Deforestation and grassland conversion are the biggest causes of biodiversity loss

Researchers rank the main drivers of global biodiversity loss. 
Photo Credit: Matthias Behr

The conversion of natural forests and grasslands to intensive agriculture and livestock is the biggest cause of global biodiversity loss. The next biggest drivers are the exploitation of wildlife through fishing, logging, trade and hunting - and then pollution. Climate change ranks fourth on land so far but second in oceans. This is the main result of an international study led by researchers from Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (UNC) in Argentina, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and the Natural History Museum London. The study, published in Science Advances, demonstrates that fighting climate change alone will not be enough to prevent the further loss of biodiversity.

Whilst climate change has rightly attracted attention for its catastrophic consequences for the natural world, it is currently only the fourth largest driver of biodiversity loss on land, followed by invasive alien species in fifth place. "This major new study, published during the COP27 climate summit, demonstrates clearly that fighting climate change alone will not be enough to prevent the further loss of biodiversity, and with it our future", says Dr Nicolas Titeux, one of the two first authors. "The various direct drivers should be addressed with similar ambition as the climate crisis and as a whole." Titeux currently works at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology but conducted the major part of the study at the UFZ with funding from iDiv.

Robots are taking over jobs, but not at the rate you might think

The study found that robots aren’t replacing humans at the rate most people think, but people are prone to exaggerate the rate of robot takeover.
Photo Credit: Jaren Wilkey, BYU Photo

It’s easy to believe that robots are stealing jobs from human workers and drastically disrupting the labor market; after all, you’ve likely heard that chatbots make more efficient customer service representatives and that computer programs are tracking and moving packages without the use of human hands.

But there’s no need to panic about a pending robot takeover just yet, says a new study from BYU sociology professor Eric Dahlin. Dahlin’s research found that robots aren’t replacing humans at the rate most people think, but people are prone to severely exaggerate the rate of robot takeover.

The study, recently published in Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, found that only 14% of workers say they’ve seen their job replaced by a robot. But those who have experienced job displacement due to a robot overstate the effect of robots taking jobs from humans by about three times.

To understand the relationship between job loss and robots, Dahlin surveyed nearly 2,000 individuals about their perceptions of jobs being replaced by robots. Respondents were first asked to estimate the percentage of employees whose employers have replaced jobs with robots. They were then asked whether their employer had ever replaced their job with a robot.

Previously unknown monumental temple discovered near the Tempio Grande in Vulci

Archaeologists and other colleagues uncover the walls of the Etruscan temple in Vulci.
Photo Credit: Mariachiara Franceschini

Archeologists from the universities of Freiburg and Mainz identify one of the largest known sacred buildings of the Etruscans

An interdisciplinary team headed by archeologists Dr. Mariachiara Franceschini of the University of Freiburg and Paul P. Pasieka of the University of Mainz has discovered a previously unknown Etruscan temple in the ancient city of Vulci, which lies in the Italian region of Latium. The building, which is 45 meters by 35 meters, is situated west of the Tempio Grande, a sacred building which was excavated back in the 1950s. Initial examination of the strata of the foundation of the northeast corner of the temple and the objects they found there led the researchers to date the construction of the temple towards the end of the sixth or beginning of the fifth century BCE. “The new temple is roughly the same size and on a similar alignment as the neighboring Tempio Grande, and was built at roughly the same Archaic time,” explains Franceschini. “This duplication of monumental buildings in an Etruscan city is rare, and indicates an exceptional finding,” adds Pasieka. The team discovered the temple when working on the Vulci Cityscape project, which was launched in 2020 and aimed to research the settlement strategies and urbanistic structures of the city of Vulci. Vulci was one of the twelve cities of the Etruscan federation and in pre-Roman times was one of the most important urban centers in what is now Italy.

Gut parasites may increase onward transmission of respiratory bugs in rabbits

Bordatella bronchiseptica shedding on BG-blood agar petri dishes. Examples of (a) supershedding event and (b) average shedding event.
Credit: Isabella Cattadori, Penn State

Rabbits co-infected with a respiratory bacterial infection and one or more gut helminth parasites are more likely to shed bacteria that can infect others, according to a report led by researchers at Penn State and published today in the journal eLife.

