Dogs' social skills linked to oxytocin sensitivity

A golden retriever turns to his owner for affection.

The tendency of dogs to seek contact with their owners is associated with genetic variations in sensitivity for the hormone oxytocin, according to a new study from Linköping University, Sweden. The results have been published in the scientific journal Hormones and Behavior and contribute to our knowledge of how dogs have changed during their development from wolf to household pet.

During their domestication from their wild ancestor the wolf to the pets we have today, dogs have developed a unique ability to work together with humans. One aspect of this is their willingness to "ask for help" when faced with a problem that seems to be too difficult. There are, however, large differences between breeds, and between dogs of the same breed. A research group in Linköping, led by Professor Per Jensen, has discovered a possible explanation of why dogs differ in their willingness to collaborate with humans.

The researchers suspected that the hormone oxytocin was involved. It is well-known that oxytocin plays a role in social relationships between individuals, in both humans and animals. The effect of oxytocin depends on the function of the structure that it binds to, the receptor, in the cell. Previous studies have suggested, among other things, that differences in dogs' ability to communicate are associated with variations in the genetic material located close to the gene that codes for the oxytocin receptor. The researchers in the present study examined 60 golden retrievers as they attempted to solve an insoluble problem.

"The first step was to teach the dogs to open a lid, and in this way get hold of a treat. After this, they were given the same task with the lid firmly fixed in place, and thus impossible to open. We timed the dogs to see how long they attempted on their own, before turning to their owner and asking for help," says Mia Persson, PhD student at the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology, and principal author of the article.

Before the behavioural test, the researchers increased the levels of oxytocin in the dogs' blood by spraying the hormone into their nose. As a control, the dogs carried out the same test after having received a spray of neutral salt water in the same way. The researchers also collected DNA using a cotton swab inside the dogs' cheek, and determined which variant of the gene for the oxytocin receptor that each dog had.

The results showed that dogs with a particular genetic variant of the receptor reacted more strongly to the oxytocin spray than other dogs. The tendency to approach their owner for help increased when they received oxytocin in their nose, compared with when they received the neutral salt water solution. The researchers suggest that these results help us understand how dogs have changed during the process of domestication. They analysed DNA also from 21 wolves, and found the same genetic variation among them. This suggests that the genetic variation was already present when domestication of the dogs started, 15,000 years ago.

"The results lead us to surmise that people selected for domestication wolves with a particularly well-developed ability to collaborate, and then bred subsequent generations from these," says Mia Persson.

The genetic variations that the researchers have studied do not affect the oxytocin receptor itself: they are markers used for practical reasons. Further research is necessary to determine in more detail which differences in the genetic material lie behind the effects.

Per Jensen points out that the study shows how social behaviour is to a large extent controlled by the same genetic factors in different species.

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New evidence for small, short-lived drops of early universe quark-gluon plasma?

The PHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) with a superimposed image of reconstructed particle tracks picked up by the detector.

Particles emerging from even the lowest energy collisions of small deuterons with large heavy nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) -- a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility for nuclear physics research at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory -- exhibit behavior scientists associate with the formation of a soup of quarks and gluons, the fundamental building blocks of nearly all visible matter. These results from RHIC's PHENIX experiment suggest that these small-scale collisions might be producing tiny, short-lived specks of matter that mimics what the early universe was like nearly 14 billion years ago, just after the Big Bang.

Scientists built RHIC, in large part, to create this "quark-gluon plasma" (QGP) so they could study its properties and learn how Nature's strongest force brings quarks and gluons together to form the protons, neutrons, and atoms that make up the visible universe today. But they initially expected to see signs of QGP only in highly energetic collisions of two heavy ions such as gold. The new findings -- correlations in the way particles emerge from the collisions that are consistent with what physicists have observed in the more energetic large-ion collisions -- add to a growing body of evidence from RHIC and Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that QGP may be created in smaller systems as well.

