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Genetics

Spatial patterns and conservation of genetic and phylogenetic diversity of wildlife in China – Science Advances

Abstract

Genetic diversity and phylogenetic diversity reflect the evolutionary potential and history of species, respectively. However, the levels and spatial patterns of genetic and phylogenetic diversity of wildlife at the regional scale have largely remained unclear. Here, we performed meta-analyses of genetic diversity in Chinese terrestrial vertebrates based on three genetic markers and investigated their phylogenetic diversity based on a dated phylogenetic tree of 2461 species. We detected strong positive spatial correlations among mitochondrial DNA-based genetic diversity, phylogenetic diversity, and species richness. Moreover, the terrestrial vertebrates harbored higher genetic and phylogenetic diversity in South China and Southwest China than in other regions. Last, climatic factors (precipitation and temperature) had significant positive effects while altitude and human population density had significant negative impacts on levels of mitochondrial DNA-based genetic diversity in most cases. Our findings will help guide national-level genetic diversity conservation plans and a post-2020 biodiversity conservation framework.

Biodiversity loss and conservation are among the most concerning global issues. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was established to develop national strategies for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity. An endangerment status assessment of worldwide vertebrates showed that approximately 20% of vertebrates have become threatened (1). In China, the situation is even worse: 21.4% of vertebrates are threatened, including 43.1% of amphibians, 29.7% of reptiles, 26.4% of mammals, 20.4% of fishes, and 10.6% of birds (2). Thus, it is urgent to protect biodiversity regionally and globally. As the most fundamental dimension of biodiversity, genetic diversity is a key basis for species survival and ecosystem functions (3). Higher genetic diversity means higher evolutionary potential and a greater ability to respond to environmental changes (4). An increasing number of studies have shown that genetic factors play a critical role in species endangerment and extinction (57). Thus, assessment and protection of genetic diversity are becoming essential and high-priority strategies for biodiversity conservation (4). However, under the current CBD framework, the goal proposed for genetic diversity focuses mainly on the conservation of farmed and domestic animals and cultivated plants and neglects that of wild animals and plants, which would overlook genetic erosion and harm the evolutionary potential of wildlife (8). Therefore, to better conserve the genetic diversity of wildlife, it is necessary to assess genetic diversity at regional and global scales for use in the scientific designs of natural protected areas and biodiversity conservation strategies. Miraldo et al. (9) presented the first global distribution of genetic diversity for mammals and amphibians using mitochondrial cytochrome b (Cytb) and cytochrome oxidase subunit I (Co1) gene sequences. However, the grid cell size (~150,000 km2) that they used was so large that it was difficult to determine the national- or regional-level pattern of genetic diversity in detail, including in China.

Phylogenetic diversity is the sum of phylogenetic branch lengths for all of the species in an area (10). Phylogenetic diversity measures the time scale of species evolution and reflects the evolutionary history of species (11), which contributes to the selection of biodiversity conservation priority areas (1214). Higher phylogenetic diversity excluding the effect of taxonomic richness indicates a higher proportion of distantly related and anciently diverged taxa (11, 15). Previous studies have shown that regions with higher phylogenetic diversity may not necessarily have higher species diversity, which would result in neglecting the conservation of the regions (11, 16). In this case, the conservation of older evolutionary lineages might be neglected. Thus, monitoring the level and spatial distribution of phylogenetic diversity is also important for effective conservation of biodiversity.

China is one of the countries with the richest biodiversity in the world, harboring more than 3000 terrestrial vertebrates (2). In recent years, with the development of molecular genetics, genetic diversity of many species has been assessed and numerous DNA sequences have been accumulated. In this study, we focus on the patterns of genetic and phylogenetic diversity in Chinese terrestrial vertebrates, using meta-analyses of a large published dataset and a robust dated phylogenetic tree as well as species distribution. We aim to (i) reveal whether positive spatial correlation existed among species richness, genetic diversity, and phylogenetic diversity; (ii) identify hotspot regions of high genetic diversity and high phylogenetic diversity; and (iii) explore the influences of abiotic (precipitation, temperature, and altitude) and biotic (human population) factors on the levels of genetic and phylogenetic diversity. We found that, on the whole, species richness predicted phylogenetic diversity and mitochondrial DNA-based genetic diversity in a positive direction, and higher phylogenetic diversity predicted higher genetic diversity. We identified that the terrestrial vertebrates in South China and Southwest China harbored higher genetic and phylogenetic diversity than in other regions, and central South China was identified as an evolutionary museum, while the Hengduan Mountains was identified as an evolutionary cradle. We also revealed that both mean annual precipitation and temperature had significant positive effects, while altitude and human population density had significant negative impacts on levels of mitochondrial DNA-based genetic diversity in most cases. Our findings provide insights into the spatial patterns and influencing factors of genetic and phylogenetic diversity at a regional scale.

We surveyed the population-level genetic diversity data of Chinese terrestrial vertebrates (mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians) based on three molecular markers (mitochondrial Cytb gene sequence, mitochondrial D-loop sequence, and nuclear microsatellites). A total of 287 terrestrial vertebrate species (103 mammals, 59 birds, 31 reptiles, and 94 amphibians) were assessed for population-level genetic diversity with at least one molecular marker, accounting for 9.3% of the 3075 terrestrial vertebrates distributed in China (figs. S1 to S4 and tables S1 to S9). Two unbiased genetic diversity indices, nucleotide diversity () for the Cytb and D-loop sequences and expected heterozygosity (HE) for microsatellite, were used as measures of population-level genetic diversity. In this study, the Cytb-, D-loop, and microsatellite-based genetic diversity measures were analyzed separately (tables S1 to S9). Furthermore, the species-level genetic diversity for three genetic markers was obtained by averaging the population-level genetic diversity values (tables S10 to S12).

