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Title uses quotes from the linked article^1 published 22 Nov. 2022 in Antiquity.

Excerpt:

>Climate change is affecting archaeological sites and landscapes around the world. Increased rainfall, more frequent extreme weather events, higher temperatures and rising seas not only create new risks but also exacerbate existing vulnerabilities and threats.

>Building on an earlier Antiquity article that explored climate change and arctic archaeology (Hollesen et al. 2018), this special section provides a global perspective on the impact of climate change on archaeological sites and landscapes and how archaeologists and cultural heritage managers are responding.

>This article introduces the following three contributions, outlining their main findings to provide an overview of the various challenges around the world, and highlighting current gaps in knowledge and future research opportunities.

> 

>Although this special section can only touch upon some of the many potential effects of climate change on archaeological resources around the world, it seeks to demonstrate the scale and complexity of the situation with which we are confronted.

>With climate change threatening an uncalculated number of archaeological sites, totalling perhaps millions globally (Heilen et al. 2018; Dawson et al. 2020), it seems reasonable to question whether current management practices and mechanisms will be able to respond to a situation that is so demanding.

>There are no easy solutions and time is limited. Thus, if we are to respond meaningfully, there is an urgent need to develop new methods and strategies that can tackle the problem head on. As suggested in this special section, and in other recent articles (e.g. Heilen et al. 2018; Hollesen et al. 2018), the first step is to determine where these impacts will occur and which types of sites will be the most affected.

>[The] vulnerability of archaeological sites can only be understood when the interactions between climate change and other factors, such as landscape modification, urbanisation and water management, are also considered.

> 

>Even if archaeologists and planners in years to come are equipped with tools efficient enough to pin-point the most vulnerable sites, they will still be faced with difficult decisions: which sites should be saved, and which sites should be allowed to decay?

>Climate change is accelerating, amplifying existing risks and creating new ones, the consequences of which could be devastating for the global archaeological record.

^1 Hollesen, J. (2022) “Climate change and the loss of archaeological sites and landscapes: a global perspective,” Antiquity. Cambridge University Press, 96(390), pp. 1382–1395. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2022.113.

Findings in title quoted from the linked summary by Manuel Ansede, 16 Jan. 2023, EL PAÍS.

Excerpt:

>The gene editing techniques that have revolutionized medicine since 2016 could also be used to treat common heart diseases, the number one cause of death in humans, according to a study published recently by one of the world’s leading scientists, Eric Olson, from the US.

>His team was able to modify two letters – or bases – of the approximately 3 billion that make up the DNA of a mouse. This change was enough to silence a protein linked to multiple cardiovascular problems.

>Olson is cautious, but highlights the potential advantages of this new strategy: since heart cells last a lifetime, it is only a matter of making the change once.

>Olson, from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, talked about his research to EL PAÍS via videoconference from Dallas, Texas, accompanied by a Spanish colleague from his laboratory, biologist Xurde Menéndez Caravia, co-author of the new study, who explained that the results of the first proof of concept are very promising.

> 

>The technique appears to be safe in mice; now, what comes next is to explore the possible long-term effects.

>The researchers modified the recipe for a protein called CaMKII delta, whose hyperactivation causes various cardiovascular problems such as arrhythmias, heart failure or damage to the heart muscle after a myocardial infarction.

>By changing two letters in the recipe, the resulting protein is not hyperactivated. Olson’s team used this technique in mice with cardiac damage after a heart attack, a phenomenon known as ischemia-reperfusion injury. The organs of the rodents recovered their function after the genetic editing of their cells.

>“As a therapy aimed at large population groups, it would be a revolution. We are talking about myocardial infarctions: potentially millions of people could be treated with this technique,” says Menéndez Caravia.

Lebek S., et al. Ablation of CaMKIIδ oxidation by CRISPR-Cas9 base editing as a therapy for cardiac disease. Science (2023). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ade1105

Excerpt:

>Ngārimu Blair, deputy chair for Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei people, said the tribe had only a handful of significant artefacts left, after most were lost in successive waves of looting by early “treasure hunters”, urbanisation and displacement.

>“We have so very few of these taonga and treasures left in our possession,” he said. “When something like this comes up where we’re both excited, but also that sorrowful that we lost so much.”

>The Sotheby’s auctions, which close in a week, include a carved pounamu (greenstone) club, or “mere”. It was originally given by Ngāti Whātua chief Pāora Tūhaere to a British vice-admiral in 1886, on condition it remained in the man’s family, according to a newspaper report at the time.

>As the mere has now passed out of the family’s hands it should be returned, Blair said, and the tribe hoped a future buyer would consider repatriating it.

>“We hope those involved in this auction understand Tūhaere’s people are not extinct nor relics, and we are inextricably linked still to this taonga,” he said.

