstruct your full hand posture based on the contours of the wrist."

Past wrist-mounted cameras have been considered too bulky and obtrusive for everyday use, and most could reconstruct only a few discrete hand gestures.

FingerTrak's breakthrough is a lightweight bracelet, allowing for free movement. Instead of using cameras to directly capture the position of the fingers, the focus of most prior research, FingerTrak uses a combination of thermal imaging and machine learning to virtually reconstruct the hand. The bracelet's four miniature, thermal cameras -- each about the size of a pea -- snap multiple "silhouette" images to form an outline of the hand.

A deep neural network then stitches these silhouette images together and reconstructs the virtual hand in 3D. Through this method, Zhang and his fellow researchers were able to capture the entire hand pose, even when the hand is holding an object.

While the technology has a wide range of possible uses, Zhang said the most promising is its potential application in sign language translation.

"Current sign language translation technology requires the user to either wear a glove or have a camera in the environment, both of which are cumbersome," he said. "This could really push the current technology into new areas."

FingerTrak could also have an impact on health care applications, specifically in monitoring disorders that affect fine-motor skills, said Yin Li, assistant professor of biostatistics and medical informatics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, who contributed to the software behind FingerTrak.

"How we move our hands and fingers often tells about our health condition," Li said. "A device like this might be used to better understand how the elderly use their hands in daily life, helping to detect early signs of diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's."

"FingerTrak: Continuous 3D Hand Pose Tracking by Deep Learning Hand Silhouettes Captured by Miniature Thermal Cameras on Wrist," was published in the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies. It also will be presented at the 2020 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, taking place virtually Sept. 12-16.

Mysterious Australian Night Parrots may not see in the dead of night

2020-06-16T22:32:00.001+05:30

An international study, co-led by Flinders University's Dr Vera Weisbecker, has revealed the critically endangered parrot's visual system is not as well-adapted to life in the dark as would be expected for a nocturnal bird, raising concerns it might be adversely impacted by fencing in the Australian outback.

"Night Parrots must be able to find their way at night -- to find food, avoid obstacles while flying, and escape predators," says Dr Weisbecker.

"We therefore expect their visual system to show adaptations for seeing in the dark, similar to other nocturnal birds -- New Zealand's Kakapo parrot and owls with enlarged eyes for example. However, we found that this wasn't the case."

Dr Karine Mardon, from The National Imaging Facility at The University of Queensland Centre for Advanced Imaging, scanned the then only known intact skull of the exceedingly rare species, as well as skulls from related parrots, using computed tomography (CT scanning).

Co-author Aubrey Keirnan then compared 3D reconstructions of the Night Parrot's skull and brain with that of related parrot species.We found that the Night Parrot has similar eye size to other parrots, with smaller optic nerves. It also has smaller optic lobes, which are visual processing areas in the brain."

"This suggests that the Night Parrot may not be great at seeing in the dark: its vision is likely sensitive, but with poor resolution, so that it might not be good at distinguishing obstacles like wire fences or even predators in dark conditions."

The findings raise questions about the night parrot's ability to survive with low numbers in remote outback Australia- where fencing is important for stock management and predator exclusion.

Dr Andrew Iwaniuk, from The University of Lethbridge (Canada), says the use of anatomical observations to infer the species' behaviour was an innovative approach to understand a species so rare it was considered extinct for most of the 20th Century.

"The species is so elusive that we do not even know how many individuals are left. To conserve the species, it is critical that we understand its behavioural needs and capabilities, but these are nearly impossible to observe."

"The Queensland Museum bird collection is an important research resource and co-author, collection manager Heather Janetzki, made available the extremely valuable Night Parrot specimen along with several other species for this comparative study."Dr Weisbecker says the research team were lucky to have this specimen -found in 1990 by Australian Museum bird expert Dr. Walter Boles.

"He spotted its mummified body by accident, lying by the side of the road after apparently being hit by a truck -- it is amazing that its skull stayed intact!"

Night Parrot specialist and PhD student Nick Leseberg from UQ's School of Earth and Environmental Sciences was a co-author of the study.

"These results suggest that removal of unused fences should be a priority in areas where night parrots are known to occur. However, we probably can't go entirely without fences -- stock needs to be managed with fences, and some forms of predator exclusion could be important for protecting the Night Parrot."

"We therefore need to be very careful with our fencing strategies, at least by increasing the visibility of wire fences, but alternatives such as low-tension electric fencing could be even better."

