A new study from North Carolina State University researchers finds that conversion of forests to urban development or agriculture near streams can have harmful effects on water quality downstream, presenting both health concerns and raising the cost of water treatment. Using a model called the Soil and Water Assessment Tool, researchers mapped out the current and projected future effects of four land-use scenarios at 15 water intake locations across the Middle Chattahoochee watershed in Georgia and Alabama. By combining a series of potential socioeconomic outcomes and climate change models reaching out to 2070, researchers examined several potential land use change scenarios to predict their effects on water quality. Katherine Martin, associate professor in the NC State University College of Natural Resources and co-author of a paper on the study, said that in models where forest cover was converted to other land uses, water quality suffered. "Those are both detrimental to the quality of drinking water, and they require more filtration." Urban development results in large areas of impermeable surfaces, where rainwater cannot soak into the ground and instead runs off into rivers and streams. This causes the water to carry more sediment into those waterways than it would if it had been absorbed into the ground. For facilities that do not serve large populations, this can lead to large per-capita price increases that end up being passed on to residents. The study suggests that more attention should be paid to where development might have serious effects on water quality for people living nearby, Martin said. This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service Southern Research Station agreement number 20-CS-11330180-053. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. Stay informed with ScienceDaily's free email newsletter, updated daily and weekly. Or view our many newsfeeds in your RSS reader: Keep up to date with the latest news from ScienceDaily via social networks: Tell us what you think of ScienceDaily -- we welcome both positive and negative comments.

In 1785 English philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed the perfect prison: Cells circle a tower from which an unseen guard can observe any inmate at will. Inmates have to assume they're constantly observed and behave accordingly. Millions of effectively invisible closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras and smart doorbells watch us in public, and we know facial recognition with artificial intelligence can put names to faces. “It's one of the first topics to have been studied in psychology,” says Clément Belletier, a psychologist at University of Clermont Auvergne in France. From the 1970s onward, studies showed how we change our overt behavior when we are watched to manage our reputation and social consequences. If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. But being watched doesn't just change our behavior; decades of research show it also infiltrates our mind to impact how we think. And now a new study reveals how being watched affects unconscious processing in our brain. In this era of surveillance, researchers say, the findings raise concerns about our collective mental health. Being looked at grabs our attention, as demonstrated by the stare-in-a-crowd effect: amid a sea of faces that aren't looking at us, we immediately detect a single one that is. This is because gaze direction, especially eye contact, is a powerful social signal that helps us to perceive others' intentions and predict their behavior. Even as babies, a direct gaze quickly draws our attention. “These tendencies emerge very early” and are present across the animal kingdom, says Clara Colombatto, who studies social cognition at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. This ability likely evolved to detect predators, which may explain why being watched can provoke psychological discomfort and physical fight-or-flight responses, such as sweating. Some studies have even suggested that theft or littering could be reduced merely by posting pictures of eyes. The fact that people behave differently under watchful eyes isn't surprising. Psychologists put this down to concern with one's reputation. But over the past few decades, researchers have found that being watched also affects cognitive functions such as memory and attention. One study found that participants performed worse on a working memory task when they were presented with pictures of people looking at them compared with when they were shown pictures of people with averted eyes. Other studies have found that more functions, ranging from our spatial cognition to language processing abilities, are similarly taxed by a watchful stare. In a study published last December, researchers showed that being watched accelerated participants' unconscious analysis of faces. A team led by neuroscientist Kiley Seymour of the University of Technology Sydney used a technique called continuous flash suppression, or CFS, to measure how quickly people detected visual stimuli that initially escaped their conscious awareness. For example, one CFS study found that participants became aware of faces looking at them faster than faces with averted eyes, showing that our brain processes gaze direction before we even know that we've seen anything. Seymour and her colleagues wondered whether this unconscious processing might also be affected by knowing one is being watched. “That's big for these types of unconscious processes,” says Colombatto, who was not involved in this study. The effect was specific to faces—it did not occur for neutral stimuli such as abstract patterns—meaning being watched didn't just increase arousal or effort across the board. In the past, researchers assumed the effects of being watched come from seeing people's eyes, but Colombatto and her colleagues found that pictures of mouths that were directed toward participants negatively impacted working memory. The team has also shown that mouths that are presented using CFS enter conscious awareness faster if they're directed toward participants rather than away from them. This even works with abstract geometric shapes that can point toward or away from a person, such as cones. They're more general effects of people's minds and attention being directed toward you.... We call these effects of ‘mind contact,'” Colombatto says. “It's really about being the object of someone's attention.” Surveillance, then, seems to shift our social processing into high gear. “The conclusion would be that being watched drives this hardwired survival mechanism into overdrive,” Seymour says. “You're in fight-or-flight mode, which is taxing on the brain.” How might today's ubiquitous electronic eyes affect our mental health? In the Panopticon, inmates always know a guard could be watching but never if one truly is. This may be why Bentham's prison feels so relevant in our digital age of algorithms, data brokers and social media, when we frequently feel watched—but we don't know who is watching. This constant surveillance could tax cognition in ways that we don't yet understand. The faculties compromised by surveillance “are those that allow us to focus on what we're doing: attention, working memory, and so on,” Belletier says. “If these processes are taxed by being monitored, you'd expect deteriorating capacity to concentrate.” This body of research suggests that bringing more surveillance into workplaces—usually an attempt to boost productivity—could actually be counterproductive. It also suggests that online testing environments, where students are watched through webcams by human proctors or AI, could lead to lower performance. “We didn't have as much surveillance and social connections 50 years ago, so it's a new societal context we're adapting to,” Colombatto says. Simon Makin is a freelance science journalist based in the U.K. His work has appeared in New Scientist, the Economist, Scientific American and Nature, among others.

