Common Household Noises May Be Stressing Your Dog

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have found that people may not recognize that their dog is stressed when exposed to common household noises. While it’s well established that sudden loud noises, such as fireworks or thunderstorms, commonly trigger a dog’s anxiety, a new study finds even common noises, such as a vacuum or microwave, can be a trigger. The study was published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science.

The research found that high-frequency, intermittent noises such as the battery warning of a smoke detector are more likely to cause a dog anxiety, rather than low-frequency, continuous noise.

“We know that there are a lot of dogs that have noise sensitivities, but we underestimate their fearfulness to noise we consider normal because many dog owners can’t read body language,” said lead author Emma Grigg, a research associate and lecturer at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

Signs of anxiety

Some common signs of a dog’s anxiety include cringing, trembling or retreating, but owners may be less able to identify signs of fear or anxiety when behaviors are more subtle. For example, stressed dogs could pant, lick their lips, turn their head away or even stiffen their body. Sometimes their ears will turn back, and their head will lower below their shoulders. Grigg suggests owners better educate themselves on anxiety-related behavior.

Researchers conducted a survey of 386 dog owners about their dogs’ responses to household sounds and examined recorded dog behaviors and human reactions from 62 videos available online. The study found that owners not only underestimated their dogs’ fearfulness, but the majority of people in videos responded with amusement rather than concern over their dog’s welfare.

Fossil elephant cranium reveals key adaptations

A remarkably well-preserved fossil elephant cranium from Kenya is helping scientists understand how its species became the dominant elephant in eastern Africa several million years ago, a time when a cooler, drier climate allowed grasslands to spread and when habitually bipedal human ancestors first appeared on the landscape. Dated to 4.5 million years ago and recovered from a site on the northeast side of Lake Turkana, it is the only well-preserved elephant cranium—the portion of the skull that encloses the brain—from that time. It is about 85% intact and holds a wealth of previously unavailable anatomical detail, according to University of Michigan paleontologist William Sanders.

Known by its museum number, KNM-ER 63642, the roughly 2-ton cranium belonged to a massive adult male of the species Loxodonta adaurora, an extinct evolutionary cousin of modern African elephants but not a direct ancestor.

Preparators from the National Museums of Kenya at the Ileret research facility of the Turkana Basin Institute, starting manual preparation and supplementing the field consolidation (chemical hardening) of Loxodonta adaurora cranium KNM-ER 63642. From left to right: Cliff Onyango, Robert Moru and Christopher Kiarie.
Image credit: Steve Jabo, Smithsonian Institution

KNM-ER 63642 is both impressively immense and unexpectedly modern in aspect, displaying adaptations that likely gave L. adaurora an edge when competing with other large mammals for grasses, according to Sanders, lead author of a study published online Oct. 21 in the journal Palaeovertebrata. Co-authors include Meave and Louise Leakey, who led the recovery effort and who are best known for the discovery of early hominid specimens and artifacts from Lake Turkana and elsewhere.

Codetta Program Deciphers Genetic Code in 250,000 Genomes

Within DNA, four chemical bases (shown in green, red, blue, and orange)
strung together in long strands contain the instructions for building proteins.
Credit: Irving Geis/HHMI

Codetta, a new computational method for predicting genetic codes, could reveal insights into how some organisms have modified a code once thought to be universal.

In the 1800s, the Rosetta Stone – an ancient rock slab inscribed with three languages – helped scholars decode Egyptian hieroglyphics. Now, a computer program is doing something similar for the genetic code.

The program, named Codetta, can read the genome sequence of any organism, and then spit out its genetic code: the biological key that translates genetic information into instructions for building proteins. Across most of the tree of life, this code is universal. But scientists have found a handful of exceptions – in some organisms, genetic info codes for instructions different from those in other life-forms.

In the largest screen to date for such alternative genetic codes, the program scanned more than 250,000 genome sequences from bacteria and archaea and identified five never-before-seen codes, Harvard University’s Kate Shulgina and Howard Hughes Medical Investigator Sean Eddy report November 9, 2021, in the journal, eLife. “I told Kate that her new codes are going straight into the textbooks,” Eddy says.

The team’s method is faster, more rigorous, and more comprehensive than previous efforts, says Ken Wolfe, an evolutionary geneticist at University College Dublin who was not involved with the research. “They looked at every genome that’s available for bacteria and archaea – essentially, all the data that exists.”

The work’s practical implications are immediate: scientists using Codetta, which is freely available, will be able to correctly predict which proteins an organism is making. But the program might unlock more sweeping biological insights too.

Adding herbs and spices to meals may help lower blood pressure

Photo by Taryn Elliott from Pexels

Seasoning your food generously with herbs and spices isn’t just a great way to make your meals tastier — new research found it may have benefits for your heart’s health, as well.

