Neural Substrates for Regulation of Sleep and General Anesthesia

: General anesthesia has been successfully used in the clinic for over 170 years, but its mechanisms of effect remain unclear. Behaviorally, general anesthesia is similar to sleep in that it produces a reversible transition between wakefulness and the state of being unaware of one’s surroundings. A growing discussion has been imposed regarding the common circuits of sleep and general anesthesia, as an increasing number of sleep-arousal regulatory nuclei are reported to participate in the consciousness shift occurring during general anesthesia. Recently, with progress in research technology, both positive and negative evidence for overlapping neural circuits between sleep and general anesthesia have emerged. This article provides a review of the latest evidence on the neural substrates for sleep and general anesthesia regulation by comparing the roles of pivotal nuclei in sleep and anesthesia.

Comment on Dimou et al. Profile of Membrane Cargo Trafficking Proteins and Transporters Expressed under N Source Derepressing Conditions in Aspergillus nidulans. J. Fungi 2021, 7, 560

Contrary to the opinion recently offered by Dimou et al., our previously published biochemical, subcellular and genetic data supported our contention that AN11127 corresponds to the A. nidulans gene encoding Sec12, which is the guanine nucleotide exchange factor (GEF) specific for SAR1. We add here additional bioinformatics evidence that fully disprove the otherwise negative evidence reported by Dimou et al., highlighting the dangers associated with the lax interpretation of genomic data. On the positive side, we establish guidelines for the identification of this key secretory gene in other species of Ascomycota and Basidiomycota, including species of medical and applied interest.

The business practice of Louis François Roubiliac, 1752-62

Evidence for the organization of Roubiliac’s workshop in the last ten years of his life is provided by the ledgers of his bank account opened with Drummond’s, Charing Cross, in the year of the sculptor’s third marriage to the Deptford heiress Elizabeth Crosby in 1752. The resulting financial confidence, albeit short-lived, enabled Roubiliac’s visit to Italy with Thomas Hudson, also in 1752. The ledgers reflect the sculptor’s expanding business between 1755 and 1760 and document his assistants Christian Carlsen Seest from 1756 to 1759, Nicholas Read from 1756 to 1760 and Nathaniel Smith between 1755 and 1761. Other payees can be identified as masons assisting with installation and suppliers of marble. Payments to and from silversmiths and jewellers indicate Roubiliac’s close connection with those of French origin trading in the London luxury market, including Thomas Harrache, who served as the sculptor’s executor. Roubiliac’s ledgers also provide negative evidence - he was not always paid in full for his work, as his will drawn up six days before his death indicates: ‘all my book debts which is due to me to be equally divided into four parts’. This suggests that Roubiliac’s reputation for taking an excessively long time to complete commissions resulted in his forfeiting full payment, and explains why he died in debt. A letter from the sculptor to the agent of the 4th Earl of Gainsborough in 1751, requesting settlement of a bill for plaster busts supplied four years earlier, published for the first time, demonstrates Roubiliac’s poor grasp of the English language as well as his lack of business acumen.

Changing minds about climate change: a pervasive role for domain-general metacognition

Updating one’s beliefs about the causes and effects of climate change is crucial for altering attitudes and behaviours. Importantly, metacognitive abilities - insight into the (in)correctness of one’s beliefs- play a key role in the formation of polarized beliefs. We investigated the role of domain-general and domain-specific metacognition in updating prior beliefs about climate change across the spectrum of climate change scepticism. We also considered the role of how climate science is communicated in the form of textual or visuo-textual presentations. We show that climate change scepticism is associated with differences in domain-general as well as domain-specific metacognitive abilities. Moreover, domain-general metacognitive sensitivity influenced belief updating in an asymmetric way : lower domain-general metacognition decreased the updating of prior beliefs, especially in the face of negative evidence. Our findings highlight the role of metacognitive failures in revising erroneous beliefs about climate change and point to their adverse social effects.