A protein that helps to fight viruses can also block lung damage repair

2020-06-16T22:26:00.001+05:30

When a virus infects the lungs, the body attempts to defend itself and fight off the infection. One defensive mechanism is the activation of a protein, called interferon lambda, which signals to surrounding lung tissue cells to switch on anti-viral defences.

Interferon lambda is currently being investigated in clinical trials as a potential treatment for COVID-19, so understanding the biology underlying its anti-viral effects is important.

The research team investigated the effects of this protein in the lab and found that if it is active for an extended period, it inhibits the repair of the lung tissue. This could prolong lung damage and increase the risk of subsequent bacterial infections.

The Crick scientists observed that in mice with influenza, having increased levels of this protein in their lungs meant that their epithelial cells multiplied less. These cells make up the lining of the airspaces in the lung and need to multiply to replace damaged cells and repair damage. This was the case for mice treated with the protein experimentally and also mice that had produced the protein naturally, as a result of their response to the virus.

Furthermore, cultures of human lung epithelial cells treated with this protein were also less able to grow.

Andreas Wack, author and group leader of the Immunoregulation lab at the Crick says, "This is a really potent protein with many different functions. At the beginning of a viral infection, it is protective, triggering functions that help to fight the virus. However, if it remains in the tissue for too long, it could become harmful.

"This means, for any anti-viral treatment that uses this protein, there is a really careful balance that must be made. Clinicians should consider the timing of the treatment, the earlier this better, and the duration of treatment."

While this research studied mice infected with influenza, the effects of this protein should be similar for other viruses that also cause lung damage, including coronavirus.

The paper has been published alongside research from Harvard Medical School, which found that severe COVID-19 patients showed strong expression of this protein in their lungs.

Jack Major, lead author and PhD student in the Immunoregulation lab at the Crick says, "Understanding how our bodies respond to infection has never been more important. Differences in our immune responses have huge implications for whether a treatment will work and what the side effects might be.

"Our results suggest that before pursuing treatment with interferon lambda, doctors should consider at what stage of the disease patients are, as treatment late in infection may increase the risk of prolonged damage."

The Crick researchers will continue to study inflammatory pathways in lung infections, including infection with coronavirus.

Surprising growth rates discovered in world's deepest photosynthetic corals

2020-06-16T22:21:00.001+05:30

Leptoseris is a group of zooxanthellate coral species which dominate the coral community near the deepest reaches of the sun's light throughout the Indo-Pacific. Symbiotic microalgae (called zooxanthellae) live within the transparent tissues some coral -- giving corals their primary color and providing the machinery for photosynthesis, and in turn, energy.

Deeper in the ocean, less light is available. At the lower end of their depth range, the sunlight available to the Leptoseris species examined in the recent study is less than 0.2% of surface light levels. Less light dictates a general trend of slower growth among species that rely on light for photosynthesis.

Previous studies suggested that photosynthetic corals at the bottom of the ocean's sunlit layer grow extremely slowly -- about 0.04 inch per year for one species of Leptoseris. Until recently, there were very few data on growth rates of corals at depths greater than about 225 feet given the logistical challenges of performing traditional time series growth measurements at these depths.

Kahng, who is also an associate professor at Hawai'i Pacific University, collaborated with SOEST's Hawai'i Undersea Research Laboratory (HURL), the Waikiki Aquarium, National Taiwan University and Hokkaido University to collected colonies of Leptoseris at depths between 225 and 360 feet in the Au'au Channel, Hawai'i using HURL's Pisces IV/V submersibles. The research team used uranium-thorium radiometric dating to accurately determine the age of the coral skeletons at multiple points along its radial growth axis -- much like one might determine the age of tree rings within a tree trunk.

"Considering the low light environment, the previous assumption was that large corals at these extreme depths should be very old due to extremely slow growth rates," said Kahng. "Surprisingly, the corals were found to be relatively young with growth rates comparable to that of many non-branching shallow water corals. Growth rates were measured to be between nearly 1 inch per year at 225 feet depth and 0.3 inches per year at 360 feet depth."

The research team found that these low light, deep water specialists employ an interesting strategy to dominate their preferred habitat. Their thin skeletons and plate-like shape allow for an efficient use of calcium carbonate to maximize surface area for light absorption while using minimal resources to form their skeleton. These thin corals only grow radially outward, not upward, and do not thicken over time like encrusting or massive corals.

"Additionally, the optical geometry of their thin, flat, white skeletons form fine parallel ridges that grow outward from a central origin," said Kahng. "In some cases, these ridges form convex spaces between them which effectively trap light in reflective chambers and cause light to pass repeatedly through the coral tissue until it is absorbed by the photosynthetic machinery."

