Scientists Reveal How Many Interstellar Objects May Be Visiting Our Solar System

According to a new study led by researchers from the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is), roughly seven ISOs enter our Solar System every year and follow predictable orbits while they are here.

This research could allow us to send a spacecraft to rendezvous with one of these objects in the near future.

https://www.universetoday.com/150478/there-should-be-about-7-inters...

Outbreak of Mysterious Paralyzing Condition Squashed by COVID–19 Pandemic

The grim pall of the COVID-19 pandemic ensures that 2020 will go down as an infamous year in the history of human disease.

But this dark chapter held some surprises we can be thankful for, too. In a new study, researchers found that a predicted 2020 outbreak of a mysterious paralyzing illness failed to materialize on schedule – and in a weird way, we actually have the coronavirus to thank for it.

The condition in question is called acute flaccid myelitis (AFM). This polio-like neurological disease mainly affects children, causing muscle weakness and, in some cases, permanent paralysis and even death.

For decades, cases of AFM were very rare, but in recent years, larger outbreaks across the US and elsewhere have occurred, seemingly reoccurring every two years.

A body of previous research has linked AFM to a rare virus called enterovirus D68 (EV-D68), and while it's not yet known how the virus manifests the symptoms of the AFM disease, coinciding outbreaks of the pair have led researchers to think they are almost certainly related.

In the new research, a team led by first author and infectious disease modeler Sang Woo Park from Princeton University tracked patterns of cases of EV-D68 between 2014 and 2019, with the virus staging significant resurgences in even-numbered years – 2014, 2016, and 2018 – which are thought to be attributable to climate-based factors.

The data suggested 2020 was due for another hit.

"We predicted that a major EV-D68 outbreak, and hence an AFM outbreak, would have still been possible in 2020 under normal epidemiological conditions," the researchers explain in their study.

Of course, as the world was at pains to witness, the epidemiological conditions of 2020 were anything but ordinary, and the expected combo hit of EV-D68 and AFM never came.

https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/13/584/eabd2400

https://www.sciencealert.com/outbreak-of-mysterious-paralyzing-cond...

https://www.iqair.com/world-most-polluted-cities

India third-most polluted country; Delhi most polluted capital city: Report

India is the third-most polluted country in the world. Delhi is the most polluted capital city in the world. Thirty-seven of the forty most polluted cities in the world are in South Asia.

These are the findings of the 2020 World Air Quality Report released by IQAir.

• A mere 1.6% of the cities in South Asia met the WHO PM2.5 target in 2020.
• Thirty-seven of the forty most polluted cities in the world in 2020 are in South Asia.

• Nearly 13 to 22% of deaths in South Asia are linked to air pollution.
• Air pollution causes a loss of 7.4% of South Asia's GDP.
• India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh generally experience the worst air quality in this region, with 32%, 67%, and 80% of cities averaging a US AQI measurement of “Unhealthy” (> 55.5 μg/m³), respectively.

• India showed an overall improvement in several cities, with 63% reporting direct improvements over 2019 averages. All cities whose pollution levels increased in 2020 still show an overall downward trend from 2018 and earlier.
• South and East Asian countries continue to be the most polluted locations.
• Bangladesh, China, India, and Pakistan share 49 of the 50 of the most polluted cities worldwide.

• Air pollution contributes to nearly 7 million premature deaths annually. A staggering 600,000 of these deaths include children.
• Air pollution is estimated to cost the global economy upwards of $2.9 trillion per year, which is equal to 3.3% of the global GDP.
• The Covid-19-induced lockdown resulted in a temporary reduction in fossil-fuel consumption. This resulted in a significant decrease in air pollution.
• 2020 saw a remarkable 65% of global cities experience air quality improvements from 2019, while 84% of countries saw improvements overall.
• The report was compiled by the world's largest database of ground-based air pollution measurements, aggregating PM2.5 data published in real-time from ground-based sensors throughout 2020.
• The 2020 World Air Quality Report includes data for 106 countries, up from 98 countries in 2019 and 69 countries in 2018.

This report  highlights that urgent action is both possible and necessary to combat air pollution, which remains the world’s greatest environmental health threat.

https://health.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/industry/india-thi...

Researchers identify a class of neurons that are most active during non-REM sleep

Typically, pyramidal cells and GABAergic interneurons in the brain are activated simultaneously. A team of neuroscientists at New York University, however, recently identified a unique class of neurons that do not fire at the same time as all principal neurons, cells and interneurons. Interestingly, the team found that these specific neurons are most active during the DOWN state of non-REM (NREM) sleep, when all other neuron types are silent.

 In their study, researchers identified a class of neurons that appear to be most active when all other neurons (i.e., excitatory pyramidal and inhibitory neurons) are silent, in the DOWN state, during NREM stages of sleep. In their follow up experiments, they showed that these neurons are neuroglia-form cells found in the deeper layers of the neocortex, which specifically express genes known as ID2 and Nkx2.1.

When they examined this class of neurons more in depth, they observed that they had an entirely antagonistic relationship with all other known types of neurons in all wakefulness states (i.e., both when mammals are awake and asleep). This suggests that these neurons could have a unique function that sets them apart from all other cells in the brain.

Sleep down state-active ID2/Nkx2.1 interneurons in the neocortex. Nature Neuroscience(2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41593-021-00797-6.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-03-class-neurons-non-rem.html?u...

Lightning strikes played a vital role in life's origins on Earth: study

Lightning strikes were just as important as meteorites in creating the perfect conditions for life to emerge on Earth, geologists say.

Minerals delivered to Earth in meteorites more than 4 billion years ago have long been advocated as key ingredients for the development of life on our planet.

Scientists thought  minimal amounts of these minerals were also brought to early Earth through billions of lightning strikes.

But now researchers  have established that lightning strikes were just as significant as meteorites in performing this essential function and allowing life to manifest.

They say this shows that life could develop on Earth-like planets through the same mechanism at any time if atmospheric conditions are right. 

 Lightning strikes as a major facilitator of prebiotic phosphorus reduction on early Earth, Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-21849-2 , dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-21849-2

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-life-earth-blue.html?utm_source=nwlet...

