Category: Science News

{Australian researchers shed light on global sauropod evolution.}

The Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum today announced the naming of Savannasaurus elliottorum, a new genus and species of dinosaur from western Queensland, Australia. The bones come from the Winton Formation, a geological deposit approximately 95 million years old.

The paper naming the new dinosaur was published on Thursday October 20 at 2pm BST (Friday October 21 at 12am AEST) in Scientific Reports — an open access, online journal published by Nature.

Savannasaurus was discovered by David Elliott, co-founder of the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum, while mustering sheep in early 2005. As Elliott recalled yesterday, “I was nearly home with the mob — only about a kilometre from the yards — when I spotted a small pile of fossil bone fragments on the ground. I was particularly excited at the time as there were two pieces of a relatively small limb bone and I was hoping it might be a meat-eating theropod dinosaur.” Mr Elliott returned to the site later that day to collect the bone fragments with his wife Judy, who ‘clicked’ two pieces together to reveal a complete toe bone from a plant-eating sauropod. The Elliotts marked the site and made arrangements to hold a dig later that year.

The site was excavated in September 2005 by a joint Australian Age of Dinosaurs (AAOD) Museum and Queensland Museum team and 17 pallets of bones encased in rock were recovered. After almost ten years of painstaking work by staff and volunteers at the AAOD Museum, the hard siltstone concretion around the bones was finally removed to reveal one of the most complete sauropod dinosaur skeletons ever found in Australia. More excitingly, it belonged to a completely new type of dinosaur.

The new discovery was nicknamed Wade in honour of prominent Australian palaeontologist Dr Mary Wade. “Mary was a very close friend of ours and she passed away while we were digging at the site,” said Mr Elliott. “We couldn’t think of a better way to honour her than to name the new dinosaur after her.”

“Before today we have only been able to refer to this dinosaur by its nickname,” said Dr Stephen Poropat, Research Associate at the AAOD Museum and lead author of the study. “Now that our study is published we can refer to Wade by its formal name, Savannasaurus elliottorum,” Dr Poropat said. “The name references the savannah country of western Queensland in which it was found, and honours the Elliott family for their ongoing commitment to Australian palaeontology.”

In the same publication, Dr Poropat and colleagues announced the first sauropod skull ever found in Australia. This skull, and the partial skeleton with which it was associated, has been assigned to Diamantinasaurus matildae — a sauropod dinosaur named in 2009 on the basis of its nickname Matilda. “This new Diamantinasaurus specimen has helped to fill several gaps in our knowledge of this dinosaur’s skeletal anatomy,” said Poropat. “The braincase in particular has allowed us to refine Diamantinasaurus’ position on the sauropod family tree.”

Dr Poropat collaborated with British sauropod experts Dr Philip Mannion (Imperial College, London) and Professor Paul Upchurch (University College, London), among others, to work out the position of Savannasaurus (and refine that of Diamantinasaurus) on the sauropod family tree. “Both Savannasaurus and Diamantinasaurus belong to a group of sauropods called titanosaurs. This group of sauropods includes the largest land-living animals of all time,” said Dr Mannion. “Savannasaurus and the new Diamantinasaurus specimen have helped us to demonstrate that titanosaurs were living worldwide by 100 million years ago.”

Poropat and his colleagues suggest that the arrangement of the continents, and the global climate during the middle part of the Cretaceous Period, enabled titanosaurs to spread worldwide.

“Australia and South America were connected to Antarctica throughout much of the Cretaceous,” said Professor Upchurch. “Ninety-five million years ago, at the time that Savannasaurus was alive, global average temperatures were warmer than they are today. However, it was quite cool at the poles at certain times, which seems to have restricted the movement of sauropods at polar latitudes. We suspect that the ancestor of Savannasaurus was from South America, but that it could not and did not enter Australia until approximately 105 million years ago. At this time global average temperatures increased allowing sauropods to traverse landmasses at polar latitudes.”

