Tychoxii

For years, investors and financial planners have advised purchasing land as one of the best and safest strategies for growing wealth, due to the old adage that “god’s not making any more of it.” That may prove to be untrue, however, as the United States recently announced plans to expand its territory by over a million square kilometers. The expansion comes in the form of ocean-floor territory which the US has claimed as a means to mine resources and grow its global presence.

This newfound ownership of land is not unprecedented, though it serves as new territory for the United States, as the nation hasn’t formally expanded its land since the ratification of Hawaii as a state in 1959. Dozens of other countries across the world have begun extending their ownership of seabed space, mostly dividing the regions along continental fault lines hundreds of miles away from their landmass coasts. The US State Department agreed to finally throw its own hat in the ring as of December of 2023, when the country began dividing up seabeds in the Arctic, Atlantic, Pacific, Bering Sea, and many other underwater fields.

The land accumulates to more than 386,000 square miles of undeveloped ocean floor, accounting for more than double the landmass of California. The land serves as part of the United States’ Extended Continental Shelf, which resides over 230 miles from the nearest coast of the massive nation. The move comes as part of a collaboration between the State Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which seeks to gather geological data and resources from the newly acquired regions.

Though the United States has laid claim to the land, experts are unsure of how the legality of the move will be examined on the international stage. As part of their ownership, the US will be made to submit data defining the newly acquired region to the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea, though the US has not technically ratified the organization’s existence. The UNCLOS is currently recognized by the European Union and a litany of other sovereign nations, despite the fact that the United States refuses to sign on due to a complex series of legal and political issues at the core of the group’s foundation.

The United States has previously condemned nations such as China and the Philippines for attempting the same kind of border expansion, though this has largely been due to the aforementioned countries trying to construct man-made islands to extend their maritime borders. Without the US formally ratifying UNCLOS, it stands to reason that the international community may hold a few objections to the expansion, though experts seem to agree that the United States is well within its rights to engage in this acquisition of continental shelf land.

For the United States, the most significant new region is the continental shelf land acquired in the Arctic Ocean, which allows the country newfound access to fishing, shipping, and mining opportunities. Of course, numerous studies will have to be done regarding the existing ecosystems in the region before any of these changes can take effect, as manmade interference could be devastating to local wildlife if it is not handled carefully.

https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/cltr/united-states-grows.html

https://newrepublic.com/article/165245/ikea-romania-europe-old-growth-forest

by Natasha Gilbert & Gemma Conroy

The US government has extended for six months a key symbolic agreement to cooperate with China in science and technology. The agreement was due to expire on 27 August, and its short-term extension has revived researchers’ hopes that the 44-year-old pact will continue.

The pact does not provide research funding. Rather, it is an umbrella agreement to encourage collaboration and goodwill between US and Chinese government agencies, universities and institutions doing research in agriculture, energy, health, the environment and other fields. The extension means that, for now, research will continue as normal.

The non-binding agreement was first signed in 1979 and has since been renewed every five years. The new extension stops short of a full renewal, which some scientists worry is now in jeopardy. Without the agreement, research cooperation and programmes between the two governments could flounder, some specialists warn.

The extension “is not as good as a renewal”, says Denis Simon, a researcher in global business and technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “But it’s a good start. It says the US wants to stay connected.”

Growing tensions

The agreement not only has a practical role in promoting scientific collaboration, but also holds great symbolic value, say researchers in China and the United States.

“Abandoning such a long-standing agreement would exacerbate the ongoing decoupling in science and education” between the two nations, says Li Tang, a public-policy researcher at Fudan University in Shanghai, China.

When the agreement was last renewed, in 2018, it was amended to strengthen rights over intellectual property generated by research collaborations between the countries. But since then, tensions have grown, potentially contributing to the decision by the administration of US president Joe Biden to adopt only a short-term extension, researchers say.

