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People with bipolar disorder are four to six times more likely to die prematurely than those without the condition, according to a study that compared data on thousands of people with and without the disorder.

What really puts the results in perspective is that bipolar disorder increased a person’s risk of death far greater than a history of smoking, or even, to some extent, age.

The research team analyzed data from a large, long-term study, called the Prechter Longitudinal Study of Bipolar Disorder, as well as data from anonymous patient records collected at University of Michigan Health clinics.

The Prechter dataset included observational data of 1,128 participants, 847 with bipolar and 281 without.

Data from the clinics included 18,561 patients, 10,735 with bipolar and 7,826 without.

In one of the two data sets the University of Michigan researchers analyzed, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder meant someone was six times more likely to die during a 10-year period than a person without the disorder.

By comparison, in that same cohort, a person’s mortality risk was 2.3 times greater if they were over 60 years of age. And the mortality risk for people with a history of smoking was 2.5 times higher than those who never smoked.

University of Michigan psychiatrist Melvin McInnis, who directs the Prechter program and was a co-author on the paper, says he was surprised by just how high the risk for premature death was for people with bipolar disorder.

“In both samples we found that having bipolar disorder is far more of a risk for premature death than smoking,” he says.

“Over the years there have been all kinds of programs that have been implemented for smoking prevention and cardiovascular disease awareness, but never a campaign on that scale for mental health.”

Bipolar is a category of mood disorder diagnoses, listed in the DSM-5, which is used to describe clusters of symptoms that can seriously affect a person’s quality of life.

People with bipolar disorder experience distinct ‘high’ (manic or hypomanic) and ‘low’ (depressive) periods that last for several days or weeks, though these episodes generally occur between periods of normal mood.

Both manic and depressive episodes carry risks for the people who experience them, which can affect their lifespan. At the manic pole, feelings of euphoria, impulsivity, distractibility, and agitation can lead people to make risky and sometimes dangerous decisions. At the depressive pole, health and hygiene can fall by the wayside and there’s a higher risk for self harm and suicide.

While deaths by suicide are more obviously attributable to mental illness, the study highlights the indirect impact that bipolar can have on shortening a person’s lifespan by up to 8-10 years.

In 2021, the CDC leading causes of death report did not include any psychiatric illnesses, which as the authors point out, is because the reported cause is always the most immediate condition (things like heart disease, stroke, or liver disease). Their findings may help address this gap in understanding how a psychiatric illness like bipolar disorder can take years off a person’s life.

For instance, accidents (unintentional injuries) are a leading cause of death, which people are at higher risk of during manic episodes. Cancer is also a leading cause of death, and since up to 70 percent of people with bipolar smoke (much higher than the worldwide average of 20 percent), they are also at higher risk of cancers associated with smoking.

“Bipolar disorder is never going to be listed on the death certificate as the main cause of death, but it can be an immediate or secondary contributor to a death,” biomedical researcher and lead author Anastasia Yocum says.

For instance, in the Prechter cohort, people with bipolar were significantly more likely than those without a diagnosis to have other simultaneous health conditions including asthma, diabetes, thyroid conditions, high blood pressure, migraine and fibromyalgia.

“We need to know more about why people with bipolar have more illnesses and health behaviors that compromise their lives and lifespan and do more as a society to help them live more healthily and have consistent access to care,” McInnis says.

This study was published in Psychiatry Research.

The beautiful thing about fractals, the self-repeating patterns found throughout nature, is their enchanting repetition which runs infinitely deep.

Zoom in on the branching found in objects like fern fronds and snowflakes and you’ll see they repeat in miniature – sometimes all the way down to atomic and quantum matter.

Mesmerizing as they are, such geometric patterns can have their limits. According to a new study that has found forest canopies don’t replicate the fractal patterns of individual trees.

Given how common fractals appear to be in nature, University of Bristol biologists Fabian Fischer and Tommaso Jucker wanted to test the idea that fractal patterns might explain how forest canopies are organized.

They thought if fractal patterns extended from the small branches and leaves of a single tree to entire forest canopies, it could help ecologists describe complex landscapes using simple mathematical language.

“Scientifically, this self-similarity has the attractive property that it allows you to describe an apparently complex object using some very simple rules and numbers,” explains Fischer.