Magnitude and source area estimations of severe prehistoric earthquakes in the western Eastern Alps

In slowly deforming intraplate tectonic regions such as the Alps only limited knowledge exists on the occurrence of severe earthquakes, their maximum possible magnitude and their potential source areas. This is mainly due to long earthquake recurrence rates exceeding the time span of instrumental earthquake records and historical documentation. Lacustrine paleoseismology aims at retrieving long-term continuous records of seismic shaking. A paleoseismic record from a single lake provides information on events for which seismic shaking exceeded the intensity threshold at the lake site. In addition, when positive and negative evidence for seismic shaking from multiple sites can be gathered for a certain time period, minimum magnitudes and source locations can be estimated for paleo-earthquakes by a reverse application of an empirical intensity prediction equation in a geospatial analysis. Here, we present potential magnitudes and source locations of four paleo-earthquakes in the western Eastern Alps based on the integration of available and updated lake paleoseismic data. The paleoseismic records at Plansee and Achensee covering the last ~10 kyrs were extended towards the age of lake initiation after deglaciation to obtain the longest possible paleoseismic catalogue at each lake site. Our results show that 25 severe earthquakes are recorded in the four lakes Plansee, Piburgersee, Achensee and potentially Starnbergersee over the last ~16 kyrs, from which four earthquakes are interpreted to left imprints in two or more lakes. Earthquake recurrence intervals range from ca. 1,000 to 2,000 years with a weakly periodic to aperiodic recurrence behavior for the individual records. We interpret that relatively shorter recurrence intervals in the more orogen-internal archives Piburgersee and Achensee are related to enhanced tectonic loading, whereas a longer recurrence rate in the more orogen-external archive Plansee might reflect a decreased stress transfer across the current-day enhanced seismicity zone. Plausible epicenters of paleo-earthquake scenarios coincide with the current enhanced seismicity regions. Prehistoric earthquakes with a minimum moment magnitude (MW) 5.8–6.1 might have occurred around the Inn valley, the Brenner region and the Fernpass-Loisach region, and might have reached up to MW 6.3 at Achensee. The paleo-earthquake catalogue might hint at a shift of severe earthquake activity near the Inn valley from east to west to east during Postglacial times. Shakemaps highlight that such severe earthquake scenarios not solely impact the enhanced seismicity region of Tyrol, but widely affect adjacent regions like southern Bavaria in Germany.

Common host variation drives malaria parasite fitness in healthy human red cells

The replication of Plasmodium falciparum parasites within red blood cells (RBCs) causes severe disease in humans, especially in Africa. Deleterious alleles like hemoglobin S are well-known to confer strong resistance to malaria, but the effects of common RBC variation are largely undetermined. Here we collected fresh blood samples from 121 healthy donors, most with African ancestry, and performed exome sequencing, detailed RBC phenotyping, and parasite fitness assays. Over one third of healthy donors unknowingly carried alleles for G6PD deficiency or hemoglobinopathies, which were associated with characteristic RBC phenotypes. Among non-carriers alone, variation in RBC hydration, membrane deformability, and volume was strongly associated with P. falciparum growth rate. Common genetic variants in PIEZO1, SPTA1/SPTB, and several P. falciparum invasion receptors were also associated with parasite growth rate. Interestingly, we observed little or negative evidence for divergent selection on non-pathogenic RBC variation between Africans and Europeans. These findings suggest a model in which globally widespread variation in a moderate number of genes and phenotypes modulates P. falciparum fitness in RBCs.

Sustainable Indigenous Fishing in the Pre-Contact Caribbean: Evidence and Critical Considerations from Carriacou, Grenada

