Differences in male and female ostriches could explain how they form groups

Photo credit: Julian Melgar

Males and females are affected in different ways by cooperation and competition in social groups – something that could determine which group sizes work best. According to a new study from Lund University in Sweden, this depends to a large extent quite simply on females and males having different interests.

Over a seven-year period, the researchers studied ostriches in differently sized groups in order to understand the pros and cons of living in a group. At the start of each breeding season, experimental groups of ostriches were established by placing different numbers of males and females in enclosures.

The group sizes were similar to those seen in the wild. During part of the breeding season, the ostriches’ natural cooperative incubation behavior was prevented by temporarily removing eggs. Using this approach, the researchers could measure what effect the number of males and females and cooperation over incubation had on the group’s reproductive success, measured in the number of offspring born.

“We decided to study the ostriches under controlled conditions in order to distinguish the effect of individual differences from group attributes on reproductive success and find out how competition and cooperation changed with the size of the group,” says Julian Melgar, a biology researcher at Lund University.

Obesity and biological sex may make individuals more vulnerable to COVID-19

A new West Virginia University study suggests obesity may impair the ability to fight off SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in a sex-dependent manner.
Credit: WVU Illustration/Graham Curry

A new animal study from Katherine Lee, a researcher with the West Virginia University School of Medicine, investigates why individuals with obesity may have a particularly difficult time fending off SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Specifically, female obese mice experienced worse disease symptoms, showing the importance of both obesity and biological sex in COVID-19 outcomes.

Lee’s findings appear in the journal iScience.

Obesity dramatically increases someone’s risk of being hospitalized, placed on a ventilator or dying due to COVID-19. Considering that about two out of every five Americans are obese, that risk is far from negligible.

“No human is 100% healthy in every respect,” said Lee, a doctoral student in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Cell Biology. “There are always going to be little differences in the way our bodies function and those changes can ultimately affect the ways we respond to everything. So, I think as soon as we start incorporating those differences and changes — metabolic diseases and preexisting conditions — into our work, we can learn more about how vaccines and therapeutics might be more or less effective in these people.”

Treatment for back pain: 84 percent increase in success rate

People who sit a lot and do not exercise often develop back pain.
Credits: Markus Bernards for Goethe University Frankfurt

If a therapy for chronic back pain is tailored specifically to a patient’s individual requirements, the chances of success are far greater than with standard forms of treatment. Accompanied by a psychotherapeutic procedure in the shape of cognitive behavioral therapy, the pain can be alleviated even more effectively. This is the result of a meta-analysis by Goethe University Frankfurt, in which the data of over 10,000 patients were combined and analyzed. It can be concluded from the study that multimodal therapies should be promoted on a larger scale in the German healthcare system, in line with the National Disease Management Guidelines.

Lack of exercise, bad posture, overexertion, constant stress at work or at home – back pain is a widespread condition with many causes. For a not insignificant number of sufferers, the symptoms are even chronic, meaning they persist for a long time or recur again and again. Sport and exercise therapies under instruction can bring relief. Common treatment methods include physiotherapy as well as strength and stability exercises. But how can the therapy be as successful as possible? Which approach alleviates pain most effectively? A meta-analysis by Goethe University Frankfurt, published recently in the Journal of Pain, has delivered new insights.

Reliably estimating proportion of vaccinated populations in wildlife

Japanese Wild Boar
Credit: KENPEI, CC BY-SA 3.0/Wikimedia Commons

Researchers develop a ground-breaking model to estimate bait vaccination effectiveness in wild animals based on the proportion of immunized animals in a population and the number of vaccine applications.

Wild animals are host to pathogens that cause a wide variety of infectious diseases, including zoonotic diseases such as rabies, influenza and tuberculosis. The control of these diseases in wild animals is an important issue in the fields of public health, livestock health, and conservation biology. One of the most widely used methods of control is vaccination of wildlife via bait containing oral vaccines (bait vaccination). However, assessing the effectiveness of these vaccines has been difficult.

A team of scientists led by Associate Professor Ryosuke Omori at the International Institute for Zoonoses Control, Hokkaido University, has developed a ground-breaking model to estimate the effectiveness of bait vaccination in wild animals. Their model and findings were published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.

How evolution overshot the optimum bone structure in hopping rodents

A bipedal jerboa, one of the rodent species included in a study of unpredictability in animal movements.
 Image credit: Talia Moore and Kim Cooper

Bones that are separate in small jerboas are fully fused in large ones, but the bone structures that are best at dissipating the stresses of jumping are only partially fused

Foot bones that are separate in small hopping rodents are fused in their larger cousins, and a team of researchers at the University of Michigan and University of California, San Diego, wanted to know why.

It appears that once evolution set jerboa bones on the path toward fusing together, they overshot the optimum amount of fusing—the structure that best dissipated stresses from jumping and landing—to become fully bonded.

This finding could inform the design of future robotic legs capable of withstanding the higher forces associated with rapid bursts of agile locomotion.

Jerboas are desert rodents that hop erratically on two legs to avoid predators. Across the jerboa family tree, these two legs can look a lot different: there are species that weigh just three grams to those that weigh 400 grams, with heavier species sporting vastly different bones of the feet, or metatarsals. Lighter jerboas are like most other mammals, including humans: their metatarsal foot bones are separate from each other.

NUS study addresses the causes of eye color variation in primates

Some of the images measured and analyzed in the study, picturing the diversity in color and forms.
 Credit: Juan Olvido Perea-García

Scientists discover that this diversity is partly due to lighting differences in their habitats

Have you ever wondered why some people have lighter eyes than others? Differences in iris coloration have traditionally been explained as a result of sexual selection, but a recent study led by researchers from the Department of Biological Sciences at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Faculty of Science revealed that this is partly due to differences in lighting in the habitats of primate species.