The species-level phylogenetic diversity of Chinese terrestrial vertebrates was surveyed on the basis of the coding sequences of five mitochondrial genes (Cytb, Co1, Nd1, 12S rRNA, and 16S rRNA). A total of 2461 terrestrial vertebrates were assessed for phylogenetic diversity with at least one available mitochondrial gene sequence, accounting for 80% of the Chinese terrestrial vertebrates (figs. S5 to S7 and table S13). On the basis of a constructed maximum likelihood phylogenetic tree and 391 available divergence times from the TimeTree database (table S14), we estimated the divergence times of these vertebrates. The results showed that the amphibians first diverged from the fishes and then the reptiles evolved from the amphibians. Both the mammals and birds evolved from the reptiles, with the mammals diverging first. These results are consistent with the general conclusion about the divergence order of the terrestrial groups (17). In this study, we used divergence time as the measure of phylogenetic diversity for further analysis.

We first divided the map of China into 0.5 0.5 (~50 km by 55 km) grid cells and then calculated the species richness, genetic diversity, and phylogenetic diversity within each grid cell. The spatial correlation tests showed that the genetic diversity measures based on mitochondrial Cytb and D-loop sequences were significantly correlated [correlation coefficient (r) = 0.385, P = 0.012]. However, no significant correlation was observed for Cytb versus microsatellites (r = 0.128, P = 0.475) and for D-loop versus microsatellites (r = 0.084, P = 0.463) (fig. S8 and table S15). The inconsistencies in spatial correlations among the three genetic markers were most likely due to different measure rationales (nucleotide diversity versus expected heterozygosity) and evolutionary rates (slowly versus rapidly evolving). The differences in correlation among the different markers were similar to that of Miraldo et al. (9).

The tests for spatial correlations between genetic diversity and species richness revealed a significant positive correlation for Cytb genetic diversity (r = 0.728, P = 0.008), and a marginally significant correlation for D-loop genetic diversity (r = 0.320, P = 0.072) (Fig. 1, A and B). These results were consistent with those of global terrestrial mammals (18) and global marine and freshwater fishes (19). However, a nonsignificant correlation for microsatellite genetic diversity (r = 0.138, P = 0.499) was detected (Fig. 1C and table S15), which was similar to AFLP marker-based genetic diversity assessment of alpine plant communities (20). The differences in correlation showed that the widely discussed correlation relationship between genetic and species diversity was genetic marker dependent.

(A to C) Correlation tests between species richness (SR) and Cytb-, D-loop, and microsatellite-based genetic diversity (GD). (D) Correlation test between SR and phylogenetic diversity (PD). (E to G) Correlation tests between PD and Cytb-, D-loop, and microsatellite-based GD.

The tests for spatial correlations between genetic diversity and phylogenetic diversity showed a significant positive correlation for Cytb (r = 0.722, P = 0.013) and a marginally significant positive correlation for D-loop (r = 0.306, P = 0.089) (Fig. 1, E and F). The results were similar to those of global terrestrial mammals (18). However, the correlation was not significant for microsatellites (r = 0.123, P = 0.566) (Fig. 1G and table S15). In addition, we selected a set of abundant terrestrial vertebrate species with a threatened status rank of LC (Least-Concern) (table S16) and tested the spatial correlations between genetic and phylogenetic diversity. The results were similar to those for all the terrestrial vertebrates (table S17).

A significant positive correlation was detected between phylogenetic diversity and species richness (r = 0.99, P < 0.001) (Fig. 1D and table S15), implying that the regions with high species richness often had high phylogenetic diversity. The significant positive correlation pattern between phylogenetic diversity and species richness may be common, as shown in different large-scale analyses focusing on birds, mammals, and angiosperms (16, 18, 21).

It is generally accepted that Chinas zoogeographical regionalization is divided into the Palaearctic and Oriental realms, including seven zoogeographical regions (22, 23). The Palaearctic realm includes the Northeast China, North China, Inner Mongolia-Xinjiang, and Qinghai-Tibet Plateau regions, while the Oriental realm consists of the Southwest China, Central China, and South China regions. We mapped the genetic diversity data onto the zoogeographical region map of China using a grid size of 0.5 0.5. Overall, the terrestrial vertebrates distributed in the Oriental realm had higher genetic diversity than those in the Palaearctic realm for all three markers (Fig. 2, A to C; fig. S9; and table S18). In the case of zoogeographical regions, the vertebrates in South China harbored the highest genetic diversity for Cytb and microsatellites, suggesting a hotspot region of genetic diversity, whereas those in North China had the lowest genetic diversity for D-loop and microsatellites (table S18). In addition, the Southwest China and west Central China harbored relatively high genetic diversity. The spatial pattern of species richness across the Palaearctic and Oriental realms was similar to that of genetic diversity (Fig. 2D). However, within the zoogeographical regions, the spatial patterns of species richness were somewhat different from those of genetic diversity. The South China region had the highest species richness, whereas the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and Inner Mongolia-Xinjiang regions harbored the lowest species richness (Fig. 2D). These results suggest that regions with low species richness do not necessarily have low genetic diversity, such as the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, which should be given more conservation attention. To determine the possible effects of different sample sizes of the grid cells, we examined the frequency distribution of the proportion of species with surveyed genetic diversity data in the grid cells based on the classification of seven zoogeographical regions and found similar frequency distributions on the whole across the seven regions (figs. S10 to S12).