The strategic efficiency of Leptoseris enabling its robust growth rates in such low light has important implications for its ability to compete for space and over-shade slower growing organisms.

"It also illustrates the flexibility of reef building corals and suggests that these communities may be able to develop and recover from mortality events much faster than previously thought,"

Hummingbirds see diverse colors humans can only imagine

2020-06-16T22:16:00.001+05:30

"Humans are color-blind compared to birds and many other animals," said Mary Caswell Stoddard, an assistant professor in the Princeton University Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Humans have three types of color-sensitive cones in their eyes -- attuned to red, green and blue light -- but birds have a fourth type, sensitive to ultraviolet light. "Not only does having a fourth color cone type extend the range of bird-visible colors into the UV, it potentially allows birds to perceive combination colors like ultraviolet+green and ultraviolet+red -- but this has been hard to test," said Stoddard.

To investigate how birds perceive their colorful world, Stoddard and her research team established a new field system for exploring bird color vision in a natural setting. Working at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) in Gothic, Colorado, the researchers trained wild broad-tailed hummingbirds (Selasphorus platycercus) to participate in color vision experiments.

"Most detailed perceptual experiments on birds are performed in the lab, but we risk missing the bigger picture of how birds really use color vision in their daily lives," Stoddard said. "Hummingbirds are perfect for studying color vision in the wild. These sugar fiends have evolved to respond to flower colors that advertise a nectar reward, so they can learn color associations rapidly and with little training."

Stoddard's team was particularly interested in "nonspectral" color combinations, which involve hues from widely separated parts of the color spectrum, as opposed to blends of neighboring colors like teal (blue-green) or yellow (green-red). For humans, purple is the clearest example of a nonspectral color. Technically, purple is not in the rainbow: it arises when our blue (short-wave) and red (long-wave) cones are stimulated, but not green (medium-wave) cones.

While humans have just one nonspectral color -- purple, birds can theoretically see up to five: purple, ultraviolet+red, ultraviolet+green, ultraviolet+yellow and ultraviolet+purple.

Stoddard and her colleagues designed a series of experiments to test whether hummingbirds can see these nonspectral colors. Their results appear June 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research team, which included scientists from Princeton, the University of British Columbia (UBC), Harvard University, University of Maryland and RMBL, performed outdoor experiments each summer for three years. First they built a pair of custom "bird vision" LED tubes programmed to display a broad range of colors, including nonspectral colors like ultraviolet+green. Next they performed experiments in an alpine meadow frequently visited by local broad-tailed hummingbirds, which breed at the high-altitude site.

Each morning, the researchers rose before dawn and set up two feeders: one containing sugar water and the other plain water. Beside each feeder, they placed an LED tube. The tube beside the sugar water emitted one color, while the one next to the plain water emitted a different color. The researchers periodically swapped the positions of the rewarding and unrewarding tubes, so the birds could not simply use location to pinpoint a sweet treat. They also performed control experiments to ensure that the tiny birds were not using smell or another inadvertent cue to find the reward. Over the course of several hours, wild hummingbirds learned to visit the rewarding color. Using this setup, the researchers recorded over 6,000 feeder visits in a series of 19 experiments.

The experiments revealed that hummingbirds can see a variety of nonspectral colors, including purple, ultraviolet+green, ultraviolet+red and ultraviolet+yellow. For example, hummingbirds readily distinguished ultraviolet+green from pure ultraviolet or pure green, and they discriminated between two different mixtures of ultraviolet+red light -- one redder, one less so.

"It was amazing to watch," said Harold Eyster, a UBC Ph.D. student and a co-author of the study. "The ultraviolet+green light and green light looked identical to us, but the hummingbirds kept correctly choosing the ultraviolet+green light associated with sugar water. Our experiments enabled us to get a sneak peek into what the world looks like to a hummingbird."

Even though hummingbirds can perceive nonspectral colors, appreciating how these colors appear to birds can be difficult. "It is impossible to really know how the birds perceive these colors. Is ultraviolet+red a mix of those colors, or an entirely new color? We can only speculate," said Ben Hogan, a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton and a co-author of the study.

"To imagine an extra dimension of color vision -- that is the thrill and challenge of studying how avian perception works," said Stoddard. "Fortunately, the hummingbirds reveal that they can see things we cannot."