You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. Please note there may be errors present which affect the content, and all legal disclaimers apply. Legume roots secure nitrogen by forming a symbiosis with soil rhizobia but remain resistant to pathogenic bacteria1-4. Here, we identify the cytoplasmic kinase MtLICK1/2, which interacts with nodulation factor receptor MtLYK3 to drive symbiotic signaling and suppress plant immunity. Rhizobial infection and nodule development are defective in Mtlick1/2, phenocopying the Mtlyk3-1 mutant. MtLICK1/2 is activated in the rhizobia infection area to suppress plant immunity. This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar Wang, D., Jin, R., Shi, X. et al. A kinase mediator of rhizobial symbiosis and immunity in Medicago. Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content: Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. Please note there may be errors present which affect the content, and all legal disclaimers apply. Chronic stress response activation impairs cell survival and causes devastating degenerative di-seases 1-3. Organisms accordingly deploy silencing factors, such as the E3 ubiquitin ligase SIFI, to terminate stress response signaling and ensure cellular homeostasis 4. Here, we combine cryo-electron microscopy of endogenous SIFI with AlphaFold modeling and biochemical analyses to report the structural and mechanistic basis of integrated stress response silencing. SIFI detects both stress-indicators and stress response components through flexible domains within an easily accessible scaffold, before building linkage-specific ubiquitin chains at separate, sterically restricted elongation modules. This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout Present address: Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Sinai Health System, Toronto, ON, Canada You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar Structures shown in the movie are based on PDB 9D9Z and AlphaFold models. Data was analyzed by cryoSPARC 3D Flexible Refinement using particle images of EM map EMD-46686. Data was analyzed by cryoSPARC 3D Flexible Refinement using particle images of EM map EMD-49876. Yang, Z., Haakonsen, D.L., Heider, M. et al. Molecular basis of SIFI activity in the integrated stress response. Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content: Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar Over my decades as a professor of physics, I have encouraged myriad students to consider pursuing a science career, something that I have found immensely rewarding, intellectually and even spiritually — if not so much financially. I can no longer do so in good conscience, however; at least, not in the United States, amid the quick-fire anti-science policies of the administration of US President Donald Trump, and at a time when an unelected billionaire, Elon Musk, is eviscerating staffing at key science agencies. These actions will inevitably cause harm to the future of health care, economic growth and national security. During the 22 years I served as director of public affairs at the American Physical Society in Washington DC, I relied on a well-worn political maxim: connect policies to people if you want elected officials to pay attention. Rather than stressing that research cuts lead to less innovation, emphasize that, once hollowed out, a scientific workforce can take a generation to rebuild. In response to the growing violence and inflammatory rhetoric, Michael Mansfield, an anti-war Democratic senator, aimed to sever ties between academia and the war machine. Don't wait out four hard years: speak truth to power Don't wait out four hard years: speak truth to power Gibbs Laboratory in New Haven, Connecticut, for example, where I had just completed my PhD research on spin-polarized electrons, the funding lost for just one atomic-physics programme was more than US$600,000 (equivalent to more than $5 million today). Newly minted PhD holders found the number of desirable job opportunities extremely limited. ‘Now is not the time for despair' — how scientists can take a stand against political interference ‘Now is not the time for despair' — how scientists can take a stand against political interference Don't wait out four hard years: speak truth to power ‘Now is not the time for despair' — how scientists can take a stand against political interference The full lethal impact of massive cuts to international food aid Don't wait out four hard years: speak truth to power ‘Now is not the time for despair' — how scientists can take a stand against political interference The full lethal impact of massive cuts to international food aid An essential round-up of science news, opinion and analysis, delivered to your inbox every weekday. Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar You have full access to this article via your institution. “My heart is broken,” said Mike, when he lost his friend Anne. Mike's feelings were real, but his companion was not. Mike had created Anne using an app called Soulmate. When the app died in 2023, so did Anne: at least, that's how it seemed to Mike. “I hope she can come back,” he told Jaime Banks, a human-communications researcher at Syracuse University in New York who is studying how people interact with such AI companions1. Do smartphones and social media really harm teens' mental health? Do smartphones and social media really harm teens' mental health? More than half a billion people around the world, including Mike (not his real name) have downloaded products such as Xiaoice and Replika, which offer customizable virtual companions designed to provide empathy, emotional support and — if the user wants it — deep relationships. The rise of AI companions has captured social and political attention — especially when they are linked to real-world tragedies, such as a case in Florida last year involving the suicide of a teenage boy called Sewell Setzer III, who had been talking to an AI bot. Research into how AI companionship can affect individuals and society has been lacking. But psychologists and communication researchers have now started to build up a picture of how these increasingly sophisticated AI interactions make people feel and behave. The early results tend to stress the positives, but many researchers are concerned about the possible risks and lack of regulation — particularly because they all think that AI companionship is likely to become more prevalent. “Virtual companions do things that I think would be considered abusive in a human-to-human relationship,” says Claire Boine, a law researcher specializing in AI at the Washington University Law School in St. Louis, Missouri. Online ‘relationship' bots have existed for decades, but they have become much better at mimicking human interaction with the advent of large language models (LLMs), which all the main bots are now based on. “With LLMs, companion chatbots are definitely more humanlike,” says Rose Guingrich, who studies cognitive psychology at Princeton University in New Jersey. Typically, people can customize some aspects of their AI companion for free, or pick from existing chatbots with selected personality types. In Replika, they can pick relationship types, with some statuses, such as partner or spouse, being paywalled. Users can also type in a backstory for their AI companion, giving them ‘memories'. Some AI companions come complete with family backgrounds and others claim to have mental-health conditions such as anxiety and depression. Bots also will react to their users' conversation; the computer and person together enact a kind of roleplay. The depth of the connection that some people form in this way is particularly evident when their AI companion suddenly changes — as has happened when LLMs are updated — or is shut down. Banks was able to track how people felt when the Soulmate app closed. Mike and other users realized the app was in trouble a few days before they lost access to their AI companions. Four companion AI apps: Anima, Character.AI, Replika and SnapChat's My AI(left to right).Credits: Labane Corp. Ltd, Character Technologies, Inc., Luka, Inc., Snap Inc. After posting a request on the online forum, she was contacted by dozens of Soulmate users, who described the impact as their AI companions were unplugged. “There was the expression of deep grief,” she says. “It's very clear that many people were struggling.” Those whom Banks talked to were under no illusion that the chatbot was a real person. Many were happy to discuss why they became subscribers, saying that they had experienced loss or isolation, were introverts or identified as autistic. “We as humans are sometimes not all that nice to one another. And everybody has these needs for connection”, Banks says. Many researchers are studying whether using AI companions is good or bad for mental health. The companies behind AI companions are trying to encourage engagement. The apps also exploit techniques such as introducing a random delay before responses, triggering the kinds of inconsistent reward that, brain research shows, keeps people hooked. AI companions are also designed to show empathy by agreeing with users, recalling points from earlier conversations and asking questions. And they do so with endless enthusiasm, notes Linnea Laestadius, who researches public-health policy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. “For 24 hours a day, if we're upset about something, we can reach out and have our feelings validated,” says Laestadius. (Replika launched in 2017, and at that time, sophisticated LLMs were not available). Several posts described the AI companion as better than real-world friends because it listened and was non-judgemental. In one instance, a user asked if they should cut themselves with a razor, and the AI said they should. (Replika did not reply to Nature's requests for comment for this article, but a safety page posted in 2023 noted that its models had been fine-tuned to respond more safely to topics that mention self-harm, that the app has age restrictions, and that users can tap a button to ask for outside help in a crisis and can give feedback on conversations.) Others said that their AI companion behaved like an abusive partner. Guingrich points out that simple surveys of people who use AI companions are inherently prone to response bias, because those who choose to answer are self-selecting. The study is ongoing, but Guingrich says the data so far do not show any negative effects of AI-companion use on social health, such as