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You’ve got to see it to be it. A heightened sense of red color vision arose in ancient reptiles before bright red skin, scales and feathers, a new study suggests. The finding bolsters evidence that dinosaurs probably saw red and perhaps displayed red color.

The new finding, published in the Aug. 17 Proceedings of the Royal Society B, rests on the discovery that birds and turtles share a gene used both for red vision and red coloration. More bird and turtle species use the gene, called CYP2J19, for vision than for coloration, however, suggesting that its first job was in sight.
“We have this single gene that has two very different functions,” says evolutionary biologist Nicholas Mundy of the University of Cambridge. Mundy’s team wondered which function came first: the red vision or the ornamentation.

In evolution, what an animal can see is often linked with what others can display, says paleontologist Martin Sander of the University of Bonn in Germany, who did not work on the new study. “We’re always getting at color from these two sides,” he says, because the point of seeing a strong color is often reading visual signals.

Scientists already knew that birds use CYP2J19 for vision and color. In bird eyes, the gene contains instructions for making bright red oil droplets that filter red light. Other forms of red color vision evolved earlier in other animals, but this form allows birds to see more shades of red than humans can. Elsewhere in the body, the same gene can code for pigments that stain feathers red. Turtles are the only other land vertebrates with bright red oil droplets in their eyes. But scientists weren’t sure if the same gene was responsible, Mundy says.

His team searched for CYP2J19 in the DNA of three turtle species: the western painted turtle, Chinese soft-shell turtle and green sea turtle. All three have the gene. Both birds and turtles, the researchers conclude, inherited the gene from a shared ancestor that lived at least 250 million years ago. (Crocodiles and alligators, close relatives of birds and turtles, probably lost the gene sometime after splitting from this common ancestor, Mundy says.)

Next, the scientists turned their attention to the gene’s function. Mundy’s team studied western painted turtles, which have a striking red shell. As in red birds, CYP2J19 is active in the eyes and bodies of these turtles, the scientists found, suggesting that the gene is involved in both vision and coloration.
Because most birds and turtles can see red, but only some have red feathers or scales, the researchers think the great-granddaddy of modern turtles and birds probably used the gene for vision, too. Whether that common ancestor was colored red is unclear.

That very old reptile would have passed CYP2J19 down to its descendants, including dinosaurs. Mounting evidence has pointed to dinosaurs as colorful, with good color vision. But the specifics of their coloration have been elusive. This study points to red as one color they could probably see, and perhaps display.

“If you would have asked me 10 years ago, ‘Will we ever know the color of dinosaurs?’” Sander says, “I would have said, ‘No way!’” But studies like this one are a new lens into dinosaur color. Seeing can mean displaying, and this study is solid evidence that dinosaurs saw red, Sander says. In the past, “we couldn’t really say that.”

Condensing billions and billions and billions of years into a 45-minute film is a tall order. But director Terrence Malick took on the challenge with Voyage of Time. The film, now playing in IMAX theaters, surveys the 13.8-billion-year history of the universe and even looks eons into the future when we — life on Earth, the planet and the entire solar system — are gone.

Starting with the Big Bang, Voyage of Time progresses through highlights of the past, with a central focus on the evolution of life. Malick, best known for directing visually rich dramas such as The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life, presents breathtaking cinematography, using locales such as Hawaii’s lava-oozing Kilauea volcano as stand-ins for the past. Stunning visualizations and special effects bring to life the formation of the planets, the origin of the first cells, the demise of the sun and other events that scientists can only imagine.
The film marks Malick’s first attempt at documentary filmmaking. If you can call it that. Viewers hoping for a David Attenborough–style treatment of the subject matter will be disappointed. The film is more evocative, with moody scenes that provide little explication. And what narration (by Brad Pitt) there is tends to be philosophical rather than informative.