The study suggests that co-infection is an important source of variation in pathogen shedding between individual animals and could influence how likely a disease is to spread. Species similar to the ones used in this study infect humans and while the study was done in rabbits it has broad implications for human populations.

Individual variation in pathogen transmission can increase the basic reproduction number — the R value — of a pathogen, and determine whether an infection will spread or stutter and quickly fade away. One of the causes of this variation is differences in the amount and duration of pathogen shedding, as some individuals shed more and for longer than others — so-called super-shedders. Co-infection with other pathogens is thought to contribute to variation in host infection, and so transmission, because of interactions between pathogen species and the immune response they trigger.

Injections for diabetes, cancer could become unnecessary

Young woman injecting insulin
Photo Credit: Pavel Danilyuk

Researchers at UC Riverside are paving the way for diabetes and cancer patients to forget needles and injections, and instead take pills to manage their conditions.

Some drugs for these diseases dissolve in water, so transporting them through the intestines, which receive what we drink and eat, is not feasible. As a result, these drugs cannot be administered by mouth. However, UCR scientists have created a chemical “tag” that can be added to these drugs, allowing them to enter blood circulation via the intestines.

The details of how they found the tag, and demonstrations of its effectiveness, are described in a new Journal of the American Chemical Society paper.

The tag is composed of a small peptide, which is like a protein fragment. “Because they are relatively small molecules, you can chemically attach them to drugs, or other molecules of interest, and use them to deliver those drugs orally,” said Min Xue, UCR chemistry professor who led the research.

Xue’s laboratory was testing something unrelated when the researchers observed these peptides making their way into cells.

The Cone Nebula as seen by the VLT

The Cone Nebula is part of a star-forming region of space, NGC 2264, about 2500 light-years away. Its pillar-like appearance is a perfect example of the shapes that can develop in giant clouds of cold molecular gas and dust, known for creating new stars. This dramatic new view of the nebula was captured with the FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrograph 2 (FORS2) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), and released on the occasion of ESO’s 60th anniversary.
Full Size Image
Credit: ESO

For the past 60 years the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has been enabling scientists worldwide to discover the secrets of the Universe. We mark this milestone by bringing you a spectacular new image of a star factory, the Cone Nebula, taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT).

On 5 October 1962 five countries signed the convention to create ESO. Now, six decades later and supported by 16 Member States and strategic partners, ESO brings together scientists and engineers from across the globe to develop and operate advanced ground-based observatories in Chile that enable breakthrough astronomical discoveries.​

On the occasion of ESO’s 60th anniversary we are releasing this remarkable new image of the Cone Nebula, captured earlier this year with one of ESO’s telescopes and selected by ESO staff. This is part of a campaign marking ESO's 60th anniversary and taking place in late 2022, both on social media under the #ESO60years hashtag, and with local events in the ESO Member States and other countries.

Growing pure nanotubes is a stretch, but possible

There are dozens of varieties of nanotubes, each with a characteristic diameter and structural twist, or chiral angle. Carbon nanotubes are grown on catalytic particles using batch production methods that produce the entire gamut of chiral varieties, but Rice University scientists have come up with a new strategy for making batches with a single, desired chirality. Their theory shows chiral varieties can be selected for production when catalytic particles are drawn away at specific speeds by localized feedstock supply. The illustration depicts this and an analogous process 19th-century scientists used to describe the evolution of giraffes’ long necks due to the gradual selection of abilities to reach progressively higher for food.
Credit: Illustrations by Ksenia Bets/Rice University

Like a giraffe stretching for leaves on a tall tree, making carbon nanotubes reach for food as they grow may lead to a long-sought breakthrough.

Materials theorists Boris Yakobson and Ksenia Bets at Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering show how putting constraints on growing nanotubes could facilitate a “holy grail” of growing batches with a single desired chirality.

Their paper in Science Advances describes a strategy by which constraining the carbon feedstock in a furnace would help control the “kite” growth of nanotubes. In this method, the nanotube begins to form at the metal catalyst on a substrate, but lifts the catalyst as it grows, resembling a kite on a string.

Carbon nanotube walls are basically graphene, its hexagonal lattice of atoms rolled into a tube. Chirality refers to how the hexagons are angled within the lattice, between 0 and 30 degrees. That determines whether the nanotubes are metallic or semiconductors. The ability to grow long nanotubes in a single chirality could, for instance, enable the manufacture of highly conductive nanotube fibers or semiconductor channels of transistors.