The PHENIX collaboration has submitted the findings in two separate papers to the journals Physical Review Letters and Physical Review C, and will present these results at a meeting in Krakow, Poland this week.

"These are the first papers that come out of the 2016 deuteron-gold collisions, and this is one indication that we are probably creating QGP in small systems," said Julia Velkovska, a deputy spokesperson for PHENIX from Vanderbilt University. "But there are other things that we have seen in the larger systems that we have yet to investigate in this new data. We'll be looking for other evidence of QGP in the small systems using different ways to study the properties of the system we are creating," she said.

Collective flow

One of the earliest signs that RHIC's collisions of two gold ions were creating QGP came in the form of "collective flow" of particles. More particles emerged from the "equator" of two semi-overlapping colliding ions than perpendicular to the collision direction. This elliptical flow pattern, scientists believe, is caused by interactions of the particles with the nearly "perfect" -- meaning free-flowing -- liquid-like QGP created in the collisions. Since then, collisions of smaller particles with heavy ions have resulted in similar flow patterns at both RHIC and the LHC, albeit on a smaller scale. There has also been evidence that flow patterns have a strong relationship with the geometrical shape of the projectile particle that is colliding with the larger nucleus.

"With these results in hand, we wanted to try smaller and smaller systems at different energies," Velkovska said. "If you change the energy, you can change the time that the system stays in the liquid phase, and maybe make it disappear."

In other words, they wanted to see if they could turn the creation of QGP off.

"After so many years we have learned that when QGP is created in the collisions we know how to recognize it, but that doesn't mean we really understand how it works," Velkovska said. "We are trying to understand how the perfect-fluid behavior emerges and evolves. What we are doing now -- going down in energy, changing the size -- is an effort to learn how this behavior arises in different conditions. RHIC is the only collider in the world that allows such a range of studies over different collision energies with different colliding particle species."

Turing down the energy

Over a period of about five weeks in 2016, the PHENIX team explored collisions of deuterons (made of one proton and one neutron) with gold ions at four different energies (200, 62.4, 39, and 19.6 billion electron volts, or GeV).

"Thanks to the versatility of RHIC and the ability of the staff in Brookhaven's Collider-Accelerator Department to quickly switch and tune the machine for different collision energies, PHENIX was able to record more than 1.5 billion collisions in this short period of time," Velkovska said.

For the paper submitted to PRC, Darren McGlinchey, a PHENIX collaborator from Los Alamos National Laboratory, led an analysis of how particles emerged along the elliptical plane of the collisions as a function of their momentum, how central (fully overlapping) the collisions were, and how many particles were produced.

"Using a deuteron projectile produces a highly elliptical shape, and we observed a persistence of that initial geometry in the particles we detect, even at low energy," McGlinchey said. Such shape persistence could be caused by interaction with a QGP created in these collisions. "This result is not sufficient evidence to declare that QGP exists, but it is a piece of mounting evidence for it," he said.

Ron Belmont, a PHENIX collaborator from the University of Colorado, led an analysis of how the flow patterns of multiple particles (two and four particles at each energy and six at the highest energy) were correlated. Those results were submitted to PRL.

"We found a very similar pattern in both two- and four-particle correlations for all the different energies, and in six-particle correlations at the highest energy as well," Belmont said.

"Both results are consistent that particle flow is observed down to lowest energy. So the two papers work together to paint a nice picture," he added.

There are other possible explanations for the findings, including the postulated existence of another form of matter known as color glass condensate that is thought to be dominated by the presence of gluons within the heart of all visible matter.

"To distinguish color glass condensate from QGP, we need more detailed theoretical descriptions of what these things look like," Belmont said.

Read more at Science Daily

Changes in Earth's crust caused oxygen to fill the atmosphere

Matthijs Smit of the University of British Columbia examines ancient rocks from the deep crust in Norway during the summer of 2017.

Scientists have long wondered how Earth's atmosphere filled with oxygen. UBC geologist Matthijs Smit and research partner Klaus Mezger may have found the answer in continental rocks that are billions of years old.