If forest canopies behaved like fractals, then Fischer and Tommaso thought perhaps they could use this emergent property to quantify the complexity of forest ecosystems, allowing them to directly compare structural differences in the world’s forests.

“Canopy structural complexity is a key emergent property of forest ecosystems that directly relates to their ability to store carbon, cycle water and nutrients, and provide habitat for biodiversity,” the pair writes in their paper.

A few decades-old studies have pointed to evidence of fractal patterning, but only in patchy or fire-affected forests, so it remained unclear whether this reflected a genuine property of forested landscapes.

More recent analytical models have also tried to compute the structural complexity of forests, to understand what conditions give rise to more complex ecosystems.

To investigate, Fischer and Tommaso compiled data from airborne laser surveys of nine vastly different forest types in Australia, ranging from dry shrublands and tropical savannas to dense rainforests and towering mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans) forests. The nine sites, each 5 square kilometers in size, varied substantially in rainfall and enormously in structure.

From each laser scan, the researchers built high-resolution models of the forest canopies to see how closely the sites followed fractal scaling.

Not closely at all, the analysis found: None of the nine canopy sections behaved like fractals beyond the crowns of individual trees.

However, there was some predictability in the traits of forests and how they deviated from fractal patterning, which might still be useful for ecosystem comparisons. Taller, wetter forests, for example, exhibited a higher degree of self-similarity than shorter, drier ecosystems.

“We found that forest canopies are not fractal, but they are very similar in how they deviate from fractality, irrespective of what ecosystem they are in,” says Fischer.

“It was surprising,” he added, “how similar all forest canopies were in the way they deviated from true fractals, and how deviations were linked to the size of the trees and how dry their environment was.”

As a next step, the researchers want to compare a wider range of forest ecosystems across the globe, and look at multiple scans in time to see how forest structure develops.

While it might be nice to think we can explain away the complexity of nature with a few mathematical terms, forests may well prove to be unruly ecosystems that defy mathematical laws, from their canopies right down to their cells. And there’s something beautiful in that too.

The study has been published in the Journal of Ecology.

A report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claims antifungal creams and combinations of antifungal treatments with corticosteroids are likely to be contributing to the rise and spread of severe skin, scalp, and nail fungal infections.

In 2023, dermatologists detected the first known cases in the US of highly contagious drug-resistant fungal skin infections that don’t respond to the few fungal treatments we have.

First concentrated in Southeast Asia, these drug-resistant fungal infections have spread to China and beyond, and have now been detected in at least 11 US states to date.

To get a handle on the situation, researchers at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have examined a whole year’s worth of antifungal prescriptions in the US, to understand which types of clinicians are dishing out what drugs.

As with the rise of antibiotic resistance among bacteria, overuse of antifungals gives potentially pathogenic fungi ample opportunity to find ways to thwart the drugs, especially when they are prescribed for the type of wrong infection or not used properly.

By understanding antifungal prescribing practices, CDC epidemiologist Kaitlin Benedict and colleagues hoped they could provide crucial insights to help nip the problem in the bud before it gets much worse.

“The large volume of topical antifungal prescriptions in the context of emerging resistance highlights the need to better understand current prescribing practices and to encourage judicious prescribing by clinicians and improve patient education about recommended use,” the team writes in their paper.

They analyzed data on roughly 1 million health professionals who wrote prescriptions for nearly 49 million people covered under Medicare, the US government’s national health insurance program, in 2021.

Roughly 6.5 million topical antifungal prescriptions were filled that year in the US, at a total cost of US$231 million, the researchers found.

“The actual volume of topical antifungal use among the study population is likely considerably higher than that identified in this study because most topical antifungals can be purchased over the counter without a prescription,” the researchers note.

Most antifungal prescriptions in 2021 were written by primary care physicians (40 percent) followed by nurse practitioners, dermatologists, and podiatrists.

The top 10 percent of antifungal prescribers – some 13,106 practitioners – prescribed nearly one-half of the dispensed medications, which may be because they see a lot of patients with suspected fungal infections or are quick to treat them.

While this is suggestive of some potential overuse or at least liberal prescribing, the Medicare data didn’t include diagnostic information on the types of fungal infections patients had, so the researchers couldn’t determine if patients had been prescribed the right medication to treat their specific condition, or if doctors had tested the infections first to know which drug to prescribe.

