Protected areas not safe from light pollution

Protected areas, such as nature reserves and national parks, are thought to provide a refuge for wildlife, but according to a new study, many of these areas are not safe from light pollution. Thanks to increasing urbanization, many nocturnal skies are no longer dark. 

Although helpful for humans, artificial night lighting can impact nocturnal wildlife by disrupting natural reproductive cycles, disorienting migratory species, and increasing the risk of predation. To assess how well protected areas shelter wildlife from light pollution and preserve natural darkness, researchers analyzed satellite images of Earth collected at night by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program between 1992 and 2010. Individual pixels, representative of approximately 3 square kilometers, were assigned a number based on their degree of illumination, ranging from 0 (complete darkness) to 63 (brightly lit urban areas). 

More than 170,000 unique protected areas were identified using the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s World Database on Protected Areas. 

The degree of nighttime illumination was then compared with unprotected areas for each continent over the 2 decades. Although 86% of the world’s landmasses remain in relative darkness at night, darkness declined slightly in all regions over the study period.

 Protected areas were still generally darker than unprotected areas, yet protected areas experienced widespread increases in nighttime light exposure between 1992 and 2010, the team reports online this month in Conservation Biology. In Europe, Asia, and South and Central America, up to 42% of protected areas have experienced significant increases in nighttime lighting. 

A smaller percentage of protected areas in Europe (24%) and North America (17%) exhibited high levels of nighttime lighting in all years. Based on their findings, researchers propose reduced lighting zones be established around existing refuges to preserve their natural darkness and biodiversity. 

NIH sets aside more than $40 million for study of human placenta

The Human Placenta Project, launched last year by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) despite uncertainty over how much money would back in the effort, has just received a whopping $41.5 million in 2015 to study the vital mass of tissue that sustains a developing fetus.

The placenta carries nutrients and oxygen to a fetus from its mother’s bloodstream and removes waste; problems with its performance may contribute to health concerns ranging from preterm birth to adult diabetes. Yet it is the least understood human organ, according to Alan Guttmacher, director of NIH’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). 

Last year, Science reported on a NICHD workshop where planning began for a Human Placenta Project that would aim to monitor the placenta during a woman’s pregnancy, using new imaging approaches, tests for fetal molecules shed into a mother’s blood, and other tools.

That plan is reflected in the title of a 26 February request for grant applications, from NICHD and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), that calls for “Paradigm-Shifting Innovations” in how to assess the human placenta. One objective is to learn how environmental factors such as a mother’s diet and exposure to pollutants affect the placenta. The $41.5 million will support eight to nine awards lasting up to 4 years.

The new funding commitment for the project comes on top of about $4.5 million in 2015 that NICHD and NIBIB have already set aside for research on tools to study the placenta. An NIH representative says that some of the additional $41.5 million could come from leftover funding from the National Children’s Study (NCS), a controversial plan to follow the health of 100,000 children for 21 years that NIH canceled in December. NIH is now looking for ways to spend $140 million that Congress appropriated for the NCS in 2015 on related studies.

Article: ScienceMag

Brain activity shows infants are hardwired to link images, sounds as they learn to speak

Child learning (stock image). An international team of researchers in the UK and in Japan examined the electrical activities of the brain in 11 month-olds at the initial stages of word learning.

Credit: © mitgirl / Fotolia

New research examining electrical brain activity in infants suggests that we are biologically predisposed to link images and sounds to create language.

In a paper published in the journal Cortex, an international team of researchers in the UK and in Japan, including those at the University of Warwick, examined the electrical activities of the brain in 11 month-olds at the initial stages of word learning.

They used novel words ('kipi' or 'moma') to refer to pictures of a spiky or a rounded shape. They found the infants very quickly began to match the word to the image.

One of the authors, Dr Sotaro Kita from the University of Warwick said: 

"The oscillatory activity of the infant brainincreased when the word they heard matched the shape they were shown, compared to when it did not. This suggests that the infant brain spontaneously engages in matching visual and auditory input."

An analysis of how different areas of the brain are communicating with each other also showed surprising results.

Dr Kita said: "Communication traffic between regions of the brain was light when the word matched the shape, but the traffic became heavy especially in the left hemisphere, where language is typically processed, when the word did not match the shape. The left-hemisphere had to work harder to associate visual and auditory input when they are not a natural match."

"The N400 response was higher for mismatching word-image pairs, which is a classic index of word meaning processing in the brain. This indicates that the infants were trying to work out the meaning of the novel words."

Dr Kita added that these findings reveal that sound symbolism allows 11-month-old infants to spontaneously bind the speech sound and the visual referent, and this spontaneous binding may provide infants an insight that spoken words refers to objects you can see in the world.

He said: "It is this cross-modal mapping between sound and image that plays a key role in the origin and development of language-learning."

Story Source: The above story is based on materials provided by University of Warwick. 
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