"Oxygenation was waiting to happen," said Smit. "All it may have needed was for the continents to mature."

Earth's early atmosphere and oceans were devoid of free oxygen, even though tiny cyanobacteria were producing the gas as a byproduct of photosynthesis. Free oxygen is oxygen that isn't combined with other elements such as carbon or nitrogen, and aerobic organisms need it to live. A change occurred about three billion years ago, when small regions containing free oxygen began to appear in the oceans. Then, about 2.4 billion years ago, oxygen in the atmosphere suddenly increased by about 10,000 times in just 200 million years. This period, known as the Great Oxidation Event, changed chemical reactions on the surface of the Earth completely.

Smit, a professor in UBC's department of earth, ocean & atmospheric sciences, and colleague, professor Klaus Mezger of the University of Bern, were aware that the composition of continents also changed during this period. They set out to find a link, looking closely at records detailing the geochemistry of shales and igneous rock types from around the world -- more than 48,000 rocks dating back billions of years.

"It turned out that a staggering change occurred in the composition of continents at the same time free oxygen was starting to accumulate in the oceans," Smit said.

Before oxygenation, continents were composed of rocks rich in magnesium and low in silica -- similar to what can be found today in places like Iceland and the Faroe Islands. But more importantly, those rocks contained a mineral called olivine. When olivine comes into contact with water, it initiates chemical reactions that consume oxygen and lock it up. That is likely what happened to the oxygen produced by cyanobacteria early in Earth's history.

However, as the continental crust evolved to a composition more like today's, olivine virtually disappeared. Without that mineral to react with water and consume oxygen, the gas was finally allowed to accumulate. Oceans eventually became saturated, and oxygen crossed into the atmosphere.

"It really appears to have been the starting point for life diversification as we know it," Smit said. "After that change, the Earth became much more habitable and suitable for the evolution of complex life, but that needed some trigger mechanism, and that's what we may have found."

As for what caused the composition of continents to change, that is the subject of ongoing study. Smit notes that modern plate tectonics began at around the same time, and many scientists theorize that there is a connection.

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Ancient Greeks May Have Deliberately Built Sacred Sites on Earthquake Faults

Temple of Apollo ruins in Delphi, Greece

Archeologists and other scientists have long known that intoxicating gases emanating from water flowing from deep within the earth likely produced the visions of the oracle of Delphi, a seer who guided ancient Greeks with her prophecies from around 800 BC through the 4th century AD from her temple on Mount Parnassus.

Now new research suggests many other Greek sacred sites were built on similar fissures created by earthquakes throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.

“The ancient Greeks placed great value on hot springs unlocked by earthquakes,” said Iain Stewart, professor of geoscience communication and director of the Sustainable Earth Institute at the University of Plymouth in Britain. “But perhaps the building of temples and cities close to these sites was more systematic than has previously been thought.”

In a study published recently in the Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, Stewart showed how temples and other structures at Mycenae, Ephesus, Cnidus, and Hierapolis were, like Delphi, built and rebuilt over earthquake faults.

In Cnidus, an ancient, ruined city in what is now southwestern coastal Turkey, for example, locals erected a temple in the same place — over a fault in hindsight — even after earthquakes wrecked it.

“You think, ‘That’s bad luck, isn’t it?’” said Stewart, describing when he first reached his findings after reviewing his data. “Then it dawns on you. These people weren’t stupid. There was this grand dawning that there was probably something deliberate here.”

The pattern repeats in other cities, reflecting how Greeks viewed the underworld as the destination for the soul after death and a source of mystical power and knowledge. “We don’t have a culture that looks down,” said Stewart. “We have a culture that looks up to the stars.”

Conversely, in his paper Stewart speculates that seismic activity could have cut off hot springs that had justified an oracle at Perachora Heraion, a sanctuary founded in honor of the goddess Hera in the 9th century BC near Corinth but then fell into disuse in 300 BC potentially after earthquakes.