Scientists create model of an early human embryo from skin cells

In a discovery that will revolutionize research into the causes of early miscarriage, infertility and the study of early human development—an international team of scientists led by Monash University in Melbourne, Australia has generated a model of a human embryo from skin cells.

The team, led by Professor Jose Polo, has successfully reprogrammed these fibroblasts or skin cells into a 3-dimensional cellular structure that is morphologically and molecularly similar to human blastocysts. Called iBlastoids, these can be used to model the biology of early human embryos in the laboratory.

The achievement is a significant breakthrough for the future study of early human development and infertility. To date, the only way to study these first days has been through the use of difficult to obtain, and scarce, blastocysts obtained from IVF procedures.

Modelling human blastocysts by reprogramming fibroblasts into iBlastoids, Nature (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03372-y

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-scientists-early-human-embryo-skin.ht...

As endangered birds lose their songs, they can't find mates

Male songbirds usually learn their tunes from adult mentors. But when aspiring crooners lack proper role models, they hit all the wrong notes—and have less success attracting mates.

For five years, ecologist Ross Crates has tracked the singing ability and breeding success of critically endangered regent honeyeaters. These distinctive black and yellow birds were once common across Australia, but habitat loss since the 1950s has shrunk their population to only about 300 or 400 wild birds today.

While male birds once formed large winter flocks, now they are sparsely distributed across the landscape, so many fly solo. That means fewer honeyeater mentors are nearby during young birds' impressionable first year.

Song learning in many birds is a process similar to humans learning languages—they learn by listening to other individuals. If you can't listen to other individuals, you don't know what you should be learning.

The researchers found that a significant portion of male birds appear to be learning tunes exclusively from other species they encounter. About 12% of male regent honeyeaters wind up producing mangled versions of songs typically sung by noisy friarbirds and black-faced cuckooshrikes, among other species.

In some species, such as mockingbirds, song mimicry adds flourish to love songs. But the female regent honeyeaters aren't impressed.

Unconventional male singers were less successful in wooing mates, the scientists found in research published Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. "We think the females are avoiding breeding and nesting with males that sing unusual songs.

For a population already on the brink of extinction, that's worrisome.

"This research suggests that the loss of a song language once the population reaches a very small size could accelerate their decline

It could be that female honeyeaters aren't even recognizing these unconventional singers as potential partners, and so they're not approaching them. Or it could be that they approach, "but then things go wrong if the males get courtship signals wrong."

Hit the wrong note - Loss of vocal culture and fitness costs in a critically endangered songbird, Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2021). rspb.royalsocietypublishing.or … .1098/rspb.2021.0225

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-honeyeaters-wrong-song.html?utm_sourc...

Study finds evidence of 55 new chemicals in people

Scientists at UC San Francisco have detected 109 chemicals in a study of pregnant women, including 55 chemicals never before reported in people and 42 "mystery chemicals," whose sources and uses are unknown.

The chemicals most likely come from consumer products or other industrial sources. They were found both in the blood of pregnant women, as well as their newborn children, suggesting they are traveling through the mother's placenta.

The study will be published March 17, 2021, in Environmental Science & Technology.

These chemicals have probably been in people for quite some time, but our technology is now helping us to identify more of them

The scientific team used high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) to identify man-made chemicals in people.

But, while these chemicals can be tentatively identified using chemical libraries, they need to be confirmed by comparing them to the pure chemicals produced by manufacturers that are known as "analytical standards." And manufacturers do not always make these available.

New chemicals -2 

The researchers report that 55 of the 109 chemicals they tentatively identified appear not to have been previously reported in people:

• 1 is used as a pesticide (bis(2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidini-4-y) decanedioate)
• 2 are PFASs (methyl perfluoroundecanoate, most likely used in the manufacturing of non-stick cookware and waterproof fabrics; 2-perfluorodecyl ethanoic acid)
• 10 are used as plasticizers (e.g. Sumilizer GA 80—used in food packaging, paper plates, small appliances)
• 2 are used in cosmetics
• 4 are high production volume (HPV) chemicals
• 37 have little to no information about their sources or uses (e.g., 1-(1-Acetyl-2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidin-4-yl)-3-dodecylpyrrolidine-2,5-dione, used in manufacturing fragrances and paints—this chemical is so little known that there is currently no acronym—and (2R0-7-hydroxy-8-(2-hydroxyethyl)-5-methoxy-2-,3-dihydrochromen-4-one (Acronym: LL-D-253alpha), for which there is limited to no information about its uses or sources

http://ucsf.edu/news/2021/03/420061/ucsf-study-finds-evidence-55-ch...

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-evidence-chemicals-people.html?utm_so...

The collective movement of nanorobots observed in vivo

Nanobots are machines whose components are at the nano-scale (one-millionth of a millimeter), and can be designed in such a way that they have the ability to move autonomously in fluids. Although they are still in the research and development phase, significant advances are being made toward the use of nanorobots in biomedicine. Their applications are varied, from the identification of tumor cells to the release of drugs in specific locations of the body. Nanorobots powered by catalytic enzymes are among the most promising systems because they are fully biocompatible and can make use of "fuels" already available in the body for their propulsion. However, understanding the collective behavior of these nanorobots is essential to advance towards their use in clinical practice.

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Technology to detect chemicals in fruit and vegetables

An ITMO Ph.D. student with her colleagues from Russia, Spain and Singapore has developed flexible sensing films based on silver nanoparticles that can be used to identify the presence of pesticide residue on the surface of agricultural produce in minutes. The research results were published in Nanoscale.

When religious leaders stand in a Q for the vaccine!

The world’s largest vaccine maker, Serum Institute of India, is testing a new virus-like particle vaccine for COVID-19 made with technology licensed from the UK-based SpyBiotech.Credit: Reuters/Amit Dave

Cutting emissions: Microwave hot water boiler heating system

https://patents.google.com/patent/US6064047A/en

Why does DNA spontaneously mutate? Quantum physics might explain.