Serious science enthusiasts may find some reasons to quibble with the movie. For one, it’s hard to grasp the true immenseness and scale of cosmic time. With so much screen time devoted to the evolution of life, many viewers may not realize just how relatively recent a phenomenon it is. After the Big Bang, more than 9 billion years passed before Earth began to form. It took many hundred thousand more years before the first microbes emerged.
Malick’s treatment of evolution may also rankle some viewers. At times, the narration seems to imply life was destined to happen, with the young, barren Earth just waiting around for the first seeds of life to take root. At other times, the narration imbues evolution with purpose. Pitt notes, for instance, that perfecting a leaf took eons. Yet perfection is something evolution neither achieves nor strives for — it’s a process that lacks intentionality.

These critiques aside, Malick sought to tell an accurate story, enlisting an accomplished group of scientists as advisers, including Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. Smolin says he was impressed with the end result. “It’s a very unusual film,” he says, likening it to a visual poem or piece of art.

And that’s probably the best mindset to watch Voyage of Time: Just sit back, soak in the dazzling visuals and contemplate the wonders of nature.

SAN DIEGO — Society’s record for protecting public health has been pretty good in the developed world, not so much in developing countries. That disparity has long been recognized.

But there’s another disparity in society’s approach to public health — the divide between attention to traditional diseases and the resources devoted to mental disorders.

“When it comes to mental health, all countries are developing countries,” says Shekhar Saxena, director of the World Health Organization’s department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse. Despite a breadth of scope and depth of impact exceeding that of many more highly publicized diseases, mental illness has long been regarded as a second-class medical concern. And modern medicine’s success at diagnosing, treating and curing many other diseases has not been duplicated for major mental disorders.

Saxena thinks that neuroscience research can help. He sees an opportunity for progress through increased interdisciplinary collaboration between neuroscience and mental health researchers.

“The collaboration seems to be improving, but much more is needed and not only in a few countries, but all countries,” he said November 12 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

By almost any measure, mental health disorders impose an enormous societal burden. Worldwide, direct and indirect costs of mental disorders exceed $2.5 trillion yearly, Saxena said — projected to reach $6 trillion by 2030. Mental illnesses also disable and kill in large numbers: Global suicides per year total over 800,000. “Indeed, it is a hidden epidemic,” Saxena said. That’s more deaths than from breast cancer and probably more from malaria, according to a new comprehensive analysis of global mortality.

Mental illnesses encompass a wide range of disorders, from autism and Alzheimer’s disease to substance abuse and schizophrenia. Saxena acknowledged that there have been advances in the scientific understanding of these diseases, but not nearly enough. No easily used diagnostic test is available for most of them. And no new class of drugs for treating major mental disorders has appeared in the last 20 years, with the possible exception of dementia.

“We need increased investment in research, increased public, private and philanthropic investments,” Saxena said. “We need increased connection of research with public health gains.”
He called on the community of neuroscientists to establish a “grand challenge” to researchers to address these concerns.

“There have been many grand challenges in neurosciences — perhaps we need one for finding out mental health interventions,” he said.

Many neuroscientists are, of course, aware of the important link between their research and mental health. Some progress is being made. One promising avenue of work focuses on synapses, the junctures through which nerve cells in the brain communicate. Typically synapses form where axons, the long neuronal extensions that transmit signals, connect with dendrites, the neurons’ message-receiving branches. Most of the axon-dendrite connections occur at small growths called dendritic spines that protrude from the dendrite surface.

Several sessions at the neuroscience meeting described new work showing ways in which dendritic spines may be involved in mental disorders. One session focused on the protein actin, a prime structural component of the spines.

Actin activity depends on a complicated chain of chemical reactions inside a cell. In mice, blocking a key link in that chain reduces the number of spines in the front part of the brain, Scott Soderling of Duke University School of Medicine reported. Those mice then exhibited symptoms reminiscent of schizophrenia in people.

It seems that losing spines in the frontal cortex alters nerve cell connections there; with spine shortages, some axons link directly to the dendrite shaft. Bypassing spines, which play a filtering role, can intensify signals sent to the ventral tegmental area, which in turn may send signals that increase production of the chemical messenger dopamine in another brain region, the striatum. “We think that this is actually what is driving the elevated dopamine levels” in disorders such as schizophrenia, Soderling said.

Some antipsychotic drugs (known as neuroleptics) for treating schizophrenia work by blocking sites of dopamine action in the striatum. But such drugs do nothing about the loss of spines that initiated the problem.