Greeks also of course didn’t live in cities with skyscrapers and millions of residents, either, he added. Earthquakes would have been viewed more as mystical occurrences and not natural disasters caused by the movement of tectonic plates. Historical and geological records show that earthquakes were frequent at the height of ancient Greek civilization, he added.

“It’s hard [for people today] to separate the modern take that earthquakes are dangerous,” said Stewart. “We kind of know too much. We know what they can do. In ancient times, they would have seen them very differently. In the course of 30 seconds, the ground would open up and then everything would go back to normal.”

Stewart added that archeologists might also look at sacred sites in South America, the Middle East, and Asia to see whether earthquake fault lines played a role in their construction.

Read more at Seeker

Measuring a crucial mineral in the mantle

Olivine, the most abundant mineral found in the Earth's mantle, is considered to be a robust model of the interior of the Earth's composition.

University of Delaware professor Jessica Warren and colleagues from Stanford University, Oxford University and University of Pennsylvania, reported new data that material size-effects matter in plate tectonics.

Plate tectonics, the way the Earth's plates move apart and come back together, has been used since the 1960s to explain the location of volcanoes and earthquakes.

The study (link here) published Wednesday, Sept. 13 in the American Association for the Advancement of Science journal Science Advances, resolves 40 years of disagreement in datasets about the strength of olivine, the most abundant mineral found in the upper 250 miles or so of the Earth, known as the mantle.

"Measuring the strength of olivine is critical to understanding how strong tectonic plates are, which, in turn, matters to how plates break and create subduction zones like those along the Cascadia plate, which runs down the west coast of Canada to the west coast of the United States," said Warren, a geologist in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment. It's also important for understanding how plates move around over the million-year time scales.

The paper demonstrated that olivine's strength is size-sensitive and that olivine is stronger the smaller the volume that is measured, something that has been known in materials science for many metals and ceramics, but has not been studied in a geological material before.

Warren explained that the problem with studying rocks on the earth's surface is that they are no longer subjected to the high pressures found inside the earth that cause materials to flow (like ice in a glacier). Recreating these elevated pressures in the laboratory is difficult, making it hard for scientists to study material strength in the lab.

The researchers used a technique, called instrumented nanoindentation, to measure olivine's strength. The technique allowed them to recreate pressure conditions similar to those inside the earth by pressing a diamond tip that was carefully machined to a specific geometry into the olivine crystal to measure the material's response. The diamond tips ranged in size from 5 to 20 microns (0.000001 meter). The researchers performed hundreds of indentation tests on tiny olivine crystals less than a centimeter square and found that the olivine crystal became weaker as the size of the diamond tip increased.

To validate this size-effect, the researchers reviewed the available literature data on the strength of olivine to determine the sizes and areas that had been tested in previous experiments dating to the late 1970s. The size-effect showed up in the old data, too.

"The reason 40 years' worth of data don't agree from one experiment to the next is because scientists were measuring different sizes or areas of olivine," Warren said. "But if you plot the same information as a function of the sample size, the datasets, in fact agree, and display the same general trend -- the larger the indentation in the material tested, the weaker the olivine becomes."

Now that Warren and her colleagues understand this size-effect, they are turning their attention to how temperature affects the strength of olivine, and more broadly, on where tectonic plates might break and give rise to potential subduction zones.

Temperatures inside the earth are much hotter than on the surface and can range from 1,470 to 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit (800 to 1,200 degrees Celsius).

The team also will consider what role water plays in the structure of olivine minerals and rocks in the earth. According to Warren, current estimates suggest the earth contains the equivalent of 50 percent to 4 times the amount of water found in the global ocean.

Read more at Science Daily

Light on exoplanets may be quite different from Earth: Different photosynthesis?

Artists impressions of a habitable planet around M-dwarfs (left) and primordial Earth (right). The surface of M-dwarf planet is illuminated by visible light. On the other hand, similar light conditions are expected underwater, since only blue-green light can penetrate meters of water.