"The colors that we see in the fields of wildflowers at our study site, the wildflower capital of Colorado, are stunning to us, but just imagine what those flowers look like to birds with that extra sensory dimension," said co-author David Inouye, who is affiliated with the University of Maryland and RMBL.

Finally, the research team analyzed a data set of 3,315 feather and plant colors. They discovered that birds likely perceive many of these colors as nonspectral, while humans do not. That said, the researchers emphasize that nonspectral colors are probably not particularly special relative to other colors. The wide variety of nonspectral colors available to birds is the result of their ancient four color-cone visual system.

"Tetrachromacy -- having four color cone types -- evolved in early vertebrates," said Stoddard. "This color vision system is the norm for birds, many fish and reptiles, and it almost certainly existed in dinosaurs. We think the ability to perceive many nonspectral colors is not just a feat of hummingbirds but a widespread feature of animal color vision."

Vegetarians tend to be slimmer and less extroverted than meat eaters

2020-06-16T22:06:00.001+05:30

It was found that the rarer the proportion of animal food in a person's diet, the lower their body mass index (BMI) on average and thus their body weight. One reason for this could be the lower proportion of heavily processed foods in the plant diet. "Products that are excessively rich in fat and sugar are particularly fattening. They stimulate the appetite and delay the feeling of satiety. If you avoid animal foods, you consume fewer such products on average," explains Evelyn Medawar, first author of the underlying publication, which has now been published in the journal Nutrients. In addition: Vegetarian food contains dietary fibres and has a positive effect on the microbiome in the intestine. This is another reason why they could fill you up earlier than those made from animal ingredients. "People who eat predominantly vegetable foods may therefore absorb less energy," Medawar adds. In addition to a changed feeling of satiety, lifestyle factors such as more sport and greater health awareness could also play a decisive role.

For the BMI it also seems to make a difference which animal products a person feeds on. If it is predominantly so-called primary animal products, i.e. meat, sausage and fish, the person usually has a higher BMI than someone who eats primarily secondary animal products, i.e. eggs, milk, dairy products, cheese and butter. In the former case the correlation is statistically significant.

Medawar uses an example to illustrate what this could mean for nutrition: "A person with a 1.2 point lower BMI on average either completely avoids certain animal products, such as the primary ones, and is on a vegetarian diet. Or she continues to eat meat and fish, but less often. Whether nutrition is ultimately the cause of lower body weight or whether other factors are responsible for it cannot be determined from the data. A follow-up study in cooperation with the University Hospital Leipzig will now shed light on this.

Nutrition and personality

The researchers also found out that vegetarian or vegan nutrition is also related to personality. Especially with one of the five major personality factors, extroversion. It was shown that people with predominantly plant-based foods on their diet are more introverted than those who mainly fed on animal products. "It is difficult to say what the reason for this is," says Veronica Witte. "It could be because more introverted people tend to have more restrictive eating habits or because they are more socially segregated because of their eating habits." Here, again, further studies should follow on how people identify with the characteristics of their diet.

However, they could not confirm that a plant-based diet is associated with a tendency towards neurotic behaviour, as other studies suggested. "Earlier analyses had found that more neurotic people were generally more likely to avoid certain groups of foods and to behave more restrictively. We focused here solely on the avoidance of animal products and could not observe any correlation," explains study leader Veronica Witte.

In a third part, they finally concentrated on the question of whether a predominantly plant-based diet is more often associated with depressive moods. Here previous studies had also suggested a relationship between the two factors. "We could not detect this correlation," says Witte. "It is possible that in previous analyses other factors had blurred the results, including the BMI or conspicuous personality traits that are known to be associated with depression. We accounted for them," said Witte explaining a possible reason for the different results. In addition, the plant-based diet is now more common and more accepted and not anymore restricted to a certain group.

The scientists had investigated these connections within the so-called LIFE project, a broad-based study in cooperation with the University Hospital of Leipzig. They determined the personal diets by means of questionnaires in which the participants were asked to fill in how often they had eaten the individual animal products in the last 12 months -- from "several times a day" to "never." The personality traits such as extroversion and neuroticism were assessed by means of a so-called personality inventory (NEOFFI), while depression was assessed by means of the so-called CESD test, a questionnaire that records various symptoms of depression.

World's first spherical artificial eye has 3D retina

2020-06-16T22:01:00.001+05:30

Scientists have spent decades trying to replicate the structure and clarity of a biological eye, but vision provided by existing prosthetic eyes -- largely in the form of spectacles attached with external cables, are still in poor resolution with 2D flat image sensors. The Electrochemical Eye (EC-Eye) developed at HKUST, however, not only replicates the structure of a natural eye for the first time, but may actually offer sharper vision than a human eye in the future, with extra functions such as the ability to detect infrared radiation in darkness.