Savannasaurus was a medium-sized titanosaur, approximately half the length of a basketball court, with a long neck and a relatively short tail. “With hips at least one metre wide and a huge barrel-like ribcage, Savannasaurus is the most rotund sauropod we have found so far — even more so than the somewhat hippopotamus-like Diamantinasaurus,” said Dr Poropat. “It lived alongside at least two other types of sauropod (Diamantinasaurus and Wintonotitan), as well as other dinosaurs including ornithopods, armoured ankylosaurs, and the carnivorous theropod Australovenator.”

Mr Elliott is relieved that Wade can now join “Matilda” and the other new dinosaur species on display in the Museum’s Holotype Room. “That this dinosaur specimen can now be displayed for our visitors is a testament to the efforts of numerous volunteers who have worked at the Museum on the fossils over the past decade,” he said. Mr Elliott and Dr Poropat agree that the naming of Savannasaurus, the fourth new species published by the AAOD Museum, is just the tip of the iceberg with respect to the potential for new dinosaur species in western Queensland. “The Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum has a massive collection of dinosaur fossils awaiting preparation and the number of specimens collected is easily outpacing the number being prepared by volunteers and staff in our Laboratory,” Mr Elliott said. “The Museum already has the world’s largest collection of bones from Australia’s biggest dinosaurs and there is enough new material to keep us working for several decades.”

{Psychology researchers at West Virginia University have discovered evidence of a genetic basis for fearing dental treatment.}

Cameron Randall and Daniel McNeil report that dental care-related fear and anxiety is due, in part, to genetic influences inherited from parents. The study is one of the first to suggest that genetics, in addition to environmental factors, can be a basis for patients fearing dental treatment.

The study demonstrates that fear of pain, a problem related to but separate from dental fear, is heritable, too. The authors found that some of the genes that influence fear of pain likely also influence dental fear. This finding provides new information that clarifies how fear of pain may contribute to the development of dental fear.

Randall, a doctoral candidate in WVU’s Department of Psychology, says the study provides a more comprehensive conceptualization of dental care-related fear, an understanding that may improve dental care in the future.

“The most important conclusion of this study is that our genes may predispose us to be more susceptible to developing dental fear, perhaps through pain-related variables,” Randall said.

The study used a novel approach to study dental fear heritability in a large participant sample, with family-based cohort data collected through the NIH-funded Center for Oral Health Research in Appalachia. The study was completed in collaboration with the Anxiety, Psychophysiology and Pain Research Laboratory in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, which McNeil directs.

Dental care-related fear is relatively common, with significant fears affecting 10 to 20 percent of U.S. adults. At high levels, it can result in delays or complete avoidance of dental treatment, which has consequences for individuals’ oral and overall health. As a result, researchers are aiming to understand the causes and cures of this public health problem.

“This information, along with a well-documented understanding of the important role of prior experiences and environment in causing dental fear, may help us develop new ways to treat dental fear and phobia,” Randall said.

{Parents, caregivers can help by talking to themselves aloud while working on tasks.}

One of the differences between adults and preschoolers when it comes to private speech is that adults typically talk to themselves in their heads, while preschoolers talk to themselves aloud, particularly while playing or working on a task. Private speech is a good thing for a child’s cognitive development; however, it may be important that children monitor and repair errors in their speech, even when talking to themselves.

Louis Manfra, assistant professor in the College of Human Environmental Sciences at the University of Missouri, found that children do, in fact, monitor their speech for errors, even without a listener. Manfra says parents and caregivers might encourage preschool-aged children to monitor their private speech by demonstrating such behavior in their own aloud private speech.

“A disconnection between private speech and task behavior has been observed in studies of children with self-regulation issues, such as ADHD,” Manfra said. “What was unknown until now was the extent to which preschool-aged children correct their own speech, and if they do so when talking to themselves. This is important because children who do not repair their speech may not benefit as much from their private speech as children who consistently repair their private speech.”