Researchers at the Astrobiology Center (ABC) of National Institutes of Natural Science (NINS) in Japan and their colleagues have proposed a prediction that red-edge could be observed as on the Earth even on exoplanets around M-dwarfs. They pointed out that the first oxgenic photorophs are most likely to have evolved underwater to utilize visible light just like what had happened in the primordial ocean on the Earth. They examined light adaptation mechanisms of visible- and IR-radiation-using phototrophs required for adapting to land habitats and found out that IR-using phototrophs struggle to adapt to changing light condition at the boundary of water and land surface.

M-dwarfs or red dwarfs are small (0.5-0.1 solar-masses) and cool ( ~3000 Kelvin) stars, and are abundant in universe. The Sun-like stars have been attracting most attention as a plausible target for searching habitable exoplanets. However, nearby M-dwarfs are becoming the most extensive targets for habitable planet searches because they are the most abundant nearby stars and thus could be the first candidate for detecting any biosignatures on exoplanets via transit or direct imaging observations in near future.

One of the most important exoplanetary biosignatures is a specific reflection pattern on the land surface named 'red-edge', which is caused by vegetation such as forests and grasslands. On the Earth, red-edge appears between red and infrared (IR) wavelengths, since red-light is absorbed for photosynthesis while IR radiation is reflected. In previous studies, it was predicted that red-edge position on exoplanets should be decided by the radiation spectrum by nearby stars. Around M-dwarfs, red-edge was expected to be shifted to a longer wavelength, since planets on the exoplanets use abundant IR radiation for photosynthesis.

Researchers at the Astrobiology Center (ABC) of National Institutes of Natural Science (NINS) in Japan and their colleagues have proposed and alternative prediction that red-edge could be observed as on the Earth even on exoplanets around M-dwarfs in the online journal Scientific Reports on August 8th, 2017. They pointed out that the first oxgenic photorophs are most likely to have evolved underwater to utilize visible light just like what had happened in the primordial ocean on the Earth. They examined light adaptation mechanisms of visible- and IR-radiation-using phototrophs required for adapting to land habitats and found out that IR-using phototrophs struggle to adapt to changing light condition at the boundary of water and land surface. Kenji Takizawa, read author of the study, said "It is too risky to utilize IR-radiation during water-to-land evolution."

Read more at Science Daily

Ancient amphibian had mouthful of teeth ready to grab you

A thematic diagram showing a cut across the skull showing the position of the denticulate plates that covered the soft palate. On the left is at resting stage, on the right, ventral movement of the soft palate by retraction of the eyeballs, during feeding

The idea of being bitten by a nearly toothless modern frog or salamander sounds laughable, but their ancient ancestors had a full array of teeth, large fangs and thousands of tiny hook-like structures called denticles on the roofs of their mouths that would snare prey, according to new research by paleontologists at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM).

In research published online in a recent issue of PeerJ, an open access journal, Professor Robert Reisz, Distinguished Professor of Paleontology at UTM, explains that the presence of such an extensive field of teeth provides clues to how the intriguing feeding mechanism seen in modern amphibians was also likely used by their ancient ancestors.

They believe that the tooth-bearing plates "were ideally suited for holding on to prey, such as insects or smaller tetrapods, may have facilitated a method of swallowing prey items via retraction of the eyeballs into the mouth, as some amphibians do today.

In many vertebrates, ranging from fish to early synapsids (ancestors of mammals), denticles are commonly found in dense concentrations on the bones of the hard palate (roof of the mouth). However, in one group of tetrapods, temnospondyls (which are thought to be the ancestors of modern amphibians) these denticles were also found on small, bony plates that filled the large soft part of the palate. The entire roof of the mouth was covered with literally thousands of these tiny teeth that they used to grab prey. Since these toothy plates were suspended in soft tissue, they are often lost or scattered during fossilization.

