The human brain is hardwired to map our surroundings. This trait is called spatial memoryour ability to remember certain locations and where objects are in relation to one another. New findings published today in Scientific Reports suggest that one major feature of our spatial recall is efficiently locating high-calorie, energy-rich food. The studys authors believe human spatial memory ensured that our hunter-gatherer ancestors could prioritize the location of reliable nutrition, giving them an evolutionary leg up.

In the study, researchers at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands observed 512 participants follow a fixed path through a room where either eight food samples or eight food-scented cotton pads were placed in different locations. When they arrived at a sample, the participants would taste the food or smell the cotton and rate how much they liked it. Four of the food samples were high-calorie, including brownies and potato chips, and the other four, including cherry tomatoes and apples, were low in caloriesdiet foods, you might call them.

After the taste test, the participants were asked to identify the location of each sample on a map of the room. They were nearly 30 percent more accurate at mapping the high-calorie samples versus the low-calorie ones, regardless of how much they liked those foods or odors. They were also 243 percent more accurate when presented with actual foods, as opposed to the food scents.

Our main takeaway message is that human minds seem to be designed for efficiently locating high-calorie foods in our environment, says Rachelle de Vries, a Ph.D. candidate in human nutrition and health at Wageningen University and lead author of the new paper. De Vries feels her teams findings support the idea that locating valuable caloric resources was an important and regularly occurring problem for early humans weathering the climate shifts of the Pleistocene epoch. Those with a better memory for where and when high-calorie food resources would be available were likely to have a survivalor fitnessadvantage, she explains.

This looks like a nice piece of work, says James Nairne, a cognitive psychology professor at Purdue University, who was not involved in the new research. Memory evolved so that we can remember things that aid our survival or reproductionhence, its not surprising that we remember fitness-relevant information particularly well, [including] high caloric content.

We tend to think of primates such as ourselves as having lost the acute sense of smell seen in many other mammals in favor of sharp eyesight. And to a large degree, we humans have developed that way. But the new findings support the notion that our sniffer is not altogether terrible: These results suggest that human minds continue to house a cognitive system optimized for energyefficient foraging within erratic food habitats of the past, and highlight the often underestimated capabilities of the human olfactory sense, the authors wrote.

One drawback of our spatial skills, as they relate to sustenance, is our modern taste for junk food. With a life span of not much more than 30as was the case for humans until relatively recentlychronic diseases such as diabetes were not a concern for our ancestors. If you came across a rich grove of fruit trees, you consumed all the sugar you could to help ensure your survival. Now our taste for sweets and fats contributes to a global obesity epidemic and has us reaching for candy over kale. In a way, our minds (and bodies) may be mismatched to our current obesogenic food-rich circumstances, de Vries says. We have reason to suspect that the high-calorie spatial memory bias could stimulate people to choose high-calorie foods by making high-calorie options easier or more convenient to find and obtain.

Were more likely to remember sweet things, which was a real plus for most of our evolutionary history, Nairne adds. But this is problematic in todays world.... Were still walking around with Stone Age brains.

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Our Brain Is Better at Remembering Where to Find Brownies Than Cherry Tomatoes - Scientific American

The smell of a man has been linked to women who suffer multiple miscarriages, new research shows.

Women who suffer an unexplained miscarriage have brains that react differently to a man's body odour.

They are better at identifying their partner by smell than those who do not experience miscarriages and preferred the smell of their partner to other male odours.

The findings could lead to urgently needed answers for many women who experience repeat miscarriage with no clear underlying explanation.

Scientists suggest women who have suffered unexplained repeated pregnancy loss (uRPL) have altered perceptions and brain responses to male body odours in comparison to those with no history of uRPL.

Around half of women miscarry at conception and 15 per cent of pregnancies also result in miscarriage but only a limited number of these can be explained.

Body odour has been linked to many aspects of healthy human reproduction, such as synchrony of menstruation between women who live together, and the influence of body odours of breastfeeding women on the timing of ovulation and menstruation in others.

Lead author Dr Liron Rozenkrantz, a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, said: "Given that sense of smell is associated with human reproduction, we hypothesised that it may also be related to disorders of human reproduction.

