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The Ukraine war is forcing migrating eagles to change their flight paths, scientists say

ination online — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 11:31:32 +0000

Greater spotted eagles are already a species under threat. Now, scientists have found that they have been facing yet another danger: the war in Ukraine.

Eagles have been exposed to conflict events while migrating through Ukraine, forcing them to deviate from their usual flight path, according to a study published Monday in the journal Current Biology.

Listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, greater spotted eagles have been largely eradicated from western and central Europe, according to the study.

However, Polesia, a large wetland region that borders Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, remains a stronghold for the species.

On March 1, 2022, a week after Russia invaded Ukraine, the first of 21 tagged greater spotted eagles crossed into Ukraine on its usual migration, according to researchers from the UK and Estonia.

“When the conflict started in February 2022, we were kind of watching things unfold on the news like everyone else, but sitting there also with the feeling that we know our birds are about to pass through that area and wondering what that might mean for them,” lead study author Charlie Russell, a conservation scientist and ornithologist who is studying for his PhD at the UK’s University of East Anglia, told CNN Tuesday.

The study authors found that the eagles diverted significantly from their usual flight path when compared to pre-conflict migrations between 2019 and 2021, with the eagles flying further and less directly to breeding grounds.

While the researchers did not have direct observational evidence to determine the stimuli the birds could respond to, they thought noise and light from military activities could have affected their behavior.

The deviations were found to be greater at areas where the route of migration coincided with more military activity, but it differed for each bird due to varying exposures and responses to conflict, according to the researchers.

Due to greater deviations, the birds had to travel further and their migrations also took longer to complete.

Females, for example, spent an average of 246 hours travelling to breeding grounds, rather than the pre-conflict time of around 193 hours, according to the study.

The eagles travelled 85 kilometers (53 miles) further on average and, in an extreme case, one bird flew an extra 250 kilometers (155 miles) further compared to previous years, Russell said.

Males were found to travel more slowly, averaging a speed of around 7.66 meters (25 feet) per second, rather than the pre-conflict average of around 9.75 meters (32 feet) per second.

The researchers observed no difference in migration performance and deviation patterns outside of Ukraine, according to the study.

Potential breeding risk

The other significant finding was that the birds were making less stopovers than in previous years.

Stopover sites are essential places for the eagles to get food, water, rest and refuel, and shelter from poor weather during their long journeys, according to researchers.

While 18 tracked individuals – 90% of the tracked eagles – made stopovers in Ukraine while migrating between 2018 and 2021, only six made stopovers in 2022.

In the years before the conflict, 11 of the eagles used common stopover sites in Ukrainian Polesia, but these sites were not used at all in 2022.

“The combination of these two things, having to fly forever and expend more energy, and the reduced ability to recover that energy, is something that we think will have had sublethal fitness costs, which might have carried over into the breeding period that year,” Russell added.

Reduced fitness and the delayed onset of breeding due to spending more time recovering from the journey could reduce breeding success, which is already relatively low in the population, as well as impact chick provisioning and the fledgling date of young birds, according to the study.

“I think it’s very important to understand the different stresses that the environment is facing as a result of conflict so that in a post-conflict setting, we can better support not just greater spotted eagles but the wider ecosystems as well to recover,” Russell said.

“We know very little about the impacts of human conflicts on wildlife, particularly when it comes to migratory species, so this study plugs an important knowledge gap,” professor Nathalie Pettorelli, an applied ecologist and senior research fellow at the Zoological Society of London, told CNN Tuesday.

Pettorelli, who was not involved in the study, added that understanding what affects the eagles’ survival is “key” to ensuring they have a future.

“More broadly, human conflicts are on the rise globally, stressing the need for more research on the impacts of conflicts on biodiversity and, where possible, for the development of effective mitigation policies,” Pettorelli said.

Ukraine accused Russia of “ecocide” after suffering an environmental catastrophe in July due to the collapse of the Kakhovka dam in the south of the country that led to more than 100 people being killed, as well as the destruction of farmland and nature reserves.

Russell said the war in Ukraine is “really raising the profile of some of the environmental issues caused by conflict. And it’s not just in Ukraine. This is something that’ll be happening to different extents at other conflict zones as well.”

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Google and Harvard unveil most detailed ever map of human brain

ination online — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 11:22:26 +0000

en years ago, Dr. Jeff Lichtman — a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University — received a small brain sample in his lab.

Although tiny, the 1 cubic millimeter of tissue was big enough to contain 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels and 150 million synapses.

“It was less than a grain of rice, but we began to cut it and look at it, and it was really beautiful,” he said. “But as we were accumulating the data, I realized that we just had way, way more than we could handle.”

Eventually, Lichtman and his team ended up with 1,400 terabytes of data from the sample — roughly the content of over 1 billion books. Now, after the lab team’s decade of close collaboration with scientists at Google, that data has turned into the most detailed map of a human brain sample ever created.

300 million images

The brain sample came from a patient with severe epilepsy. It’s standard procedure, Lichtman said, to remove a small portion of the brain to stop the seizures, and then look at the tissue to make sure it’s normal. “But it was anonymized, so I knew next to nothing about the patient, other than their age and gender,” he said.

To analyze the sample, Lichtman and his team first cut it into thin sections using a knife with a blade edge made of diamond. The sections were then embedded into a hard resin and sliced again, very thinly. “About 30 nanometers, or roughly 1,000th of the thickness of a human hair. They were virtually invisible, if it weren’t for the fact that we had stained them with heavy metals, which made them visible when doing electron imaging,” he said.