In a controlled-feeding study, the researchers found that seasoning foods with 6.5 grams, or about 1.3 teaspoons, of herbs and spices a day was linked with lower blood pressure after four weeks.

Penny Kris-Etherton, Evan Pugh University Professor of Nutritional Sciences, and Kristina Petersen, assistant professor of nutritional sciences at Texas Tech University and co-principal investigator of the study while at Penn State, said the findings offer people a simple way to help improve their heart health.

“Adding herbs and spices to your food is a great way to add flavor without adding extra sodium, sugar or saturated fat,” Kris-Etherton said. “And, if you go a step further and add these seasonings to foods that are really good for you, like fruits and vegetables, you can potentially get even more health benefits by consuming that extra produce.”

According to the researchers, cardiometabolic diseases like heart disease, strokes and type two diabetes continue to be one of the leading causes of death in the United States. One of the ways health professionals aim to improve heart health is by monitoring and improving blood pressure.

One way people can improve their blood pressure is by limiting their sodium intake, usually by adding less salt to their meals. Petersen said that while people have long been encouraged to season their food with herbs and spices instead of salt to boost flavor without added sodium, less was known about whether herbs and spices have health benefits of their own.

“As nutritionists, we’re interested in new ways we can use diet to benefit health, and cardiovascular health in particular,” Petersen said. “We were curious about how herbs and spices could affect heart health, since they are versatile and can be added to many different types of food.”

Microbiome discovery could help save kids’ hearing

Bacteria could help fight chronic middle ear infections.
Credit: Australian Department of Health

Bacteria found in children’s upper respiratory systems could help fight chronic middle ear infections, the leading cause of preventable hearing loss and deafness in Indigenous communities.

The University of Queensland’s Dr Seweryn Bialasiewicz said this discovery helped explain a long-held mystery, while providing hope for potential treatments.

“We’ve been puzzled for years now, trying to work out why some children never develop chronic ear disease, despite being in a high-risk category for contracting it,” Dr Bialasiewicz said.

“By focusing on the microbiomes in the upper respiratory tracts of disease-resistant kids, we could investigate the ecological networks of bacterial interactions that seemed to be working together to protect against the condition.

“It was clear that these two groups of bacteria needed to not only be present, but to be interacting with each other, to provide protection from middle ear infections.”

Dr Bialasiewicz said they were hoping to use this information to figure out what the exact mechanism of protection is, and then mimic it in the very young children, as a therapy or a preventative measure.

“This could take the form of a molecule that can be used as a drug for treatment, or as a protective probiotic so that these ‘good’ bacteria can be seeded in the nose early enough to offer protection against the incoming ‘bad’ bacteria,” he said.

First Global River Database Documents 40 Years of Change

A first-ever database compiling movement of the largest rivers in the world over time could become a crucial tool for urban planners to better understand the deltas that are home to these rivers and a large portion of Earth’s population.

The database, created by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, uses publicly available remote sensing data to show how the river centerlines of the world’s 48 most threatened deltas have moved during the past 40 years. The data can be used to predict how rivers will continue to move over time and help governments manage population density and future development.

“When we think about river management strategies, we have very little to no information about how rivers are moving over time,” said Paola Passalacqua, an associate professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering who leads the ongoing river analysis research.

The research was published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The database includes three U.S. rivers, the Mississippi, the Colorado and the Rio Grande. Although some areas of these deltas are experiencing migration, overall, they are mostly stable, the data show. Aggressive containment strategies to keep those rivers in their place, especially near population centers, play a role in that, Passalacqua said.

Scientists Issue New Climate Adaptation “Scorecard”

Beaver landscape mimicry project on Blackfeet Nation lands
Credit: Center for Large Landscape Conservation

A new study, co-authored by researchers at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Forestry, offers a “scorecard” for climate adaptation projects – a set of 16 criteria that can be used to evaluate climate adaptation projects and inform their design. The scientists recently published their findings in the journal Environmental Science & Policy.

Climate adaptation projects are interventions that help wildlife, ecosystems, and people adapt to climate change. Examples include restoring habitat with plant species that are more likely to survive future climate conditions, reclaiming agricultural lands to create erosion-resistant ecosystems, and installing artificial nests to foster more resilient habitat for birds.

The research team interviewed and surveyed 18 climate adaptation experts and then surveyed an additional 47 practitioners to develop this flexible and comprehensive set of criteria, which can be tailored to an individual project’s goals and context.

The increasingly significant and unprecedented pledges in investments for adaptation have intensified the need to assess adaptation outcomes and return on investment. However, unlike evaluating climate change mitigation outcomes, which scientists can measure through the balance of greenhouse gas emissions and removals, evaluating adaptation is a complex endeavor. Outcomes can be multifaceted, (social, ecological, economic), and may not be apparent for years after project completion, making it difficult to define what constitutes success and whether it was achieved.