Manfra studied three-and four-year-old children to investigate their speech behaviors. The children worked on a project with building blocks, a problem-solving task known to elicit private speech. The children talked through the project with someone and then alone. In assessing speech errors and self-repairs during social and private speech, Manfra found that approximately eight percent of preschoolers’ utterances made during problem-solving tasks contained errors and self-repairs. Moreover, he found that children made errors and repairs both while talking through the task with another person and alone, providing evidence that they monitor speech for themselves, just as adults do.

“Adults often struggle to find the right word or have breaks in their speech as they think through a task,” Manfra said. “Though they make corrections, they often internalize those corrections, talking to themselves in their head rather than aloud. To help children repair their private speech, adults working with children should model speech repair behaviors by talking aloud while working on a task. Doing so will help children realize that even without a listener present, speech errors should be corrected.”

“Speech monitoring and repairs in preschool children’s social and private speech,” recently was published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly. Shannon Tyler with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Adam Winsler from George Mason University contributed to the study.

{Low socio-economic status and fear of abandonment early in life can lead to poor health in adulthood, regardless of adult socio-economic status, according to a new study from psychologists at Rice University.}

“Attachment Orientations, Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia and Stress Are Important for Understanding the Link Between Childhood Socio-Economic Status and Adult Self-Reported Health” appears in the current edition of Annals of Behavioral Medicine. The study examined the self-reported measures of childhood socio-economic status, attachment orientations (such as fear of abandonment or difficulty in forming relationships), stress and adult health of 213 participants from 2005 to 2011.

The study found that people who were in the lowest 25 percent of the sample for socio-economic status as children had 65 percent worse self-reported health as adults than people who were in the top 75 percent of the sample as children. The researchers noted that this poor health later in life occurred regardless of adult socio-economic status.

“Low socio-economic status places burdens on parents where they are less available to their kids at times,” he said. “This can lead to the development of ‘attachment orientations’ — which include fear of abandonment or difficulty in forming close relationships — that can compromise adult health,” said Chris Fagundes, an assistant professor of psychology and the study’s co-author.

Fagundes said the study is one of the first to examine how these attachment issues link early adversity and adult health. He and his co-author, Kyle Murdock, a postdoctoral research fellow in psychology, also found that a person’s biological capacity to regulate their emotions — including stress — had a correlation to overall health.

“If individuals are better at managing negative feelings and levels of stress, they are more likely to be healthy as adults,” Murdock said. “However, if they are not so good at managing emotions, they are more likely to be less healthy.”

Fagundes and Murdock hope the study will encourage further exploration of why low socio-economic status during childhood is associated with an increased risk of experiencing health disparities in adulthood.

“Ultimately, early childhood is a critical time for adult health, regardless of whether you move up the socio-economic ladder as an adult,” the authors concluded.

{New dating on the stone buildings of Nan Madol suggests the ancient coral reef capital in the Pacific Ocean was the earliest among the islands to be ruled by a single chief.}

The discovery makes Nan Madol a key locale for studying how ancient human societies evolved from simple societies to more complex societies, said archaeologist Mark D. McCoy, Southern Methodist University, Dallas. McCoy led the discovery team.

McCoy deployed uranium series dating to determine that when the tomb was built it was one-of-a-kind, making it the first monumental scaled burial site on the remote islands of the Pacific.

The discovery enables archaeologists to study more precisely how societies transform to more and more complex and hierarchical systems, said McCoy, an expert in landscape archaeology and monumental architecture and ideology in the Pacific Islands.

“The kind of society that we live in today, it wasn’t born last year, or even 100 years ago,” McCoy said. “It has its roots in a pre-modern era like Nan Madol where you have a king or chief. These islanders invented a new kind of society — that is a socially creative achievement. The idea of chiefs, someone in charge, is not a new thing, but it’s an extremely important precursor. We know tribes and bands predate chiefdoms and states. But it’s not a straight line. By looking at these intermediate stages we get insight into that social phenomenon.”