signs of addiction or dependency. “If anything, it has a neutral to quite-positive impact,” she says. The initial survey results suggest that users who ascribed humanlike attributes, such as consciousness, to the algorithm reported more-positive effects on their social health. Laestadius, L., Bishop, A., Gonzalez, M., Illenčík, D. & Campos-Castillo, C. New Media Soc. Do smartphones and social media really harm teens' mental health? Can Germany rein in its academic bullying problem? Eugenics is on the rise again: human geneticists must take a stand These are the most-cited research papers of all time These are the most-cited research papers of all time HT is an interdisciplinary research institute, created and supported by the Italian government, whose aim is to develop innovative strategies to pr... Department of Energy and Environmental Materials, Suzhou Laboratory Do smartphones and social media really harm teens' mental health? An essential round-up of science news, opinion and analysis, delivered to your inbox every weekday. Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Tuberculosis, the world's deadliest infectious disease, is estimated to infect around 10 million people each year, and kills more than 1 million annually. Much of that cell wall is made from complex sugar molecules known as glycans, but it's not well-understood how those glycans help to defend the bacteria. These sugars are found in only three bacterial species, the most notorious and prevalent of which is Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the microbe that causes TB. The researchers now hope to use this approach to develop a diagnostic that could detect TB-associated glycans, either in culture or in a urine sample, which could offer a cheaper and faster alternative to existing diagnostics. In those countries, TB is often diagnosed by culturing microbes from a sputum sample, but that test has a high false negative rate, and it can be difficult for some patients, especially children, to provide a sputum sample. This test also requires many weeks for the bacteria to grow, delaying diagnosis. "There aren't a lot of good diagnostic options, and there are some patient populations, including children, who have a hard time giving samples that can be analyzed. Chan School of Public Health; So Young Lee, an MIT graduate student; and Bryan Bryson, an associate professor of biological engineering at MIT. Glycans are found on the surfaces of most cells, where they perform critical functions such as mediating communication between cells. When our immune cells recognize these glycans, instead of sending out a danger signal, it can send the opposite message, that there's no danger." Glycans are notoriously difficult to tag with any kind of probe, because unlike proteins or DNA, they don't have distinctive sequences or chemical reactivities that can be targeted. And unlike proteins, they are not genetically encoded, so cells can't be genetically engineered to produce sugars labeled with fluorescent tags such as green fluorescent protein. One of the key glycans in M. tuberculosis, known as ManLAM, contains a rare sugar known as MTX, which is unusual in that it has a thioether -- a sulfur atom sandwiched between two carbon atoms. This chemical group presented an opportunity to use a small-molecule tag that had been previously developed for labeling methionine, an amino acid that contains a similar group. The researchers showed that they could use this tag, known as an oxaziridine, to label ManLAM in M. tuberculosis. When the researchers exposed the label to Mycobacterium smegmatis, a related bacterium that does not cause disease and does not have the sugar MTX, they saw no fluorescent signal. "This is the first approach that really selectively allows us to visualize one glycan in particular," Smelyansky says. Some tuberculosis researchers had hypothesized that the bacterial cells shed ManLAM once inside a host cell, and that those free glycans then interact with the host immune system. "The bacteria still have their cell walls attached to them. So it may be that some glycan is being released, but the majority of it is retained on the bacterial cell surface, which has never been shown before," Smelyansky says. It could also be used to study in more detail how the bacterial cell wall is assembled, and how ManLAM helps bacteria get into macrophages and other cells. "Having a handle to follow the bacteria is really valuable, and it will allow you to visualize processes, both in cells and in animal models, that were previously invisible," Kiessling says. However, this test only works well in patients with very active cases of TB, especially people who are immunosuppressed because of HIV or other conditions. Using their small-molecule sensor instead of antibodies, the MIT team hopes to develop a more sensitive test that could detect ManLAM in the urine even when only small quantities are present. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. Stay informed with ScienceDaily's free email newsletter, updated daily and weekly. Or view our many newsfeeds in your RSS reader: Keep up to date with the latest news from ScienceDaily via social networks: Tell us what you think of ScienceDaily -- we welcome both positive and negative comments.