Northeast China (NE), North China (NC), Inner Mongolia-Xinjiang (IX), Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QT), Southwest China (SW), Central China (CC), and South China (SC). The red line indicates the boundary between the Palaearctic and Oriental realms. (A and B) Spatial patterns of Cytb- and D-loopbased GDs. measured by nucleotide diversity. (C) Spatial pattern of microsatellite-based GD measured by expected heterozygosity. (D) Spatial pattern of SR measured by number of species.

The province-level distributions of genetic diversity based on the three markers demonstrated similar patterns on the whole (figs. S13 and S14). The terrestrial vertebrates distributed in Yunnan, Guangxi, Sichuan, and Guizhou provinces harbored the highest genetic diversity. In contrast, the terrestrial vertebrates distributed in Shanxi, Shandong, Hebei, Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang, and part of Xinjiang had lower genetic diversity. The terrestrial vertebrates in Qinghai and Tibet had intermediate genetic diversity. These results could help guide province-level conservation plans for genetic diversity.

The terrestrial vertebrates in the Oriental realm had significantly higher phylogenetic diversity (PD = 10,390.25 2029.43) than those in the Palaearctic realm (PD = 4942.60 1402.09) (Fig. 3, A and B). The terrestrial vertebrates in South China harbored the highest phylogenetic diversity (PD = 12,327.46 2111.27), and those in Central China and Southwest China had the second highest phylogenetic diversity. The terrestrial vertebrates on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau had the lowest phylogenetic diversity (PD = 3936.66 1162.35) (Fig. 3B and table S18). The province-level distribution of phylogenetic diversity showed a clear pattern, in which the terrestrial vertebrates in south China had notably higher phylogenetic diversity than those in north China (fig. S15). Specifically, the vertebrates in Yunnan and Guangxi provinces had the highest phylogenetic diversity, and those in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Qinghai had the lowest phylogenetic diversity (fig. S15). These results could help guide province-level conservation plans for phylogenetic diversity.

(A) A dated phylogenetic tree of Chinese terrestrial vertebrates based on five mitochondrial genes (Cytb, Co1, Nd1, 12S rRNA, and 16S rRNA). Ma, million years. (B) Spatial pattern of PD measured by species divergence time. The red line indicates the boundary between the Palaearctic and Oriental realms. (C) Areas with significantly higher or lower PD after controlling for the confounding effect of SR. The red line indicates the boundary between the Palaearctic and Oriental realms.

As shown by the correlation analysis above, the phylogenetic diversity pattern was highly correlated with the species richness pattern (Fig. 1D). To control for the confounding effect of species richness, we detected areas with significantly higher or lower phylogenetic diversity than expected using a randomization method. The result showed that significantly higher phylogenetic diversity occurred in the central South China region, mainly including Hainan and Guangxi provinces, suggesting that these areas harbored many older terrestrial vertebrate lineages, serving as an evolutionary museum (Fig. 3C and fig. S16) (9). This result is similar to that for the phylogenetic diversity of genus-level angiosperms in China, in which the top 5% highest phylogenetic diversity and standard effective size of phylogenetic diversity were mainly located in Guangdong, Guangxi, Guizhou, and Hainan provinces (15). These results suggested that the above areas are phylogenetic diversity hotspots not only for terrestrial vertebrates but also for angiosperms in China, which deserve more conservation efforts. In contrast, significantly lower phylogenetic diversity occurred in the Southwest China region, i.e., the Hengduan Mountains, suggesting that these areas were the centers of recent speciation events and thus contained many younger lineages, serving as an evolutionary cradle (Fig. 3C and fig. S16) (15, 24). This divergence pattern is similar to that of a study on global terrestrial birds (16).

The above correlation results showed that the mitochondrial DNA-based genetic diversity was strongly correlated with species richness. Therefore, to reveal the effects of abiotic and biotic factors on genetic diversity, we performed the semi-part spatially explicit generalized linear mixed modeling (spaGLMM) analysis by regressing genetic diversity against species richness and then using the residuals of models to evaluate the effects of abiotic (mean annual precipitation, mean annual temperature, and altitude) and biotic (human population density) factors. The results showed that most of the genetic diversity measures were well predicted by these factors (Table 1). In detail, mean annual precipitation had a significant positive effect on Cytb-based genetic diversity; mean annual temperature had a significant positive effect on D-loopbased genetic diversity; and altitude and human population density had significant negative impacts on Cytb- and D-loopbased genetic diversity (Table 1). In addition, the spaGLMM analysis with the species richness included as an explanatory variable gave similar results to the semi-part spaGLMM analysis (table S19). Because the relationships between most of the factors and microsatellite-based genetic diversity were different from theoretically expected, here we did not discuss microsatellite-related results.

MAP, mean annual precipitation; MAT, mean annual temperature; ALT, mean altitude; HPD, human population density.