“These neuroleptics largely treat these symptoms, but they’re not a cure,” Soderling said. “We think that this is good evidence … for the idea that these drugs are treating a downstream consequence of a primary insult that’s occurring elsewhere in the brain.”

This insight from neuroscience — that antipsychotics treat downstream symptoms, not the problem at its source — may help the search for better treatments.

Soderling suggests that many other mental disorders may have their roots in problems with actin in dendritic spines. Another speaker at the neuroscience meeting, Haruo Kasai of the University of Tokyo, emphasized how fluctuations in the numbers of spines, related to actin activity, could play a role in autism.

Such results from neuroscience should be of great value to fighting mental disorders. But science alone won’t enable the discovery of effective treatments without a broader scope of scientific investigation of mental illness as a global problem. Too much of research to date focuses on too small a portion of the worldwide population. As Saxena noted, more than 90 percent of scientific studies on mental illness are from — and about — high-income countries.

“We are ignoring a very large number of people living in this world,” he said. “And this can be, and is, a real impediment to science. If we don’t know what is happening in the brains of the majority of the people living in this world, can we really advance science in the best possible manner? Can we still say that we know the human brain? And at least my answer would be: No.”

A newly discovered particle is dishing out a double dose of charm.

The newcomer is a baryon, meaning that it’s composed of three smaller particles called quarks — in this case, two “charm” quarks and one “up” quark. Detected by the LHCb experiment at CERN, the European physics laboratory near Geneva, the baryon is the first to be discovered with two charm quarks, LHCb scientists reported July 6 at the European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics in Venice, Italy. Scientists produced the particle by ramming protons together at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and sifting through the aftermath.
Baryons can be composed of a variety of quark combinations, two up quarks and one charm quark, for example, or one “strange” quark and two “down” quarks. Because the charm quarks are a particularly heavy variety of quark, scientists should be able to use the new particle to perform different types of tests of their theories of particle interactions.

Although the particle, called a doubly charmed Xi baryon, is the first of its kind, its appearance is no surprise — physicists’ theories predicted its existence. The particle’s mass — about four times that of the proton — agreed with expectations.

Data from a previous experiment had hinted at the presence of a similar doubly charmed particle, but the results were disputed. In 2002, scientists with the SELEX experiment, located at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., reported that they had discovered a particle composed of two charm quarks and a down quark (SN: 7/6/02, p. 14). But the particle’s properties didn’t align with theoretical expectations, and other experiments couldn’t confirm the results. The new particle further casts doubt on SELEX’s results, because the two baryons should be close in mass, but instead they differ by a significant margin.

Carbon nanotubes may be the key to shrinking down transistors and squeezing more computer power into less space.

Historically, the number of transistors that can be crammed onto a computer chip has doubled every two years or so, a trend known as Moore’s law. But that rule seems to be nearing its limit: Today’s silicon transistors can’t get much smaller than they already are.

Carbon nanotubes may offer a sizable solution. In the June 30 Science, IBM researchers report a carbon-nanotube transistor with an overall width of 40 nanometers — the smallest ever. It’s about half the size of typical silicon transistors.

Researchers have created carbon-nanotube transistors with certain supersmall components before, but the whole package was still bulky, says study coauthor Qing Cao of IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. The new study confirms that, in terms of size, carbon-nanotube transistors can beat out silicon — and that’s no small feat.

A genetic “crystal ball” can predict whether certain people will respond effectively to the flu vaccine.

Nine genes are associated with a strong immune response to the flu vaccine in those aged 35 and under, a new study finds. If these genes were highly active before vaccination, an individual would generate a high level of antibodies after vaccination, no matter the flu strain in the vaccine, researchers report online August 25 in Science Immunology. This response can help a person avoid getting the flu.