The analysis is the first time uranium-thorium series dating, which is significantly more precise than previously used radiocarbon dating, was deployed to calculate the age of the stone buildings that make up the famous site of Nan Madol (pronounced Nehn Muh-DOLL) — the former capital of the island of Pohnpei.

“The thing that makes this case special is Nan Madol happened in isolation, it happened very recently, and we have multiple lines of evidence, including oral histories to support the analysis,” McCoy said. “And because it’s an island we can be much more specific about the natural resources, the population, all the things that are more difficult when people are on a continent and all connected. So we can understand it with a lot more precision.”

Nan Madol, which UNESCO this year named a World Heritage Site, was previously dated as being established in A.D. 1300. McCoy’s team narrowed that to just a 20-year window more than 100 years earlier, from 1180 to 1200.

The finding pushes back even earlier the establishment of the powerful dynasty of Saudeleur chiefs who asserted authority over the island society for more than 1,000 years.

First chief was buried in Pohnpei tomb by A.D. 1200

An ancient city built atop a coral reef, Nan Madol has been uninhabited for centuries now. Located in the northwestern Pacific on the remote island of Pohnpei, it’s accessible via a 10-hour flight from Hawaii interspersed with short hops from atoll to atoll, including a stop at a U.S. military installation. Nan Madol is the largest archaeological site in Micronesia, a group of islands in the Caroline Archipelago of Oceania.

Uranium dating indicates that by 1180, massive stones were being transported from a volcanic plug on the opposite side of the island for construction of the tomb. And by 1200, the burial vault had its first internment, the island’s chief. Manipulate two 3D models of the burial monument, one with foliage and one without, at https://skfb.ly/StXA and https://skfb.ly/S9LF.

Construction of monumental buildings followed over the next several centuries on other islands not in the Saudeleur Dynasty across Oceania.

McCoy, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Anthropology, and his team reported their discovery in the journal Quaternary Research in “Earliest direct evidence of monument building at the archaeological site of Nan Madol identified using 230Th/U coral dating and geochemical sourcing of megalithic architectural stone.”

Co-authors include Helen A. Alderson, University of Cambridge, U.K., Richard Hemi, University of Otago, New Zealand, Hai Cheng, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China, and R. Lawrence Edwards, University of Minnesota.

An inactive volcano that hasn’t erupted in at least one million years, Pohnpei Island is much larger than its neighboring atolls at 128 square miles (334 square kilometers), making it about the physical size of Columbia, S.C.

Now part of the 607-island nation of the Federated States of Micronesia, Pohnpei Island and its nearby atolls have a population of 34,000.

Pohnpei monument indicates invention of a new kind of society

How Nan Madol was built remains an engineering mystery, much like Egypt’s Pyramids.

“It’s a fair comparison to the Pyramids, because the construction, like the Pyramids, didn’t help anyone — it didn’t help society be fairer, or to grow crops or to provide any social good. It’s just a really big place to put a dead person,” McCoy said.

It’s important to document such things, he said, because this architectural wonder indicates that independently of Egypt, another group of people put effort into building a monument.

“And we think that’s associated with the invention of a new kind of society, a new kind of chiefdom that ruled the entire island,” McCoy said.

Unlike Egypt and the Pyramids however, Nan Madol was invented much more recently in the big story of human prehistory, he said.

“At A.D. 1200 there are universities in Europe. The Romans had come and gone. The Egyptians had come and gone,” he said. “But when you’re looking at Pohnpei, it’s very recent, so we still have the oral histories of the descendants of the people who built Nan Madol. There’s evidence that you just don’t have elsewhere.”

Monumental city built of coral and stone

Pohnpei was originally settled in A.D. 1 by islanders from the Solomon or Vanuatu island groups. According to local oral history, the Saudeleur Dynasty is estimated to have begun its rule around 1160 by counting back generations from the modern day.

To build the tomb and other structures, naturally formed boulders of basalt, each weighing tons, were somehow transported far from existing quarries on the other side of the island to a lagoon overgrown with mangrove and stretching across 205 acres (83 hectares).