Denticles are significantly smaller than the teeth around the margin of the mouth -- on the order of dozens to a couple hundred microns in length. They are actually true teeth, rather than just protrusions in the mouths of these tetrapods, says Reisz and his colleagues, Bryan Gee and Yara Haridy, both graduate students in paleontology.

"Denticles have all of the features of the large teeth that are found on the margin of the mouth," says Reisz. "In examining tetrapod specimens dating back ~289 million years, we discovered that the denticles display essentially all of the main features that are considered to define teeth, including enamel and dentine, pulp cavity and peridontia."

In reaching these conclusions, the researchers analyzed specimens unearthed from the fossil-rich Dolese Brothers Limestone Quarry near Richards Spur, Oklahoma. They were extraordinarily well preserved, making them ideal candidates for study.

The researchers extracted and isolated the denticle-bearing plates, created thin section slides and examined them under the microscope -- no small feat since denticles on this animal were only about 100 microns long.

Read more at Science Daily

Why we did not evolve to live forever: Unveiling the mystery of why we age

C. elegans.

Researchers at the Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB) in Mainz, Germany, have made a breakthrough in understanding the origin of the ageing process. They have identified that genes belonging to a process called autophagy -- one of the cells most critical survival processes -- promote health and fitness in young worms but drive the process of ageing later in life. This research published in the journal Genes & Development gives some of the first clear evidence for how the ageing process arises as a quirk of evolution. These findings may also have broader implications for the treatment of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Huntington's disease where autophagy is implicated. The researchers show that by promoting longevity through shutting down autophagy in old worms there is a strong improvement in neuronal and subsequent whole body health.

Getting old, it's something that happens to everyone and nearly every species on this planet, but the question is, should it? In a recent publication in the journal Genes & Development titled "Neuronal inhibition of the autophagy nucleation complex extends lifespan in post-reproductive C. elegans," the laboratory of Dr Holger Richly at IMB, has found some of the first genetic evidence that may put this question to rest.

As Charles Darwin explained, natural selection results in the fittest individuals for a given environment surviving to breed and pass on their genes to the next generation. The more fruitful a trait is at promoting reproductive success, the stronger the selection for that trait will be. In theory, this should give rise to individuals with traits which prevent ageing as their genes could be passed on nearly continuously. Thus, despite the obvious facts to the contrary, from the point of evolution ageing should never have happened. This evolutionary contradiction has been debated and theorised on since the 1800s. It was only in 1953 with his hypothesis of antagonistic pleiotropy (AP) that George C. Williams gave us a rational explanation for how ageing can arise in a population through evolution. Williams proposed that natural selection enriches genes promoting reproductive success but consequently ignores their negative effects on longevity. Importantly, this is only true when those negative effects occur after the onset of reproduction. Essentially, if a gene mutation results in more offspring but shortens life that's fine. This is because there can be more descendants carrying on the parent's genes in a shorter time to compensate. Accordingly, over time, these pro-fitness, pro-ageing mutations are actively selected for and the ageing process becomes hard-wired into our DNA. While this theory has been proven mathematically and its implications demonstrated in the real world, actual evidence for genes behaving in such as fashion has been lacking.

This evidence has now arrived according to the co-lead author of the paper Jonathan Byrne, "The evolutionary theory of ageing just explains everything so nicely but it lacked real evidence that it was happening in nature. Evolution becomes blind to the effects of mutations that promote ageing as long as those effects only kick in after reproduction has started. Really, ageing is an evolutionary oversight." Jonathan continues "These AP genes haven't been found before because it's incredibly difficult to work with already old animals, we were the first to figure out how to do this on a large scale." He explains further "From a relatively small screen, we found a surprisingly large number of genes [30] that seem to operate in an antagonistic fashion." Previous studies had found genes that encourage ageing while still being essential for development, but these 30 genes represent some of the first found promoting ageing specifically only in old worms. "Considering we tested only 0.05% of all the genes in a worm this suggests there could be many more of these genes out there to find," says Jonathan.