Concerning Benedict and colleagues was the large number of clotrimazole-betamethasone prescriptions, which accounted for 15 percent of all topical antifungals prescribed. This combination treatment is thought to be a potential driver of emerging drug-resistant tinea, also known as dermatophytosis.

They also note how clinicians, including board-certified dermatologists, commonly diagnose a skin condition simply by looking at it, yet they are “frequently incorrect”.

“To help control the emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistant superficial fungal infections and help promote the appropriateness of topical antifungal prescribing, health care providers could use diagnostic testing whenever possible to confirm suspected superficial fungal infections,” the researchers conclude.

The research has been published in US CDC’s journal, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Tardigrades stand apart from much of the animal kingdom due to their extreme durability, which famously helps the tiny creatures survive being boiled, frozen, irradiated, and fired from a gun, among other indignities.

Hoping to better understand these superpowers, scientists have identified many individual genes that may contribute to tardigrades’ survival skills. Less clear, however, is the bigger picture: Where, how, and why did all these amazing adaptations evolve?

In a new study, researchers shed a little more light on this surprisingly complex history, suggesting ancient tardigrades made the transition from marine to terrestrial environments twice, followed by “numerous independent adaptations to cope with aridity” on land.

Today, tardigrades exist all over the planet, thriving in a wide range of environments at sea and on land, from deep ocean mud and Antarctic rocks to mountains, rainforests, and gardens.

Also known as ‘water bears’ and ‘moss piglets,’ tardigrades have become renowned as some of the most resilient animals known to science, even demonstrating an ability to survive in the vacuum of space.

Key to many of their feats of survival is anhydrobiosis, a dormant state in which tardigrades can reversibly halt their metabolism, helping them withstand almost complete desiccation.

Previous research has identified multiple gene families that are unique to tardigrades and show an association with extreme metabolic shutdown in response to lack of water, known as anhydrobiosis, including several related to heat-soluble proteins, along with some stress-resistance genes that also exist in other animals.

Despite those insights, however, research has so far yielded little data from most tardigrade lineages, according to the authors of the new study, leaving major gaps in our knowledge about tardigrade evolution and ecology.

To address that, the authors identified sequences from six gene families across 13 genera of tardigrades, including members of both of the two major classes – eutardigrades and heterotardigrades — letting researchers build the first evolutionary trees for these tardigrade groups.

Since anhydrobiosis presumably would be more useful to terrestrial tardigrades than to their ocean-dwelling relatives, researchers expected to find a connection between gene duplications in these families and habitat changes among tardigrades.

“When we began the work, we expected to find that each clade would be clearly grouped around ancient duplications, with few independent losses,” Keio University bioscientist James Fleming told Indiana University biologist Casey McGrath in a commentary on the paper. “That would help us easily tie them to an understanding of modern habitats and ecology.”

“It’s an intuitive hypothesis,” Fleming adds, “that the evolution of the duplications of these desiccation-related genes should, in theory, contain remnants of the ecological history of these organisms, although, in reality, this turned out to be overly simplistic.”

Fleming and his colleagues say they were surprised by how many independent duplications they found in these gene families, suggesting the evolution of genes related to anhydrobiosis was significantly more complicated than previously thought.

“What we found was far more exciting: a complex network of independent gains and losses that does not necessarily correlate to modern terrestrial species ecologies,” Fleming says.

Based on the distribution of gene families across the two major tardigrade classes, the researchers believe there were two separate transitions from marine to terrestrial habitats in tardigrades’ history, once in the ancestor of eutardigrades and once among heterotardigrades.

While this study helps advance our knowledge about the history of anhydrobiosis in tardigrades, there is still a lot we don’t understand, the researchers say. Clarity is lacking partly due to meager or nonexistent data from some key tardigrade lineages, they add.

“We unfortunately have no representatives from several important families, such as the Isohypsibiidae, and this does limit how firmly we can stand by our conclusions,” Fleming says. “With more freshwater and marine tardigrade samples, we will be better able to appreciate the adaptations of terrestrial members of the group.”

That’s easier said than done, however, especially given the difficulty in tracking down types of tardigrades. Tanarctus bubulubus, for example, is too small to see without magnification and lives only in mud deep beneath the North Atlantic Ocean.