"We set out to test the hypothesis that perception of smell - known as olfaction - is altered in unexplained pregnancy loss, specifically the smell of body odours."

In the study, the team started by testing the ability to identify mates by smell which is a key olfactory function important in reproduction.

They offered 33 women with uRPL and the same number of women with no history of uRPL three body odour sniff jars, scented with body odour from their partner, another male and one with no odour.

Women with a history of uRPL were twice as likely to correctly identify their spouse than the control women, findings revealed.

Senior author Professor Noam Sobel, from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, said: "We have found that women who experience unexplained pregnancy loss are much more likely to recognise their spouse by smell and rate men's body odour differently than other women."

To see whether this was because the women with a history of uRPL had a better sense of smell, the team compared their ability to smell a range of different odours, such as peanuts and soap.

The women with experience of uRPL were also better at discriminating between the smells, but only marginally.

Next researchers asked whether it was the characteristics of the men's body odours that made the women who have had uRPL better at identifying their spouse by smell.

They asked 36 women, half who have experienced uRPL, to rate men's body odours based on intensity, pleasantness, sexual attraction and fertility.

Based on these criteria, the uRPL group rated non-spouse body odours lower when compared with the other group.

To look at how these perceptions might be controlled, the team used MRI scans to look at brain structure and function.

They found that women with a history of uRPL had smaller olfactory bulbs, which was surprising given their apparent greater ability to perceive and discriminate between different smells.

When they measured brain activity while the women watched an emotional film clip, with or without the subliminal presence of a non-spouse male body odour, they found a remarkable response in the hypothalamus region.

While body odour increased the hypothalamus activity in women with history of uRPL, it decreased this activity in the control group.

Prof Sobel added: "We have also found differences in structural and functional brain patterns, which have not been previously associated with unexplained repeat pregnancy loss.

"We hope our findings will help direct further thinking and research on this condition, which is currently not well understood or managed."

Findings were published in the journal eLife.

Continued here:
Women who suffer miscarriage react differently to the smell of men - Surrey Live

The president has had a life-threatening, infectious disease for over a week, and he and his doctors havent been very transparent about the timeline and course of his affliction. In lieu of detailed disclosures, reporters have to piece together his condition based on the treatments hes been receiving.

Trump was started off on an experimental therapeutic an antibody cocktail and then advanced to another remdesivir. The other biomolecules coursing through Donald Trump's system (and this week's headlines) are corticosteroids, called dexamethasone.

You may have heard of cytokine storms, where the body's immune response to severe COVID-19 bombards healthy cells, making the illness worse. Trump has been given dexamethasone, an immuno-supressant that doctors prescribe to temper that effect. Unlike the other experimental treatments, dexamethasone is common and somewhat easy to access. However, it is rarely administered to a patient with a case as (self-)reportedly mild as Donald Trumps. In an interview with New York Magazine's Intelligencer, the co-author of a recent study testing dexamethasone elaborates:

That lack of evidence is concerning as Trump heads into a critical point in the course of his illness. COVID-19 is known for being a bit of a roller coaster, with intermittent fevers, mysterious symptoms, and rapid declines. Abraar Karan, a physician with experience treating patients with COVID-19, told Monique Brouillette at Scientific American that some people have turned corners and left the hospital, only to come back feeling much sicker, with even worse oxygen levels and possibly other harm to the bodys organs.

It is theoretically possible that the early steroid treatment may ward off a dangerous auto-inflammatory reaction. But beyond the inherent risks of immuno-supression, corticosteroids may also cause behavioral side effects in the President. Trump's cognitive and behavioral state has been a point of concern for years. Potent steroids such as dexamethasone are known to increase appetite, decrease restful sleep, and bring about heightened "maniacal" energy states.

As the nation enters the weekend, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is rolling out a 25th amendment commission, Trump is boasting a miraculous recovery with a Fox News doctor, and the rest of us continue to wait and learn how biology will run its course. For better or worse, the side effects our president experiences may prove to have historical consequences. To my knowledge, roid rage has never been a factor in nuclear geopolitics.