Quantum mechanics, which rules the world of the teensy-tiny, may help explain why genetic mutations spontaneously crop up in DNA as it makes copies of itself, a recent study suggests.

Quantum mechanics describes the strange rules that govern atoms and their subatomic components. When the rules of classical physics, which describe the big world, break down, quantum comes in to explain. In the case of DNA, classical physics offers one explanation for why changes can suddenly appear in a single rung of the spiraling ladder of DNA, resulting in what's called a point mutation.

In a recent study, published Jan. 29 in the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, researchers explore another explanation, showing that a quantum phenomenon called proton tunneling can cause point mutations by allowing positively charged protons in DNA to leap from place-to-place. This, in turn, can subtly change the hydrogen bridges that bind the two sides of DNA's double helix, which can lead to errors when it's time for DNA to make copies of itself. 

In particular, this subtle change can potentially cause misprints in the DNA sequence, where the wrong "letters" get paired together as the strand replicates, the study authors note. These letters, known as bases, usually pair up in a certain way: A to T and G to C. But proton tunneling could cause some bases to mix-and-match. 

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/CP/D0CP05781A#!divAbstract

https://www.livescience.com/quantum-physics-dna-mutations.html

Neuroscientists identify brain circuit motifs that support short-term memory

Humans have the innate ability to store important information in their mind for short periods of time, a capability known as short-term memory. Over the past few decades, numerous neuroscientists have tried to understand how neural circuits store short-term memories, as this could lead to approaches to assist individuals whose memory is failing and help to devise memory enhancing interventions.

Researchers  have recently identified neural circuit motifs involved in how humans store short-term memories. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggest that memory-related neural circuits contain recurrently connected modules that independently maintain selective and continuous activity.

Short-term memories are of approximately 10 seconds or so, for example, if you needed to remember a phone number while you looked for a pen to write the number. Individual neurons, however, are very forgetful, as they can only remember their inputs for about 10 milliseconds. It has been hypothesized that if two forgetful neurons were connected to each other, they could continuously remind each other of what they were supposed to remember so that the circuit can now hold information for many seconds.

It was found that neurons tended to be connected in clusters. This means that the circuit was composed of many independent clusters, or modules, that were each able to store short-term memories independently. 

Targeted photostimulation uncovers circuit motifs supporting short-term memory. Nature Neuroscience(2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41593-020-00776-3.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-03-neuroscientists-brain-circui...

Found in space: Complex carbon-based molecules

Much of the carbon in space is believed to exist in the form of large molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Since the 1980s, circumstantial evidence has indicated that these molecules are abundant in space, but they have not been directly observed.

Now, a team of researchers has identified two distinctive PAHs in a patch of space called the Taurus Molecular Cloud (TMC-1). PAHs were thought  to form efficiently only at high temperatures—on Earth, they occur as byproducts of burning fossil fuels, and they're also found in char marks on grilled food. But the interstellar cloud where the research team observed them has not yet started forming stars, and the temperature is about 10 degrees above absolute zero.

This discovery suggests that these molecules can form at much lower temperatures than expected, and it may lead scientists to rethink their assumptions about the role of PAH chemistry in the formation of stars and planets, the researchers say.

B.A. McGuire el al., "Detection of two interstellar polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons via spectral matched filtering," Science (2021). science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi … 1126/science.abb7535

Ci Xue et al. Detection of Interstellar HC4NC and an Investigation of Isocyanopolyyne Chemistry under TMC-1 Conditions, The Astrophysical Journal (2020). iopscience.iop.org/article/10. … 847/2041-8213/aba631

Brett A. McGuire et al. Early Science from GOTHAM: Project Overview, Methods, and the Detection of Interstellar Propargyl Cyanide (HCCCH2CN) in TMC-1, The Astrophysical Journal (2020). iopscience.iop.org/article/10. … 847/2041-8213/aba632

Andrew M. Burkhardt et al. Ubiquitous aromatic carbon chemistry at the earliest stages of star formation, Nature Astronomy (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-01253-4

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-space-complex-carbon-based-molecules....

Enigmatic circling behavior captured in whales, sharks, penguins, and sea turtles

Technological advances have made it possible for researchers to track the movements of large ocean-dwelling animals in three dimensions with remarkable precision in both time and space. Researchers reporting in the journal iScience on March 18 have now used this biologging technology to find that, for reasons the researchers don't yet understand, green sea turtles, sharks, penguins, and marine mammals all do something rather unusual: swimming in circles.

A wide variety of marine megafauna showed similar circling behavior, in which animals circled consecutively at a relatively constant speed more than twice.

This finding is surprising in part because swimming in a straight line is the most efficient way to move about.

Researchers report that some circling events were recorded at animals' foraging areas, suggesting that it might have some benefit for finding food.

It's possible the circling helps the animals to detect the magnetic field to navigate; interestingly, the researchers say, submarines also circle during geomagnetic observations. But it's also possible that the circling serves more than one purpose.

iScience, Narazaki et al.: "Similar circling movements observed across marine megafauna taxa" www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext … 2589-0042(21)00189-9 , DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2021.102221

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-enigmatic-circling-behavior-captured-...

Artificial intelligence system detects errors when medication is self-administered

From swallowing pills to injecting insulin, patients frequently administer their own medication. But they don't always get it right. Improper adherence to doctors' orders is commonplace, accounting for thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in medical costs annually. Researchers now  have developed a system to reduce those numbers for some types of medications.

The new technology pairs wireless sensing with artificial intelligence to determine when a patient is using an insulin pen or inhaler, and flags potential errors in the patient's administration method. 

Assessment of medication self-administration using artificial intelligence, Nature Medicine (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41591-021-01273-1

Bacteria Behind UTIs Make Their Own DNA Building Blocks From Your Urine

Some infectious bacteria have adapted so well to the human bladder, they appear to make their own DNA using chemicals in our urine.

The urinary tract is a hard place for most bacteria to survive. That's why urine is often said to be sterile, although that's not actually true. 

Just like your gut, human urine is home to a community of microbes, known as a microbiota, and while most bacteria that live within it are harmless, sometimes a particular species can tip the scales, causing painful urinary tract infections (UTIs).