The key feature allowing such breakthroughs is a 3D artificial retina -- made of an array of nanowire light sensors which mimic the photoreceptors in human retinas. Developed by Prof. FAN Zhiyong and Dr. GU Leilei from the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering at HKUST, the team connected the nanowire light sensors to a bundle of liquid-metal wires serving as nerves behind the human-made hemispherical retina during the experiment, and successfully replicated the visual signal transmission to reflect what the eye sees onto the computer screen.

In the future, those nanowire light sensors could be directly connected to the nerves of the visually impaired patients. Unlike in a human eye where bundles of optic nerve fibers (for signal transmission) need to route through the retina via a pore -- from the front side of the retina to the backside (thus creating a blind spot in human vision) before reaching the brain; the light sensors that now scatters across the entire human-made retina could each feed signals through its own liquid-metal wire at the back, thereby eliminating the blind spot issue as they do not have to route through a single spot.

Apart from that, as nanowires have even higher density than photoreceptors in human retina, the artificial retina can thus receive more light signals and potentially attain a higher image resolution than human retina -- if the back contacts to individual nanowires are made in the future. With different materials used to boost the sensors' sensitivity and spectral range, the artificial eye may also achieve other functions such as night vision.

"I have always been a big fan of science fiction, and I believe many technologies featured in stories such as those of intergalactic travel, will one day become reality. However, regardless of image resolution, angle of views or user-friendliness, the current bionic eyes are still of no match to their natural human counterpart. A new technology to address these problems is in urgent need, and it gives me a strong motivation to start this unconventional project," said Prof. Fan, whose team has spent nine years to complete the current study from idea inception.

The team collaborated with the University of California, Berkeley on this project and their findings were recently published in the journal Nature.

"In the next step, we plan to further improve the performance, stability and biocompatibility of our device. For prosthesis application, we look forward to collaborating with medical research experts who have the relevant expertise on optometry and ocular prosthesis," Prof. Fan added.

The working principle of the artificial eye involves an electrochemical process which is adopted from a type of solar cell. In principle, each photo sensor on the artificial retina can serve as a nanoscale solar cell. With further modification, the EC-Eye can be a self-powered image sensor, so there is no need for external power source nor circuitry when used for ocular prosthesis, which will be much more user-friendly as compared with the current technology.

Music captivates listeners and synchronizes their brainwaves.

2020-05-14T16:42:00.001+05:30

Music has the ability to captivate us; when listeners engage with music, they follow its sounds closely, connecting to what they hear in an affective and invested way. But what is it about music that keeps the audience engaged? A study by researchers from The City College of New York and the University of Arkansas charts new ground in understanding the neural responses to music.

Despite the importance, it has been difficult to study engagement with music given the limits of self-report. This led Jens Madsen and Lucas Parra, from CCNY's Grove School of Engineering, to measure the synchronization of brainwaves in an audience. When a listener is engaged with music, their neural responses are in sync with that of other listeners, thus inter-subject correlation of brainwaves is a measure of engagement.

According to their findings, published in the latest issue of "Scientific Reports," a listener's engagement decreases with repetition of music, but only for familiar music pieces. However, unfamiliar musical styles can sustain an audience's interest, in particular for individuals with some musical training.

"Across repeated exposures to instrumental music, inter-subject correlation decreased for music written in a familiar style," Parra and his collaborators write in "Scientific Reports."

In addition, participants with formal musical training showed more inter-subject correlation, and sustained it across exposures to music in an unfamiliar style. This distinguishes music from other domains, where interest drops with repetition.

"What is so cool about this, is that by measuring people's brainwaves we can study how people feel about music and what makes it so special." says Madsen.

Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis and Rhimmon Simchy-Gross, both from the University of Arkansas, were among the other researchers. The study involved 60 graduate and undergraduate students from City College of New York.

How does language emerge?

2020-05-14T16:27:00.001+05:30

How did the almost 6,000 languages of the world come into being? Researchers have tried to simulate the process of developing a new communication system in an experiment -- with surprising results: even preschool children can spontaneously develop communication systems that exhibit core properties of natural languageHow the languages of the world emerged is largely a mystery. Considering that it might have taken millennia, it is intriguing to see how deaf people can create novel sign languages spontaneously. Observations have shown that when deaf strangers are brought together in a community, they come up with their own sign language in a considerably short amount of time. The most famous example of this is Nicaraguan Sign Language, which emerged in the 1980s. Interestingly, children played an important role in the development of these novel languages. However, how exactly this happened has not been documented, as Manuel Bohn describes: "We know relatively little about how social interaction becomes language. This is where our new study comes in."