“Hopefully, large-scale sequencing initiatives through the Earth Biogenome Project will steadily bridge this gap in our understanding, and it’s an effort I’m excited to see continue,” Fleming says.

The study was published in Genome Biology and Evolution.

Skin accounts for around 15 percent of our body mass. It is the largest and most visible organ in the human body.

Yet many of the skin’s functions are often overlooked. It’s a sunscreen, a shield from germs, a reservoir of vitamin D and a means of tightly regulating our body temperature.

Being the most visible of our organs, the skin also offers us a view into the body tissues that it protects. So don’t think of your skin merely aesthetically – think of it as a reflection of your health. Disorders of the gut, blood, hormones and even the heart might first be seen on the skin in the form of a rash.

Here are a few to look out for.

Bullseye

Ticks are pesky creatures that no one will want to return home from a country walk with.

But while the vast majority of tick bites won’t make you ill, there is one rash that should prompt a visit to your doctor if you spot it.

Erythema migrans, a rash named for its ability to rapidly expand across the skin, is a hallmark of Lyme disease, a potentially severe bacterial illness. This rash forms a classic target pattern, like a bullseye on a dartboard.

Be vigilant for a few weeks after being bitten to check this rash doesn’t make an appearance – especially if you noticed a red lump that wasn’t there before or if you had to remove a tick from your skin. You should also keep an eye out for other associated symptoms of Lyme disease – such as swinging temperatures, muscle and joint pains and headache.

The condition is treated with antibiotics, which can prevent long-term complications, including chronic fatigue symptoms.

Purpura

Some rashes are given a colorful namesake – purpura is one such example. This rash’s name is derived from a mollusk which was used to make purple dye.

Purpura refers to a rash of small purple or red dots. The cause is pooling of blood into a deeper layer of the skin (dermis). When pressed with a finger – or even better, the side of a glass – it refuses to blanch away.

Purpura signals an issue with either the walls of the tiny blood vessels that feed the skin or the blood within them. This might be from a deficiency in platelets, the tiny cell fragments that allow blood to clot – perhaps from bone marrow failure, or an autoimmune condition where the body turns on itself and attacks its own cells.

At worst, purpura may signal the life-threatening condition septicemia, where an infection has spread into the bloodstream – perhaps from the lungs, kidneys or even from the skin itself.

Skin spiders

Skin rashes can also take on recognizable shapes.

Spider naevi represent an issue within skin arterioles (small arteries which supply the skin with blood). Arterioles open and close to control the loss of heat from the body’s surface. But sometimes they can get stuck open – and a spider-like pattern will appear.

The open arteriole is the spider’s body, and the even tinier capillaries fanning out in all directions are the thready legs. Crush the body under a fingertip and the whole thing disappears, as your touch temporarily stops the blood flow.

Often, these are benign and not associated with any specific condition – especially if you only have one or two. However, more than three suggest higher circulating levels of the hormone estrogen, often due to liver disease or from the hormonal changes seen in pregnancy. Treat the underlying cause, and the spiders often vanish with time – though they may persist or reappear later.

Black velvet

Changes to the folds of your skin (usually around the armpits or neck) – especially if it becomes thickened and velveteen to the touch – may suggest a condition known as acanthosis nigricans. This “black velvet” skin appearance is more commonly seen in darker skins.

Usually, the condition is associated with disorders of the metabolism – namely type 2 diabetes and polycystic ovary syndrome. If either of these conditions are successfully treated, the rash may fade. In rare cases, it can also be a sign of stomach cancer, which should be considered in patients with few or none of the key signs of metabolic disease (obesity and high blood pressure).

Butterfly rashes

Even disorders of the heart can be visible on the skin.

Cardiac valves have the important role of correctly directing the journey of blood through the heart and preventing backflow. The valve between the chambers on the left side of the heart (the mitral valve – so called because of its resemblance to a bishop’s hat, or miter) can sometimes become narrowed, causing the heart’s function to deteriorate. The body’s natural response is to preserve core blood volume, shutting off flow towards the skin.

The net effect can produce a purple-red rash, high across the cheeks and the bridge of the nose, like the outstretched wings of a butterfly. We call this mitral facies which, depending on the extent of damage to the heart and great vessels, may persist despite treatment.

It’s important to pay heed to your skin. It’s constantly talking to you, and any changes in its texture, color or if new marks or patterns appear, may indicate something is going on beneath the surface.