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Working-class ants take the reins when the Indian jumping ant queen dies - Massive Science

Understanding the detailed anatomy of the endocrine pancreas, its innervation, and the remodeling that occurs in diabetes can provide new insights into metabolic disease. Using tissue clearing and whole-organ imaging, we identified the 3D associations between islets and innervation. This technique provided detailed quantification of and cell volumes and pancreatic nerve fibers, their distribution and heterogeneity in healthy tissue, canonical mouse models of diabetes, and samples from normal and diabetic human pancreata. Innervation was highly enriched in the mouse endocrine pancreas, with regional differences. Islet nerve density was increased in nonobese diabetic mice, in mice treated with streptozotocin, and in pancreata of human donors with type 2 diabetes. Nerve contacts with cells were preserved in diabetic mice and humans. In summary, our whole-organ assessment allows comprehensive examination of islet characteristics and their innervation and reveals dynamic regulation of islet innervation in diabetes.

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A 3D atlas of the dynamic and regional variation of pancreatic innervation in diabetes - Science Advances

Who were David Starr Jordan and Louis Agassiz?

David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) was a prominent ichthyologist and Stanfords first president. He made important contributions to the university, including leadership during an early financial crisis and the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake. But he was also a leader in the American eugenics movement, which promoted controlled reproduction based on heritage.

Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) was a renowned scholar of natural history who also promoted polygenism, which holds that human racial groups have different ancestral origins and are unequal. He was a mentor to Jordan but has no significant association with the university.

What is the origin of this issue?

The university received requests from the faculty of the Department of Psychology, which is located in Jordan Hall, and the Stanford Eugenics History Project, a group founded by Stanford undergraduate Ben Maldonado, asking that the building be renamed. The Psychology faculty also requested the removal of the statue of Agassiz from the buildings front faade.

How was the committee selected?

President Marc Tessier-Lavigne appointed the Advisory Committee on Renaming Jordan Hall and Removing the Statue of Louis Agassiz in July and charged it with delivering recommendations before the beginning of fall quarter. Committee members were charged to represent the best interests of the entire university and be open to multiple perspectives. They were not selected to represent any particular constituencies, but rather to consider issues impartially.

What analysis was conducted?

The committee met weekly, engaging in extensive research, from July 17 through Sept. 11, 2020. To make its own independent assessment of the strength and clarity of historical evidence, the committee reviewed relevant historical material and verified information by consulting primary materials. It focused principally and substantially on Jordans own writings, examining both published and unpublished materials.

The committee followed principles developed in 2018 to consider the renaming of campus features generally. The principles include such considerations as the strength and clarity of the historical evidence, the persons role in the universitys history, the centrality of a persons offensive behavior to the persons life as a whole and the university communitys identification with the named feature. Then it applied those principles to the requests concerning Jordan and Agassiz and forwarded recommendations to President Tessier-Lavigne.

What outreach was conducted?

The committee solicited extensive feedback in order to inform its deliberations and recommendations.

It hosted a Zoom open town hall, which had 206 attendees and more than 20 speakers, and a separate town hall for alumni, with 100 attendees and 18 speakers. It engaged in specific outreach to those who had majored in biology and psychology, the principal departments that have occupied Jordan Hall in the past century; met with biology and psychology faculty and others working in genetics and bioethics; and consulted with several historians working at Stanford on related subjects. And it sought and considered written comments from the community, including 52 comments from the Psychology Diversity Committee and more than 200 comments received through [emailprotected].

What decision has been made?

Although renaming decisions fall under the presidents authority, he brought the recommendations to the Board of Trustees for additional approval because of the historical importance of Jordan to the university.

Acting on that request, the board approved the removal of the Jordan name from Jordan Hall and from other features named for him. It endorsed the removal of the Agassiz statue from its current location and the committees recommendation to pursue educational projects to help make Jordans complex history better known.

What are the next steps regarding the features named for Jordan?

Debra Satz, whose responsibilities as dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences include the Department of Psychology, will institute a process to determine a new name for Jordan Hall, whether it be an individuals name or a name based on other considerations. Some buildings in the Main Quad are named for individuals, others are named for subjects or disciplines, and some are not named at all. Satz will bring her recommendation to the president and provost.