Streptococcus agalactiae is a known source of UTIs in some humans, and new research has now revealed how it can survive in such an unfriendly environment.

In a healthy human body, urine should be relatively low in the four nucleobases making up DNA's code, which are broken down into nitrogenous compounds and excreted out.

Sequencing the S. agalactiae genome, scientists have now found a key, specialized gene, which allows the bacterium to exploit the presence of other compounds in our urine to produce at least one of these bases - guanine - in order for it to survive.

Similar genes have also recently been found in Escherichia coli (E. coli), which is the most common offender of human UTIs. 

Usually, in the gut or the blood, E. coli and Streptococcus scavenge for certain chemicals they need to make DNA, borrowing products like guanine from our own bodies. In the urinary tract, however, these essential building blocks are ultimately broken down into uric acid, which means they are not as easy to find.

It's a tough situation, and it means both E. coli and Streptococcus must synthesize their own chemical bases if they want to grow and reproduce. 

"It's basically a survival strategy to colonize the urine, an environment that not many organisms can live in

It seems to be a common strategy among species of bacteria that make up the microbiome of the urine."

In the study, scientists used mice to show how essential this specialized gene, known as guaA, truly is. Collecting Streptococcus strains from several individuals, researchers compared a normal S. agalactiae infection with a form of the bacterium deficient in guaA.

Microbes that were unable to create their own guanine were unable to colonize the bladder of mice to the same extent. The same thing was found when researchers used synthetic human urine.

This suggests guaA is essential for a Streptococcus infection to take hold in the bladder, not just in mice but also in us.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41396-021-00934-w

https://www.sciencealert.com/bacteria-behind-utis-create-their-own-...

Long COVID Symptoms Are Vanishing For Some Vaccinated Patients, And We Don't Know Why

A woman who had long COVID said her symptoms were gone 36 hours after getting her second dose of COVID-19 vaccine, according to The Washington Post.

Arianna Eisenberg, 34, said she experienced muscle pains, insomnia, fatigue, and brain fog for eight months after getting sick. These symptoms are typical of what has become known as "long COVID".

But 36 hours after receiving a second dose of COVID-19 vaccine, her symptoms were gone, the Post reported.

Eisenberg's story is one of several describing a similar effect.

The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Huffington Post also reported on people for whom long COVID symptoms improved after vaccination.

Daniel Griffith, an infectious diseases clinician and researcher at Columbia University, told The Verge on March 2 that around a third of his long COVID patients reported that they were feeling better after the vaccine.

In a YouTube video, Gez Medinger, a science journalist who reports on long COVID, did a survey of 473 long haulers among support groups on Facebook, The Verge reported, around a third of whom saw their symptoms improve after vaccination.

One small study from the UK's University of Bristol, which has not been peer reviewed, looked at giving vaccines to people with long COVID-19 symptoms, per the Washington Post report.

The scientists gave the vaccine to 44 COVID long-haulers, and compared their reaction to a group of long-haulers who didn't get the vaccine.

They reported that those who had received the vaccine had a "small overall improvement in long COVID symptoms".

https://www.sciencealert.com/woman-with-months-of-long-covid-finds-...

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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Chemists gain new insights into the behavior of water in an influenza virus channel

In a new study of water dynamics, a team of MIT chemists led by Professor Mei Hong, in collaboration with Associate Professor Adam Willard, has discovered that water in an ion channel is anisotropic, or partially aligned. The researchers' data, the first of their kind, prove the relation of water dynamics and order to the conduction of protons in an ion channel. The work also provides potential new avenues for the development of antiviral drugs or other treatments.

Members of the Hong lab conducted sophisticated nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiments to prove the existence of anisotropic water in the proton channel of the influenza M virus, while members of the Willard group carried out independent all-atom molecular dynamics simulations to validate and augment the experimental data. Their study, of which Hong was the senior author, was published in Communications Biology

The influenza B virus protein BM2 is a protein channel that acidifies the virus, helping it to release its genetic material into infected cells. The water in this channel plays a critical role in helping the influenza virus become infectious, because it facilitates proton conduction inside the channel to cross the lipid membrane.

This new study has provided the missing link in a full understanding of the mixed hydrogen-bonded chain between water and histidine inside the M2 channel. To curb the flu virus protein, the channel would have to be plugged with small molecules—i.e., antiviral drugs—so that the water pathway would be broken.

the researchers were able to observe that the water network has fewer hydrogen-bonding bottlenecks in the open state than in the closed state. Thus, faster dynamics and higher orientational order of water molecules in the open channel establish the water network structure that is necessary for proton hopping and successful infection on the virus' part.

When a flu virus enters a cell, it goes into a small compartment called the endosome. The endosome compartment is acidic, which triggers the protein to open its water-permeated pathway and conduct the protons into the virus. Acidic pH has a high concentration of hydrogen ions, which is what the M2 protein conducts. Without the water molecules relaying the protons, the protons will not reach the histidine, a critical amino acid residue. The histidine is the proton-selective residue, and it rotates in order to shuttle the protons carried by the water molecules. The relay chain between the water molecules and the histidine is therefore responsible for proton conduction through the M2 channel. Therefore, the findings indicated in this research could prove relevant to the development of antiviral drugs and other practical applications.

Martin D. Gelenter et al. Water orientation and dynamics in the closed and open influenza B virus M2 proton channels, Communications Biology (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s42003-021-01847-2

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-chemists-gain-insights-behavior-influ...

Bioengineers learn the secrets to precisely turning on and off genes

In a recent study , scientists have shown how to simultaneously harness multiple forms of regulation in living cells to strictly control gene expression and open new avenues for improved biotechnologies.

Engineered microbes are increasingly being used to enable the sustainable and clean production of chemicals, medicines and much more. To make this possible, bioengineers must control when specific sets of genes are turned on and off to allow for careful regulation of the biochemical processes involved.

Although turning on or off a gene sounds simple, getting a living cell to do it on command is a real challenge. Every cell is slightly different, and the processes involved are not 100 percent reliable. To solve this issue, the team took inspiration from nature where key events are often controlled by multiple processes simultaneously.