The evidence for ageing driven by evolution was not the only surprise the paper had in store, according to Thomas Wilhelm, the other co-lead author on the paper. "What was most surprising was what processes those genes were involved in." Not content to provide just the missing evidence for a 60-year-old puzzle, Wilhelm and his colleagues went on to describe what a subset of these genes do in C. elegans and how they might be driving the ageing process. "This is where the results really get fascinating," says Dr Holger Richly, the principal investigator of the study. "We found a series of genes involved in regulating autophagy, which accelerate the ageing process." These results are surprising indeed, the process of autophagy is a critical recycling process in the cell, and is usually required to live a normal full lifetime. Autophagy is known to become slower with age and the authors of this paper show that it appears to completely deteriorate in older worms. They demonstrate that shutting down key genes in the initiation of the process allows the worms to live longer compared with leaving it running crippled. "This could force us to rethink our ideas about one of the most fundamental processes that exist in a cell," Holger explains. "Autophagy is nearly always thought of as beneficial even if it's barely working. We instead show that there are severe negative consequences when it breaks down and then you are better off bypassing it all together." "It's classic AP," he continues, "In young worms, autophagy is working properly and is essential to reach maturity but after reproduction, it starts to malfunction causing the worms to age."

In a final revelation, Richly and his team were able to track the source of the pro longevity signals to a specific tissue, namely the neurons. By inactivating autophagy in the neurons of old worms they were not only able to prolong the worms life but they increased the total health of the worms dramatically. "Imagine reaching the halfway point in your life and getting a drug that leaves you as fit and mobile as someone half your age who you then live longer than, that's what it's like for the worms," says Thomas Wilhelm. "We turn autophagy off only in one tissue and the whole animal gets a boost. The neurons are much healthier in the treated worms and we think this is what keeps the muscles and the rest of the body in good shape. The net result is a 50% extension of life."

Read more at Science Daily

Evolution of 'true frogs' defies long-held expectations of science

Ranidae family are most diverse frog group in the world, found on all the world's continents except Antarctica.

Evolutionary biologists long have supposed that when species colonize new geographic regions they often develop new traits and adaptations to deal with their fresh surroundings. They branch from their ancestors and multiply in numbers of species.

Apparently, this isn't the story of "true frogs." The frog family scientists call Ranidae are found nearly everywhere in the world, and their family includes familiar amphibians like the American Bullfrog and the European common frog.

New research from the University of Kansas appearing in Royal Society Biology Letters shows, in contrast to expectations, "the rapid global range expansion of true frogs was not associated with increased net-diversification."

"First, we had to identify where these true frogs came from and when they started their dispersal all over the world," said lead author Chan Kin Onn, a doctoral student at KU's Biodiversity Institute. "We found a distinct pattern. The origin of these frogs was Indochina -- on the map today, it's most of mainland Asia, including Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Burma. True frogs dispersed throughout every continent except Antarctica from there. That's not a new idea. But we found that a lot of this dispersal happened during a short period of time -- it was during the late Eocene, about 40 million years ago. That hadn't really been identified, until now."

Next, Chan and co-author Rafe Brown, curator-in-charge of the KU Biodiversity Institute's Herpetology Division, looked to see if this rapid dispersal of true frogs worldwide triggered a matching eruption of speciation.

"That was our expectation," Chan said. "We thought they'd take off into all this new habitat and resources, with no competition -- and boom, you'd have a lot of new species. But we found the exact opposite was true. In most of the groups, nothing happened. There was no increase in speciation. In one of the groups, diversification significantly slowed down. That was the reverse of what was expected."

To establish the actual timing of true frogs' diversification, Chan and Brown performed phylogenetic analysis of 402 genetic samples obtained from an online database called GenBank. These samples represented 292 of the known 380 true frog species in the world.

"We mined all of these sequences and combined them into a giant analysis of the whole family," Chain said. "It is to my knowledge the most comprehensive Ranidae phylogenetic analysis ever performed that included most of the representative species from the family."