Weak coupling shows flaw in strange metal model

Planckian metals have the potential to power high-temperature superconductors, quantum computers and a host of other next-generation technologies. However, these “strange” metals – in which electrical resistance increases linearly with temperature – are notoriously difficult to study, let alone comprehend.

In the last decade, physicists have attempted to explore the inner workings of these quantum materials with cold atom experiments, whereby the behavior of electrons is simulated with neutral atoms, light beams and ultra-cold temperatures. These 2D models provide an analog system that allows experimentalists to see the interactions at more scrutable length and time scales – microns and milliseconds, rather than angstroms and femtoseconds – bringing them ever closer to understanding the materials’ unusual electrical functions.

Now, Cornell researchers led by Erich Mueller, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, have found this experimental model doesn’t capture what’s really happening inside strange metals at all.

Their paper, “Transport in the Two-Dimensional Fermi-Hubbard Model: Lessons from Weak Coupling,” published Oct. 25 in Physical Review B. The lead author is doctoral student Thomas Kiely.

“These cold atom experiments are a really awesome way to try and learn about this strange metal behavior, this crazy unusual resistivity, which we believe is the key to understanding how to make higher-temperature superconductors and all sorts of other things,” Mueller said. “We found there’s actually a simple explanation for what happens in this experiment.”

Neutrons take a deep dive into water networks surrounding DNA

Vanderbilt University researchers used neutrons at ORNL to reveal the hydrogen bonding patterns between water molecules (shown in blue) and DNA. The findings could help provide insights into how water influences DNA function.

Credit: ORNL/Jill Hemman

Water plays several important roles within the human body, even affecting the DNA in our cells. The entire surface of a DNA double helix is coated in layers of water molecules. This sheath of water attaches to the genetic material through hydrogen bonds, made by sharing hydrogen atoms between molecules. Through hydrogen bonds, water can influence how DNA takes shape and interacts with other molecules. In some cases, water can help proteins recognize DNA sequences.

Scientists can estimate where hydrogen bonds occur and how hydrogen atoms are shared, but it is difficult to gather experimental evidence. A research team led by Vanderbilt University has used a method that successfully captured the most detailed view to date of water’s hydrogen bonding patterns around DNA, opening new possibilities for studying how water impacts DNA function. Details on the methodology and the results, produced in part through neutron scattering at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), are published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research.

“Water serves as a mediator between DNA and other molecules, even for very specific interactions. Before any molecule can bind to a segment of DNA, it must first go through this water shell,” said Martin Egli, a biochemistry professor at Vanderbilt University and corresponding author of the study. “To advance our understanding of DNA processes, it’s important to know exactly what the surrounding water does and how it arranges itself around molecules.”

Converting Methane to Methanol -- With and Without Water

This scanning tunneling electron microscope image shows the structure of a copper-zinc oxide catalyst that converts methane to methanol with and without water. Triangular zinc-oxide "islands" rest on a copper-oxide thin film (flat background) over a copper substrate (not seen). The "step" edges between copper-oxide and zinc-oxide (A, where blue is zinc, red is oxygen) are the main active sites for producing methanol when no water is present. The semi-flat areas have a relatively perfect crystal structure (B) and are inert during the reaction. The very rough areas are likely associated with defects—in this case with fewer zinc atoms and an oxygen-rich crystal structure (C)—and are the most active sites for methanol production when water is present.
Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

Chemists have been searching for efficient catalysts to convert methane—a major component of abundant natural gas—into methanol, an easily transported liquid fuel and building block for making other valuable chemicals. Adding water to the reaction can address certain challenges, but it also complicates the process. Now a team at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory has identified a new approach using a common industrial catalyst that can complete the conversion effectively both with and without water. The findings, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, suggest strategies for improving catalysts for the water-free conversion.

“Water is like a trick that people have been using for a long time to get this reaction going—and it definitely helps. It improves the selectivity and it aids the ability to extract the methanol,” said José Rodriguez, a leader of Brookhaven Lab’s Catalysis Group, who has an adjunct appointment at Stony Brook University (SBU) in the departments of Chemistry and Materials Science and Chemical Engineering.

As shown in a recent related study by this group, adding water keeps the reaction from running away to transform the desired product, methanol, into carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon dioxide (CO2). But adding water also adds complexity and cost. Plus, at the temperatures and in the amounts required for this reaction, the water exists as large quantities of steam, which would have to be controlled in an industrial setting.

So, the Brookhaven team set out to explore if they could run the reaction without water by changing the catalyst—the substance that brings the reactants together and helps guide them along a particular reaction pathway.