> 

>Other New Zealand artefacts being sold by Sotheby’s this week include a Tewhatewha staff, and the remains of extremely rare New Zealand birds – the leg bones of the now-extinct four-metre (12ft) tall moa, and a brooch made from the beak of a huia, a wattlebird believed to be extinct since 1907.

>Sotheby’s has sold a number of high-value Māori artefacts, including some of unknown provenance. In 2019, an Arawa tekoteko carving sold for US$740,000 (£‎608,000). The auction description noted that it was “a major Māori sculpture” but said it had “no remaining trace of its original provenance”.

>In 2014, the sale of a carving valued at NZ$3.1m caused controversy in New Zealand, with academics and tribal authorities calling for the government to work for its return.

>The auction comes as international museums, governments and private collectors wrestle with the question of ownership of Indigenous artefacts – particularly those obtained through colonisation, looting or war.

Tess McClure in Auckland, 12 Jan. 2023.

Findings in title quoted from linked summary released by the University of Missouri.

Excerpt:

>In a new study, a team of astronomers led by Haojing Yan at the University of Missouri used data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Early Release Observations and discovered 87 galaxies that could be the earliest known galaxies in the universe.

>The finding moves the astronomers one step closer to finding out when galaxies first appeared in the universe — about 200-400 million years after the Big Bang, said Yan, associate professor of physics and astronomy at MU and lead author on the study.

>“Finding such a large number of galaxies in the early parts of the universe suggests that we might need to revise our previous understanding of galaxy formation,” Yan said. “Our finding gives us the first indication that a lot of galaxies could have been formed in the universe much earlier than previously thought.”

>In the study, the astronomers searched for potential galaxies at “very high redshifts.” Yan said the concept of redshifts in astronomy allows astronomers to measure how far away distant objects are in the universe — like galaxies — by looking at how the colors change in the waves of light that they emit.

> 

>The JWST was critical to this discovery because objects in space like galaxies that are located at high redshifts — 11 and above — can only be detected by infrared light, according to Yan. This is beyond what NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope can detect because the Hubble telescope only sees from ultraviolet to near-infrared light.

>“JWST, the most powerful infrared telescope, has the sensitivity and resolution for the job,” Yan said. “Up until these first JWST data sets were released [in mid-July 2022], most astronomers believed that the universe should have very few galaxies beyond redshift 11.

>“At the very least, our results challenge this view. I believe this discovery is just the tip of the iceberg because the data we used only focused on a very small area of the universe.

>“After this, I anticipate that other teams of astronomers will find similar results elsewhere in the vast reaches of space as JWST continues to provide us with a new view of the deepest parts of our universe.”

Haojing Yan et al. First Batch of z ≈ 11–20 Candidate Objects Revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope Early Release Observations on SMACS 0723-73. The Astrophysical Journal Letters 942 L9 (2023). https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/aca80c

Findings in title quoted from the summary released by the University of York, U.K., 11 Jan. 2023.

Excerpt:

>Researchers have uncovered how some bacteria use electrical spikes to overcome antibacterial drugs, potentially leading to ‘superbugs’ that are resistant to antibiotics.

>The study, led by a team at the University of York and Peking University, reveals how bacteria – many of which result in debilitating diseases – exhibit short-lived electrical spikes very similar to those found in nerve cells, and use these to help evade the killing effects of antibiotics.

>The research is an important step forward in understanding how actively growing bacteria exhibit transient electrical spikes across their cell membranes, and how these spikes are associated with an increased ability to survive the killing effects of antibiotics, the authors of the study say.

> 

>Co-lead author of the study, Professor Mark Leake, from the Physics of Life group at the University of York, said: “Our study suggests that when bacteria are actively growing, such as during an infection, they exhibit short-lived spikes in the electrical voltage across their cell membranes.

>"We find that cells which have larger and more frequent spikes can literally spit out antibiotics via these channels before they have a chance to kill the cell.”

>The study may solve the puzzle of how some bacteria known as ‘persisters’ can in effect resuscitate themselves after a treatment of antibiotics is stopped and go on to grow new infectious colonies.

>The team developed new used fluorescent dyes to act as high-precision voltage sensors that are inserted directly into the bacteria’s genetic code. Using laser fluorescence microscopy on these cells allowed the team to observe these voltage spikes directly for the first time on individual cells.

Xin Jin, et al. Sensitive bacterial Vm sensors revealed the excitability of bacterial Vm and its role in antibiotic tolerance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2208348120

Radojčić, et al. Trends in antipsychotic prescribing to children and adolescents in England: cohort study using 2000–19 primary care data. Lancet Psychiatry (2023). https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(22)00404-7

Findings in title from the linked summary released by the University of Manchester, 10 Jan. 2023:

>The proportion of children and adolescents prescribed antipsychotics in English general practice doubled from 0.06% to 0.11% between 2000 and 2019, find researchers at The University of Manchester’s Centre for Women’s Mental Health.

>The drugs, which have a tranquillising effect, are frequently used in adults to treat major mental illness, such as schizophrenia.

