The fascinating relationship between mice and a plant that flowers once a century in terms of seed dispersal

Researchers revealed unexpected dispersal behavior of field mice, which influences the forest ecosystem.
Illustration Credit: Reiko Matsushita

Researchers at Nagoya University in Japan have revealed new insights into the interaction between mast seeding plants and the animals that eat their seeds. Hanami Suzuki and Professor Hisashi Kajimura examined the behavior of field mice using seeds from once-in-a-century flowering sasa bamboo plants in central Japan.

The researchers found that the seed use patterns of field mice differed by species (large Japanese field mouse Apodemus speciosus and small Japanese field mouse A. argenteus), the presence or absence of understory vegetation, forest tree species (broadleaf forest or coniferous forest), and season (summer or fall). Their findings underscore the importance of understanding the needs of both plants and animals to ensure the health of local ecosystems. They also overturn a previously held belief about how mice store seeds. 

Dwarf bamboo (Sasa borealis) exhibits masting behavior in wide areas. Masting behavior means a plant collectively flowers and seeds at regular intervals to overwhelm predators and maximize pollination rates. Masting events are rare, however, with intervals up to 120 years. But when they occur, the resulting abundance of seeds in the forest provides easily available food for various animals, especially rodents such as field mice.  

Detecting nuclear materials using light

Sandia National Laboratories researcher Patrick Feng, left, and Former Sandian Joey Carlson, right, hold Organic Glass Scintillators they helped create to detect radioactive materials.
Photo Credit: Randy Wong

Blueshift Optics, owned by former Sandia employee Joey Carlson, is working to shift the way radioactive materials are detected, using technology that he helped create at Sandia National Laboratories.

Radiation detection has long been a critical aspect of national security and efforts to make the world safer.

“Agencies are trying to cast this wide net to catch nuclear smuggling, and this is one aspect of that effort,” said Sandia materials scientist Patrick Feng. “You could use this technology at a border crossing, in a handheld detector as someone enters a facility or fly it on a drone to map an area.”

However, the uses of this technology extend far beyond border security.

“It has the potential to provide us with better data from nuclear physics experiments, enhance national security applications both at home and abroad and has applications in fusion energy,” Carlson said.

Feng and Carlson collaborated to develop the state-of-the-art technology known as Organic Glass Scintillators for radiation detection. Sandia recently licensed the technology to Blueshift Optics, paving the way for potential commercial production.

European wildcats avoided introduced domestic cats for 2000 years

A wildcat which is part of the Saving Wildcats conservation breeding for release program which conducted the first release of wildcats to the Cairngorms National Park, Scotland in 2023
Photo Credit: Saving Wildcats

Domestic cats introduced from the Near East and wildcats native to Europe did not mix until the 1960s, despite being exposed to each other for two thousand years.

Two studies published today in Current Biology involving new archaeological and genetic evidence rewrites the history of cats in Europe.

The international team of researchers sequenced and analyzed both wildcats and domestic cats including 48 modern individuals and 258 ancient samples excavated from 85 archaeological sites over the last 8,500 years. They then assessed the patterns of hybridization (or interbreeding) after domestic cats were introduced to Europe over 2,000 years ago, and came into contact with native European wildcats.

The results of the studies demonstrate that, since their introduction, domestic cats and European wildcats generally avoided mating with each other. About 50 years ago in Scotland, however, that all changed and rates of interbreeding between wildcats and domestic cats rose rapidly. This may have happened as a result of dwindling wildcat populations and a lack of opportunity to mate with other wildcats.

Success of Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes in fighting dengue may be underestimated

Alex Perkins, associate professor of biological science
Photo Credit: Courtesy of University of Notre Dame

The fight against dengue fever has a new weapon: a mosquito infected with the bacteria Wolbachia, which prevents the spread of the virus. These mosquitoes have now been deployed in several trials demonstrating their potential in preventing disease transmission.

Now, researchers at the University of Notre Dame have conducted an analysis of the World Mosquito Program’s randomized control trial of Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes in Indonesia, looking at how excluding transmission dynamics impacted the original interpretation of the trial’s results.

“Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard for evaluating the efficacy of any medical or public health intervention. That is very difficult for vector interventions against dengue because incidence of the disease can be somewhat unpredictable and sporadic, requiring very large-scale trials,” said Alex Perkins, associate professor of biological sciences at Notre Dame and senior author on the study.

Improving the efficacy of cancer immunotherapy with modified CAR-T cells

Water color art illustrates the publication by Velasco et al. The authors systematically engineered novel Chimeric Antigen Receptors (CARs), each containing one of the signaling chains of the natural T cell receptor: epsilon, gamma, delta and zeta (from left to right, from top to bottom) to create innovative CAR T cells. The work demonstrated that each signaling chain imprints the functioning of the CAR T cells (represented by the different colors) impacting thus their anti-tumor activity.
Illustration Credit: Sara Wossning Minguet

CAR-T cell therapy is a last hope for many patients with blood, bone marrow or lymph gland cancer when other treatments such as chemotherapy are unsuccessful. A limiting factor of this otherwise very effective and safe therapy is that the cells used in the process quickly reach a state of exhaustion. Researchers at the University of Freiburg have now been able to prevent this exhaustion and thus significantly improve the effect of the therapy in a preclinical animal model. The new results have been published in the journal Nature Immunology.