Dan Baumgardt, Senior Lecturer, School of Physiology, Pharmacology and Neuroscience, University of Bristol

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

More than half a century ago, Japanese physicist Yosuke Nagaoka theorized a way a magnetic field might expand from meandering electrons restlessly searching for a place to rest that was radically different from conventional models of ferromagnetism.

A phenomenon recently observed in a stack of alternating semiconductors could be explained by Nagaoka’s speculations, while throwing out a few unforeseen surprises.

In an experiment led by researchers from ETH Zürich in Switzerland, atomically thin grids of two different synthetic materials were superimposed like pages in the world’s thinnest book to create a repeating effect known as a moiré pattern.

“Such moiré materials have attracted great interest in recent years, as they can be used to investigate quantum effects of strongly interacting electrons very well,” explains study senior author and physicist Ataç Imamoğlu.

“However, so far very little was known about their magnetic properties.”

Magnetism is the team effort of numerous electrons arranging themselves under a quantum contract dictated by a property called spin.

Unlike the rotation of a ball, an electron’s spin is a binary characteristic. It’s never fast or slow, only ever up or down. Or, if you imagine them as tiny magnets, north or south.

Arrange enough of those tiny magnets so that their spins align; their collective behavior will allow something like an ordinary lump of iron to stick your niece’s drawing of a smiling daffodil to the fridge door.

That agreement on which way to align comes courtesy of an interaction between electrons sitting calmly in their atom’s back row seats. Quantum law dictates electrons with the same spin really ought to stay far away from one another, which, under the right circumstances, creates a pattern that magnifies their magnetism.

In the 1960s, Nagaoka realized a similar kind of arrangement just might form through a completely different agreement, one determined not by exchanges based on the electrons’ spins but by their wanderlust.

He imagined a grid, not unlike a cityscape populated by electrons sitting at street corners like eager buskers. Leave just one corner vacant, he realized, and electrons would move, keen to find a space as far from the other quantum buskers as they could. Each jump would leave a new vacancy, causing a ‘hole’ to jump from street to street.

Guided by this kinetic effect of empty street corners, the same large-scale effect of spins might emerge, generating a more exaggerated magnetic field.

It’s an effect that has since been seen among a tiny handful of electrons. Yet until now, nobody had observed Nagaoka’s ‘kinetic’ magnetism emerging in a material en masse.

“Up to now, such mechanisms for kinetic magnetism have only been detected in model systems, for example in four coupled quantum dots, but never in extended solid state systems like the one we use,” says Imamoğlu.

That system comprised six layers of two different semiconductors: molybdenum diselenide and tungsten disulfide. Similar to Nagaoka’s grids, each could be stacked on top of one another in a way that created ‘street corners’ from the moiré effect of spaces between the layers.

Once the thin layers had been cooled right down to remove as much thermal jiggling as possible, a voltage was applied to send in a trickle of electrons.

Sure enough, each busker found a street corner to pluck out their special brand of spin. Yet unlike what Nagaoka imagined, magnetism only appeared once there was a significant surplus of electrons.

Rather than being lured into a magnetic harmony by the promise of empty spaces, it was the competition for a harmonious place to play that generated short-lived dual-acts known as doublons.

Enough of these partnerships blinking in and out caused the material to become magnetic in a way physicists had never seen before.

While the process is unlikely to lead to any new technology (or ways of holding daffodil drawings to fridges) any time soon, it does give researchers insights into behaviors that could inform the electronics of the future.

This research was published in Nature.

Researchers peering back through 800 years of history have concluded that Mayapan – the capital of culture and politics for the Maya people of the Yucatán Peninsula in the 13th and 14th century CE – may well have been undone by drought.

That drought would have led to civil conflict, which would, in turn, have brought about political collapse, according to the researchers.

People would then have retreated to smaller and safer settlements.

As well as giving us a useful insight into the history of this ancient people, the 2022 study served as a warning as well: about how shifts in climate can quickly put pressures on even the most well-established and prosperous civilizations.

“Multiple data sources indicate that civil conflict increased significantly, and generalized linear modeling correlates strife in the city with drought conditions between 1400 and 1450 CE,” wrote the researchers in their paper, published in July 2022.