>However, they can be associated with substantial side-effects such as sexual dysfunction, infertility, and weight gain leading to diabetes.

> The National Institute for Clinical Excellence has approved the use of some antipsychotics in under 18’s with psychosis or with severely aggressive behaviour from conduct disorder.

>However the study, published in the Lancet Psychiatry, suggests they are prescribed for an increasingly broad range of reasons - the most common being autism.

>[The] increasing use of antipsychotics is a cause for concern, argue the researchers, given that their safety in children, who are still rapidly developing, has not been established.

> 

>Dr Matthias Pierce, senior research fellow at the University of Manchester’s Centre for Women’s Mental Health jointly lead the study.

>He said: “This study demonstrates a concerning trend in antipsychotic prescribing in children and adolescents. We do not think the changes in prescribing necessarily relate to changes in clinical need; rather, it may be more likely to reflect changes in prescribing practice by clinicians.

>“However, this study will help clinicians to evaluate the prescribing of antipsychotics to children more fully and will encourage them to consider better access to alternatives.”

Chirenti, C., Dichiara, S., Lien, A. et al. Kilohertz quasiperiodic oscillations in short gamma-ray bursts. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05497-0

Findings in title quoted from the linked summary released by NASA, 9 Jan. 2023.

Excerpt:

>A neutron star forms when the core of a massive star runs out of fuel and collapses. This produces a shock wave that blows away the rest of the star in a supernova explosion.

>Neutron stars typically pack more mass than our Sun into a ball about the size of a city, but above a certain mass, they must collapse into black holes.

>Both the Compton data and computer simulations revealed mega neutron stars tipping the scales by 20% more than the most massive, precisely measured neutron star known – dubbed J0740+6620 – which weighs in at nearly 2.1 times the Sun’s mass.

>Superheavy neutron stars also have nearly twice the size of a typical neutron star, or about twice the length of Manhattan Island.

> 

>Computer simulations of these mergers show that gravitational waves exhibit a sudden jump in frequency – exceeding 1,000 hertz – as the neutron stars coalesce.

>These signals are too fast and faint for existing gravitational wave observatories to detect. But [lead author] Chirenti and her team reasoned that similar signals could appear in the gamma-ray emission from short GRBs.

>The mega neutron stars spin nearly 78,000 times a minute – almost twice the speed of J1748–2446ad, the fastest pulsar on record. This rapid rotation briefly supports the objects against further collapse, allowing them to exist for just a few tenths of a second, after which they proceed to form a black hole faster than the blink of an eye.

>While no gamma-ray QPOs materialized in the Swift and Fermi bursts, two short GRBs recorded by Compton’s Burst And Transient Source Experiment (BATSE) on July 11, 1991, and Nov. 1, 1993, fit the bill.

Banner: Merging neutron stars, illustrated here, produce a blast of gamma rays when they come together and collapse into a black hole. Observations of two bursts by NASA's Compton mission indicate that before their final collapse, the objects briefly form a single supersized neutron star. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab. Editor: Francis Reddy

Findings in title quoted from the lead author’s summary, “Happy rather than sad music soothes newborns” in The Conversation, 5 Jan. 2023.

Excerpt:

>Our team looked at how music affected healthy newborns, who were carried to term. First, we wanted to select a music piece that was really happy, and another that was really sad.

>Two experimenters collected and listened to hundreds of lullabies and children’s songs and selected 25 of these that sounded happy or sad. Only six of these were sung in English (Simple Simon, Humpty Dumpty, Hey Diddle Diddle, Little Miss Muffet, Ding Dong Bell, Little Bo Beep) while the others were in various other languages.

>A French lullaby entitled Fais Dodo (by Alexandra Montano and Ruth Cunningham) was found to be the saddest, while a German song, Das singende Känguru (by Volker Rosin), was ranked the happiest.

>We played these two songs in random order – along with a silent control period – to 32 babies in a first experiment.

>We also analysed how 20 behaviours, such as crying, yawning, sucking, sleeping and limb movements changed millisecond by millisecond during the music pieces and the silence, respectively.

> 

>In a second experiment, we recorded the heart rates of 66 newborn infants while they were listening to these two songs or silence.

>Perhaps the most striking results was that babies started to downshift to sleep during happy music, but not to sad music or when there was no music.

>Also, they showed a decrease in their heart rates during happy music but not during sad music or silent periods, suggesting they were getting calmer.

>In response to both happy and sad music, babies also moved their eyes less frequently and and there were longer pauses between their movements compared with the silence period. This might mean that both types of music had some calming effect on the babies compared with no music, but happy music was the best.

>Our results suggest that newborns thus do react to emotions in music, and that responses to music are present at birth.

Nagy, E., Cosgrove, R., Robertson, N. et al. Neonatal Musicality: Do Newborns Detect Emotions in Music?. Psychological Studies 67, 501–513 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12646-022-00688-1