The basalt blocks formed when hot lava cooled and adopted the shape of long, column-shaped boulders and cobbles. Formed from 1 million to 8 million years ago, they came from a number of possible quarry locations on the island.

The city’s stone structures were built atop 98 shallow artificial coral reef islets, each one built by the Saudeleur people. The structures were constructed about three feet above waterline by laying down framing stones, filling the void between them with crushed coral, then laying up double parallel walls and again filling the gap between with crushed coral. The islets are separated by tidal canals and protected from the ocean by 12 sea walls, making Nan Madol what many consider the Venice of the Pacific.

“The structures are very cleverly built,” said McCoy. “We think of coral as precious, but for the architects of Nan Madol it was a building material. They were on a little island surrounded by huge amounts of coral reef that grows really quickly in this environment, so they could paddle out at low tide and mine the coral by smashing some off and breaking it up into rubble.”

The largest and most elaborate architecture in the city is the tomb of the first Saudeleur, measuring 262 feet by 196 feet (80 meters by 60 meters), basically the size of a football field. It is more than 26 feet (8 meters) tall, with exterior walls about six feet to 10 feet (1.8 to 3 meters) thick. A maze of walls and interior walkways, it includes an underground crypt capped with basalt.

“The architecture is meant to be extremely impressive, and it is,” McCoy said. “The structures were built to last — this is one of the rainiest places on earth, so it can be muddy and slippery and wet, but these islets on the coral reef are very stable.”

Portable X-ray technology provides clue to source of megalithic stones

McCoy and his team used portable X-ray fluorescence (XRF) to geochemically match the columnar-shaped basalt stones to natural sources on the island. The uranium-thorium technique calculates a date based on characteristics of the radioactive isotope thorium-230 and its radioactive parent uranium-234.

That enabled them to determine the construction chronology of a tomb that oral histories identify as the resting place of the first chief to rule the entire island.

“We used an X-ray gun, which looks like a 1950s-styled ray gun,” McCoy said. “It allows you — at a distance and without destroying the thing you’re interested in — to bounce X-rays off it and work out what the chemistry is. The mobile technology has gotten much more affordable, making this kind of study feasible.”

Using uranium series dating on coral emerged in the last decade. Accuracy — superior to radiocarbon — is plus or minus a few years of when the coral died. A very good radiocarbon date only will get within 100 years.

“That’s a monumental shift in terms of the precision with which we talk about things,” McCoy said. “If Nan Madol had not been made of the kind of stone we could source, if the architects hadn’t chosen to use coral, we wouldn’t have been able to get this date. So it’s a happy coincidence that the evidence at the site came together.”

McCoy suggests that future research look at finding the cause for this major turning point on Pohnpei, and what sparked this new hierarchy of rule and monumental building in this society.

{Stress isn’t good for your waist line. For older married couples, the added pounds may be caused by a spouse’s long-term stress levels.}

A new University of Michigan study looked at how the negative quality of marriage can be detrimental for weight gain—possibly leading to obesity—when couples 50 and older are stressed. The results varied by gender.

The study specifically focused on chronic stress, which is an ongoing circumstance occurring for more than a year and threatens to overwhelm an individual’s resources, such as financial problems, difficulties at work or long-term caregiving.

Participants came from the nationally longitudinal Health and Retirement Study at the U-M Institute for Social Research. The sample included 2,042 married individuals who completed questions about their waist circumference, negative marriage quality, stress levels and other factors in 2006 and 2010. Couples were married for an average of 34 years.

Greater negative quality ties as reported by husbands exacerbated the effects of partner stress on both husbands’ and wives’ waist circumference.

Interestingly, lower negative quality ties reported by wives exacerbated the effect of wife stress on husbands’ waist circumference, said Kira Birditt, a research associate professor at ISR’s Survey Research Center.

For the increased risk of obesity, 59 percent of the husbands and 64 percent of the wives were at higher risk of disease in the study’s first assessment, whereas 66 percent of husbands and 70 percent of wives were at increased risk at the study’s conclusion.