“We argue that prolonged drought escalated rival factional tensions, but subsequent adaptations reveal region-scale resiliency, ensuring that Maya political and economic structures endured until European contact in the early 16th century CE.”

The team already had a lot of historical records to work with, covering population change, contemporary diets, and climate conditions.

These records were augmented with a new analysis of human remains for signs of traumatic injury (pointing to conflict).

Correlations emerged between increased rainfall and an increased population in the area, and between subsequent decreases in rainfall and increased conflict. Prolonged drought during 1400-1450 CE most likely led to the abandonment of Mayapan, the researchers say.

The lack of water would have affected agricultural practices and trade routes, putting strain on the people of Mayapan, the study suggests. As food got scarcer and the situation got more dangerous, people either died or dispersed.

In the final mass grave dug before the city was abandoned, the researchers report that many of the remains probably belonged to the family members of the Cocoms (the heads of state) – a bloody end brought on by competing factions and social unrest.

“Our findings support Mayapan’s storied institutional collapse between 1441 and 1461 CE, a consequence of civil conflict driven by political rivalry and ambition, which was embedded in the social memory of Yucatecan peoples whose testimonies entered the written record of the early Colonial Period,” wrote the researchers.

Human responses to environmental pressures such as drought are clearly complex, varying by region and by era – there are so many factors to weigh up and balance when it comes to considering why a historical population acted in the way that it did.

The movement of people to other parts of the Yucatán Peninsula, including prosperous coastal towns and politically independent settlements, helped the Maya culture continue to thrive after the fall of Mayapan – and there was little evidence of any conflict between these regions before Spanish rule started.

That’s testament to a “resilient system of human-environmental adaptations,” the researchers say, but adaptations can only get you so far. These same regions, along with the rest of the world, are once again facing up to a climate crisis.

“Archaeological and historical records are well suited for examining past societal effects of climate crises over long-term cycles,” wrote the researchers.

“The Maya region offers the breadth and depth of archaeological, historical, and climate records essential for studying correlations between social change and fluctuating climate conditions.”

The research has been published in Nature Communications.

A version of this article was first published in July 2022.

Encased inside some of the oldest rocks on Earth are previously overlooked nanocrystals that tell a story about how life might have emerged.

Earth scientists at the University of Western Australia and the University of Cambridge say their findings could explain why phosphorus became a major building block of life and how molecules first clicked together to form primitive RNA at hydrothermal vents on the seafloor.

They examined 3.5-billion-year-old rocks from the Pilbara region of Western Australia under a transmission electron microscope and found unexpected minerals.

The Pilbara is renowned for its pristine preservation of the Earth’s crust during the Archean era when life was just getting started. The rocks in this area are a time capsule containing insights into prebiotic chemistry.

 

From afar, a trained eye might identify the Pilbara’s stripy red rock as a mix of very fine quartz (containing silicon and oxygen) and hematite (made of iron and oxygen), a combination known as jaspilite.

Closer inspection reveals something surprising; hidden nanocrystals with interesting properties. Dispersed throughout the jasper beds are fine particles of greenalite, a mineral containing iron, silicon, and oxygen, which would have been ejected from a nearby hydrothermal vent and precipitated on the seafloor billions of years ago.

“We found hidden between the more conspicuous iron oxides (which gives the rock its bright red color) much more abundant iron clays,” University of Western Australia geologist Birger Rasmussen told ScienceAlert.

“It’s amazing you can see nanoparticles in rocks so old, and part of the reason for that is they’re sealed in these relatively chemically inert materials.”

At the nanoscale, the structure of greenalite is unusual. Particle edges are corrugated due to a misalignment in its crystal structure between the iron-rich octahedral layers and the silica-rich tetrahedral layers.

“It produces a series of parallel grooves on the edges that are the perfect size for things like RNA and DNA,” says Rasmussen, explaining this makes the clay nanoparticles the perfect catalytic tool for aligning the components of these biomolecules so they can easily click together.

Billions of years ago, hydrothermal vents might have produced trillions of microscopic clay particles with grooves that acted like assembly lines, concentrating RNA or pre-RNA.

Long considered a likely place for life to emerge, hydrothermal vents provide the perfect location for this process to happen. They constantly churn seawater through magma chambers, and spew hot, smoky plumes filled with nutrients back into the ocean.

