’Almost certain #extinction': 1,200 species under severe threat across world | Environment | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/13/almost-certain-extinction-1200-species-under-severe-threat-across-world
The new research, published in PLOS Biology, maps “hotspots” where species are most affected by threats such as agriculture, urbanisation, night lighting, roads, rail, waterways and population density, and “coolspots” that provide refuge from these threats.
#effondrement #collapsologie #catastrophe #fin_du_monde #it_has_begun #Anthropocène #capitalocène
Pour la troisième compilation :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/680147
The Rapid Decline Of The Natural World Is A Crisis Even Bigger Than Climate Change | HuffPost
▻https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nature-destruction-climate-change-world-biodiversity_n_5c49e78ce4b06ba6d3b
“Species which are not charismatic have been politically overlooked,” said Rounsevell. “Over 70 percent of freshwater species and 61 percent of amphibians have declined [in Europe], along with 26 percent of marine fish populations and 42 percent of land-based animals ... It is a dramatic change and a direct result of the intensification of farming,” he said.
This destruction is also driving mass human migration and increased conflict. Decreasing land productivity makes societies more vulnerable to social instability, says the report, which estimates that in around 30 years’ time land degradation, together with the closely related problems of climate change, will have forced 50 to 700 million people to migrate.
The importance of being second
▻http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2005203
we are formalizing a policy whereby manuscripts that confirm or extend a recently published study (“scooped” manuscripts, also referred to as complementary) are eligible for consideration at PLOS Biology.
(…) many journals will reject it citing lack of novelty. However, there is a self-evident benefit to publishing complementary research, and at PLOS Biology, we consider that two papers from two groups independently identifying the same phenomenon in parallel increase the confidence in the results of the work.
This new policy, acknowledging the value of complementary studies, therefore addresses the current concern regarding the reproducibility, or lack thereof, of scientific findings.
(…) We wish to recognize both the value of validating results and the researchers undertaking the work. Highlighting replication studies will ultimately prove positive for the public perception of science.
L’#ADN révèle les secrets du #tardigrade, résistant suprême
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2017/07/31/l-adn-revele-les-secrets-du-tardigrade-resistant-supreme_5167103_1650684.htm
« Shinjirarenai ! », « Amazing ! », « Incroyable ! ». Dans toutes les langues, l’adjectif résonne souvent à l’unisson à l’évocation du nom d’une petite bête : le tardigrade. D’origine obscure et doté de facultés de survie inouïes, l’animal microscopique, surnommé « ourson d’eau » à cause de ses griffes, intrigue les scientifiques. Un groupe de biologistes britanniques et japonais a donc entrepris d’explorer son génome. Cette plongée dans les arcanes de son ADN leur a permis d’en percer certains mystères. Publiée le 27 juillet dans la revue PLOS Biology, leur étude apporte des révélations sur deux fronts distincts : la position exacte de l’animal au sein du vivant et les mécanismes génétiques à l’origine de ses capacités de #résistance.
Son portrait forme le bandeau de la page d’accueil
L’article original, accessible, est là
Comparative genomics of the tardigrades Hypsibius dujardini and Ramazzottius varieornatus
▻http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2002266
Abstract
Tardigrada, a phylum of meiofaunal organisms, have been at the center of discussions of the evolution of Metazoa, the biology of survival in extreme environments, and the role of horizontal gene transfer in animal evolution. Tardigrada are placed as sisters to Arthropoda and Onychophora (velvet worms) in the superphylum Panarthropoda by morphological analyses, but many molecular phylogenies fail to recover this relationship. This tension between molecular and morphological understanding may be very revealing of the mode and patterns of evolution of major groups. Limnoterrestrial tardigrades display extreme cryptobiotic abilities, including anhydrobiosis and cryobiosis, as do bdelloid rotifers, nematodes, and other animals of the water film. These extremophile behaviors challenge understanding of normal, aqueous physiology: how does a multicellular organism avoid lethal cellular collapse in the absence of liquid water? Meiofaunal species have been reported to have elevated levels of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) events, but how important this is in evolution, and particularly in the evolution of extremophile physiology, is unclear. To address these questions, we resequenced and reassembled the genome of H. dujardini, a limnoterrestrial tardigrade that can undergo anhydrobiosis only after extensive pre-exposure to drying conditions, and compared it to the genome of R. varieornatus, a related species with tolerance to rapid desiccation. The 2 species had contrasting gene expression responses to anhydrobiosis, with major transcriptional change in H. dujardini but limited regulation in R. varieornatus. We identified few horizontally transferred genes, but some of these were shown to be involved in entry into anhydrobiosis. Whole-genome molecular phylogenies supported a Tardigrada+Nematoda relationship over Tardigrada+Arthropoda, but rare genomic changes tended to support Tardigrada+Arthropoda.
L’image complète
Je n’arrive pas à savoir duquel des deux il s’agit : R. varieornatus ou H. dujardini ?