Among the programmes that have degraded the US–China relationship is a US initiative that aimed to safeguard US laboratories and businesses from espionage. It targeted researchers of Chinese descent before it was shuttered last year. And last July, the US Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act, which includes measures designed to tighten research security, such as requiring US institutions to report gifts of US$50,000 or more from a foreign government; the previous reporting limit was $250,000.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government recently restricted the flow of academic and health data from China, citing cybersecurity and data-privacy concerns.

In a statement to Nature, a US State Department spokesperson said that the country intends to negotiate amendments to the deal and that challenges posed by China’s science and technology strategies, protection of intellectual property and threat to US security are central considerations.

“This short-term, six-month extension will keep the agreement in force while we seek authority to undertake negotiations to amend and strengthen the terms of the [agreement]. It does not commit the US to a longer-term extension.”

Opposition in Congress

Some US lawmakers say the agreement poses a threat to national security and have called for scrapping it. In a 27 June letter to Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, some members of a US House of Representatives committee on China alleged that research partnerships between government agencies in the United States and China organized under the agreement could have developed technologies that would later be used against the United States.

But some scientists have campaigned for the US government to continue the agreement. In a letter sent to Biden on 24 August, physicists Steven Kivelson and Peter Michelson at Stanford University in California wrote that the agreement provides an important framework for cooperation between the two countries and that cutting off ties with China “would directly and negatively impact” their own research. More than 1,000 academics signed the letter.

Kivelson, a theoretical physicist researching quantum materials, told Nature that many of his best graduate students and postdocs come from China.

“Much of the physics that I think about is based on experimental work that is done in China,” he says. “The entire field is highly dependent on and benefits from cooperation with colleagues in China.”

Collaboration under threat?

Deborah Seligsohn, a specialist in US–China relations at Villanova University in Pennsylvania and a former US State Department official who served at the US embassy in Beijing, says scientific cooperation between the two governments could become “deeply problematic” without the agreement. It provided a “critical structural basis” for projects such as one on birth abnormalities that was the basis for the discovery that folic acid can prevent spina bifida, a birth defect in which an area of the spinal column doesn’t form properly, and other neural-tube defects, she says.

Jenny Lee, a higher-education researcher and vice-president for international affairs at the University of Arizona, Tucson, says that, if the agreement is scrapped, it could hurt research and higher education in the United States more than in China. This year, China overtook the United States as the nation publishing the largest number of high-quality research articles. The impact will probably be felt in future when new collaborations fail to form, she says. “It will signal to the next generation of scientists that we don’t want to actively cooperate with China,” she says.

It’s not clear what amendments the US government will seek, but Simon says he is “cautiously optimistic” that the two nations can agree on a way forward that will lay the groundwork for future collaboration.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02701-7

BY DAVID GRIMM

Apart from Garfield’s legendary love of lasagna, perhaps no food is more associated with cats than tuna. The dish is a staple of everything from The New Yorker cartoons to Meow Mix jingles—and more than 6% of all wild-caught fish goes into cat food. Yet tuna (or any seafood for that matter) is an odd favorite for an animal that evolved in the desert. Now, researchers say they have found a biological explanation for this curious craving.

In a study published this month in Chemical Senses, scientists report that cat taste buds contain the receptors needed to detect umami—the savory, deep flavor of various meats, and one of the five basic tastes in addition to sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. Indeed, umami appears to be the primary flavor cats seek out. That’s no surprise for an obligate carnivore. But the team also found these cat receptors are uniquely tuned to molecules found at high concentrations in tuna, revealing why our feline friends seem to prefer this delicacy over all others.

“This is an important study that will help us better understand the preferences of our familiar pets,” says Yasuka Toda, a molecular biologist at Meiji University and a leader in studying the evolution of umami taste in mammals and birds. The work could help pet food companies develop healthier diets and more palatable medications for cats, says Toda, who was not involved with the industry-funded study.

Cats have a unique palate. They can’t taste sugar because they lack a key protein for sensing it. That’s probably because there’s no sugar in meat, says Scott McGrane, a flavor scientist and research manager for the sensory science team at the Waltham Petcare Science Institute, which is owned by pet food–maker Mars Petcare UK. There’s a saying in evolution, he says: “If you don’t use it, you lose it.” Cats also have fewer bitter taste receptors than humans do—a common trait in uber-carnivores.