Because the phylogenetic diversity was very strongly correlated with species richness, we also performed the semi-part spaGLMM analysis for phylogenetic diversity. The results showed that the above abiotic and biotic factors had no significant impacts on phylogenetic diversity (Table 1), suggesting that the species richness had a much higher effect on phylogenetic diversity compared to other factors. To test this, we performed the spaGLMM analysis with species richness as an independent variable. The results showed that the importance of species richness was far more than those of other factors, indicating that phylogenetic diversity was mainly affected by species richness (table S19).

This is the first study to assess the correlation between genetic diversity and phylogenetic diversity for all the terrestrial vertebrate groups at a large spatial scale. The findings revealed a significant correlation between genetic and phylogenetic diversity for Cytb-based genetic diversity measure and a marginally significant correlation for D-loopbased measure at a grid cell scale, demonstrating the important role of phylogenetic diversity in predicting level of genetic diversity. In addition, we also found a significant positive correlation between genetic diversity and species richness for Cytb-based genetic diversity measure and a marginally significant correlation for D-loopbased measure. However, no significant correlations were detected between genetic diversity and phylogenetic diversity (or species richness) for microsatellite-based measure, suggesting that these correlations are genetic marker dependent.

Our study is also the first region-level survey and assessment of the genetic and phylogenetic diversity of Chinese terrestrial vertebrates that demonstrated the spatial distribution pattern of diversity and identified the regions of high and low genetic/phylogenetic diversity. The spatial patterns showed that the terrestrial vertebrates in South China and Southwest China harbored not only higher genetic diversity but also higher phylogenetic diversity, highlighting the high conservation priority for these hotspot regions. We also identified key areas with significantly higher or lower phylogenetic diversity after controlling for the effects of species richness and discerned the evolutionary museum and cradle for Chinese terrestrial vertebrates. In particular, we found inconsistencies among the regions in terms of genetic and species diversity. Although the terrestrial vertebrates on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau had the lowest species richness, they had intermediate genetic diversity, possibly because of less human activity and heterogeneous abiotic effects in this region. The terrestrial vertebrates in North China and Northeast China, which are exposed to more human activity and located in north further in latitude, harbored intermediate species richness but lower genetic diversity. These results were supported by the semi-part spaGLMM analyses, which revealed that abiotic (precipitation, temperature, and altitude) and biotic factors (human population) played important roles in the spatial patterns of genetic diversity.

We investigated the effects of abiotic and biotic factors driving the spatial patterns of genetic and phylogenetic diversity at a grid cell scale. On the whole, the effects of these factors on Cytb- and D-loopbased genetic diversity were consistent with ecological and evolutionary expectations. Mean annual precipitation and temperature had significant positive effects on genetic diversity, because higher precipitation and temperature most likely provide more suitable conditions for species survival, population expansion, and speciation. In contrast, altitude had significant negative impacts on genetic diversity, because higher elevation means harsher living conditions especially for terrestrial vertebrates. For biotic factor, human population density had significant negative impacts on genetic diversity, because higher density means more human activities and more possible interference with wildlife and their habitats.

Our study summarizes the findings of genetic/phylogenetic diversity studies, revealing the basic background of genetic resources in Chinese terrestrial vertebrates, which could facilitate genetic resource protection under the CBD framework and guide future genetic/phylogenetic diversity research and conservation. In addition, compared with the total number of Chinese terrestrial vertebrates, the number of species with surveyed genetic diversity data is relatively small. To better conserve genetic diversity, scientists and managers should cooperate to perform genetic diversity surveys for more species, especially those with an unclear genetic status. Furthermore, the genetic and phylogenetic diversity of freshwater and marine vertebrates should be surveyed and assessed to protect gradually decreasing aquatic genetic resources. Last, our study is the first to use nuclear microsatellite markers to assess large-scale genetic diversity pattern and explore the relationship between genetic and phylogenetic diversity. However, it is worth noting that microsatellite-based correlation and model analyses produced different results from those based on mitochondrial DNA, which cautions us to carefully interpret results from different genetic markers.

We retrieved published literatures of population-level genetic diversity studies from public academic databases. For the English literature, we searched the Web of Science database (http://apps.webofknowledge.com/) using the search rule TS = (species Latin name OR species English name) AND TS = genetic diversity AND TS = population. For the Chinese literature, we searched the CNKI database (www.cnki.net), CQVIP database (www.cqvip.com), and Chinese Science Citation Database (http://sciencechina.cn) using the search rule species Latin name AND genetic diversity. Then, to search the literature as comprehensively as possible, we searched only the species Latin name again for species without related references or with few related references.

We screened the retrieved literature following several steps. First, we used only the literature about wild animal studies and discarded the literature studying captive populations. Second, we focused on population-level studies based on microsatellite, mitochondrial Cytb, or D-loop markers. These three markers have been widely used in population genetics and phylogeographic studies of vertebrates. For microsatellite-based studies, we extracted the expected heterozygosity (HE) values for each population of species as the measure of microsatellite genetic diversity. HE is an unbiased measure and thus insensitive to small sample sizes (25). For mitochondrial Cytb gene and D-loop sequence-based studies, we extracted Neis nucleotide diversity () values for each population of species as the measure of Cytb or D-loop genetic diversity (26). is also unbiased and thus insensitive to small sample sizes (26). If the same population had more than one HE or from different references, we used the mean value as the genetic diversity measure of this population. Last, on the basis of population-level genetic diversity data, we estimated species-level genetic diversity by averaging the population-level genetic diversity values (9). Mean genetic diversity metric has been widely applied in large-scale studies (9, 18, 19).