The team showed that by using this type of multi-level regulation, they could create some of the most high-performance switches for gene expression built to date. They demonstrated that even when used outside of living cells, these multi-level systems offered some of the most stringent control over gene expression yet seen.

Harnessing the central dogma for stringent multi-level control of gene expression, Nature Communications (2021).

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-bioengineers-secrets-precisely-genes....

Researchers find evidence of elusive Odderon particle

For 50 years, the research community has been hunting unsuccessfully for the so-called Odderon particle. Now, a Swedish-Hungarian research group has discovered the mythical particle with the help of extensive analysis of experimental data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland.

In 1973, two French particle physicists found that, according to their calculations, there was a previously unknown quasi-particle. The discovery sparked an international hunt.

The Odderon particle is what briefly forms when protons collide in high-energy collisions, and in some cases do not shatter, but bounce off one another and scatter. Protons are made up of quarks and gluons, that briefly form Odderon and Pomeron particles.

And now a research team, involving researchers from Lund University, has succeeded in identifying the Odderon in connection with an advanced data analysis study at the particle accelerator CERN.

 T. Csörgő et al. Evidence of Odderon-exchange from scaling properties of elastic scattering at TeV energies, The European Physical Journal C (2021). DOI: 10.1140/epjc/s10052-021-08867-6

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-evidence-elusive-odderon-particle.htm...

Past Climate Change: Geologists Explore the History of Cave Ice

Covid reinfection rare, more common over 65: study

Surviving Covid-19 protects most people against reinfection for at least six months, but elderly patients are more likely to be laid low by the virus a second time, researchers reported Thursday. An assessment of reinfection rates in Denmark last year showed that just over half a percent of people who tested positive for Covid during the first wave from March to May did so again during the second wave, from September to December. Among these, the researchers found that initial infection with Covid-19 was likely to bestow 80 percent protection from reinfection among under-65s, but that dropped to just 47 percent in older people. "We did not identify anything to indicate that protection against reinfection declines within six months of having Covid-19, say the researchers.

The researchers said this meant that initial infection with Covid-19 was likely to bestow 80 percent protection from reinfection among under 65s.

For those aged over 65, however, the protection level diminished sharply.

Of the more than 1,900 over-65s who tested positive during the first wave, 17 (0.88 percent) tested positive again during the second.

This compared to 1,866 out of more than 90,000 over-65s (two percent) who tested positive during the second wave but not the first -- a protection difference of 47 percent.

The study confirms what a number of others appeared to suggest: reinfection with Covid-19 is rare in younger, healthy people.

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Teamwork makes light shine ever brighter

If you’re looking for one technique to maximize photon output from plasmons, stop. It takes two to wrangle. Rice University physicists came across a phenomenon that boosts the light from a nanoscale device more than 1,000 times greater than they anticipated. When looking at light coming from a plasmonic junction, a microscopic gap between two gold nanowires, there are conditions in which applying optical or electrical energy individually prompted only a modest amount of light emission. Applying both together, however, caused a burst of light that far exceeded the output under either individual stimulus. 

**

Finger tap-operated virtual realities

Study shows stronger brain activity after writing on paper than on tablet or smartphone

Unique, complex information in analog methods likely gives brain more details to trigger memory.

A study of Japanese university students and recent graduates has revealed that writing on physical paper can lead to more brain activity when remembering the information an hour later. Researchers say that the unique, complex, spatial and tactile information associated with writing by hand on physical paper is likely what leads to improved memory.

"Actually, paper is more advanced and useful compared to electronic documents because paper contains more one-of-a-kind information for stronger memory recall.

Contrary to the popular belief that digital tools increase efficiency, volunteers who used paper completed the note-taking task about 25% faster than those who used digital tablets or smartphones.

Keita Umejima, Takuya Ibaraki, Takahiro Yamazaki, and Kuniyoshi L. Sakai. 19 March 2021. Paper Notebooks vs. Mobile Devices: Brain Activation Differences During Memory Retrieval. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. DOI: 10.3389/fnbeh.2021.634158

Sakai lab: https://www.sakai-lab.jp/english/

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences: https://www.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/eng_site/

https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-03/uot-sss031821.php

World's smallest origami bird shows potential of nanoscale machines

Carbon pawprint: is man's best friend the planet's enemy?

Is your adorable puppy as bad for the planet as a gas-guzzling SUV?

While the precise carbon pawprint of our pets is the source of scientific debate, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: lovable, they may be, cats and dogs have an impact on the planet.

No doubt, they bring a lot of good to people, both working animals and companion animals. But they mostly eat meat. 

However, some argue that because most pet foods are based on secondary products from the human food industry, especially the ingredients that are animal-based, the environmental costs of those ingredients are not the same as those being consumed by humans.

Yet in some countries meat is reared specifically for animal consumption. As with humans—animal carbon footprints "depend on where you live in the world".

But scientists can agree on at least one thing: a large dog, logically, eats more than a small cat and therefore has a bigger environmental impact. It si not possible to make a dog fully vegetarian.

So what can the environmentally conscious animal lovers out there do to mitigate the damage caused by their furry friends?

Experts suggest considering other species of animals to have as pets, such as hamsters or birds. But if you don't want to have an ecological pawprint, don't have a pet at all. Let them live in wilderness using natural resources and  bound by natural laws.

But one environmental impact from outdoor cats  can't be avoided. A massacre all around your home: dead birds, shrews, lizards...

One solution for animals and the planet would be to cut down or diversify the protein in their diet.

Several dried food producers already use insects in their kibble, although there is still debate over the environmental merits of various animal foods and their production.

https://phys.org/news/2017-08-truth-cats-dogs-environmental-impact....

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-carbon-pawprint-friend-planet-enemy.h...

**

Microscope that detects individual viruses could power rapid diagno...

A fast, low-cost technique to see and count viruses or proteins from a sample in real time, without any chemicals or dyes, could underpin a new class of devices for rapid diagnostics and viral load monitoring, including HIV and the virus that causes COVID-19. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign described the technique, called Photonic Resonator Interferometric Scattering Microscopy, or PRISM, in the journal Nature Communications. 