D’une façon générale, les images très variées que l’on peut trouver, par exemple celles rassemblée ici ▻http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2280286/Meet-toughest-animal-planet-The-water-bear-survive-frozen-boiled-float- (article de février 2013) ne donnent aucune précision taxonomique :-(
J’ai lu cet article hier et j’avoue avoir été choquée par toutes les tortures qu’on inflige (de surcroit en rigolant) à ces petites bêtes juste pour connaître leur degré de résistance. Pas vraiment convaincue que cela fasse avancer la science, en tout cas pas pour leur bien-être.
Refugee crisis: the fences built across Europe are threatening wildlife, too — Quartz
▻http://qz.com/880092/refugee-crisis-the-fences-built-across-europe-are-threatening-wildlife-too
▻https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/h_52433816-e1483740579836.jpg?quality=80&strip=all&w=1600
After decades of being literally fenced off from western Europe, the region’s wildlife—including carnivores such as wolves and lynx—began to thrive. Getting rid of physical borders allowed animals to expand their habitats, and since there wasn’t much human development in these transboundary areas, it turned out to be a place where wildlife could really thrive.
But, after a few decades of somewhat free movement of people, goods, and animals, since 2015 fences have started rising up again. For example, a fence has been built between Slovenia and Croatia to stop the movement of refugees between the countries. A side effect has been to also stop the movement of wildlife, according to a study titled Border Security Fencing and Wildlife published in PLOS Biology.
Rosalind’s Ghost: Biology, Collaboration, and the Female, by Caroline Wagner (PLOS Biology)
▻http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2001003
Zeng et al. find the gap to be so great, with such a low participation of women, that it appears to constitute “gender segregation.” The number of women coauthoring in genomics is so far below expectation that chance or shorter careers cannot be the reason for the disparity.
Perhaps the most enigmatic finding from Zeng et al. is that women do not repeat coauthorships as frequently as male counterparts. On one hand, this might indicate practices related to active search for new ideas, as the authors note: “….[w]e find evidence for the hypothesis that female scientists are more open to novel collaborations…” Furthermore, this resonates with our work on Nobel Laureates, in which the communication networks suggested that prize winners were more likely than elite peers to reach outside of their immediate networks to seek new ideas. However, it is clear from their data that this characteristic of women’s teams is not translating into citations, publications, and certainly not into scientific prizes.
Hints of tool use, culture seen in bumble bees
▻http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/hints-tool-use-culture-seen-bumble-bees
almost everyone assumed that the insects acted on instinct, not intelligence.
Une forme de culture découverte chez les abeilles
▻https://news.sfr.fr/actualites/societe/une-forme-de-culture-decouverte-chez-les-abeilles-4702366.html
[Une] étude, publiée mardi dans le journal PLOS Biology, montre que les insectes sont capables de comprendre le lien entre un outil et un résultat, mais aussi d’apprendre de nouveaux comportements en s’observant les uns les autres.
With additional experiments, Chittka hopes to figure out the neural basis of these “smarts” in the bumble bees. He cautions that the insects might not be all that intelligent, but that instead, “these results may mean that culturelike phenomena might actually be based on relatively simple mechanisms.”
Let’s Make Gender Diversity in #Data_Science a Priority Right from the Start - PLOS Biology
▻http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002206
Ten Simple Rules for Increasing Gender Diversity in Data Science
Get data science culture right at our places of employment:
1 Foster a recruitment process that seeks out diverse candidate pools and engages in targeted and intentional outreach efforts that attract a diverse applicant pool.
2 Monitor and promote pay equity.
3 Develop organizational mechanisms for promoting diversity in which success of such efforts can be measured and rewarded.
4 Provide leadership opportunities for women, promote their efforts, and help women identify advancement opportunities.
5 Make diversity a strategic priority and expect those who work for and/or with us to do so as well.
Become an activist for women’s representation in data science:
6 Put women colleagues and students up for awards and recognitions. Share their work with colleagues. Provide mentorship that helps them navigate the pathways to success. Help clear those paths.
7 Raise awareness of diversity. If you are asked to present, be on a panel, or serve on a committee, ask if there are (other) women participating. If not, suggest names of women to invite. (Bonus points for not accepting the response that finding good women candidates is hard.) This approach is particularly effective when both men and women ask these questions.
8 Help create positive language and social expectations around data science: assume that women will be part of the process and part of the leadership. Spread the word that women’s leadership belongs in data science. Position and highlight the expertise of women in the field and include their voices.
9 Send colleagues and students to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women (and go yourself). Encourage them to utilize this meeting to expand their networks, advance their professional success, and develop mentors, colleagues and friends in data science.
10 Focus on daily actions and interactions. Make sure that women’s contributions are valued and heard. Model inclusive behavior and hold yourself and others accountable.
ping @archiloque #femmes #informatique
Illegal Drugs Laws: Clearing a 50-Year-Old Obstacle to Research -
PLOS Biology
▻http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002047
Many drugs are made “illegal” in an attempt to reduce their availability and so their harms. (…) [creating] perverse restrictions (…) on pharmacology and therapeutics research. Here I will show how they have led to censoring of life science and medical research, with disastrous consequences that have lasted for more than 50 years
#drogues #répression #recherche #santé_mentale #neurosciences
Emergent Global Patterns of Ecosystem Structure and Function from a Mechanistic General Ecosystem Model | PLOS Biology
▻http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001841
un modèle global de l’ensemble des interactions de l’#écosystème planétaire
ecologists have gathered sufficient information to begin to build realistic, global, and mechanistic models of ecosystems, capable of predicting a diverse range of ecosystem properties and their response to human pressures.