In the meantime, the university will remove the Jordan Hall lettering from the building as soon as practicable, along with the Agassiz statue, and the building will be referred to by its number in the Main Quad, Building 420.

Tessier-Lavigne will implement the other recommendations from the report, including establishing a process for identifying replacement names for the other features named for Jordan, if needed. The committee noted that Jordan Way, a pathway in the medical center area, has less salience than the other spaces named for Jordan and recommended that its name be changed in the course of normal university planning.

Why will the statue be relocated on campus and not removed from public display?

The committee recommended removing the Agassiz statue from Jordan Hall but retaining it elsewhere on campus because of its particular significance in the Stanford community. A prominent example is the iconic imagery showing the statues head stuck in concrete after being dislodged in the 1906 earthquake. As a result, the statue also has been used as an educational example demonstrating important principles in rock rheology (the study of the strength of Earth materials).

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Frequently asked questions on Jordan Hall and the statue of Louis Agassiz | Stanford News - Stanford University News

The origins and development of the arid and highly seasonal steppe-desert biome in Central Asia, the largest of its kind in the world, remain largely unconstrained by existing records. It is unclear how Cenozoic climatic, geological, and biological forces, acting at diverse spatial and temporal scales, shaped Central Asian ecosystems through time. Our synthesis shows that the Central Asian steppe-desert has existed since at least Eocene times but experienced no less than two regime shifts, one at the EoceneOligocene Transition and one in the mid-Miocene. These shifts separated three successive stable states, each characterized by unique floral and faunal structures. Past responses to disturbance in the Asian steppe-desert imply that modern ecosystems are unlikely to recover their present structures and diversity if forced into a new regime. This is of concern for Asian steppes today, which are being modified for human use and lost to desertification at unprecedented rates.

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Cenozoic evolution of the steppe-desert biome in Central Asia - Science Advances

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. New analysis of the DNA sequence of the male-specific Y chromosomes from all living species of the great ape family helps to clarify our understanding of how this enigmatic chromosome evolved. A clearer picture of the evolution of the Y chromosome is important for studying male fertility in humans as well as our understanding of reproduction patterns and the ability to track male lineages in the great apes, which can help with conservation efforts for these endangered species.

A team of biologists and computer scientists at Penn State sequenced and assembled the Y chromosome from orangutan and bonobo and compared those sequences to the existing human, chimpanzee, and gorilla Y sequences. From the comparison, the team were able to clarify patterns of evolution that seem to fit with behavioral differences between the species and reconstruct a model of what the Y chromosome might have looked like in the ancestor of all great apes.

A paper describing the research appears Oct. 5 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Y chromosome is important for male fertility and contains the genes critical for sperm production, but it is often neglected in genomic studies because it is so difficult to sequence and assemble, said Monika Cechova, a graduate student at Penn State at the time of the research and co-first author of the paper. The Y chromosome contains a lot of repetitive sequences, which are challenging for DNA sequencing, assembling sequences, and aligning sequences for comparison. There arent out-of-the-box software packages to deal with the Y chromosome, so we had to overcome these hurdles and optimize our experimental and computational protocols, which allowed us to address interesting biological questions.

The Y chromosome is unusual. It contains relatively few genes, many of which are involved in male sex determination and sperm production; large sections of repetitive DNA, short sequences repeated over and over again; and large DNA palindromes, inverted repeats that can be many thousands of letters long and read the same forwards and backwards.

Previous work by the team comparing human, chimpanzee, and gorilla sequences had revealed some unexpected patterns. Humans are more closely related to chimpanzees, but for some characteristics, the human Y was more similar to the gorilla Y.

If you just compare the sequence identity comparing the As,Ts, Cs, and Gs of the chromosomes humans are more similar to chimpanzees, as you would expect, said Kateryna Makova, Pentz Professor of Biology at Penn State and one of the leaders of the research team. But if you look at which genes are present, the types of repetitive sequences, and the shared palindromes, humans look more similar to gorillas. We needed the Y chromosome of more great ape species to tease out the details of what was going on.