About 9 percent of the participants showed a 10 percent increase in waist circumference, which represented an average increase of four inches of more over four years, the study indicated.

“Marriage has powerful influences on health,” said Birditt, the study’s lead author. “The stress experienced by partners, and not the individual’s stress, was associated with increased waist circumference. This effect of stress was even stronger in particular spousal relationships.”

Husbands, she said, usually experience lower negative marital quality and thus greater negative feelings may be less expected and more harmful. Because women tend to report greater negative marital quality, low levels of negative marital quality among wives may be an indicator of a lack of investment in the marriage.

Researchers said the study does not address what to do to lessen stress. However, other findings indicate that it’s important for couples to cope with stress together, and that goals created by a couple can be more effective than goals created individually.

Birditt said the findings are applicable to younger couples. Previous research has shown that stress has strong effects on marital quality among this group, too.

“We can only assume that this may translate into health effects, although they are probably not as strong on younger, often healthier, samples,” she said.

The study’s other authors were Nicky Newton, assistant professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, and U-M researchers Jim Cranford and Noah Webster.

{The first animals evolved from their single-celled ancestors around 800 million years ago, but new evidence suggests that this leap to multi-celled organisms in the tree of life may not have been quite as dramatic as scientists once assumed. In a Developmental Cell paper publishing October 13, researchers demonstrate that the single-celled ancestor of animals likely already had some of the mechanisms that animal cells use today to develop into different tissue types.}

“We’re looking into the past at an evolutionary transition that was important for the origin of all animals,” explains Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo, an evolutionary biologist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain. “We show that these early organisms already had some behaviors that we once thought were only in multicellular animals. From there, it would have been a simpler evolutionary leap.”

The researchers studied a single-celled amoeba called Capsaspora owczarzaki, which is a close relative of today’s multi-celled animals. Capsaspora was originally discovered living inside a freshwater snail and has been used by Ruiz-Trillo’s group to learn more about animal evolution. Ruiz-Trillo and his team sequenced the Capsaspora genome in an earlier project and discovered that the amoeba contained many genes that, in animals, are related to multicellular functions.

As a single-celled organism, Capsaspora can’t have multiple different cell types at the same time like humans can. However, a single Capsaspora does change its cell type over time, transitioning from a lone amoeba to an aggregated colony of cells to a hardy cystic form during its life cycle. This new study explored whether Capsaspora uses the same mechanisms to control cell differentiation over time as animals use to control cell development across different tissues.

In collaboration with the team of Eduard Sabidó at the Proteomics Unit of the Centre for Genomic Regulation and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the researchers analyzed the proteins in Capsaspora to determine how the organism might be regulating its internal cell processes at different life stages. “Mass spectrometry-based proteomics allows us to measure which proteins are being expressed and how they are being modified,” says Sabidó. “Intracellular signaling depends on these protein modifications — so by doing these analysis, we know not only what’s in the cell, but also how the cell organizes and communicates internally.”

The researchers discovered that from one stage to another, Capsaspora’s suite of proteins undergoes extensive changes, and the organism uses many of the same tools as multicellular animals to regulate these cellular processes. For example, Capsaspora activated transcription factors and a tyrosine-kinase signaling system in different stages to regulate protein formation. “These are the same mechanisms that animals use to differentiate one cell type from another, but they haven’t been observed in unicellular organisms before,” says Ruiz-Trillo.

The presence of these protein-regulating tools in both Capsaspora and animals means that the single-celled ancestor of all animals likely also possessed these systems — and was more complex than scientists have previously given it credit for. “The ancestor already had the tools that the cell needed to differentiate into different tissues,” says Sabidó. “The cells that were around before animals were more or less prepared for this leap.”