Multiple studies reveal pre-1492 anthropogenic impacts on Caribbean fisheries that are consistent with overfishing, including changes in targeted prey, shifts in marine habitats exploited, and decreases in the average body size of taxa. At the Indigenous Caribbean village of Sabazan (AD 400–1400) on Carriacou, Lesser Antilles, post-AD 800 declines in fishing, increased mollusk collection, and changes in resource patch emphasis accord with the archaeological correlates of resource depression predicted by foraging theory models from behavioral ecology. Here, I apply foraging theory logic and abundance indices incorporating body size and fish habitat to test the predictions of expanded diet breadth, declining prey body size, and shifts to more distant fishing patches that are typically associated with overfishing. Results uphold a significant decrease in overall fishing, which may be due to habitat change associated with the Medieval Warm Period. Indices of fish size and resource patch use do not meet foraging theory expectations for resource depression, however. Instead, they suggest an absence of resource depression in the Sabazan fishery and at least 600 years of sustainable fishing. I review similar findings for other Caribbean archaeological sites with either negative evidence for fisheries’ declines or quantitatively demonstrated sustainable fishing. These sites collectively serve as a critical reminder of the heterogeneous trajectories of Indigenous social–ecological systems in the pre-contact Caribbean and the need for meta-level analyses of the region’s ancient fisheries. I discuss the application of the sustainability concept in archaeological studies of fishing and conclude that a more critical, explicit approach to defining and measuring sustainability in ancient fisheries is needed.

Spiking Autoencoders With Temporal Coding

Spiking neural networks with temporal coding schemes process information based on the relative timing of neuronal spikes. In supervised learning tasks, temporal coding allows learning through backpropagation with exact derivatives, and achieves accuracies on par with conventional artificial neural networks. Here we introduce spiking autoencoders with temporal coding and pulses, trained using backpropagation to store and reconstruct images with high fidelity from compact representations. We show that spiking autoencoders with a single layer are able to effectively represent and reconstruct images from the neuromorphically-encoded MNIST and FMNIST datasets. We explore the effect of different spike time target latencies, data noise levels and embedding sizes, as well as the classification performance from the embeddings. The spiking autoencoders achieve results similar to or better than conventional non-spiking autoencoders. We find that inhibition is essential in the functioning of the spiking autoencoders, particularly when the input needs to be memorised for a longer time before the expected output spike times. To reconstruct images with a high target latency, the network learns to accumulate negative evidence and to use the pulses as excitatory triggers for producing the output spikes at the required times. Our results highlight the potential of spiking autoencoders as building blocks for more complex biologically-inspired architectures. We also provide open-source code for the model.

Polar Express: Polar Question Forms Expressing Bias-Evidence Conflicts in Italian

Past research has concentrated on the use of different forms of polar questions in specific contexts, defined in terms of the relationship between original bias and contextual evidence. It has been showed that, for English and German, people tend to prefer specific forms given the pragmatic context. Based on previous experiments, in this work, we observe that the same tendencies occur in Italian. Also, we adopt a more refined experimental setup with three different tasks and a more natural evaluation scale to better capture nuances in appropriateness evaluations, provided by human subjects, which therefore reflects the more realistic one-to-many relationship among forms and functions. In fact, the results show how specific forms of polar questions are especially typical of situations where the bias has the opposite value with respect to the evidence, i.e., in positive bias versus negative evidence, for which a high negative polar question in the past tense was more frequently selected by the subjects (Note 1).

The Evolution of Smoking and Intoxicant Plant Use in Ancient Northwestern North America

Smoking pipes discovered in archaeological contexts demonstrate that Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest of North America have practiced smoking for over 4,500 years. Archaeometry and ancient residue metabolomics provide evidence for the association of particular plants with these artifacts. In this article, we synthesize recent research on ancient smoking and present current knowledge on the spatiotemporal distribution of smoking in the past. The presence of stone smoking pipes in the archaeological record is paired with our understanding of past plant use based on chemical residue analyses to create a picture of precontact smoking practices. Archaeological pipe data demonstrate that smoking was a widely distributed practice in the inland Northwest over the past several thousand years, but not on the coast. Distributional data—including positive and negative evidence from chemical residue studies—show that tobacco was an important smoke plant in the region as early as around 1,410 years ago and as far north as the mid-Columbia region. Ancient residue metabolomics contributes to a richer understanding of past use of specific plants through the identification of tobacco species and other indigenous plants, including Rhus glabra, Cornus sericia, and Salvia sp., as contributing to the chemical residues in ancient pipes.