The team, therefore, sequenced the Y chromosome of a bonobo, a close relative of the chimpanzee, and an orangutan, a more distantly related great ape. With these new sequences, the researchers could see that the bonobo and chimpanzee shared the unusual pattern of accelerated rates of DNA sequence change and gene loss, suggesting that this pattern emerged prior to the evolutionary split between the two species. The orangutan Y chromosome, on the other hand, which serves as an outgroup to ground the comparisons, looked about like what you expect based on its known relationship to the other great apes.

Our hypothesis is that the accelerated change that we see in chimpanzees and bonobos could be related to their mating habits, said Rahulsimham Vegesna, a graduate student at Penn State and co-first author of the paper. In chimpanzees and bonobos, one female mates with multiple males during a single cycle. This leads to what we call sperm competition, the sperm from several males trying to fertilize a single egg. We think that this situation could provide the evolutionary pressure to accelerate change on the chimpanzee and bonobo Y chromosome, compared to other apes with different mating patterns, but this hypothesis, while consistent with our findings, needs to be evaluated in subsequent studies.

In addition to teasing out some of the details of how the Y chromosome evolved in individual species, the team used the set of great ape sequences to reconstruct what the Y chromosome might have looked like in the ancestor of modern great apes.

Having the ancestral great ape Y chromosome helps us to understand how the chromosome evolved, said Vegesna. For example, we can see that many of the repetitive regions and palindromes on the Y were already present on the ancestral chromosome. This, in turn, argues for the importance of these features for the Y chromosome in all great apes and allows us to explore how they evolved in each of the separate species.

The Y chromosome is also unusual because, unlike most chromosomes it doesnt have a matching partner. We each get two copies of chromosomes 1 through 22, and then some of us (females) get two X chromosomes and some of us (males) get one X and one Y. Partner chromosomes can exchange sections in a process called recombination, which is important to preserve the chromosomes evolutionarily. Because the Y doesnt have a partner, it had been hypothesized that the long palindromic sequences on the Y might be able to recombine with themselves and thus still be able to preserve their genes, but the mechanism was not known.

We used the data from a technique called Hi-C, which captures the three-dimensional organization of the chromosome, to try to see how this self-recombination is facilitated, said Cechova. What we found was that regions of the chromosome that recombine with each other are kept in close proximity to one another spatially by the structure of the chromosome.

Working on the Y chromosome presents a lot of challenges, said Paul Medvedev, associate professor of computer science and engineering and of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State and the other leader of the research team. We had to develop specialized methods and computational analyses to account for the highly repetitive nature of the sequence of the Y. This project is truly cross-disciplinary and could not have happened without the combination of computational and biological scientists that we have on our team.

In addition to Cechova, Makova, Vegesna, and Medvedev, the research team at Penn State included Marta Tomaszkiewicz, Robert S. Harris, Di Chen, and Samarth Rangavittal. The research was supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute, the Institute of Computational and Data Sciences, the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, and the Eberly College of Science of the Pennsylvania State University, and by the CBIOS Predoctoral Training Program awarded to Penn State by the National Institutes of Health.

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Evolution of the Y chromosome in great apes deciphered - Penn State News

Superficial white matter (SWM) contains the most cortico-cortical white matter connections in the human brain encompassing the short U-shaped association fibers. Despite its importance for brain connectivity, very little is known about SWM in humans, mainly due to the lack of noninvasive imaging methods. Here, we lay the groundwork for systematic in vivo SWM mapping using ultrahigh resolution 7 T magnetic resonance imaging. Using biophysical modeling informed by quantitative ion beam microscopy on postmortem brain tissue, we demonstrate that MR contrast in SWM is driven by iron and can be linked to the microscopic iron distribution. Higher SWM iron concentrations were observed in U-fiberrich frontal, temporal, and parietal areas, potentially reflecting high fiber density or late myelination in these areas. Our SWM mapping approach provides the foundation for systematic studies of interindividual differences, plasticity, and pathologies of this crucial structure for cortico-cortical connectivity in humans.