{Project Associate Professor Kenji Suetsugu (Kobe University Graduate School of Science) has discovered a new species of plant on the subtropical Japanese island of Kuroshima (located off the southern coast of Kyushu in Kagoshima prefecture) and named it Gastrodia kuroshimensis. This research was published on October 14 in the Phytotaxa.}

Non-photosynthetic mycorrhizal plants, or mycoheterotrophic plants, have long attracted the curiosity of botanists and mycologists. However, a common feature of most mycoheterotrophic plants is their extreme scarcity and small size. In addition, most species are found in the dark understory of forests, only discoverable during the flowering and fruiting period when aboveground organs appear through the leaf litter. As such, we still have scant knowledge on the precise taxonomy of the mycoheterotrophic group.

Professor Suetsugu is involved in documenting the distribution and classification of mycoheterotrophic plants in Japan. In April 2016, during his research trip in the lowland forests in Kuroshima, he came across approximately one hundred individuals of an unfamiliar mycoheterotrophic species. He collected a specimen, carried out a detailed examination of the plant’s morphological characteristics and found that it was indeed a new species.

The description of a new flowering plant species in Japan is itself a very rare event as the flora of this region have been thoroughly investigated. However, G. kuroshimensis was a particularly special discovery because it is both completely mycoheterophic, deriving its nutrition not from photosynthesis but from host fungi, and completely cleistogamous, producing flowers that never bloom.

Cleistogamy, literally meaning ‘a closed marriage’, refers to plants that produce flowers in which self-fertilization occurs within closed buds. This mechanism of reproduction has intrigued botanists since the time of Darwin, and is now recognized as an important mechanism of self-pollination that is found in a diverse range of plant taxa. However, most cleistogamous species also produce chasmogamous (cross-pollinating) flowers. Cleistogamous flowers are considered a bet-hedging strategy, since they require less resources than chasmogamous flowers, and because they can provide reproductive assurance by setting seeds in the absence of pollinators and under disadvantageous environmental conditions. In addition, cleistogamous flowers can also promote adaptation to local habitats, as both maternal sets of genes can be passed onto the progeny, purging deleterious alleles (gene variants which are generally harmful). However, this is a somewhat risky strategy as the progeny are also less able to adapt to changes in spatially and temporally heterogeneous habitats.

The evolution of complete cleistogamy is therefore somewhat of a mystery. Chasmogamous flowers are an important factor in the success of most plants as even a small degree of outcrossing can result in a relatively rapid decline in linkage disequilibrium across the genome, and is sufficient to overcome the negative effects associated with an absence of effective recombination, such as the accumulation of deleterious mutations and a slowdown in the rate of adaptation. The discovery of G. kuroshimensis, therefore, provides a useful opportunity to further investigate the ecological significance, evolutionary history, and genetic mechanisms underlying the evolution of complete cleistogamy.

{A first-of-its-kind study that ranks nations by empathy puts the United States at No. 7, behind countries ranging from Peru to Korea to Saudi Arabia.}

While a top 10 finish isn’t bad, Michigan State University’s William Chopik, lead author of the study, notes that the psychological states of Americans have been changing in recent decades — leading to a larger focus on the individual and less on others.

“These changes might ultimately cause us to leave our close relationships behind,” said Chopik, assistant professor of psychology. “People are struggling more than ever to form meaningful close relationships. So, sure, the United States is seventh on the list, but we could see that position rise or fall depending on how our society changes in the next 20-50 years.”

The researchers analyzed the data from an online survey on empathy completed by more than 104,000 people from around the world. The survey measured people’s compassion for others and their tendency to imagine others’ point of view. Countries with small sample sizes were excluded (including most nations in Africa). All told, 63 countries were ranked in the study.

Ecuador was the most empathetic country, followed in order by Saudi Arabia, Peru, Denmark, United Arab Emirates, Korea, the United States, Taiwan, Costa Rica and Kuwait.

Chopik said he was surprised that three countries from the Middle East — Saudi Arabia, UAE and Kuwait — ranked so highly in empathy considering the long history of aggression and wars with other countries in the region. That could be because the study did not distinguish between feeling empathy toward people in other countries vs. people in one’s own country.

