a bat flying in a cave

Diversity in bat communities predicts coronavirus prevalence

Magdalena Meyer, Dominik Melville and colleagues study coronavirus infections in bats, and find that coronavirus prevalence is higher in less diverse bat communities.

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  • The end of the green Sahara in the mid-Holocene was gradual, but punctuated by rapidly changing episodes of extreme drought and wetness, to which human societies were exposed and had to adapt to, as a lake record from southern Ethiopia suggests.

    • Martin H. Trauth
    • Asfawossen Asrat
    • Paul J. Valdes
    ArticleOpen Access
  • Here, the authors describe an early synziphosurine from the Lower Ordovician Fezouata Shale of Morocco, which exhibits traits that elucidate the long-contentious relationships between crown euchelicerates and their sister taxa, and also clarifies euchelicerate body plan evolution.

    • Lorenzo Lustri
    • Pierre Gueriau
    • Allison C. Daley
    ArticleOpen Access
  • Sperm whales use sequences of clicks to communicate. Here, the authors show that these vocalizations are significantly more complex than previously believed-the “sperm whale phonetic alphabet" has both combinatorial structure and call modulation dependent on the conversational context.

    • Pratyusha Sharma
    • Shane Gero
    • Jacob Andreas
    ArticleOpen Access

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  • Developmental stress can detrimentally affect adult female reproductive behavior, influencing sexual receptivity and fertility. Recent work has demonstrated neuronal nitric oxide (NO) synthase (nNOS)-promoted NO release in the ventromedial hypothalamus as a nexus between pre-pubertal stress and adult sexual behavior in mice.

    • Konstantina Chachlaki
    CommentOpen Access
  • Cellular and organismal aging have been consistently associated with mitochondrial dysfunction and inflammation. Accumulating evidence indicates that aging-related inflammatory responses are mechanistically linked to compromised mitochondrial integrity coupled with mtDNA-driven CGAS activation, a process that is tonically inhibited by mitophagy.

    • Emma Guilbaud
    • Kristopher A. Sarosiek
    • Lorenzo Galluzzi
    CommentOpen Access
  • Dinoflagellates are ecologically important and essential to corals and other cnidarians as phytosymbionts, but their photosystems had been underexplored. Recently, photosystem I (PSI) of dinoflagellate Symbiodinium sp. was structurally characterized using cryo-Electron Microscopy (cryo-EM). These analyses revealed a distinct organization of the PSI supercomplex, including two previously unidentified subunits, PsaT and PsaU, and shed light on interactions between light harvesting antenna proteins and the PSI core. These results have implications with respect to the evolution of dinoflagellates and their association with cnidarians.

    • Senjie Lin
    • Shuaishuai Wu
    • Arthur R. Grossman
    CommentOpen Access
  • Arboviral infections are major public health threats, with 100 million people estimated to get sick annually from dengue infection alone. Globally, the risk of arboviruses is likely to further increase both within, and outside of, affected regions due to a combination of factors including climate change, human mobility, and other societal factors. Despite the availability of vaccines for some arbovirus infections, there is a lack of specific antiviral treatment options. Professor Johan Neyts at the University of Leuven, Belgium, has been working on developing antiviral strategies for more than 30 years. His current research focuses on developing antiviral drugs and vaccines against emerging and neglected viruses many of which are arboviruses. In this Q&A, he discusses the risks associated with vector-borne virus infections, challenges in developing efficient drugs for treatment, and current promising efforts to address these challenges.

    Q&AOpen Access
  • Multidisciplinary culture-dependent and -independent techniques elucidate the unique microbial nitrogen cycle in nutrient-poor coastal Antarctica soils and reveal the contribution of novel key microbes to their nitrogen budget.

    • Maximiliano Ortiz
    CommentOpen Access
  • Can many-body systems be beneficial to designing quantum technologies? We address this question by examining quantum engines, where recent studies indicate potential benefits through the harnessing of many-body effects, such as divergences close to phase transitions. However, open questions remain regarding their real-world applications.

    • Victor Mukherjee
    • Uma Divakaran
    CommentOpen Access
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This page highlights recent engaging work in the areas of optics and photonics, ranging from optical physics, materials, imaging, and communications, to techniques, integration and applications, at all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.
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