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Superficial white matter imaging: Contrast mechanisms and whole-brain in vivo mapping - Science Advances

Don Eddins, in his article, is uncertain as to the legal status of the Roe v Wade decision allowing abortion on demand, and only during the first trimester, since Trump has nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett as a replacement for Judge Ginsberg on the Supreme Court. Judge Barrett has previously said that the 1973 Court decision was not based on the Constitution but on a "right to privacy" that liberal justices invented. There is no reference to "privacy" in the Constitution.

If a woman can kill her unborn child in "privacy," why can't she kill her born children in "privacy?" Or her husband or grandmother? The Declaration of Independence guarantees "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness;" but if someone is denied life, they will never experience liberty or pursuit of happiness.

These questions must be answered if one thinks the Roe v. Wade decision was correct and whether it can be invalidated by another succeeding Court:

(1) Is the thing aborted human life? Will it be something other than human life at birth? What it will become at birth, it already is; another human person. Calling it by terms that describe its development stages does not make it non-human at any one point and human at another.

(2) When did it become a right for anyone to kill another human being? Why is that decision only the woman's right and not also the father's? The child could only come about because of the two different genders engaging in sex. Roe v. Wade gives the father no rights in this abortion decision, only the mother.

(3) Have other Supreme Court decisions been invalided later? Why is Roe v. Wade untouchable? Many like Hillary Clinton think that a mother's abortion decision is almost "sacred." The Dredd Scott decision allowing slavery was overturned along with hundreds of State laws that allowed slavery and the relegation of Blacks to a second-class citizenship. It was also the law of the land for some time.

(3) Eddins says: "Abortion is a strange issue in that no one is really for abortion. Some just believe women cannot completely have reproductive freedom without a right to abortion." Is that true? Reproductive rights are exercised when a woman chooses to engage in sex. Nature and science have provided many means to prevent reproduction. If she becomes pregnant from that prior decision, should society allow her to correct it by killing the conceived child? Would it be acceptable if some people want to commit serious crimes because they limit their "freedoms," so everyone else, who think these crimes are immoral, should just go along with it and accept the consequences?

In the 2000 Stenberg v. Carhart case concerning whether a State could prohibit "partial-birth" abortion, where the child is partially removed from the woman's womb, then its brains are vacuumed out or crushed, Judge Ginsberg mocked what she called the "emotional uproar" the procedure caused. What a great humanitarian jurist; may she rest in peace with the 50 million aborted children whose deaths she was unconcerned about.

Let's all hope and pray that Roe v. Wade is history, a terrible holocaust of human life.

This November, vote your values. Many people focus on the personalities running for president, but much more is at stake than tweets or hurt feelings. Whoever wins the presidency will likely be gone in four years, but the laws passed, judges installed, and policies implemented could have lasting effects on our country. Here are some considerations.

An unborn child can experience pain by 22 weeks of gestation or earlier. Doug Jones and Joe Biden support abortion through nine months of pregnancy. There are documented cases where a child who survives attempted abortion is left to die without medical care. Democrats in Congress refused to support a bill to protect these children. If you believe that submitting an unborn child to the pain of late term abortion is cruel, that every child who is born has a constitutional right to life, that taxpayers should not be forced to pay for abortions, vote for Trump and Tuberville.

Under the deceptively named Equality Act (EA) passed by House Democrats, boys, who are generally stronger than girls, can compete in girls sports, win scholarships intended for women and violate womens privacy by using their locker rooms and bathrooms. Under EA, people suffering from gender dysphoria (transgender) must be provided dangerous hormones and doctors must, against their best judgment, remove healthy organs in so-called gender affirmation surgeries instead of addressing the underlying psychological disorder. No procedure having a suicide rate post-surgery 19 times the national average can be therapeutic. Parents of minor children often have no say.

The EA eliminates religious freedom protections for individuals and businesses. Under EA, Christian adoption agencies would be forced to place children in same-sex households. Studies show that children raised by a mother and a father have the best chance of success in life. The reverse is true of same-sex households.

If you believe that children should not be denied the chance to ever experience the love of both a mother and a father, that adoption agencies should act in a childs best interests, that womens sports should be reserved for women, that compassion means protecting people from self-harm, and that you should not be forced to violate your faith in your workplace, dont vote for Democrats.