The least empathetic country was Lithuania. In fact, seven of the 10 least empathetic countries were in Eastern Europe.

The study, published online today in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, was co-authored by Ed O’Brien of the University of Chicago and Sara Konrath of Indiana University.

Konrath and O’Brien in 2011 published research suggesting that American college students had become less empathetic over a 20-year span. Potential factors included the explosion of social media; increases in violence and bullying; changing parenting and family practices; and increasing expectations of success.

The latest study is the first to look at empathy on a country-by-country level. And while it “only grabbed a snapshot of what empathy looks like at this very moment,” Chopik noted that cultures are constantly changing.

“This is particularly true of the United States, which has experienced really large changes in things like parenting practices and values,” Chopik said. “People may portray the United States as this empathetic and generous giant, but that might be changing.”

{While jumping spiders are known to have great vision, a new Cornell University study proves for the first time that spiders can hear at a distance. The discovery runs counter to standard textbook wisdom that claimed spiders could only detect nearby sounds.}

A study published online Oct. 13 in the journal Current Biology describes how researchers used metal microelectrodes in a jumping spider’s poppy-seed-sized brain to show that auditory neurons can sense far-field sounds, at distances up to 3 meters, or about 600 spider body lengths.

In further tests, researchers stimulated sensitive long hairs on the spider’s legs and body — previously known to pick up near-field airflow and vibrations — which generated a response in the same neurons that fired after hearing distant sounds, providing evidence the hairs are likely detecting nanoscale air particles that become excited from a sound wave.

“We are the first and only lab that has successfully and fully been able to tap into what the spider’s brain is listening to,” said Ron Hoy, Cornell professor of neurobiology and behavior and the senior author of the study.

An interdisciplinary team with researchers from fields of psychology, biological statistics and computational biology, medicine, and physics included the study’s co-first authors, Paul Shamble, a former graduate student in Hoy’s lab who specializes in spiders and is a distinguished science fellow at Harvard University, and Gil Menda, a postdoctoral researcher in Hoy’s lab.

Menda developed the technique for recording the jumping spider’s neural activity. Standard techniques for studying spider neurology require dissection, which kills the animal because spiders’ bodies are under pressure, so a cut causes the arachnid to quickly bleed and die. Instead, Menda’s method creates a very tiny hole that seals, like a self-sealing tire, around a hair-sized tungsten microelectrode. The electrodes record electrical spikes when neurons fire.

Menda was actually studying visual perception in jumping spiders when his chair squeaked, and neurons suddenly fired. The discovery led him to test reactions to different audio frequencies. He identified an area of the brain that integrates visual and audio stimuli. He also learned the spiders were sensitive to high frequencies and very specific low frequencies, at 90 Hz.

“All the team sat there together and we were thinking, ‘why are they so sensitive to those frequencies?’” Menda said. It turned out 90 Hz is near the same frequency as wing beats of parasitic wasps, the jumping spider’s biggest enemies, which provision their nests with jumping spiders for their young to feed on.

With the help of Ron Miles, professor of mechanical energy at Binghamton University, whose lab has a special quiet room without vibrations, Menda, Miles and undergraduate co-author Katherine Walden ’14, ran experiments with a special cage that allowed them to eliminate vibrations. They used high-speed video and recorded the spider’s behavior when exposed to pulses of sound.

“When we played 90 Hz, 80 percent of the spiders froze” for up to a second, before they turned and jumped, said Menda. By freezing, a classic behavior called a startle response for animals that hear, spiders assess the situation to avoid detection from wasps that scout for movement, before escaping.

The technique opens up studies that link neurology with behavior in all spiders, Hoy said. Menda has since found evidence of hearing in five different spider species: jumping spiders, fishing spiders, wolf spiders, netcasting spiders and house spiders. Future work by Hoy’s lab will investigate audio perception from lyriform organs and will better investigate audio neurons in the brain. The findings could have applications for using hairlike structures for extremely sensitive microphones, such as in hearing aids.