For over 20 years, studies focused on explaining variation in primate eye coloration have exclusively focused on eyes as visual signals for inter and intra-specific communication. This idea, however, has received little support from experimental studies in species other than humans. Other suggestions, like eye pigmentation patterns being used in camouflage against predators, have also received limited support.

Even though eyes help us navigate the world thanks to light entering that organ, the idea that eye color diversity may have evolved due to different qualities of light being present in different habitats was never seriously considered.

A Machine Learning-Based Solution Could Help Firefighters Circumvent Deadly Backdrafts

NIST researchers conducted hundreds of fire experiments to find out what conditions make a room ripe for backdraft and fed the data to a machine learning algorithm. The result was a backdraft-predicting computer model. The NIST's team plans to incorporate the model into handheld devices that firefighters could use to take simple measurements through small openings in a room.

A lack of oxygen can reduce even the most furious flame to smoldering ash. But when fresh air rushes in, say after a firefighter opens a window or door to a room, the blaze may be suddenly and violently resurrected. This explosive phenomenon, called backdraft, can be lethal and has been challenging for firefighters to anticipate.

Now, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have hatched a plan for informing firefighters of what dangers lie behind closed doors. The team obtained data from hundreds of backdrafts in the lab to use as a basis for a model that can predict backdrafts. The results of a new study, described at the 2022 Suppression, Detection and Signaling Research and Applications Conference, suggest that the model offers a viable solution to make predictions based on particular measurements. In the future, the team seeks to implement the technology into small-scale devices that firefighters could deploy in the field to avoid or adapt to dangerous conditions.

Currently, firefighters are looking for visual indicators of a potential backdraft, including soot-stained windows, smoke puffing through small openings and the absence of flames. If the cues are present, they may vent the room by creating holes in its ceiling to reduce their risk. If not, they may charge right in. Ultimately, first responders must rely on their eyes in a hazy environment to guess the correct action. And guessing wrong could come at a steep cost.

Kidney health in adult life begins in the womb, Monash researchers discover

A representative image for double immunofluorescence for DACH1 (podocyte nuclei, magenta) and synaptopodin (podocyte cytoplasm, green). The Image was obtained using a laser confocal microscope.
Image source: Monash University

Maternal health may play an important role in helping prevent kidney disease after a Monash University study found the risk of developing the disease in adult life is partially determined at birth.

The study shows for the first time that some people are born with a double protection against future kidney disease, while others have double the risk of poor kidney health.

About 800 million people worldwide suffer from chronic kidney disease. While diabetes is the most common cause, the research shows some people have a greater protection against predisposition to future kidney disease than others.

The study, undertaken in collaboration with Tokyo’s Jikei University School of Medicine and published in the journal Kidney International, analyzed 50 kidneys from adult donors. First author and Jikei University Adjunct Associate Professor (Research), Dr Kotaro Haruhara, examined the kidney’s key filtering mechanism with fellow researchers – homing in on the organ’s blood filters, known as glomeruli, and analyzed their individual cells, called podocytes.

New Approach Would Improve User Access to Electric Vehicle Charging Stations

Photo credit: Rick Govic.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a dynamic computational tool to help improve user access to electric vehicle (EV) charging stations, with the goal of making EVs more attractive for drivers.

“We already know that there is a need for EV charging networks that are flexible, in order to support the adoption of EVs,” says Leila Hajibabai, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor in NC State’s Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. “That’s because there is tremendous variability in when and where people want to charge their vehicles, how much time they can spend at a charging station, how long it takes to charge their vehicles, and so on.

“The fundamental question we wanted to address with this work is: What is the best way to manage existing charging station infrastructure in order to best meet the demands of electric vehicle users?”

To answer that question, the researchers wanted to take the user’s perspective, so they focused on questions that are important to EV drivers. How long will it take me to reach a charging station? What is the cost of using the charging station? How long might I have to wait to access a charging station? And what sort of fines are there if I stay at a charging station beyond the time limit?

The researchers developed a technique that accounts for all of these factors in a complex computational model that makes use of a game theory framework.

Burping bacteria: Identifying Arctic microbes that produce greenhouse gases

Sandia National Laboratories technologist Jenna Schambach working with a sample of Alaska lakebed soil. By studying the microbes in the soil, and the gases they emit, Schambach and project lead Chuck Smallwood hope to improve our understanding of the rapidly melting Arctic permafrost and improve computer models of climate change.
Photo credit: Craig Fritz

As greenhouse gases bubble up across the rapidly thawing Arctic, Sandia National Laboratories researchers are trying to identify other trace gases from soil microbes that could shed some light on what is occurring biologically in melting permafrost in the Arctic.

Sandia bioengineer Chuck Smallwood and his team recently spent five days collecting lakebed soil and gas samples. They were joined by international collaborators led by professor Katey Walter Anthony from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, including researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder, University of Quebec in Rimouski and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

“The Arctic is rapidly changing, releasing large amounts of greenhouse gases; we just don’t know how much greenhouse gases are released every year,” Smallwood said. “Our work at Sandia seeks to improve our understanding of how much greenhouse gases soil microbes are producing, without going out and destructively sampling permafrost soils. The goal is to use sensitive gas detection devices to sample microbial volatile compounds coming out with the methane and CO2 gases instead.”

Both methane and CO2 are greenhouse gases, and methane actually traps more heat in the atmosphere than the commonly discussed CO2. In fact, it is 30 times more potent than CO2, Smallwood said.