That’s when the researchers realized they needed help with the data, because the resulting images would take up a significant amount of storage.

Lichtman knew that Google was working on a digital map of a fruit fly’s brain, released in 2019, and had the right computer hardware for the job. He got in touch with Viren Jain, a senior staff research scientist at Google who was working on the fruit fly project.

“There were 300 million separate images (in Harvard’s data),” Jain said. “What makes it so much data is that you’re imaging at a very high resolution, the level of an individual synapse. And just in that small sample of brain tissue there were 150 million synapses.”

To make sense of the images, scientists at Google used AI-based processing and analysis, identifying what type of cells were in each picture and how they were connected. The result is an interactive 3D model of the brain tissue, and the largest dataset ever made at this resolution of a human brain structure. Google made it available online as “Neuroglancer,” and a study was published in the journal Science at the same time, with Lichtman and Jain among the coauthors.

Understanding the brain

The collaboration between the Harvard and Google teams resulted in colorized images that make the individual components more visible, but they are otherwise a truthful representation of the tissue.

“The colors are completely arbitrary,” Jain explained, “but beyond that, there’s not much artistic license here. The whole point of this is that we’re not making it up — these are the real neurons, the real wires that exist in this brain, and we’re really just making it convenient and accessible for biologists to view and study.”

The data contained some surprises. For example, rather than forming a single connection, pairs of neurons instead have more than 50. “This is kind of like if two houses on a block had 50 separate phone lines connecting them. What’s going on there? Why are they so strongly connected? We don’t know what the function or significance of this phenomenon is yet, we’re going to have to study it further,” he said.

Eventually, observing the brain at this level of detail could help researchers make sense of unresolved medical conditions, according to Lichtman.

“What does it mean to understand our brain? The best we may be able to do is describe it, and hope that from these descriptions will come a realization, for example, about how normal brains are different from brains that are disordered, in adult psychiatric diseases or developmental disorders like the autism spectrum — that kind of comparison will be very valuable,” he said. “Eventually, it will give us some insight into what’s wrong, which, in most cases, we’re still in the dark about.”

Lichtman also believes that the dataset may be filled with other amazing details that, because of its size, haven’t been discovered yet: “And that’s why we’re sharing it online, so anyone can look at it and find things,” he added.

Next up, the team behind the project aims to create a full map of the brain of a mouse, which would require between 500 and 1,000 times the amount of data of the human brain sample.

“That would mean 1 exabyte, which is 1,000 petabytes,” Lichtman said. “A lot of people are thinking hard about how we’re going to do this, and we’re in the first year of a five-year proof of principle. I think that would be a watershed moment for neuroscience, to have a complete mammalian brain’s wiring diagram; it would answer many, many questions. And of course, it would reveal many more problems, things we hadn’t expected.”

What about mapping an entire human brain? That would be another 1,000 times bigger, Lichtman explained, which means the data would amount to 1 zettabyte. In 2016, that was the size of the entire internet traffic for the year, according to Cisco. At the moment, Lichtman said, it would not only be difficult to even store that much data, but there would be no ethically acceptable way of sourcing a pristine, well-preserved human brain.

Breaking new ground

Researchers in the same field who were not involved with the work expressed their enthusiasm when approached by CNN for comment.

“This study is wonderful, and there is so much to learn from data like this,” said Michael Bienkowski, an assistant professor of physiology and neuroscience at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.

“Much of what we think we understand about the human brain is extrapolated from animals, but research like this is critical for revealing what truly makes us human. Visualizing neurons and other brain cells is really challenging due to their sheer density and complexity, and the current dataset does not capture the longer-range connections,” Bienkowski said.

“What other brain regions are these inputs originating from, and where do the outputs go once they leave the area? But to see all these different cell types and their interactions is incredible and makes you appreciate what a masterpiece of architecture life has given us,” he added.

Andreas Tolias, a professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University in California, agreed. “This is a remarkable technical study that reconstructs the structure of the human cortex at high resolution,” he said. “I was particularly excited about the discovery of rare axons capable of forming up to 50 synapses. This finding is intriguing and raises important questions about their computational roles.”

The brain-mapping project opens the door for future investigations, according to neuroscientist Olaf Sporns.

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How one of the world’s most successful indoor pests took over the planet

ination online — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 11:07:20 +0000

The cockroach that emerged from your sink drain and scuttled under the fridge? The nocturnal critter was most likely a German cockroach, and its ancestors were pestering people more than 2,000 years ago in southern Asia, a new study found.

The research, published May 20 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that the insects’ journey from scavenging in ancient Asian civilizations to getting cozy beneath your kitchen floor closely aligns with major historical shifts in global commerce, colonization and war.

German cockroaches, scientifically known as Blattella germanica, are ubiquitous in cities in the United States and around the world. The hardy pests first appeared in scientific records from 250 years ago in Europe, hence the German moniker, but little is known about their origin.

To figure out how cockroaches got there and spread to other parts of the world, first study author Dr. Qian Tang and his collaborators asked scientists and pest control experts around the globe for local specimens. The research team received 281 German cockroach samples from 57 sites in 17 countries and studied their DNA to trace their evolution.

“Our main purpose was to show how a species can travel with humans and how genetics can make up the missing part of historical records,” said Tang, an evolutionary biologist who is now a postdoctoral research associate at Harvard University.

Using genomic data from the samples, Tang was surprised to learn that the modern cockroach’s lineage goes back much further than 18th century Europe. The insect evolved from the wild Asian cockroach, scientifically known as Blattella asahinai, 2,100 years ago, according to his research.

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