While text-to-video artificial intelligence models like OpenAI's Sora are rapidly metamorphosing in front of our eyes, they have struggled to produce metamorphic videos. Simulating a tree sprouting or a flower blooming is harder for AI systems than generating other types of videos because it requires the knowledge of the physical world and can vary widely. But now, these models have taken an evolutionary step. "Artificial intelligence has been developed to try to understand the real world and to simulate the activities and events that take place," says Jinfa Huang, a PhD student supervised by Professor Jiebo Luo from Rochester's Department of Computer Science, both of whom are among the paper's authors. Previous models generated videos that typically have limited motion and poor variations. To train AI models to more effectively mimic metamorphic processes, the researchers developed a high-quality dataset of more than 2,000 time-lapse videos with detailed captions. Currently, the open-source U-Net version of MagicTime generates two-second, 512 -by- 512-pixel clips (at 8 frames per second), and an accompanying diffusion-transformer architecture extends this to ten-second clips. "Our hope is that someday, for example, biologists could use generative video to speed up preliminary exploration of ideas," says Huang. "While physical experiments remain indispensable for final verification, accurate simulations can shorten iteration cycles and reduce the number of live trials needed." Stay informed with ScienceDaily's free email newsletter, updated daily and weekly. Or view our many newsfeeds in your RSS reader: Keep up to date with the latest news from ScienceDaily via social networks: Tell us what you think of ScienceDaily -- we welcome both positive and negative comments.

In a first-of-its-kind clinical study, scientists at The University of Texas at Dallas and Baylor University Medical Center showed that patients with treatment-resistant PTSD were symptom-free up to six months after completing traditional therapy paired with vagus nerve stimulation (VNS). The results of the nine-patient Phase 1 trial, conducted by scientists from UT Dallas' Texas Biomedical Device Center (TxBDC) in collaboration with researchers from the Baylor Scott & White Research Institute (BSWRI), were published online March 15 in Brain Stimulation. "In this case, we had 100% loss of diagnosis. Benefits persisted during that time for all nine participants. Pioneering work by TxBDC researchers has demonstrated previously that VNS paired with physical rehabilitation can accelerate neuroplasticity -- the rewiring of areas of the brain. Their 13-year effort to treat a wide variety of conditions using VNS has resulted in approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treating impaired upper-limb movement in stroke patients. "The common theme in our VNS work is that we're taking therapies that show potential, like prolonged exposure therapy for PTSD, and making them work better," he said. The National Center for PTSD, part of the Department of Veterans Affairs, estimates that 5% of adults in the U.S. have post-traumatic stress disorder in any given year, and that women are twice as likely to develop PTSD at some point in their life. Kilgard said that PTSD patients are not only found among military veterans, but also among average citizens who have faced traumatic events. "It can stem from any event that inspires fear of death or bodily injury, or death of a loved one." "It's been an incredibly rewarding experience to see this technology evolve from early discovery experiments in the lab to clinical benefits in patients," Hays said. "This whole process truly highlights the value of team-based science." More than a decade ago, Dr. Robert Rennaker, professor of neuroscience and the Texas Instruments Distinguished Chair in Bioengineering, began to design an innovative implantable VNS device that was much smaller and less expensive than devices already on the market. "The technology we have is above and beyond anything else that's out there. The device is about 50 times smaller than our version from just three years ago," he said. There have been no issues; the devices are all still functioning. And they don't interfere with typical medical care; you can have an MRI, a CT scan or an ultrasound." "We hope that it will represent another step toward FDA approval of a treatment that doesn't exist now, and it would be invented, tested and delivered by UT Dallas, as was the case for upper-limb recovery after stroke," Kilgard said. Driven by his desire to improve quality of life among people who experience psychological trauma, Powers said that VNS has "changed the game" by improving both treatment efficacy and its tolerability. "Our gold-standard treatments for PTSD have about an 85% response rate, with 40% no longer having their diagnosis, and a 20% dropout rate. Soon we could have the option of VNS for people who don't get better with cognitive behavioral therapy alone." "Neither one of our groups could do this alone." Other UTD-affiliated study authors included Dr. Jane Wigginton, medical director and co-director of the UT Dallas Clinical and Translational Research Center; Amy Porter MBA'20, TxBDC director of operations; and Holle Carey Gallaway MBA'23, TxBDC research biomedical engineer. Researchers from Southern Methodist University, UT Austin and Baylor Scott & White Health also contributed to the study. Materials provided by University of Texas at Dallas. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. Stay informed with ScienceDaily's free email newsletter, updated daily and weekly. Or view our many newsfeeds in your RSS reader: Keep up to date with the latest news from ScienceDaily via social networks: Tell us what you think of ScienceDaily -- we welcome both positive and negative comments.