In total, we compiled a dataset of 287 terrestrial vertebrates, which included 103 mammals, 59 birds, 31 reptiles, and 94 amphibians, accounting for 15.6, 4.1, 6.7, and 18.6% of the respective total numbers of species (figs. S1 and S2). Overall, the assessment proportions for genetic diversity of mammals and amphibians were higher than those of birds and reptiles, with the proportion of birds being the lowest. The number of terrestrial vertebrate species with population-level genetic diversity data based on microsatellite marker (n = 151) was higher than those based on Cytb gene (n = 142) and D-loop (n = 105), accounting for 4.9, 4.6, and 3.4% of the 3075 Chinese terrestrial vertebrates, respectively (figs. S3 and S4).

Sequences of five mitochondrial genes (Cytb, Co1, 12S rRNA, 16S rRNA, and Nd1) were used to reconstruct the phylogeny of Chinese terrestrial vertebrates. The sequences of the five mitochondrial genes were searched in GenBank with the following steps. First, the available mitochondrial reference genomes were downloaded, and the corresponding coding sequences of these genes were extracted. Then, the available coding sequences for the remaining species were directly downloaded from GenBank using the species Latin name and gene name. If more than one sequence was available for the same locus of a species, the sequence with a length similar to that of the corresponding gene was selected. Last, the short genes whose coding sequence length was <300 base pairs were discarded from the dataset. After these steps, we compiled a total of 2461 species including 573 mammals, 1170 birds, 359 reptiles, and 359 amphibians, representing 87.0, 81.0, 77.2, and 71.0% of the respective total numbers of species. Our dataset covered 46 orders, 204 families, and 847 genera. For each gene, the coding sequences of 973 species were extracted from their mitochondrial genomes, while others were directly downloaded from the GenBank database. The numbers of species with Cytb and Co1 sequences were higher than those with Nd1, 12S rRNA, and 16S rRNA sequences (fig. S7).

The coding sequences of each gene were concatenated and aligned by MAFFT (27) with default parameters, and the poorly aligned sites at the beginning and the end were trimmed. Then, the aligned sequences of these five genes were imported into SequenceMatrix software (28) to construct a supermatrix with the gaps treated as missing data. A phylogenetic analysis was performed on this supermatrix using the maximum likelihood method implemented in RAxML 8.2.12 (29) with the ASC_GTRGAMMA model and 1000 bootstrap replicates. Each gene was treated as a partition, and the zebrafish was used as outgroup. On the basis of this phylogenetic tree, we used the penalized likelihood method implemented in treePL (30) to date the divergence times of these vertebrates. A total of 391 available divergence times from TimeTree (31) were selected as calibration points for the dating analysis (table S14). The prime option and through analysis were implemented with optimal parameters.

On the basis of our dated phylogenetic tree and species distribution data, we calculated Faiths phylogenetic diversity of Chinese terrestrial vertebrates using the picante package (32) in R, as widely used in phylogenetic diversity studies (33). In this study, we used divergence time as the measure of phylogenetic diversity of each species.

The distributional ranges of terrestrial vertebrate species (including mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and birds) were derived from the IUCN spatial database (www.iucnredlist.org/resources/spatial-data-download). The range of each species was originally in a vectorized shapefile format and was rasterized into a grid system with a 0.5 0.5 resolution (~50 km by 55 km). We double-checked the rasterized maps to confirm that they matched the original vectorized distributional range maps. The resultant rasterized map of each species was always conservative relative to the original vectorized map, as many margins of species fragmented distributions might not have been recorded as the presence of the species in our 0.5 0.5 grid cells. This is because the areas of these margins were too small in the corresponding grid cells. The map of China used in this study was from Resource and Environment Science and Data Center (www.resdc.cn/data.aspx?DATAID=200). The Latin name of each species was checked to avoid potential synonyms. In total, our gridded distribution database included the occurrence records for 1941 species. After matching with the genetic and phylogenetic data, the final distribution dataset used for the diversity assessment included a total of 180 species for the genetic diversity analysis and 1685 species for the phylogenetic diversity analysis.

Climate data with a 2.5 spatial resolution were collected from the WorldClim database (https://worldclim.org/). We used the two most important climatic variables, mean annual temperature and mean annual precipitation that were calculated for the climate data from 1970 to 2000, as predictors of spatial patterns of genetic and phylogenetic diversity of terrestrial vertebrates in China. Human population density in 2010 in China (in persons per square kilometer) was derived from the Gridded Population of the World collection (https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/collection/gpw-v4). Digital elevation data with a 2.5 spatial resolution in China were originally derived from the NASA Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission and downloadable from the WorldClim database. Because we mapped the genetic and phylogenetic diversity using a grid cell size of 0.5 0.5 for each variable (including altitude), we took the average of all values within each grid cell as the variables value for the grid cell.

In many cases in which biodiversity data are collected associated with spatial information (e.g., sampling location coordinates), conventional correlation tests are not valid because the assumption of total independence of samples is violated. For spatial biodiversity data, neighboring locations can present similar biodiversity features (e.g., genetic diversity or phylogenetic diversity as investigated here), which is a phenomenon known as spatial autocorrelation, resulting in nonindependent association of biodiversity information between neighboring locations. To this end, conventional correlation tests can be misleading. To cope with this issue, we used a modified t test to account for spatial autocorrelation (34, 35) when testing the spatial associations between genetic diversity, phylogenetic diversity, and species richness. The test is based on the adjustment of the sample correlation coefficient between the two spatially correlated quantities and requires the estimation of an effective sample size (degrees of freedom).