Chan and Brown focused on four genes that would help to establish the family tree of true frogs.

"It's a genealogical pedigree of specimens, a family tree of species," Chan said. "Normally, you think of family tree as everyone in one family and how the various people are related. But this is more expanded where we look at how species are related to each other, so you can trace ancestry back in time."

After completing the phylogenetic analysis, the KU researchers used several frog fossils to "time calibrate" the history of the frogs' global dispersal.

"We use fossil frogs because we can accurately date the fossils," Chan said. "We know we found the fossil in a certain rock deposit, and we know with confidence how old the deposit is, so then we can estimate the age of the fossil."

After Chan and Brown deduced similarities between fossilized true frogs as reported by paleontologists and contemporary true frogs, they placed fossils into groups of closely related species, which scientists call genera.

"Using data from paleontological studies, we can loosely place a fossil where in the phylogeny it belongs and can put a time stamp on that point," Chan said. "That's where calibration happens, each fossil is sort of like an anchor point. You can imagine with a really big phylogeny, the more anchor points or calibration points the better your time estimate."

Through this process, the KU researchers concluded true frogs didn't become one of the most biodiverse frog families due to dispersing into new ranges, or due to filling a gap created by a catastrophic die-off (such as the Eocene-Oligocene Extinction Event that triggered widespread extinctions from marine invertebrates to mammals in Asia and Europe).

Rather, the rich diversity of species in the Ranidae family comes from millions of years' worth of continual evolution influenced by a host of different environs.

Read more at Science Daily

A one-of-a-kind star found to change over decades

AR Scorpii consists of a rapidly spinning, magnetized white dwarf star that mysteriously interacts with its companion star.

Astronomers studying the unique binary star system AR Scorpii have discovered the brightness of the system has changed over the past decade. The new evidence lends support to an existing theory of how the unusual star emits energy. AR Scorpii consists of a rapidly spinning, magnetized white dwarf star that mysteriously interacts with its companion star. The system was recently found to more than double in brightness on timescales of minutes and hours, but research recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters found variability on a timescale of decades.

Researchers at the University of Notre Dame analyzed data on the unique system from the Kepler Space Telescope's K2 mission taken in 2014 before the star was known to be unusual. The data was then compared with archival sky survey images going back to 2004 to look for long-term changes in the light curve of AR Scorpii. The binary's light curve is unique, in that it exhibits a spike in emission every two minutes as well as a major brightness variation over the approximately 3.5-hour orbital period of the two stars.

"One model of this system predicts long-term variations in the way the two stars interact. It was not known what the time scale of these changes might be -- whether 20 to 200 years. By looking at the K2 and archival data, we were able to show that in addition to hourly changes in the system, there are variations occurring over decades," said Peter Garnavich, professor and department chair of astrophysics and cosmology physics at Notre Dame.

A white dwarf is a very dense remnant of a star like the sun. When a solar-like star runs out of energy, gravity compresses its core to about the size of the Earth but with a mass 300,000 times higher. A teaspoon-sized piece of a white dwarf would weigh about 15 tons. The compression of the star can also amplify its magnetic field strength and its spin rate.

The unique system became famous in 2016 when researchers in England discovered that AR Scorpii, believed to be a mundane solitary star, was actually a rapidly varying binary. The system is remarkable as the white dwarf spins on its axis at an incredibly fast rate, causing flashes in luminosity every two minutes. The amplitude of the flashes varies over the 3.5-hour orbital period, something no other white dwarf binary system is known to do.

"We found that back 12 years ago, AR Scorpii's peak brightness came a bit later in its orbit than it does now," said Colin Littlefield, research associate working with Garnavich. "This does not solve the mystery, but it is another piece to the puzzle that is AR Scorpii."

The team at Notre Dame has been observing the system with the Sarah L. Krizmanich Telescope at the University's Jordan Hall of Science, and they plan to publish those results in an upcoming paper.

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