But cats must taste something, McGrane reasoned, and that something is likely the savory flavor of meat. In humans and many other animals, two genes—Tas1r1 and Tas1r3—encode proteins that join together in taste buds to form a receptor that detects umami. Previous work had shown that cats express the Tas1r3 gene in their taste buds, but it was unclear whether they had the other critical puzzle piece.

So McGrane and colleagues biopsied the tongue of a 6-year-old male cat that had been euthanized for health reasons unrelated to the study. Genetic sequencing revealed his taste buds expressed both the Tas1r1 and Tas1r3 genes—the first time scientists showed that cats have all the molecular machinery needed to detect umami.

When the researchers compared the protein sequences encoded by these genes with those of humans, however, they found a striking difference: Two critical sites that allow the human receptor to bind to glutamic and aspartic acid—the main amino acids that activate umami taste in people—were mutated in cats. “So I began thinking, maybe cats can’t taste umami,” McGrane says.

To double check, he and his team engineered cells to produce the cat umami receptor on their surface. They then exposed the cells to a variety of amino acids and nucleotides. The cells did respond to umami—but with a twist. In people, the amino acids bind first and the nucleotides amplify the response. But in cats, the nucleotides activated the receptor, and the amino acids further boosted it, McGrane says. “That’s the exact opposite of what we see in people.”

In the last part of the experiment, McGrane and colleagues gave 25 cats a taste test. In a series of trials, they presented the felines with two bowls of water, each with various combinations of amino acids and nucleotides, or just water alone. The cats showed a strong preference for bowls that contained molecules found in umami-rich foods, suggesting this flavor—above all others—is the primary motivator for cats.

“I think umami is as important for cats as sweet is for humans,” Toda says. Dogs, she notes, can taste both sweet and umami, which may explain why they’re not such fussy eaters.

But it wasn’t just umami in general the cats craved. The felines showed a particular preference for bowls containing histidine and inosine monophosphate—compounds found at particularly high levels in tuna. “It was one of the most preferred combinations,” McGrane says. “It really seems to hit that umami sweet spot.”

That jibes with Toda’s personal experience. When she was a veterinary student, she got cats with no appetite to eat by sprinkling their food with dried flakes of bonito—a common umami ingredient in Japan and a close relative of tuna. “It worked very well!” she says.

Indeed, one application of the work could be developing foods that are more palatable to cats, McGrane says. He also thinks a spoonful of umami (figuratively speaking) could help feline medications go down easier—welcome news for anyone who’s almost lost a finger trying to pill a cat.

Why cats have a hankering for tuna in the first place remains a mystery. They evolved in the deserts of the Middle East about 10,000 years ago, where fish of any kind was unlikely to be on the menu.

It may have been a taste cats developed over time. As far back as 1500 B.C.E., cats are depicted eating fish in the art of Ancient Egypt. And by the Middle Ages, felines in some Middle Eastern ports were consuming large quantities of fish—including tuna—likely because they were feasting on the scraps left by fishers. In both cases, cats that evolved a taste for fish—and perhaps tuna in particular—may have had an advantage over their comrades, says Fiona Marshall, a zooarchaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

“We’re at a starting point—it’s not a finished story,” McGrane admits. “But all of this work is building up to our basic understanding of what it means to be a cat.”

doi: 10.1126/science.adk5076

back from the webcomic heyday

by Christie Wilcox

Nearly everyone has fun on a carousel—including, possibly, fruit flies. Scientists observed some flies embarking on a spinning platform voluntarily and repeatedly, suggesting the animals may find the movement appealing for some reason, according to a study posted on the bioRxiv preprint server earlier this month.

“The flies are fulfilling all the criteria of play as we understand it in other animals,” says Samadi Galpayage, a behavioral scientist at Queen Mary University of London who discovered bumble bees play with objects and who was not involved in the work. “There isn't really an alternative explanation so far. Whether that’s [evidence of] fun in itself—that’s the next question.”