Gadolinium Improved Conductivity of Hydrogen Energy Material Twenty-fold

Schematic and photograph of layered perovskites with gadolinium.
Illustration Credit: et al. journal Materials

Employees of the Institute of High Temperature Electrochemistry of the Urals Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Hydrogen Energy of Ural Federal University have created a new electrolyte material for hydrogen power. It is based on layered perovskites modified with rare-earth gadolinium, Indicator reports. Layered perovskites have good conductivity, and they can also be used to create systems that will convert the energy of chemical reactions into electricity. The development of the Ural scientists will make it possible to expand green energy technologies and thereby reduce carbon emissions. The research was supported by the Russian Science Foundation. The results of the work were published in the journal Materials.

Classical ABO3 perovskite (where A and B are two different elements and O is oxygen) is a network of octahedrons connected with each other by all vertices, and each oxygen atom is included in this network. In layered perovskites AA'BO4 octahedrons are connected in layers separated from each other by layers with a cubic structure of rock salt. It is more "flexible" than the classical perovskite, which may open up additional possibilities for its improvement.

The authors decided to modify the layered perovskites BaLaInO4 (Ba - barium, La - lanthanum, In - indium, O - oxygen) by adding atoms of the rare-earth gadolinium, which can also increase the conductivity of materials. In this case, this effect is due to the fact that the system originally had rare-earth ions - lanthanum - and the addition of their "relative" gadolinium led to more repulsion of octahedrons in the crystal lattice. As a result, the space for the transport of charged particles expanded.

Efficient mRNA delivery by branched lipids

A cross-section of an LNP-RNA. The mRNA (red) is encapsulated by lipids (blue spheres with tails.
 Image Credit: Yusuke Sato

A novel branched lipid that has a high stability in storage and a high efficiency in the delivery of mRNA to cells has been developed.

Messenger RNA (mRNA) are biological molecules that transfer the information coded by genes in the nucleus to the cytoplasm for protein synthesis by ribosomes. mRNA sequences can be designed to encode specific proteins; the most well-known example of this are the mRNA vaccines for COVID-19. mRNA molecules are large and chemically unstable, so a vector must be utilized to deliver mRNA to the cells. One of the most advanced technologies for the delivery of mRNA are lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), which are composed of ionizable lipids, cholesterol, helper lipids and polyethylene glycol.

A team of researchers led by Assistant Professor Yusuke Sato and Professor Hideyoshi Harashima at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Hokkaido University, and by Kazuki Hashiba at the Nitto Denko Corporation have developed a novel branched ionizable lipid which, when included in LNPs, greatly increases the efficiency of mRNA delivery. Their results were published in the journal Small Science.

Searching for traces of dark matter with neutron spin clocks

Part of the experimental apparatus in the laboratory in Bern with PhD student Ivo Schulthess.
Credit: zvg/mad/Courtesy of F. Piegsa

With the use of a precision experiment developed at the University of Bern, an international research team has succeeded in significantly narrowing the scope for the existence of dark matter. The experiment was carried out at the European Research Neutron Source at the Institute Laue-Langevin in France, and makes an important contribution to the search for these particles, of which little remains known.

Cosmological observations of the orbits of stars and galaxies enable clear conclusions to be drawn about the attractive gravitational forces that act between the celestial bodies. The astonishing finding: visible matter is far from sufficient for being able to explain the development or movements of galaxies. This suggests that there exists another, so far unknown, type of matter. Accordingly, in the year 1933, the Swiss physicist and astronomer Fritz Zwicky inferred the existence of what is known now as dark matter. Dark matter is a postulated form of matter which isn’t directly visible but interacts via gravity, and consists of approximately five times more mass than the matter with which we are familiar.

Recently, following a precision experiment developed at the Albert Einstein Center for Fundamental Physics (AEC) at the University of Bern, an international research team succeeded in significantly narrowing the scope for the existence of dark matter. With more than 100 members, the AEC is one of the leading international research organizations in the field of particle physics. The findings of the team, led by Bern, have now been published in the highly-regarded journal Physical Review Letters.