In a series of studies, researchers at the Leipzig Research Centre for Early Childhood Development and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology attempted to recreate exactly this process. The idea had been around for quite some time, says Gregor Kachel. But there was a problem: how to make children communicate with each other without them reverting to talking to each other? The solution came up in Skype conversations between the two researchers from Germany and their colleague Michael Tomasello in the US. In the study, children were invited to stay in two different rooms and a Skype connection was established between them. After a brief familiarization with the set-up, the researchers sneakily turned off the sound and watched as the children found new ways of communicating that go beyond spoken language.

The children's task was to describe an image with different motifs in a coordination game. With concrete things -- like a hammer or a fork -- children quickly found a solution by imitating the corresponding action (e.g. eating) in a gesture. But the researchers repeatedly challenged the children with new, more abstract pictures. For example, they introduced a white sheet of paper as a picture. The depicted "nothing" is difficult to imitate. Kachel describes how two children nevertheless mastered this task: "The sender first tried all sorts of different gestures, but her partner let her know that she did not know what was meant. Suddenly our sender pulled her T-shirt to the side and pointed to a white dot on her coloured T-shirt. The two had a real breakthrough: of course! White! Like the white paper! Later, when the roles were switched, the recipient didn't have a white spot on her T-shirt, but she nevertheless took the same approach: she pulled her T-shirt to the side and pointed to it. Immediately her partner knew what to do." Within a very short time, the two had established a sign for an abstract concept. In the course of the study, the images to be depicted became more and more complex, which was also reflected in the gestures that the children produced. In order to communicate, for example, an interaction between two animals, children invented separate gestures for actors and actions and began to combine them -- thus creating a kind of small local grammar.

How does a language emerge? Based on the present study, the following steps appear plausible: first, people create reference to actions and objects via signs that resemble things. The prerequisite for this is a common ground of experience between interaction partners. Partners also coordinate by imitating each other such that they use the same signs for the same things. The signs thus gain interpersonal and eventually conventional meaning. Over time, the relationships between the signs and things become more abstract and the meaning of the individual signs more specific. Grammatical structures are gradually introduced when there is a need to communicate more complex facts. However, the most remarkable aspect of the current studies is that these processes can be observed under controlled circumstances and within 30 minutes.

The studies demonstrate that communication cannot be reduced to words alone. When there is no way to use conventional spoken language, people find other ways to get their message across. This phenomenon forms the basis for the development of new languages. The study by Manuel Bohn, Gregor Kachel and Michael Tomasello shows what the first steps in the development of a new language could look like. According to Bohn, however, numerous new questions arise at this point: "It would be very interesting to see how the newly invented communication systems change over time, for example when they are passed on to new 'generations' of users. There is evidence that language becomes more systematic when passed on."

How the heart affects our perception

2020-05-14T16:17:00.001+05:30

When we encounter a dangerous situation, signals from the brain make sure that the heart beats faster. When we relax the heart slows down. But the heartbeat also affects the brain but the underlying mechanisms are unclear. Researchers have now identified two mechanisms underpinning how the heart influences our perception, the brain, and how these mechanisms differ between individuals.

Now, in a new study, Esra Al and colleagues have found the reason for this change in perception: Brain activity is changing over the heart cycle. In systole a specific component of brain activity, which is associated with consciousness, the so called P300-component is suppressed. In other words, it seems that -- in systole -- the brain makes sure that certain information is kept out of conscious experience. The brain seems to take into account the pulse which floods the body in systole and predicts that pulse-associated bodily changes are "not real" but rather due to the pulse. Normally, this helps us to not be constantly disturbed by our pulse. However, when it comes to weak stimuli which coincide with systole we might miss them, although they are real.

During their investigations on heart-brain interactions, Al and colleagues also revealed a second effect of heartbeat on perception: If a person's brain shows a higher response to the heartbeat, the processing of the stimulus in the brain is attenuated -- the person detects the stimulus less. "This seems to be a result of directing our attention between external environmental signals and internal bodily signals.," explains study author Al. In other words, a large heartbeat-evoked potential seems to reflect a "state of mind," in which we are more focused on the functioning of our inner organs such as the blood circulation, however less aware of stimuli from the outside world.