Sergio Pellis, a behavioral scientist at the University of Lethbridge, says he finds the study—which has yet to be peer reviewed—“very exciting.” If confirmed, he notes, it would add to the small but growing pile of evidence for play in invertebrates—and would be the first instance of a type called “locomotor play” in these animals. Locomotor play involves the movement of one’s own body, such as running, jumping, or swinging. It’s different from object play, as bees have been observed doing, or social play, which has been observed in certain wasps and spiders.

The idea behind the study was inspired, ultimately, by a duck. Years before co-author Wolf Hütteroth became a neurobiologist, he remembers one day seeing a lone duck floating down a fast-moving river. Just as the animal was nearly out of sight, it flew back upriver, alit on the water, and floated back down—over and over again. “I never stopped wondering what motivated the duck to perform such curious behavior,” he says.

In February 2016, Hütteroth attended a symposium where researchers were discussing whether insects can act with intention. He pondered how to test whether flies would do something similar to the rapids-running duck.

He and Tilman Triphan, a colleague then at the University of Konstanz, decided to build a carousel of sorts. They’d offer male laboratory fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) the chance to hop onto a spinning section of floor in a stress-free, if otherwise unexciting, environment. He didn’t think the flies would actually go for it. “My expectations were extremely low,” he says. Some of the flies ignored the contraption. But a small group of them acted as if they’d just discovered Disneyland.

Triphan and Hütteroth—who have both since moved to the University of Leipzig—report in their preprint that a subset of the flies spent 5% or more of their time on the turning wheel. When the researchers put two disks in the arena that alternated spinning every 5 minutes, some flies spent their time bouncing back and forth between whichever carousel was spinning.

Fruit flies are excellent spatial learners, Hütteroth notes, so if they didn’t like to spin, they could have simply avoided the disk, as some did. The majority were somewhere in between—not overly enthusiastic, but also not avoidant of the spinning disks.

So, were the flies riding the carousels—for lack of a better word—playing? It’s certainly possible, Pellis says. “It’s clear that at least some of the flies are engaging in this locomotor behavior just for the hell of it.”

The fact that some flies apparently liked the carousel and others didn’t came as no surprise to University of Tennessee, Knoxville, behavioral scientist Gordon Burghardt, an expert on play in nonhuman animals who wasn’t involved in the study. “You take a bunch of kids to the fairground, and some are really anxious to get on the rides while others are a little more hesitant.”

Still, Hütteroth hesitates to claim the flies were having fun. After all, the flies didn’t reveal their motivations to the researchers. But to Pellis and Burghardt, the idea isn’t so crazy. According to Burghardt, the flies could be experiencing something akin to what we feel when we ride a roller coaster or go down a slide. “I see no reason why other species, even invertebrates, could not share in this aspect of life,” he says.

The next steps in solving this riddle may come from studying the flies’ brains to uncover the neural circuitry involved in the carousel behavior, Hütteroth says. Such research could help explain what benefit flies—or any other animal—might derive from locomotor play. “What is the adaptive value of this kind of play behavior? Is it good for anything?” Hütteroth asks. For example, does it perhaps refine an animal’s perception of their own body, a sense known as proprioception?

Pellis notes there has been resistance to the idea that animals outside of mammals engage in play. He recalls research in the 1970s on roughhousing in cockroaches, for example, that would immediately be considered an example of play if puppies were doing it. Now, he says, there are enough solid examples of play in other species that it makes sense to ask just how widespread various kinds of play are across the animal kingdom.

Ultimately, the findings suggest locomotor play “might really be deeply rooted in our evolutionary history,” Burghardt says. So, it’s possible it’s happening all around us—and we’ve just been too focused on the playful antics of furry critters to notice.

so im replaying the baldurs gates due to bg3 hype. I didnt remember how dark bg2 is straight from the get go. it's quite a whiplash coming stright from bg1.

i was also suprised by the "dragonspear" beamdog expasion I quite liked it.