We performed spatial correlation tests between genetic diversity based on different markers, between genetic diversity and species richness, between genetic diversity and phylogenetic diversity, and between phylogenetic diversity and species richness. In addition, we selected a set of abundant terrestrial vertebrate species with a threatened status rank of LC (2) to further explore the relationship between genetic diversity and phylogenetic diversity. The set of abundant terrestrial vertebrates included 39 species for Cytb, 25 species for D-loop, and 45 species for microsatellite (table S16). We performed the correlation analyses for Cytb-, D-loop, and microsatellite-based genetic diversity separately.

We divided the map of China into 0.5 0.5 grid cells using R software. Then, we mapped the spatial distributional patterns of species richness, genetic diversity, and phylogenetic diversity based on the diversity values calculated for each grid cell. For species richness, we summed the total number of species occurring in the grid cell. For genetic diversity, we summed the genetic diversity values of each species present within the grid cell and divided the total value by the number of species surveyed in the grid cell, as used in (9). For phylogenetic diversity, we summed the divergence times of all species surveyed within the grid cell following the definition of Faiths phylogenetic diversity (10, 15).

To detect grid cells with significantly higher or lower phylogenetic diversity than expected controlling for the confounding effect of species richness, we used a randomization protocol (36). In detail, we first computed the phylogenetic diversity for each grid cell and divided this value by the species richness found in the cell. Then, we used a random swapping algorithm to randomize the species-site binary matrix while fixing the species richness of each grid cell and the range size of each species. The randomization procedure was repeated 1000 times, and the following effective size of phylogenetic diversity-species richness was computedZPD=ObsPDMean(RandPD)SD(RandPD)where ObsPD is the observed phylogenetic diversity-species richness ratio for each grid cell. RandPD represents the random phylogenetic diversity-species richness ratio calculated for each grid cell derived from the randomized species-site matrix. Mean(RandPD) and SD(RandPD) denote the mean and standard deviation of the 1000 random phylogenetic diversity-species richness ratio values, respectively. ZPD approximately followed a standard normal distribution; as such, at the significance level of 0.05, a grid cell was identified as having statistically significantly high phylogenetic diversity given the associated species richness if ZPD > 1.96. Conversely, a grid cell was identified as having statistically significantly low phylogenetic diversity given the associated species richness if ZPD < 1.96.

Species richness might have strong associations with genetic and phylogenetic diversity (37, 38). To explore the effects of factors affecting the spatial patterns of genetic and phylogenetic diversity of Chinese terrestrial vertebrates, we performed a semi-part spaGLMM implemented in the spaMM package (39) in the R environment (40), in which the influence of species richness on genetic or phylogenetic diversity was explicitly partialled out. To do so, we firstly constructed a spaGLMM model in which species richness is the only explanatory variable of genetic or phylogenetic diversity and then we used the residuals of this model for evaluating the impacts of other abiotic and biotic factors on genetic or phylogenetic diversity. In addition, to assess the effect of species richness on genetic and phylogenetic diversity, we also performed the spaGLMM analyses with the species richness as an explanatory variable as well as other factors.

For all the above spaGLMM analyses, a correlation matrix according to the Matrn correlation function was assumed and fitted on the basis of the longitude and latitude information of the center point of each grid cell when fitting the mixed model. The Matrn correlation function, containing a scale parameter and a smoothness parameter, is widely applied to model spatial correlation by including exponential and squared exponential models as special cases (41, 42). For the modeling results of semi-part spaMM analyses, when the confidence interval of the estimated coefficient for an explanatory variable was significantly deviated from zero, the variable was considered to have a significant effect on levels of genetic or phylogenetic diversity.

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Acknowledgments: We thank Jiekun He for providing the map of zoogeographical regionalization. Funding: This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31821001); the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB31000000); the Biodiversity Survey, Monitoring and Assessment Project of Ministry of Ecology and Environment of China (2019HB2096001006); the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31672319); the Youth Innovation Promotion Association, CAS (2016082); and the Special Research Assistant Program of CAS. Author contributions: F.W. conceived and supervised the project. Y.H., H.F., J.C., X.Z., H.W., B.Z., L.Y., X.H., X.S., T.P., W.W., and J.L. performed the data collection. Y.H., H.F., Y.C., J.C., M.W., W.Z., L.Y., and H.H. performed the data analysis. Y.H., H.F., and Y.C. wrote the manuscript with input from F.W. Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Data and materials availability: All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials. Additional data related to this paper may be requested from the authors.

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Spatial patterns and conservation of genetic and phylogenetic diversity of wildlife in China - Science Advances

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A green agenda works in tandem with a premium positioning, so perhaps 2021 is the year snacking ‘gets’ sustainability – BakeryAndSnacks.com

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Youve got to convey any changes to the public without seeming opportunistic or being accused of completely changing the brand. But at the same time, you shouldnt be hiding your sustainability credentials under a bushel.

People have enormous loyalty to a range of product characteristics. They like the way the packaging looks, how it feels; they like the pack size, the way it looks familiar and jumps out to them from the supermarket shelf. Mess around with any of these things when youre building in messaging around sustainability, and you risk upsetting loyal consumers.