PLOS Biology: Imre Festetics and the Sheep Breeders’ Society of Moravia: Mendel’s Forgotten “Research Network”
▻http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001772
Most students are still taught that the discipline of genetics began with Mendel, and would be surprised to learn that many of the central principles were formulated before Mendel was born, also in Brno where Mendel later worked, and through the study of sheep rather than peas. Inasmuch as a single individual can be credited for pre-Mendelian genetics, it is Count Imre (Emmerich) Festetics (1764–1847), a sheep breeder based in Hungary, who remains as obscure today as Mendel is famous.
(...) Festetics did not discover factorial or “Mendelian” genetics before Mendel, but he certainly laid the groundwork for their later discovery [9]. If Mendel is the father of genetics in this context, Festetics has a strong claim to be the grandfather, having introduced the term “genetic” as early as 1819. Unfortunately, with a few exceptions, Festetics is rarely mentioned in contemporary scientific literature or in books addressing the history of genetics.
The Actress, the Court, and What Needs to Be Done to Guarantee the Future of Clinical Genomics - PLOS Biology
▻http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001663
While [Angelina] Jolie had access to testing, much still needs to be done to remedy disparities in access to testing and follow-up treatments for others at high risk due to heredity. At the same time, outside of those in known risk groups, like Jolie, it is not clear when genetic testing for breast cancer and other conditions in the general population makes sense [6]. The control and third-party use of genetic information obtained through testing remains uncertain [7]. What information ought to be disclosed to those undergoing genetic testing, by whom, and with what, if any, sort of counseling is also still unsettled [8]. What will be said when further advances in the precision of genetic testing reveal that some may have had mastectomies or removed their prostate, stomach, or ovaries unnecessarily [9]? And there still remain penalties (higher costs for life or disability insurance) facing those either identified as being at genetic risk or who simply have sought testing that need to be addressed [7].
Un jeu pour expliquer aux enfants sud-africains comment se transmet le VIH
►http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001390
PLOS Biology : Addressing HIV/AIDS in South African Classrooms
The Transmission Game: An Example of Our Approach in Practice
The transmission game is played as follows. Students are invited to a “party” where each participant is offered a glass of water and given an instruction on a piece of paper. The participants are warned not to drink from the glasses as the water may contain dangerous chemicals. One of the many glasses of water contains caustic soda. This represents the virus. Each student receives one of three possible instructions. Instruction one states that the participants may exchange fluids with as many people as possible. Instruction two states that the participant must find a partner and only exchange fluids with that person. The final instruction states that the participant should always say “no” to any request to exchange liquid. The students are given about five minutes to enact the instructions. The teacher then asks them to stop exchanging fluids and asks: “What do you think you have been doing?” The students will invariably answer that they have been engaging in unprotected sex. The teacher then invites the students to come forward for an HIV test. A drop of dye (phenolphthalein) is put into each glass. If the water turns pink, it indicates a positive HIV test result. Clear water indicates a negative result. The teacher reminds the students that only one glass did not contain pure water at the beginning of the activity.
What to Do When the Oceans Rise | PLoS Biology
►http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001387
The costs of either rebuilding or relocating in response are enormous but unavoidable. Furthermore, since the economies of many coastal communities are based on fisheries and tourism, the impacts of anthropogenic climate change threaten their long-term sustainability [1]. Given their vulnerability, coastal communities are on the front line of global warming. But do they have the capacity to adapt to so much environmental change? Do their responses to past challenges suggest strategies for coping with future change? Can we predict which communities are most vulnerable and help them to become more resilient?
To answer these questions, scientists like Tim McClanahan and Joshua Cinner are merging marine and climate change ecology with modern social science.
The Little Book of Viruses | PLoS Biology
►http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001139
Viruses are fascinating because of their evolutionary dance with their hosts, because of the myriad of solutions they have come up with for replication with a limited repertoire of genes, and because of the unpredictable ways they interact with the immune system, making vaccines so difficult to rationally develop and pathogenesis so variable.
What Is the Brain Basis of Intelligence? by Charles F. Stevens | PLoS Biology
►http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001078
à propos de Duncan J (2010) How Intelligence Happens. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
One of the things that makes it hard for artificial intelligence to mimic human intelligence is that we can be, but often are not, rational beings. Capturing our special forms of irrationality poses a special problem for computer programmers. In the final chapter, Duncan describes some ongoing and incomplete research to give an impression of the direction intelligence studies is heading. For example, he outlines some experiments that permit us to “read a person’s mind” by examining the pattern of brain activity revealed by fMRI.