The results not only have implications for our understanding of heart-brain interactions in healthy persons, but also in patients. The senior author, Arno Villringer explains, "The new results might help to explain why patients after stroke often suffer from cardiac problems and why patients with cardiac disease often have impaired cognitive function."

The researchers investigated these relationships by sending weak electrical stimuli to electrodes clamped onto the study participants fingers. In parallel, they recorded each participants' brain processes using an EEG and their cardiac activity using an EKG.

Learning difficulties due to poor connectivity, not specific brain regions

2020-05-14T16:13:00.001+05:30

Between 14-30% of children and adolescents worldwide have learning difficulties severe enough to require additional support. These difficulties are often associated with cognitive and/or behavioural problems. In some cases, children who are struggling at school receive a formal diagnosis of a specific learning difficulty or disability, such as dyslexia, dyscalculia or developmental language disorder, or of a developmental disorder such as attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyspraxia, or autism spectrum disorder.

Scientists have struggled to identify specific areas of the brain that might give rise to these difficulties, with studies implicating myriad brain regions. ADHD, for example, has been linked to the anterior cingulate cortex, caudate nucleus, pallidum, striatum, cerebellum, prefrontal cortex, the premotor cortex and most parts of the parietal lobe.

One potential explanation is that each diagnosis differs so much between one individual and the next, that each involves different combinations of brain regions. However, a more provocative explanation has been proposed by a team of scientists at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge: there are, in fact, no specific brain areas that cause these difficulties.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers used machine learning to map the brain differences across a group of almost 479 children, 337 of whom had been referred with learning-related cognitive problems and 142 from a comparison sample. The algorithm interpreted data taken from a large battery of cognitive, learning, and behavioural measures, as well as from brain scans taken using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The results are published today in Current Biology.

The researchers found that the brain differences did not map onto any labels the children had been given -- in other words, there were no brain regions that predicted having ASD or ADHD, for example. More surprisingly, they found that the different brain regions did not even predict specific cognitive difficulties -- there was no specific brain deficit for language problems or memory difficulties, for example.Instead, the team found that the children's brains were organised around hubs, like an efficient traffic system or social network. Children who had well-connected brain hubs had either very specific cognitive difficulties, such as poor listening skills, or had no cognitive difficulties at all. By contrast, children with poorly connected hubs -- like a train station with few or poor connections -- had widespread and severe cognitive problems.

"Scientists have argued for decades that there are specific brain regions that predict having a particular learning disorder or difficulty, but we've shown that this isn't the case," said Dr Duncan Astle, senior author on the study. "In fact, it's much more important to consider how these brain areas are connected -- specifically, whether they are connected via hubs. The severity of learning difficulties was strongly associated with the connectedness of these hubs, we think because these hubs play a key role in sharing information between brain areas."

Dr Astle said that one implication of their work is that it suggests that interventions should be less reliant on diagnostic labels.

"Receiving a diagnosis is important for families. It can give professional recognition for a child's difficulties and open the door to specialist support. But in terms of specific interventions, for example from the child's teachers, they can be a distraction.

"It's better to look at their areas of cognitive difficulties and how these can be supported, for example using specific interventions to improve listening skills or language competencies, or at interventions that would be good for the whole class, like how to how to reduce working memory demands during learning."

The findings may explain why drugs treatments have not proven effective for developmental disorders. Methylphenidate (Ritalin), for example, which is used to treat ADHD, appears to reduce hyperactivity, but does not remediate cognitive difficulties or improve educational progress. Drugs tend to target specific types of nerve cells, but would have little impact on a 'hub-based' organisation that has emerged over many years.

While this is the first time that hubs and their connections have been shown to play a key role in learning difficulties and developmental disorders, their importance in brain disorders is becoming increasingly clear in recent years. Cambridge researchers have previously shown that they also play an important role in mental health disorders that begin to emerge during adolescence, such as schizophrenia.

The study was funded by the Medical Research Council.

Hugs and kisses: Research connects affection, attachment style and marriage satisfaction

2020-05-14T16:06:00.001+05:30

particularly looks at the effects of non-sexual intimate touch -- for example, hugging, holding hands or cuddling on the couch, rather than actions intended to lead to sex. Attachment style refers to human social bonds and exists on a spectrum; avoidant individuals prefer more interpersonal distance, while anxious individuals seek greater closeness. This style develops in childhood, but can change over time and vary with the individual in question.