“It’s a great place for chemical reactions to occur … because they are areas of extreme gradients,” says Rasmussen.

The 3.5-billion-year-old rocks from the Pilbara also contained nanoparticles of fluorapatite (a mineral made of oxygen, calcium, fluorine and phosphorus).

Scientists have been puzzled over why phosphorus is found in so many biological structures (including DNA, membranes, and lipids) in spite of such low concentrations of the element in the ocean.

But the presence of the phosphorus-containing mineral fluorapatite in billion-year-old rocks provides a potential explanation: hydrothermal vents might have been an early source of accessible phosphorus.

The researchers’ modeling suggests that the concentration of phosphorus in deep seawater 3.5 billion years ago was likely 10 to 100 times higher than it is today.

“Why did life select phosphorus for so many essential biochemical processes, including the manufacture of genetic material, when it is so scarce in the ocean today? The answer may be that phosphorus was much more abundant during the origin and early evolution of life,” says Rasmussen.

This paper was published in Science Advances.

Land hermit crabs have been using bottle tops, parts of old light bulbs and broken glass bottles, instead of shells.

New research by Polish researchers studied 386 images of hermit crabs occupying these artificial shells. The photos had been uploaded by users to online platforms, then analyzed by scientists using a research approach known as iEcology.

Of the 386 photos, the vast majority, 326 cases, featured hermit crabs using plastic items as shelters.

At first glance, this is a striking example of how human activities can alter the behavior of wild animals, and potentially the ways that populations and ecosystems function as a result.

But there are lots of factors at play and, while it’s easy to jump to conclusions, it’s important to consider exactly what might be driving this particular change.

Shell selection

Hermit crabs are an excellent model organism to study because they behave in many different ways and those differences can be easily measured.

Instead of continuously growing their own shell to protect their body, like a normal crab or a lobster would, they use empty shells left behind by dead snails. As they walk around, the shell protects their soft abdomen but whenever they are threatened they retract their whole body into the shell. Their shells act as portable shelters.

Having a good enough shell is critical to an individual’s survival so they acquire and upgrade their shells as they grow. They fight other hermit crabs for shells and assess any new shells that they might find for suitability.

Primarily, they look for shells that are large enough to protect them, but their decision-making also takes into account the type of snail shell, its condition and even its color – a factor that could impact how conspicuous the crab might be.

Another factor that constrains shell choice is the actual availability of suitable shells. For some as yet unknown reason, a proportion of land hermit crabs are choosing to occupy plastic items rather than natural shells, as highlighted by this latest study.

Housing crisis or ingenious new move?

Humans have intentionally changed the behavior of animals for millennia, through the process of domestication. Any unintended behavioral changes in natural animal populations are potentially concerning, but how worried should we be about hermit crabs using plastic litter as shelter?

The Polish research raises a number of questions. First, how prevalent is the adoption of plastic litter instead of shells?

While 326 crabs using plastic seems like a lot, this is likely to be an underestimation of the raw number given that users are likely to encounter crabs only in accessible parts of the populations.

Conversely, it seems probable that users could be biased towards uploading striking or unusual images, so the iEcology approach might produce an exaggerated impression of the proportion of individuals in a population opting for plastic over natural shells. We need structured field surveys to clarify this.

Second, why are some individual crabs using plastic?

One possibility is that they are forced to due to a lack of natural shells, but we can’t test this hypothesis without more information on the demographics of local snail populations.

Or perhaps the crabs prefer plastic or find it easier to locate, compared with real shells?

As the authors point out, plastic might be lighter than the equivalent shells affording the same amount of protection but at lower energy cost of carrying them. Intriguingly, chemicals that leach out of plastic are known to attract marine hermit crabs by mimicking the odor of food.

This leads to a third question about the possible downsides of using plastic. Compared to real shells plastic waste tends to be brighter and might contrast more with the background making the crabs more vulnerable to predators.

Additionally, we know that exposure to microplastics and compounds that leach from plastic can change the behavior of hermit crabs, making them less fussy about the shells that they choose, less adept at fighting for shells and even changing their personalities by making them more prone to take risks. To answer these questions about the causes and consequences of hermit crabs using plastic waste in this way, we need to investigate their shell selection behavior through a series of laboratory experiments.