The research team also tried to find a predictive set of genes in people aged 60 and above — a group that includes those more likely to develop serious flu-related complications, such as pneumonia — but failed. Even so, the study is “a step in the right direction,” says Elias Haddad, an immunologist at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia, who did not participate in the research. “It could have implications in terms of identifying responders versus nonresponders by doing a simple test before a vaccination.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that vaccination prevented 5.1 million flu illnesses in the 2015‒2016 season. Getting a flu shot is the best way to stay healthy, but “the problem is, we don’t know what makes a successful vaccination,” says Purvesh Khatri, a computational immunologist at Stanford University School of Medicine. “The immune system is very personal.”
Khatri and colleagues wondered if there was a certain immune state one needed to be in to respond effectively to the flu vaccine. So the researchers looked for a common genetic signal in blood samples from 175 people with different genetic backgrounds, from different locations in the United States, and who received the flu vaccine in different seasons. After identifying the set of predictive genes, the team used another collection of 82 samples to confirm that the crystal ball accurately predicted a strong flu response. Using such a variety of samples makes it more likely that the crystal ball will work for many different people in the real world, Khatri says.

The nine genes make proteins that have various jobs, including directing the movement of other proteins and providing structure to cells. Previous research on these genes has tied some of them to the immune system, but not others. Khatri expects the study will spur investigations into how the genes promote a successful vaccine response. And figuring out how to boost the genes may help those who don’t respond strongly to flu vaccine, he says.

As for finding a genetic crystal ball for older adults, “there’s still hope that we’ll be able to,” says team member Raphael Gottardo, a computational biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Older people are even more diverse in how they respond to the flu vaccine than younger people, he says, so it may take a larger group of samples to find a common genetic thread.

More research is also needed to learn whether the identified genes will predict an effective response for all vaccines, or just the flu, Haddad says. “There is a long way to go here.”

A new insect-inspired tiny robot that can move between air and water is a lightweight.

Weighing the same as about six grains of rice, it is the lightest robot that can fly, swim and launch itself from water, an international team of researchers reports October 25 in Science Robotics. The bot is about 1,000 times lighter than other previously developed aerial-aquatic robots. In the future, this kind of aquatic flier could be used to perform search-and-rescue operations, sample water quality or simply explore by air or sea.
To hover, the bot flaps its translucent wings 220 to 300 times per second, somewhat faster than a housefly. Once submerged, the tiny robot surfaces by slowly flapping its wings at about nine beats per second to maintain stability underwater.

For the tricky water-to-air transition, the bot does some chemistry. After water has collected inside the machine’s central container, the bot uses a device to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas. As the chamber fills with gas, the buoyancy lifts the vehicle high enough to hoist the wings out of the water. An onboard “sparker” then creates a miniature explosion that sends the bot rocketing about 37 centimeters — roughly the average length of a men’s shoe box — into the air. Microscopic holes at the top of the chamber release excess pressure, preventing a loss of robot limbs.
Still, the design needs work: The machine doesn’t land well, and it can only pierce the water’s surface with the help of soap, which lowers the surface tension. More importantly, the experiment points to the possibilities of incorporating different forms of locomotion into a single robot, says study coauthor Robert Wood, a bioengineer at Harvard University.

As the chill of autumn encroaches on Siberia’s grasslands, Richard’s pipits usually begin their southward trek to warmer latitudes. But a growing number of the slender, larklike songbirds seem to be heading west instead, possibly establishing a new migratory route for the species.

This would be the first new route known to emerge on an east-west axis in a long-distance migratory bird, researchers report October 22 in Current Biology. The finding could have implications for how scientists understand the evolution of bird migration routes over time and how the animals adapt to a shifting climate.

Richard’s pipits (Anthus richardi) typically breed in Siberia during the summer and travel south for the winter to southern Asia. Occasionally, “vagrant” birds get lost and show up far from this range, including in Europe. But as a Ph.D. student at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France, evolutionary biologist Paul Dufour noticed, along with colleagues, that described sightings and photo records of the pipits wintering in southern France had increased from a handful of birds annually in the 1980s and 1990s to many dozens in recent years.

So, Dufour, now at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, and his team started monitoring the pipits in France and Spain to see where the birds were coming from, and if the birds were visiting Europe on purpose or just getting lost.

The researchers captured seven pipits in France during the winter of 2019–2020, tagging them with a sensor that estimates the birds’ geographic positions based on light levels and length of day. The team then released the birds. The next winter, the team successfully recaptured three of them. Those sensors showed that the birds had all flown back to the same part of southwestern Siberia for the summer before returning to France.