"It all depends on how open, close and secure you feel with that person, which is impacted by many, many factors,"

To determine the connection of attachment style, touch satisfaction and marital satisfaction, researchers used a sample of 184 couples over the age of 18, consisting of husbands and wives; same-sex couples were excluded. Because the study protocol included hormonal sampling, individuals on hormonal therapy were also excluded, as well as postmenopausal, pregnant or breastfeeding women. They were interviewed separately on their attachment tendencies, the amount of touch and routine affection in their relationships, and their relationship satisfaction.

Researchers expected to find that avoidant individuals preferred less touch, while anxious people prefer more. What they found was more nuanced.

The more routine affection that couples experienced, the more they felt satisfied with their partners' touch, even if they had avoidant attachment styles. With low levels of physical affection, anxious husbands were less satisfied with the touch they received, but not anxious wives, who may instead choose to solicit the missing affection.

For men, higher levels of routine affection are associated with relationship satisfaction; in other words, touch is a positive, the icing on the marriage cake. For women, lower levels of routine affection correlated with relationship dissatisfaction, meaning that touch is an essential ingredient and its absence is a negative. It's a subtle distinction.

"There's something specific about touch satisfaction that interplays with relationship satisfaction but not dissatisfaction for wives," that further research studies may be able to clarify the distinction.

Whatever a couple's attachment insecurities, the perception of how their partner touches them has the greatest association with "touch satisfaction." In other words, more is better because they can more easily see that their partner is trying to engage with them.

Overall, the study shows an association between non-sexual physical affection and solid marriages, although the current data can't establish cause and effect.

"Interestingly, there's some evidence that holding your partner's hand while you're arguing de-escalates the argument and makes it more productive.

that the study focused only on healthy, consensual touch -- not manipulation or abuse. Touch holds different meanings for people, she pointed out; someone with autism spectrum disorder may be overwhelmed by tactile sensitivity, and someone with a history of trauma may experience touch as averse.

a hugger and has long been fascinated by the healing possibilities of touch as a qualitative review of the uses and benefit of touch across the lifespan. But questions continued to arise: Why do some people enjoy touch more than others? And do they benefit more as a result?

As the coronavirus pandemic continues, couples may want to consider adding more affection to decrease stress -- as long as their partners are receptive and willing.

"Feel free to give some extra snugs on the couch. There's plenty of evidence that suggests touch as a way to decrease stress.

But she notes that the coronavirus pandemic also may lead to touch deprivation, as social distancing keeps us physically apart from one another. Consider, for example, healthcare workers who are quarantining themselves from their own families when they return home, to keep the virus from spreading to their loved ones.

"I think we should all hold the loved ones we can a little closer and be thoughtful of the struggles that others might be having because they can't do just that," she said. "If anything is true for me, a hug has become even more precious than it was before.

𝐃𝐄𝐁𝐀𝐁𝐑𝐀𝐓 𝐉𝐄𝐍𝐀

Get Access to Food Stamp Support!

Install and Open an Account in the Bright App!

Refinance those high APR credit cards

APRFrom 9%

Krakatoa: The World’s Mightiest Explosion

Eudoxus of Cnidus

Biography – Eudoxus’s Odyssey

Plato’s Planet Puzzle – Modelling the Heavens

Unequal neutron-star mergers create unique 'bang' in simulations

COVID-19 lockdown caused 50 percent global reduction in human-linked Earth vibrations

29,000 years of Aboriginal history

A tiny ancient relative of dinosaurs and pterosaurs discovered

Hyksos, 15th Dynasty rulers of Ancient Egypt, were an internal takeover

Foxes have been eating humans' leftovers for 42,000 years

Alaska is getting wetter: That's bad news for permafrost and the climate

South Atlantic anomalies existed 8 - 11 million years ago

New native Hawaiian land snail species discovered, first in 60 years

3D hand-sensing wristband signals future of wearable technology

Mysterious Australian Night Parrots may not see in the dead of night

A protein that helps to fight viruses can also block lung damage repair

Surprising growth rates discovered in world's deepest photosynthetic corals

Hummingbirds see diverse colors humans can only imagine

Vegetarians tend to be slimmer and less extroverted than meat eaters

World's first spherical artificial eye has 3D retina

Music captivates listeners and synchronizes their brainwaves.

How does language emerge?

How the heart affects our perception

Learning difficulties due to poor connectivity, not specific brain regions

Hugs and kisses: Research connects affection, attachment style and marriage satisfaction

APR
From 9%