Pollution changes behavior

Plastic pollution is just one of the ways we are changing our environment. It’s by far the most highly reported form of debris that we have introduced to marine environments. But animal behavior is affected by other forms of pollution too, including microplastics, pharmaceuticals, light and noise, plus the rising temperatures and ocean acidification caused by climate change.

So while investigating the use of plastic waste by hermit crabs could help us better understand the consequences of certain human impacts on the environment, it doesn’t show how exactly animals will adjust to the Anthropocene, the era during which human activity has been having a significant impact on the planet. Will they cope by using plastic behavioral responses or evolve across generations, or perhaps both?

In my view, the iEcology approach cannot answer questions like this. Rather, this study acts as an alarm bell highlighting potential changes that now need to be fully investigated.

Mark Briffa, Professor of Animal Behavior, University of Plymouth

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Eddies of quantum chaos spontaneously emerging in atomically thin layers of insulating material have stumped physicists, requiring revisions to models that could solve some pressing problems in a quest to understand superconductivity.

Experimental physicists from Princeton University in the US and the Japanese National Institute for Materials Science examined the spontaneous appearance of quantum fluctuations at a point of transition from electron traffic-jam to superconducting freeway cutting across a two-dimensional landscape.

“How a superconducting phase can be changed to another phase is an intriguing area of study,” says Princeton physicist and senior author, Sanfeng Wu.

“And we have been interested in this problem in atomically thin, clean, and single crystalline materials for a while.”

The electrons drifting through the copper wiring behind your drywall have a hard time moving from A to B. Switch on your television, and peak-hour madness unfolds in those wires, with electrons swerving and bumping, tooting their tiny electron horns and shaking their tiny electron fists as their tiny electron engines overheat.

Superconductivity is the dream. It’s effortless motion from start to finish. No heat, no wasted energy. It’s as efficient as efficient can be, perfect for generating powerful electromagnetic fields or high-speed computing that doesn’t melt into a puddle.

Yet it’s also not exactly an easy phase of conductivity to produce. It occurs when electrons lose their sense of individuality and fall into sync, forming what’s known as Cooper pairs, capable of negotiating the atomic neighborhood with zen-like ease.

This demands a level of chill only achievable with some pretty impressive, heavy-duty equipment. Yet if researchers could understand precisely what triggers this quantum transition and the role temperature plays, they just might be able to make do with a little less cooling.

One area of research involves examining the quantum behavior of electrons trapped on what are effectively 2D surfaces. Deprived of the ability to move up and down, quantum phenomena make their transition into a superconductive state a lot more challenging.

“As you go to lower dimensions, fluctuations become so strong that they ‘kill’ any possibility of superconductivity,” says Princeton physicist Nai Phuan Ong.

The primary killer of the electron’s zen state is best described as a quantum vortex. Or as Ong describes it, “quantum versions of the eddy seen when you drain a bathtub.”

According to what’s known as the BKT transition, after Nobel laureates Vadim Berezinskii, John Kosterlitz, and David Thouless, these murderous whirlpools of doom vanish in 2D materials when the temperature sinks low enough.

Investigating this space of quantum tornadoes playing havoc with superconductive states, Wu and his team crafted a single layer of the semi-metal tungsten ditelluride, which at anything warmer than a whisker above absolute zero is an energy-stifling insulator.

Pumping in enough electrons, however, forces a current to flow in a superconducting manner.

Yet the researchers noticed something quite bizarre when the temperature plummeted. Add enough electrons, you get superconductivity. At a critical level of electron traffic, though, those party-pooping whirlwinds of quantum madness return, switching off the current.

Measuring the swirls revealed they weren’t your average quantum vortices, remaining steady at higher temperatures and magnetic fields than theory dictates. When the number of electrons dips below a precise quantity, the vortices suddenly vanish.

“We expected to see strong fluctuations persist below the critical electron density on the non-superconducting side, just like the strong fluctuations seen well above the BKT transition temperature,” says Wu.

“Yet, what we found was that the vortex signals ‘suddenly’ vanish the moment the critical electron density is crossed. And this was a shock. We can’t explain at all this observation – the ‘sudden death’ of the fluctuations.”

New models introduce the possibilities of new avenues of research that just might lead to new technology. Given the potential rewards of developing room-temperature superconductivity, it helps to have a good map of the weather on the quantum landscape.

This research was published in Nature Physics.