▲ Abstract：Contingency (or “luck”) in early life plays an important role in shaping individuals’ development. By comparing the developmental trajectories of functionally genetically identical free-living mice who either experienced high levels of resource competition (males) or 信网did not (females), we show that competition magnifies early contingency. Male resource competition results in a feedback loop that magnifies the importance of early contingency and pushes individuals onto divergent, self-reinforcing life trajectories, while the same process appears absent in females. Our results indicate that the strength of sexual selection may be self-limiting, and they highlight the potential for contingency to lead to differences in life outcomes, even in the absence of any underlying differences in ability (“merit”).
▲ Abstract：In 2023, the global mean temperature soared to almost 1.5 kelvin above the preindustrial level, surpassing the previous record by about 0.17 kelvin. Previous best-guess estimates of known drivers, including anthropogenic warming and the El Ni?o onset, fall short by about 0.2 kelvin in explaining the temperature rise. Using satellite and reanalysis data, we identified a record-low planetary albedo as the primary factor bridging this gap. The decline is apparently caused largely by a reduced low-cloud cover in the northern mid-latitudes and tropics, in continuation of a multiannual trend. Further exploring the low-cloud trend and understanding how much of it is due to internal variability, reduced aerosol concentrations, or a possibly emerging low-cloud feedback will be crucial for assessing the present and expected future warming.
Canadian forests are more conducive to high-severity fires in recent decades
近多少十年来，
▲ Abstract：Long-distance migration, co妹妹on in passerine birds, is rare and poorly studied in bats. Piloting a 1.2-gram IoT (Internet of Things) tag with onboard processing, we tracked the daily location, temperature, and activity of female co妹妹on noctules (Nyctalus noctula) during spring migration across central Europe up to 1116 kilometers. Over 3 years, 71 bats migrated tens to hundreds of kilometers per night, predominantly with incoming warm fronts, which provided them with wind support. Bats also showed unexpected flexibility in their ability to migrate across a wide range of conditions if needed. However, females leaving toward the end of the season showed higher total activity per distance traveled, a possible cost for their flexible migration timing.
Competitive social feedback amplifies the role of early life contingency in male mice
▲ Abstract：Enzymes capable of breaking down polymers have been identified from natural sources and developed for industrial use in plastic recycling. However, there are many potential starting points for enzyme optimization that remain unexplored. We generated a landscape of 170 lineages of 1894 polyethylene terephthalate depolymerase (PETase) candidates and performed profiling using sampling approaches with features associated with PET-degrading capabilities. We identified three promising yet unexplored PETase lineages and two potent PETases, Mipa-P and Kubu-P. An engineered variant of Kubu-P outperformed benchmarks in terms of PET depolymerization in harsh environments, such as those with high substrate load and ethylene glycol as the solvent.
医学Medicine
Rare germline structural variants increase risk for pediatric solid tumors
▲ Abstract：This study identifies driving forces of burn severity and estimates its spatiotemporal variations in Canadian forests. Our results show that fuel aridity was the most influential driver of burn severity, su妹妹er months were more prone to severe burning, and the northern areas were most influenced by the changing climate. About 6% (0.54 to 14.64%) of the modeled areas show significant increases in the number of days conducive to high-severity burning during 1981 to 2020, most of which were found during 2001 to 2020 and in the spring and autumn. The extraordinary 2023 fire season demonstrated similar spatial patterns but more-widespread escalations in burn severity.
▲ Abstract：Pediatric solid tumors are a leading cause of childhood disease mortality. In this work, we examined germline structural variants (SVs) as risk factors for pediatric extracranial solid tumors using germline genome sequencing of 1765 affected children, their 943 unaffected parents, and 6665 adult controls. We discovered a sex-biased association between very large (>1 megabase) germline chromosomal abnormalities and increased risk of solid tumors in male children. The overall impact of germline SVs was greatest in neuroblastoma, where we uncovered burdens of ultrarare SVs that cause loss of function of highly expressed, mutationally constrained genes, as well as noncoding SVs predicted to disrupt chromatin domain boundaries. Collectively, we estimate that rare germline SVs explain 1.1 to 5.6% of pediatric cancer liability, establishing them as an important component of disease predisposition.
地球迷信Earth Science
Recent global temperature surge intensified by record-low planetary albedo
历史新低的行星反照率减轻了近期全天下气温飞腾
▲ 作者：HELGE F. GOESSLING, THOMAS RACKOW, AND THOMAS JUNG