Using the body’s own defenses against cancer

CAR-T cells are one of the personalized cancer therapies and have been used in specialized centers in Europe since 2018. In this complex treatment, immune cells, or more precisely T cells, are taken from the blood of cancer patients, genetically engineered in the laboratory with a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) and then re-administered. The receptor helps the T cells to identify and kill cancer cells. As a result, the therapy utilizes the body’s own cells to permanently eradicate the cancer.

Parkinson's: New hope when treatment options seem exhausted

Prof. Paul Lingor
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Technical University of Munich

As Parkinson's progresses, more invasive therapies are used that require brain surgery, for example. When these no longer deliver the desired results, physicians often conclude that treatment options are exhausted. A study led by researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) now shows that such patients can still benefit from a change in treatment. So far, however, this option has only been used very rarely.

A team led by Prof. Paul Lingor has examined data from 22 German Parkinson's centers. The result: although there are several options for therapies in the late stages of the disease, rarely is more than one used - although those affected often benefit from them.

Parkinson's disease is the world’s second-most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer's. So far it has proved incurable. Only the symptoms can be treated. In the early stages, tablets can generally provide relief from complaints. As the disease progresses, this is often no longer enough.

Phytoplankton uptake of methylmercury is controlled by thiols

In the sea, phytoplankton are the first step when methylmercury is absorbed into the food web. The image was taken under a microscope and shows a spring bloom of phytoplankton in the Bothnian Sea.
 Image Credit: Marlene Johansson

Methylmercury is one of the chemicals that poses the greatest threat to global public health. People ingest methylmercury by eating fish, but how does the mercury end up in the fish? A new study shows that the concentrations of so-called thiols in the water control how available methylmercury is to living organisms.

For methylmercury to enter the food web, it must be absorbed from the water by organisms and the uptake takes place primarily by phytoplankton. This results in a dramatic enrichment, where the levels of methylmercury can increase by a factor of 10,000 to 100,000. However, there is a great deal of variation between different aquatic environments, and it has so far been unclear what controls the process and why the variation is so large.

Higher risk of 17 cancers after high BMI in late teens

Aron Onerup, Institute of Clinical Sciences, and Maria Åberg, Institue of Medicine, Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg.
Photo Credit: Anna Onerup, Johan Wingborg

Men who are overweight or obese at age 18 have a higher risk of 17 different cancers later in life. This has been shown in a study at the University of Gothenburg. The research also describes how the youth obesity epidemic is expected to affect the cancer situation over the next 30 years.

In August, a study on higher cancer risk in men who had lower aerobic fitness recorded at the time of compulsory conscription for military service at the age of 18 was presented. The results were independent of any overweight or obesity at conscription.

In two new studies published in the journals Obesity and Cancer Medicine, the same research team is now focusing on body mass index (BMI), while the results are independent of the participants' aerobic fitness level. And it turns out that higher BMI at age 18 can be linked to even more cancers later in life than poor fitness at the same age.

High BMI at conscription was associated with a higher risk of 17 cancers: lung, head and neck, brain, thyroid, esophageal, stomach, pancreatic, liver, colon, rectal, kidney, and bladder cancer, as well as malignant melanoma, leukemia, myeloma, and lymphoma (both Hodgkin's and non-Hodgkin's).

Mystery Resolved: Black Hole Feeding and Feedback at the Center of an Active Galaxy

Fig. 1
An illustration depicting the distribution of interstellar medium in the active galactic nucleus based on the results of this observation.
Illustration Credit: ©ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), T. Izumi et al.

An international research team led by Takuma Izumi, an assistant professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, has observed in high resolution (approximately 1 light year) the active galactic nucleus of the Circinus Galaxy - one of the closest major galaxies to the Milky Way. The observation was made possible by the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) astronomical observatory in Chile.

This breakthrough marks the world's first quantitative measurement at this scale of gas flows and their structures of a nearby supermassive black hole in all phase gases, including plasma, atomic, and molecular. Such high resolution allowed the team to team to capture the accretion flow heading towards the supermassive black hole, revealing that this accretion flow is generated by a physical mechanism known as 'gravitational instability.' Furthermore, the team also found that a significant portion of this accretion flow does not contribute to the growth of the black hole. Instead, most of the gas is expelled from the vicinity of the black hole as atomic or molecular outflows, and returns to the gas disk to participate again into an accretion flow towards the black hole, much like how water gets recycled in a water fountain. These findings represent a crucial advancement towards a greater understanding of the growth mechanisms of supermassive black holes.

Nanosatellite to Test Novel AI Technologies

Image Credit: Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg

A new Würzburg space mission is on the home straight: The SONATE-2 nanosatellite will test novel artificial intelligence hardware and software technologies in orbit.

After more than two years of development, the nanosatellite SONATE-2 is about to be launched. The lift-off into orbit by a rocket is expected in March 2024. The satellite was designed and built by a team led by aerospace engineer Professor Hakan Kayal from Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany.

JMU has been developing small satellite missions for around 20 years. SONATE-2 now marks another high point.

The satellite will test novel artificial intelligence (AI) hardware and software technologies in near-Earth space. The goal is to use it to automatically detect anomalies on planets or asteroids in the future. The Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs is funding the project with 2.6 million euros.