The researchers also examined images in citizen-science databases of 331 Richard’s pipits that were photographed in Europe and North Africa, categorizing the birds by apparent age. Among songbirds, Dufour says, vagrants are always young birds. Songbirds tend to follow a route based on instincts written into their DNA, replicating the trip their ancestors took. But storms or mutations that create faulty wayfinding abilities can send young songbirds off target.
Wherever it arrives, the songbird’s first migration creates a mental map for every migration after, so any adult birds in Europe have made the trip more than once. Since more than half of the birds in southern Europe and nearby northwestern Africa documented in the winter were adults, Dufour and his colleagues think that many of these pipits are seasonal migrants.

Contemporary shifts in migration routes are more common in species that travel via the cues of a traveling group, like geese or cranes. Songbirds usually migrate alone, following their instinctual route when young, Dufour says, so changes to migration patterns are rarer.

What’s more, east-west migration is unusual in birds. Most species that travel this way are ones that migrate short distances within the tropics, says Jessie Williamson, an ornithologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque who was not involved with the research. “It’s exciting that an understudied migratory behavior like east-west migration is in the spotlight,” she says.

If the pipits’ European trek is in fact now an established route, it’s possible that the detour was facilitated by climate change, which may also be meddling with birds’ migrations in other ways (SN: 12/17/19). Dufour and his team used computer models that estimate climate suitability for the pipits in Europe based on variables like temperature and precipitation. The researchers compared two periods — 1961 to 1990 and 1990 to 2018 — and found that warmer temperatures in the latter period have made most parts of southern Europe a better wintering location for the birds than they were before.
The selection of European wintering grounds may also involve the deterioration of ancestral, southern Asian sites, but the researchers haven’t investigated that yet. Climate change could be affecting that too, Dufour says. But “we suspect that habitat modification in Southeast Asia — increasing urbanization, less open areas — may also be part of the equation.”

Ginny Chan, an ecologist at the Swiss Ornithological Institute in Sempach who was not involved with the research, says that the types of environmental changes that could be hurting bird populations “are happening very quickly in the traditional wintering range [for Richard’s pipits] in South and East Asia.” In India, the Richard’s pipit population has declined by more than 90 percent over the last couple of decades, Chan says.

Other Siberian bird species that typically migrate south but have recently shown up in Europe in growing numbers, like the yellow-browed warbler and Siberian chiffchaff, may also be making their own westward routes, Dufour suspects.

If other Siberian songbird species are also establishing new western migration routes, this could mean that migratory songbirds are more flexible travelers than scientists previously thought, Dufour says.

That could have hopeful implications for some birds as species worldwide deal with a changing climate. But the new research, he adds, shouldn’t overshadow other studies of migratory birds — like barnacle geese and the European pied flycatcher — which show that some of these species are not as able to cope with climate change.

Regenerating body parts is never easy. For instance, some lizards can grow back their tails, but these new appendages are pale imitations of the original. Now, genetically modified stem cells are helping geckos grow back better tails.

Tweaking and implanting embryonic stem cells on the tail stumps of mourning geckos (Lepidodactylus lugubris) allowed the reptiles to grow tails that are more like the original than ever before, researchers report October 14 in Nature Communications. These findings are a stepping-stone to developing regenerative therapies in humans that may one day treat hard-to-heal wounds.

A gecko’s tail is an extension of its spine — with the vertebrae to prove it. Regenerated tails, however, are simpler affairs. “It’s just a bunch of concentric tubes of fat, muscle and skin,” says Thomas Lozito, a biologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

That’s because stem cells in adult geckos produce a molecular signal that encourages the formation of cartilage in new tails, but not bone or nervous tissues (SN: 8/17/18). Lozito and his colleagues used embryonic stem cells, which can develop into a wider range of tissues than adult stem cells, modified them to ignore this signal and then implanted them on the tail stumps of geckos that had their tails surgically removed. The tails that grew from these modified stem cells had bonelike grooves in the cartilage and generated new neural tissue at the top of the tail.

These modified tails still lack a spinal cord, making them a far cry from the original. “We fixed one problem, but there are still many imperfections,” Lozito says. “We’re still on the hunt for the perfect tail.”