Researchers have developed a new form of microscopy that amplifies the interaction between light and biological materials. One can use it for very rapid and sensitive forms of diagnostic testing, and also as a very powerful tool for understanding biological processes at the scale of individual items, like counting individual proteins or recording individual protein interactions.

**

The new crisis in cosmology:

Scientists Just Demonstrated How These 'Spiders' Might Form on Mars

We may not have detected life on Mars, but we have found 'spiders'... of a sort.

They're called araneiforms: dark, spider-like systems of branching, fractal troughs found only in the southern polar regions of the red planet. There's nothing like them on Earth, or any other planet in the Solar System.

That makes it tricky to understand what creates them, but scientists have just obtained the first physical evidence that supports the most popular model, known as Kieffer's hypothesis. According to this idea, the spider-like forms are shaped by the direct sublimation of frozen carbon dioxide (CO₂).

"This research presents the first set of empirical evidence for a surface process that is thought to modify the polar landscape on Mars

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-82763-7

https://www.sciencealert.com/there-are-spiders-on-mars-like-nothing...

The Sensitivity of Human Fingertips Is Greater Than We Ever Imagined

Skin – the largest organ in the human body – envelops us from head to toe, letting us touch, feel, and interact with the outside world. But there's one part of that organ even more attuned to touch than any other.

A new study has revealed just how receptive the sensory neurons in our fingers are: As it turns out, we can detect touch on the minuscule scale of a single fingerprint ridge.

Sensory neurons attached to receptors are dotted just underneath the skin's surface, allowing us to detect touch, vibration, pressure, pain, and lots more. Our hands alone contain tens of thousands of these neurons, each one with receptors on a small surface area of the skin, called a receptive field.

To map these fields, the researchers strapped down the arms of 12 healthy people and glued their fingernails to plastic holders to really make sure they couldn't move. A machine then wheeled tiny, 0.4 millimeter-wide cones around 7 mm apart across their skin (you can see what that looks like below) and the team recorded each neuron's response using an electrode in the participants' arms.

Specifically, they were mapping the more sensitive zones – known as subfields – within these receptive fields.

By calculating the sensory neuron detection areas and mapping them onto the fingerprint, the team found that the detection area's width was equivalent to the width of one fingerprint ridge.

These subfields also didn't move when the machine wheeled the dots faster or slower, or changed directions, suggesting that these sensitive areas are anchored to the fingerprint ridges themselves.

"We report that the sensitivity of the subfield arrangement for both neuron types on average corresponds to a spatial period of ~0.4 mm and provide evidence that a subfield's spatial selectivity arises because its associated receptor organ measures mechanical events limited to a single papillary ridge," the researchers write in their new paper.

https://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2021/03/08/JNEUROSCI.1716-2...

https://www.sciencealert.com/our-fingertips-have-a-secret-weapon-th...

To produce more food, scientists look to get more mileage out of plant enzymes

Enzymes play essential roles in the cells of every living thing, from bacteria, to plants to people. Some do their jobs a few times and fizzle out. Others can repeat a task hundreds of thousands of times before they quit.

Organisms put a lot of energy into replacing worn out enzymes, energy they could put into other processes. In plants grown for food, fuel, fiber or other purposes, longer lasting enzymes could translate into increased yields.

 Andrew D. Hanson el al., "The number of catalytic cycles in an enzyme's lifetime and why it matters to metabolic engineering," PNAS (2021). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023348118

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-food-scientists-mileage-enzymes.html?...

**

Five myths about the Big Bang

The whole universe was packed together in an infinitely small point, then it exploded, and the entire mass that made up the universe was sent out into space.

No, this is not how it happened.

The Big Bang theory is that about 14 billion years ago the universe was in a state that was much warmer and much denser, and that it expanded. That's it, it's not much more than that. 

Since then space has continued to expand and has become colder.

Based on the theory, scientists have gained a clearer overview of the history of the universe, such as when elementary particles were formed and when atoms, stars and galaxies formed.

If you take the entire observable universe and rewind all the way back, everything fit into a very, very small area. An explosion where the mass explodes in all directions is not an accurate picture of the Big Bang.

The universe itself expands, space itself expands.

So it isn't the galaxies that are moving apart, but space that's expanding.

We can think of it as a ball of dough with raisins. The dough represents space and the raisins are the galaxies. Set the dough to rise, and the raisins will end up further apart, without actually having moved. At the same time, it's true that galaxies also move due to mutual gravitational attraction—that's an additional effect.

A few galaxies are blue-shifting, meaning they're moving towards us. This applies to some nearby galaxies. But over large distances, this effect is eclipsed by Hubble-Lemaître's law, which states how fast galaxies are moving away in proportion to distance. In fact, the distance increases faster than light between points that are extremely far apart.

The universe doesn't expand into anything. Scientists don't believe that the universe has an edge.

That which we call the observable universe is a bubble surrounding us that is 93 billion light-years in diameter. The more distant something is that we look at, the farther back in time we're seeing. We can't observe or measure anything farther away than the distance light has managed to travel towards us since the Big Bang.

Since the universe has been expanding, the observable universe is counterintuitively larger than 14 billion light-years.

But scientists calculate that the universe outside our bubble is much, much larger than that, perhaps infinite.

The universe can be "flat," it appears. That would mean that two light rays would remain parallel and never meet. If you tried to travel to the end of the universe, you would never reach it. The universe goes on infinitely.

If the universe has positive curvature, it could in theory be finite. But then it would be like a kind of strange sphere. If you traveled to the "end" you would end up in the same place you started, no matter which direction you took. It's a bit like being able to travel around the world and ending up back where you started.

In either case, the universe can expand without having to expand into anything.

An infinite universe that's getting bigger is still infinite. A "spherical universe" has no edge.

Myths about big bang - part 1 

Big bang myths - part 2

The big band didn't have  a center.  

If we imagine the Big Bang as an explosion, it's easy to think that it exploded outwards, from a center. That's how explosions work.