Prominent Democrats express anti-Semitic sentiments without censure and associate with avowed anti-Semites. Where poor children attend failing schools, parents should have the option of choosing an alternative school. This especially affects minority communities. Biden opposes charter schools and school choice. Trump calls school choice a civil right. If anti-Semitism should not be tolerated, if you support school choice, vote Republican.

Republicans believe judges should not legislate and that the Constitution and laws should be interpreted based on the meaning of the text at the time they were written.

The differences between the two parties have never been starker. Religious liberty, parental rights, childrens rights, school choice, our Constitution and much more are on the ballot this November. If these values are important to you, your vote is important.

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Letters to the Editor: Pray Roe v. Wade is history - Auburn Villager

The Regeneron Pharmaceuticals company logo is seen on a building at the company's Westchester campus in Tarrytown, New York, U.S. September 17, 2020. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File PhotoNew York: The experimental antibody cocktail which US President Donald Trump received when he tested positive for COVID-19 offers benefits against the novel coronavirus infection, according to a new study in animal models which provides more evidence of the clinical potential of the therapeutic.

While earlier studies had shown that the cocktail of two antibodies targeting the coronavirus spike protein could be used to neutralise the pathogen, scientists from the American biotechnology company Regeneron noted that further research in multiple animal models is needed to test the effectiveness of the formulation.

In the current study, published in the journal Science, the researchers tested REGN-COV2 in rhesus macaques, which manifest mild COVID-19 symptoms, and in golden hamsters, which show symptoms that are much more severe, including rapid weight loss.

According to the scientists, this ability of REGN-COV2 "matches or exceeds the effects recently shown in vaccine efficacy studies using the same animal models."

"These findings highlight the therapeutic potential of (this approach) to both protect from and treat SARS-CoV-2 disease," the researchers noted in the study.

When the macaques were treated with the drug one day after infection, they said there was faster viral clearance than in controls who had not been treated with the cocktail.

In the hamster model, the study noted that the animals treated with the drug two days before infection exhibited a "dramatic protection from weight loss," and decreased viral load in the lungs.

The scientists also reported benefits for hamsters treated one day after infection, as compared to controls.

"In conclusion, our data provide evidence that REGN-COV2 based therapy may offer clinical benefit in both prevention and treatment settings of COVID-19 disease, where it is currently being evaluated," they wrote in the study.

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Regeneron's antibody cocktail may offer protection against Covid-19: Study - ETHealthworld.com

Intersexuality in female moles

Female moles are intersexual and develop masculinizing ovotestes, a distinctive trait among mammals. Real et al. investigated the origin of this trait by sequencing the Iberian mole genome and applying comparative strategies that integrate transcriptomic, epigenetic, and chromatin interaction data. They identified mole-specific genomic rearrangements that alter the three-dimensional regulatory landscape of the androgen-converting gene CYP17A1 and the pro-testicular factor gene FGF9, both of which show distinct expression patterns in mole gonads. The use of transgenic mice confirms the capability of these factors to increase circulating testosterone levels and to induce gonadal masculinization. This study highlights how integrative approaches can reveal the phenotypic impact of genomic variation.

Science, this issue p. 208

Linking genomic variation to phenotypical traits remains a major challenge in evolutionary genetics. In this study, we use phylogenomic strategies to investigate a distinctive trait among mammals: the development of masculinizing ovotestes in female moles. By combining a chromosome-scale genome assembly of the Iberian mole, Talpa occidentalis, with transcriptomic, epigenetic, and chromatin interaction datasets, we identify rearrangements altering the regulatory landscape of genes with distinct gonadal expression patterns. These include a tandem triplication involving CYP17A1, a gene controlling androgen synthesis, and an intrachromosomal inversion involving the pro-testicular growth factor gene FGF9, which is heterochronically expressed in mole ovotestes. Transgenic mice with a knock-in mole CYP17A1 enhancer or overexpressing FGF9 showed phenotypes recapitulating mole sexual features. Our results highlight how integrative genomic approaches can reveal the phenotypic impact of noncoding sequence changes.

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The mole genome reveals regulatory rearrangements associated with adaptive intersexuality - Science Magazine