One of the hottest names in college football coaching searches is officially off the market.

Penn State's James Franklin agreed to a deal Tuesday that will keep him at the school for the next 10 years, until 2031. Franklin is in his eighth season leading the Nittany Lions.
Franklin had been linked to numerous open coaching gigs, most notably USC and LSU, despite Penn State's relative struggles this season.

However, the 49-year-old who has described Penn State as a "dream job," has also reaffirmed his commitment and loyalty to the program in recent weeks, as well.

"Penn State's future is bright, and I'm honored to continue to serve as your head football coach," Franklin said in a statement. "Nine weeks ago, the administration approached me about making a long-term investment in our football program. This prompted numerous conversations outlining the resources needed to be competitive at a level that matches the expectations and history of Penn State."

The Nittany Lions are 7-4 this year and 67-32 in Franklin's tenure in Happy Valley, with a game against Michigan State in East Lansing set for Saturday.

Here's everything to know about Franklin's contract extension, plus how it came together.

James Franklin contract details, salary
For much of his time at Penn State, Franklin has been one of the highest paid coaches in both the Big Ten and NCAA, with his $7 million annual salary ranking in the top 10.

Franklin will once again be guaranteed $7 million annually according to the terms released by Penn State, plus up to an additional $1 million per year based on certain incentives and bonuses.

Among the incentives and bonuses Franklin will be eligible for are an additional $350,000 to win the Big Ten title, $300,000 for a New Years' Six bowl and $100,000 if he's named Big Ten Coach of the Year. The full terms of the contract can be found here.

Notably, Franklin's buyout if he chooses to leave Penn State for another college or an NFL gig is $12 million if he leaves before April 1, 2022. It then drops to $8 million if he stays until Dec. 31, 2022 before dropping to $6 million after 2023, $2 million after 2024-25 and ultimately dropping to just $1 million per year from 2026-2031.

Why did James Franklin sign an extension with Penn State?
A native of Langhorne, Pa. and a former Division II quarterback at East Stroudsburg, Franklin has long made his love of Penn State known, calling it his "dream job," when he was hired in 2014.

Penn State has routinely been a 9-11 win team during Franklin's tenure in State College and even won a Big Ten title in 2016. But the Nittany Lions have struggled to keep pace with the likes of Ohio State, Alabama and Clemson during that time as well in recruiting, facilities, NIL deals, on-the-field results and more.

But that seems primed to change, and that's the biggest reason why Franklin says he opted to stay at Penn State.

"We've been able to create a roadmap of the resources needed to address academic support, community outreach, Name, Image and Likeness (NIL), facility improvements, student-athlete housing, technology upgrades, recruiting, training table and more," Franklin said.

"This renewed commitment to our student-athletes, community and fans reinforces all the reasons I've been proud to serve as your head football coach for the last eight years and why my commitment to Penn State remains steadfast

James Franklin's record at Penn State
Franklin's seemed to win everywhere he's gone. Granted, he only had one stop as a head coach prior to arriving at Penn State, but even as an assistant, Franklin was on successful teams.

His first head coaching gig came at Vanderbilt in 2011, a school which had won just two games the year before and had only been to three bowl games in the 100-plus years of history prior to Franklin's arrival.

He immediately turned around the Commodores program, going 6-7 and reaching a bowl game in his first year before rattling off two 9-4 seasons in a row, culminating in Vanderbilt ending the season ranked in both seasons, something which hadn't happened since 1948. He finished his tenure in Nashville with a record of 24-15.

Franklin then came to Penn State in 2014 where he's gone 67-32 as he gets ready to coach his 100th game with the Nittany Lions. The high point of his tenure thus far was in 2016 when the Nittany Lions won the Big Ten title and finished the season ranked No. 7 and led Penn State to 11 wins in three out of four years from 2016-19.

One of just 13 Black coaches currently at the FBS level, Franklin is among the winningest in that category. His 91 career FBS wins place him third all-time behind former Houston and Texas A&M coach Kevin Sumlin (95 career wins) and Stanford's David Shaw (93 career wins) for most wins by a Black FBS coach.