But that wasn't the case with the Big Bang. Almost all galaxies are moving away from us, in all directions. It seems like the Earth was the center of the beginning of the universe. But it wasn't.

All other observers would see the same thing from their home galaxy.

The universe is expanding everywhere at the same time. The Big Bang didn't happen in any particular place.

It happened everywhere.

It's true that our entire observable universe was gathered incredibly tightly together in very little space at the beginning of the Big Bang.

But how can the universe be infinite, and at the same time have been so small?

You might read that the universe was smaller than an atom at first and then the size of a football. But that analogy insinuates that space had boundaries in the beginning, and an edge.

There's nothing that says that the universe wasn't already infinite at the Big Bang.

The whole observable universe comes from a tiny little area that you can call a point. But the point next to it has also expanded, and the next point as well. It's just that it's so far away from us that we can't observe it.

Maybe you've heard that the universe began as a singularity. Or that it was infinitely small, hot and so on. That might be true, but a lot of physicists don't think it's a correct understanding.

Singularities are an expression for mathematics that breaks down and can't be described with ordinary physics.

"The universe today is a little bigger than it was yesterday. And it's even a little bigger still than it was a million years ago. The Big Bang theory involves extrapolating this back in time. Then you need a theory for that: and that's the general theory of relativity."

"If I extrapolate all the way back, the universe gets smaller and smaller, it gets denser and denser, and warmer and warmer. Finally you get to a point where it's really small, really hot and dense. That's actually the Big Bang theory: that the universe started in such a condition. That's where you really have to stop.

If you run the general relativity theory all the way back you reach a point of infinitely high density and heat, where the size is zero.

"That's pure mathematical extrapolation beyond what the theory actually allows.

You then come to a point where the energy density and temperatures are so high that we no longer have physical theories to describe them.

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-myths-big.html?utm_source=nwletter&am...

Evidence of new physics at CERN? Why we're cautiously optimistic ab...

When CERN's gargantuan accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), fired up ten years ago, hopes abounded that new particles would soon be discovered that could help us unravel physics' deepest mysteries. Dark matter, microscopic black holes and hidden dimensions were just some of the possibilities. But aside from the spectacular discovery of the Higgs boson, the project has failed to yield any clues as to what might lie beyond the standard model of particle physics, our current best theory of the micro-cosmos.

Researchers reveal how a cell mixes its mitochondria before it divides

In a landmark study, a team led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has discovered and filmed the molecular details of how a cell, just before it divides in two, shuffles important internal components called mitochondria to distribute them evenly to its two daughter cells. The finding, published in Nature, is principally a feat of basic cell biology, but this line of research may one day help scientists understand a host of mitochondrial and cell division-related diseases, from cancer to Alzheimers and Parkinsons.

Mitochondria are tiny oxygen reactors that are crucial for energy production in cells. It was found in the study that a protein called actin, which is known to assemble into filaments that play a variety of structural roles in cells, also has the important task of ensuring an even distribution of mitochondria prior to cell division. Thanks to this system, the two new cells formed by the division will end up with approximately the same mass and quality of these critical energy producers.

Mitochondria, which can number from a handful to tens of thousands per cell, depending on the cell type, are probably especially important to mix evenly. They are critical for the health of a cell, and contain their own small DNA genomes—new mitochondria can’t be produced in a cell except by the splitting of mitochondria inherited from the mother cell.

https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/news-releases/2021/march/penn-med...

https://researchnews.cc/news/5797/Penn-Medicine-researchers-reveal-...

Ten years later, here’s what Fukushima’s damaged reactors look like today

Why you can't compare Covid-19 vaccines

All meat that has been smoked, salted, cured, dried or canned is considered processed.

Corona waste kills animals throughout the entire world

Biologists started a quest to determine how often and where interactions between corona waste and animals occur. They collected observations from Brazil to Malaysia and from social media to local newspapers and international news websites.

A fox in the United Kingdom, birds in Canada, hedgehogs, seagulls, crabs, and bats - it transpired that all sorts of animals, everywhere, become entangled in face masks.

They found reports about apes chewing on face masks, and about a penguin with a face mask in its stomach. Pets too, especially dogs, were found to swallow face masks. Animals become weakened due to becoming entangled or starve due to the plastic in their stomach. The diversity of animals influenced by corona waste is considerable. "Vertebrates and invertebrates on land, in freshwater, and in seawater become entangled or trapped in corona waste.

 animals use the waste as nest material. For example, coots in Dutch canals use face masks and gloves as nest material. And the packaging from paper handkerchiefs is found in nests too. As such, we even see the symptoms of COVID-19 in animal structures.

https://www.covidlitter.com/

https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-03/nbc-cwk032421.php

Cells can walk a microscopic tightrope, researchers discover

By offering cells a microscopic “tightrope,” Johns Hopkins University and Virginia Tech scientists have discovered a new and surprising form of cellular movement.

Normally when cells crawling in an organism come in contact with another one another, they reverse and move randomly away from the other cell. But when nanofiber “tightropes” coated with proteins were suspended in a three-dimensional medium for cells to explore, cells either walked past each other to avoid a collision or formed a train moving together along the length of the nanofiber.

The option of walking the line made the typically erratically moving cells much more systemic and predictable, the team found. This new understanding of cellular movement helps explain why some drugs work differently in tests within petri dishes than they do in humans or animals.

The findings just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“A cocktail of mechanical engineering, cell biology, physics, and computational modeling reveals cell behaviors not known before

Neuroscientists Detect Confused 'Zombie' Cells in The Human Brain After Death

You'd think once a human is dead, the body would be done doing things; without blood circulation and air, the inner systems would be fast depleted. But due to a weird quirk of biology there are such things as the living dead - living cells, at least, within a done and dusted body.

Some cells within human brains actually increase their activity after we die. These 'zombie' cells ramp up their gene expression and valiantly continue trying to do their vital tasks, as if someone forgot to tell them they're now redundant.

Neurologists recently  watched as these cells stubbornly sprouted new tentacles and busied themselves with chores for hours after death.

Most studies assume that everything in the brain stops when the heart stops beating, but this is not so.

