Proprioception, the sense of body position, movement, and associated forces, remains poorly understood, despite its critical role in movement. Most studies of area 2, a proprioceptive area of somatosensory cortex, have simply compared neurons' activities to the movement of the hand through space. By using motion tracking, we sought to elaborate this relationship by characterizing how area 2 activity relates to whole arm movements. We found that a whole-arm model, unlike classic models, successfully predicted...

Objective In the past decade, an increasing number of studies have examined the efficacy of physical therapy interventions in people with Huntington disease (HD). Methods We performed a mixed-methods systematic review using Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) methodology and included experimental and observational study designs. The search resulted in 23 quantitative studies and 3 qualitative studies from which we extracted data using JBI standardized extraction tools. Results of this review suggested that physical therapy interventions may...

Humans engagement in music rests on underlying elements such as the listeners’ cultural background and interest in music. These factors modulate how listeners anticipate musical events, a process inducing instantaneous neural responses as the music confronts these expectations. Measuring such neural correlates would represent a direct window into high-level brain processing. Here we recorded cortical signals as participants listened to Bach melodies. We assessed the relative contributions of acoustic versus melodic components of the music...

Currently, there are over 1.9 million confirmed cases of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) globally with over 590,000 cases in the United States.1 The number of COVID-19 positive children in the United States is unknown. A report summarizing 72,314 COVID-19 cases from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention noted 416 COVID-19 positive children under 10.2 An observational study at Wuhan Children's Hospital noted 31 COVID-19 positive children under 1 year with the youngest confirmed...

The absence of pines from tropical forests is a puzzling biogeographical oddity potentially explained by traits of shade intolerance. Pinus krempfii, a flat-leaved pine endemic to the Central Highlands of Vietnam, provides a notable exception as it seems to successfully compete with shade-tolerant tropical species. Here, we test the hypothesis that successful conifer performance at the juvenile stage depends on physiological traits of shade tolerance by comparing the physiological characteristics of P. krempfii to coexisting...

Aim: Populations of cold-adapted species at the trailing edges of geographic ranges are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of climate change from the combination of exposure to warm temperatures and high sensitivity to heat. Many of these species are predicted to decline under future climate scenarios, but they could persist if they can adapt to warming climates either physiologically or behaviorally. We aim to understand local variation in contemporary habitat use and use this...

1. Understanding patterns of diversity is central to ecology and conservation, yet estimates of diversity are often biased by imperfect detection. In recent years, multi-species occupancy models (MSOM) have been developed as a statistical tool to account for species-specific heterogeneity in detection while estimating true measures of diversity. Although the power of these models has been tested in various ways, their ability to estimate gamma diversity – or true community size, N – is a...

Phylogeny, molecular sequences, fossils, biogeography, and biome occupancy are all lines of evidence that reflect the singular evolutionary history of a clade, but they are most often studied separately, by first inferring a fossil-dated molecular phylogeny, then mapping on ancestral ranges and biomes inferred from extant species. Here we jointly model the evolution of biogeographic ranges, biome affinities, and molecular sequences, incorporating fossils to estimate a dated phylogeny for all of the 163 extant species...

Studies of controlled lab animals and natural populations represent two insightful extremes of microbiota research. We bridged these two approaches by transferring lab-bred female C57BL/6 mice from a conventional mouse facility to an acclimation room and then to an outdoor enclosure, to investigate how the gut microbiota changes with environment. Mice residing under constant conditions served as controls. Using 16S rRNA sequencing of fecal samples, we found that the shift in temperature and humidity, as...

We provide here the data used in analysis of 3 test cases, presented in the manuscript "Ecological insights from three decades of animal movement tracking across a changing Arctic". We utilized the new Arctic Animal Movement Archive (AAMA), a growing collection of 201 standardized terrestrial and marine animal tracking studies from 1991–present. The AAMA supports public data discovery, preserves fundamental baseline data for the future, and facilitates efficient, collaborative data analysis. With three AAMA-based case...

Group living is only predicted to arise when the fitness benefits outweigh the costs of sociality. Group-living species—including cooperatively breeding and family-living birds and mammals—occur most frequently in environments where climatic conditions fluctuate unpredictably from year-to-year. The fitness consequences of group living are thus expected to vary with changing environmental conditions, though few studies have examined this possibility. We examined whether living in large social groups improves adult survivorship in cooperatively breeding superb starlings (Lamprotornis...