Guesswork only gets you so far. You need to get in peoples heads - neuroscience can help you do that.

Neuroscience can help identify how people feel about different aspects of your product, and just how far you can change things you can test a range of sustainability messages to see which ones work best for your brand. Its about communicating your sustainability credentials so that they are seen as better, and something the consumer cant do without. More on how that works later.

Going to market with a green product is just the beginning, though.

Customers dont have to make sacrifices on quality and taste anymore - gone are the days when a vegan protein bar would set you back three pounds and go down like sawdust. Good for the environment no longer means bad for your tastebuds, nor does it condemn a product exclusively to the depths of a local Holland & Barrett.

Today, when done right, sustainability clearly works in tandem with a premium positioning. Take eco-friendly cookies, which sell at more than a 100% premium. Sustainable chocolate also hikes its prices by an average of 50%. This means, now more than ever, that the experience has to justify the price tag. And that experience is anything and everything. The visual cues, the language, the tactile experience, the manner in which the brand conducts itself on social media, how it comes across on TV and billboards, how it looks on the shelf, and even how any influencers or celebrities represent your brands message.

Some of this stuff might seem like it doesnt matter, but every piece of your communications should ladder up to your sustainability message. If not, you risk alienating an entire generation - and future generations - from interacting with your product: NYU Stern research from last year concluded: The younger the household, the more likely they [are] to buy sustainability-marketed products.#

Given were in lockdown, you can use remote, online techniques like implicit association testing to assess how respondents react at speed to the brand assets you present to them. Implicit association measures how strongly people subconsciously link two concepts, such as Jaffa Cakes and sustainable. The stronger the association, the faster this link between the two words will come to mind, which is reflected in the response time.

This rapid-fire, real-time quizzing means you can collect honest answers this is not the same as being given a survey in the train station, or being put on the spot by a friend. This is the brain trying its best to make sense of information. Its not trying to impress anyone. Itll tell you what you need to know if your sustainable packaging is aesthetically awful, or the texture of your snack is uncomfortable, or if the price is putting people off, this testing will let you know. You can also run new ideas against your current packaging, comms and so on.

Naturally, neuroscience isnt the answer to everything. Sometimes, a good idea is a good idea and you just know it. But neuroscience decreases risk. With new pandemic-related restrictions and rules coming into play every day, it seems, theres now more risk than ever. Why take a blind leap of faith when you really dont have to?

Read more here:
A green agenda works in tandem with a premium positioning, so perhaps 2021 is the year snacking 'gets' sustainability - BakeryAndSnacks.com

Neuroscience

Fragments of Rage – The Bulwark

Were drowning in debates about banning violence-inciting speech and its authors from social media platforms, but what if thats only half the story? While were busy focusing on the production sideall that the QAnoners, meme-dispensers, and internet conspiracists are doing on the various platforms that host themwere not paying enough attention to the consumption side: How the human brain receives and processes information, and how the designs of the platforms maximize profit by taking advantage of how our brains work.

The neuroscientific knowledge that explains the effectiveness of social media platforms and other Internet tools occasionally becomes a matter of public debate, as when the documentary The Social Dilemma hit Netflix last year. But the subject remains under-discussed, especially outside of the academy, and especially when compared to how important it is to our social, moral and political lives.

For present purposes, lets take just one aspect of neuroscientific researchrelating to the division of our brains into left and right hemispheres, with distinctive characteristicsand discuss how it relates to our heated debates about social media and worrying trends in our political life. Well use as our guide The Master and His Emissary, a 2009 overview of how this area of neuroscientific research relates to social history, by Iain McGilchrist, a British psychiatrist and professor of literature. (Joking about the books denseness and richness, economist Russ Roberts of EconTalk fame said it was one he couldnt recommend and couldnt recommend highly enough.)

The popular conception of the left and right brains, McGilchrist explains, is wronga result of vulgarization of research conducted in the 1960s and 70s. It is not true that one side of the brain controls reason and vision, while the other side of the brain controls emotion and language. Our continually evolving understanding is much more nuanced and, frankly, mysterious.

The right hemisphere of the brain, McGilchrist says, is generally attuned to the environment around us, seeking new information and keeping a weather eye out for potential threats. It is, in McGilchrists term, the master. The left hemisphere is designed for narrow attention, to encode and manipulate knowledge gleaned by the right. McGilchrist calls it the emissary, a faithful servant figuring out how to do things while the right side is concerned about relationships between things. This division is broadly suggestive of two huge evolutionary imperatives: finding food while not becoming food for others. The right side of the brain looks at the landscape and searches for meaning while the left produces maps. Even in left-handed people (that is, right-brain dominant people), the instructions for using tools are encoded in the left brain.

The book (and the subsequent documentary film) make this distinction clear in a particularly vivid way. In an experiment using pigeons, scientists discovered that using only their right eye (controlled by the left hemisphere) the birds were able to identify highly disaggregated pictures of human beings. In other words, if you chop up a vacation photo into hundreds of tiny pieces and mix them up leaving no discernable pattern, the birds could still pick out which photos had humans in them and which did not. The left hemisphere of their brains saw the pieces that made up a human being (an eye, an arm, a leg) even in fragments. Using just the right hemisphere (left eye), the pigeons couldnt distinguish which fragment photos had humans in them and which did not; the right hemisphere could only see the human figure when it was fully assembled. The human brain is constructed similarly. Our left brain focuses on the pieces while our right looks for the whole.