While most gene activity remained stable for the 24 hours,  neuronal cells and their gene activity rapidly depleted. Most remarkably though, glial cells increased gene expression and processes after death. 

While surprising at first, this actually makes a lot of sense, given glial cells, such as waste-eating microglia and astrocytes, are called into action when things go wrong. And dying is about as 'wrong' as living things can go.

That glial cells enlarge after death isn't too surprising given that they are inflammatory and their job is to clean things up after brain injuries like oxygen deprivation or stroke. The scientists then demonstrated the RNA expressed by genes doesn't itself change within 24 hours post death, so any changes in its amount must indeed be due to the continuation of biological processes.

After 24 hours, however, these cells also succumbed and were no longer distinguishable from the degrading tissue that surrounded them.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-85801-6

https://www.sciencealert.com/confused-zombie-cells-spring-to-action...

Earth is the only planet known to maintain life. Find out the origins of our home planet and some of the key ingredients that help make this blue speck in space a unique global ecosystem.

Cheap Wine Really Does Taste Better if You Increase The Price Tag

In 2002, one of the most prestigious restaurants in New York City served four Wall Street workers its most expensive bottle of wine: a US$2,000 Mouton Rothschild from 1989.

After it was decanted, the host of the group, a self-reported wine connoisseur, twirled his glass, took a sip and began praising the wine for its purity. Blissfully ignorant, the group had accidentally been given the cheapest bottle of wine on the menu, a Pinot noir valued at just US$18.

This story might sound like a flight of fancy, but growing research on the psychology and neuroscience of wine-tasting suggests mistakes like this are made all the time, although true wine experts often know better.

One of the first studies to explicitly manipulate the price of wine in a realistic tasting session has found a cheap glass becomes far more pleasant when participants are told it has a higher price. 

The experiment was conducted during a public event at the University of Basel in Switzerland. To entertain visitors, the psychology department kindly contributed a wine tasting session.

The event drew 140 participants throughout the day and consisted of a 15-minute session of wine tasting. For each tasting, participants were given their own table and told not to communicate with others also involved in the event - that way their views of the wine wouldn't be influenced.

Six small glasses of wine were then placed on each table, and visitors were told to taste each and every glass in a specific sequence fully randomized for every individual. After each sip, participants were instructed to clear their palates with a swish of water and rate the wine for pleasantness and intensity.

Half the glasses held three different wines without any price information. The remaining glasses contained three different wines of low, medium, and high price with the retail tag clear to see.

In each case, one, two or none of these price-tagged wines had been labeled deceptively. If they were mislabeled, the retail price displayed was either four times higher, or four times lower than the real cost.

When the price of the wine was hidden, researchers found no difference in pleasantness ratings, no matter the actual price.

On the other hand, when the price of wine was mislabeled and deceptively up-priced, pleasantness ratings also increased. For instance, when a low-cost wine was tagged to appear higher in price and exceeded that of the mid-priced wine, participants tended to enjoy the low-cost one more.

"Thus, in wine may lay the truth, but its subjective experience may also lie in the price," the authors conclude. 

Beyond sheer enjoyment, this study is the first to assess the perceived intensity of blind tastings in a real world setting, and it suggests that most wine drinkers are able to determine something different about more expensive wine - they just don't enjoy that difference as much.

part 1

In 2008, researchers used functional MRI to scan participants while they tasted wines that were deceptively labeled. When the price of a wine was increased, participants reportedly enjoyed the flavor more, while intensity ratings remained the same. 

In 2017, follow-up research was able to confirm these results. Scanning the brains of those tasting wines, researchers found increasing the price of the product once again improved subjective reports of flavor without changing its perceived intensity.

What's more, this deceptive pricing increased activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex of the brain, which is thought to encode for experienced pleasantness. 

"The reward and motivation system is activated more significantly with higher prices and apparently increases the taste experience in this way," said behavioral economist Bernd Weber from the University of Bonn in Germany in 2017. 

Such studies have allowed us to better understand how marketing might influence our brains and our perceptions of pleasantness, but few experiments have replicated these effects in a real-world setting. Previous fMRI studies fed wine to participants through plastic tubes, which means the color and smell were not taken into account, just the price and taste.

This has helped narrow down confounding factors, but it also misses out on several of the ways experts normally judge wine.

The current study is more realistic, measuring both pleasantness and intensity "to get a more comprehensive understanding of the influence of price...."

Unlike previous studies, the authors found decreasing the price of an expensive wine by four fold did not change the overall wine ratings for its pleasantness among laypeople. Only when the price was deceptively increased, did the average person seem to prefer the wine more.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S095032932100...

https://www.sciencealert.com/psychologists-find-cheap-wine-tastes-b...

Multiple factors explain the covering behaviour in the green sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis

Although numerous species of sea urchins often cover themselves with small rocks, shells and algal fragments, the function of this covering behaviour is poorly understood. Diving observations showed that the degree to which the sea urchin Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis covers itself in the field decreases with size. We performed laboratory experiments to examine how the sea urchin's covering behaviour is affected by the presence of predators, sea urchin size, wave surge, contact with moving algae blades and sunlight. The presence of two common sea urchin predators did not influence the degree to which sea urchins covered themselves. Covering responses of sea urchins that were exposed to a strong wave surge and sweeping algal blades were significantly greater than those of individuals that were maintained under still water conditions. The degree to which sea urchins covered themselves in the laboratory also tended to decrease with increasing size. Juveniles showed stronger covering responses than adults, possibly because they are more vulnerable to dislodgement and predation. We found that UV light stimulated a covering response, whereas UV-filtered sunlight and darkness did not, although the response to UV light was much weaker than that to waves and algal movement. Our observations suggest that the covering behaviour of S. droebachiensis has evolved as an adaptation to protect it from mechanical injuries associated with abrasion and dislodgement, and to a lesser extent as a defence against UV radiation. The covering behaviour may reduce the sea urchin's ability to move and this would limit its ability to forage and to flee from predators. In this case, the covering behaviour may have evolved as a trade-off between locomotion and limiting environmental stresses.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S000334720700....

Image source: Back to sea society blog