Metabolic dysfunction occurs in many age-related neurodegenerative diseases, yet its role in disease etiology remains poorly understood. We recently discovered a potential causal link between the branched-chain amino acid transferase, BCAT-1, and the neurodegenerative movement disorder, Parkinson’s disease (PD). RNAi-mediated knockdown of C. elegans bcat-1 recapitulates PD-like features, including progressive motor deficits and neurodegeneration with age, yet the underlying mechanisms have remained unknown. Using transcriptomic, metabolomic, and imaging approaches, we show here that bcat-1 knockdown...

1. Recent findings suggest that tree mortality and post-drought recovery of gas exchange can be predicted from loss of function within the water transport system. Understanding the susceptibility of plants to hydraulic damage requires knowledge about the vulnerability of different plant organs to stress-induced hydraulic dysfunction. This is particularly important in the context of vulnerability segmentation between plant tissues which is believed to protect more energetically “costly” tissues, such as woody stems, by sacrificing “cheaper”...

Fields as diverse as human genetics and sociology are increasingly using polygenic scores based on genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for phenotypic prediction. However, recent work has shown that polygenic scores have limited portability across groups of different genetic ancestries, restricting the contexts in which they can be used reliably and potentially creating serious inequities in future clinical applications. Using the UK Biobank data, we demonstrate that even within a single ancestry group (i.e., when there...

The type 1 pilus is a bacterial filament consisting of a long coiled proteic chain of subunits joined together by non-covalent bonding between complementing β-strands. Its strength and structural stability are critical for its anchoring function in uropathogenic Escherichia coli bacteria. The pulling and unravelling of the FimG subunit of the pilus was recently studied by atomic force microscopy (AFM) experiments and steered molecular dynamics (SMD) simulations [A. Alonso-Caballero et al., Nature Commun. 9, 2758...

Mimicry, and especially spontaneous facial mimicry, is a rudimentary element of social–emotional experience that is well-conserved across numerous species. Although such mimicry is thought to be a relatively automatic process, research indicates that contextual factors can influence mimicry, especially in humans. Here, we extend this work by investigating the effect of acute psychosocial stress on spontaneous facial mimicry. Participants performed a spontaneous facial mimicry task with facial electromyography (fEMG) at baseline and approximately one month...

The number of males per group varies substantially in group-living primates, both between and within species. In blue monkeys (Cercopithecus mitis), males may temporarily join groups during annual mating seasons when sexually receptive females are present. A likely determinant of the number of males per group is female group size (the number of adult females in a group). To clarify the role of female group size in driving variation in the number of males per...

Using data from New York City, we found that there was an estimated 28-day lag between the onset of reduced subway use and the end of the exponential growth period of SARS-CoV-2 within New York City boroughs. We also conducted a cross-sectional analysis of the associations between human mobility (i.e., subway ridership), sociodemographic factors, and COVID-19 incidence as of April 26, 2020. Areas with lower median income, a greater percentage of individuals who identify as...

Clinical trials are the gold standard for generating reliable medical evidence, but patient search of relevant trials often suffers from information overload. With nearly 700 COVID-19 trials conducted in the United States as of August 2020, it is imperative that trial seekers can search for COVID-related clinical trials efficiently to enable rapid recruitment to these studies. We developed a web application called COVID-19 Trial Finder, which facilitates COVID-19 trial search in the United States, first...

Brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) thrive in urban environments by navigating the anthropocentric environment and taking advantage of human resources and by-products. From the human perspective, rats are a chronic problem that causes billions of dollars in damage to agriculture, health and infrastructure. Did genetic adaptation play a role in the spread of rats in cities? To approach this question, we collected whole-genome sequences from 29 brown rats from New York City (NYC) and scanned for...

Attention to the relations between visual features modulates hippocampal representations. Moreover, hippocampal damage impairs discrimination of spatial relations. We explore a mechanism by which this might occur: modulation by the acetylcholine system. Acetylcholine enhances afferent input to the hippocampus and suppresses recurrent connections within it. This biases hippocampal processing toward environmental input, and should improve externally-oriented, hippocampally mediated attention and perception. We examined cholinergic modulation on an attention task that recruits the hippocampus. On each...