McGilchrist applies his divided-brain approach to our modern, high-technology society and argues that in our ever-stronger preference for the left-brains narrow, fragmentary take on the world we risk losing our capacity for integrating knowledge and relating to other people as well as the natural world. Our right-brain capacities, which help us to see the big picture and appreciate whole and embodied thingsincluding other peopleis subject to atrophy even as our ability to manipulate the world grows relentlessly stronger.

Through the fragmenting lens of social media we are living, increasingly, in the left-brains world. By stripping information of context and then actively manipulating it, social media has the power to prey upon left-brain tendencies and preferences by transforming bits of information into world-historic conspiracies. This phenomenon pre-dated the Internet, of course. Oliver Stone used the technique to brilliant effect in his film JFK, running and re-running the Zapruder film showing the killing of President Kennedy (Back and to the left, back and to the left) to make it seem impossible that the fatal bullet shot from behind could have driven Kennedys torso backward. Stones distortion helped fulfill the requirement for a second gunman and provided support for a conspiracy Stone said involved the entire U.S. military and intelligence apparatus. In fact, experts have demonstrated conclusively how that movement was not just possible but required by the ballistic and other conditions in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Partial information can be manipulated in the left hemisphere to create conspiracies; a fuller context protects against them.

The rise of social media has infinitely multiplied the potential and reality of fake news. The public concerns about allegations of fraud in the 2020 presidential election are in large part a product of a disaggregated reality created, or at least exacerbated, by social media. Deceptively edited videos of election workers mishandling ballots, the red mirage of election night, the entirely insane idea that a deceased Hugo Chvez teamed up with Dominion Voting to elect Joe Biden (among many other conspiracy theories)all these could be understood as weapons targeted at over-dominant left hemispheres searching for patterns and explanations where there are none. As McGilchrist points out, while emotions are housed in both hemispheres, anger lateralizes to the left, tending to fuel the rage associated with the feelings of powerlessness and fear that conspiracy thinking engenders. Focus enough people on deceptive, fragmented information that makes them believe a vast interlocking conspiracy has overturned the democratic will and you get the events of January 6.

The forces driving left-brain analytical fragmentation are immense and embedded throughout our society and economy. One example is our obsessive focus on STEM skill development while we devalue and reduce investment in subjects like art, literature, and philosophya kind of tripling-down on left-hemisphere preferences. This is all happening despite pleas from employers for workers with better right-hemisphere social capacities. Through these policy choices, and the accelerating demands for narrow, technical understanding of the world, we are unwittingly leaving ourselves increasingly vulnerable to false digitized information and the growing social and political conflict it generates.

It is important, of course, not to rely too heavily on any one neuroscientific explanation for human actions and social phenomena. The brain is like a universe unto itself: immense and infinitely complex. Our understanding of how it works is constantly revised as new research emerges. In addition to the research on brain hemispheres that McGilchrist explores, there are many other aspects of neuroscience and psychology that are relevant to our understanding of how social media have remade our public discourse, including research on distraction and on the brains reward system.

And even the best neuroscientific explanations can only take us so far. Scientific epistemology and reductionist methods that focus exclusively on mechanics can rarely offer us moral guidance. In his inaugural address on Wednesday, President Biden noted how manipulated and even manufactured facts are part of the raging fire that is destroying our politics, and called on us instead to listen to one another. Hear one another. See one another. Show respect to one another. To understand why that matters and how to do it we must consult the humanitiespoetry, art, history, philosophyand religion, sources of the ought of life that are impermeable to scientific analysis.

Read more here:
Fragments of Rage - The Bulwark

Genetics

Twins with Covid-19 help scientists untangle the diseases genetic roots. – The New York Times

Kimberly and Kelly Standard, who are twins, assumed that when they became sick with Covid-19 their experiences would be as identical as their DNA.

The virus had different plans.

Early last spring, the sisters from Rochester, Mich., checked themselves into the hospital with fevers and shortness of breath. While Kelly was discharged after less than a week, her sister ended up in intensive care, and spent almost a month in critical condition.

Nearly a year later, the sisters are bedeviled by the divergent paths their illnesses took.

I want to know, Kelly said, why did she have Covid worse than me?

Identical twins offer a ready-made experiment to untangle the contributions of nature and nurture in driving disease. With the help of twin registries in the United States, Australia, Europe and elsewhere, researchers are confirming that genetics can influence which symptoms Covid-19 patients experience.

These studies have also underscored the importance of the environment and pure chance: Even between identical twins, immune systems can look vastly different.

But at least some of the factors that influence the severity of a Covid-19 case are written into the genome. Recent studies suggest that people with type O blood, for example, may be at a slightly lower risk of becoming seriously sick (though experts have cautioned against overinterpreting these types of findings). Other papers have homed in on genes that affect how cells sound the alarm about viruses.

There even seems to be a measurable genetic influence on whether patients experience symptoms like fever, fatigue and delirium, said Tim Spector, an epidemiologist and the director of the TwinsUK registry based at St. Thomas Hospital in London.

Last year, he and his colleagues developed a symptom-tracking app. In a study that has not yet been published in a scientific journal, they reported that genetic factors might account for up to 50 percent of the differences between Covid-19 symptoms.

Still, Dr. Spector said, It would be wrong to think we can answer this if we just crack the genes.

Read this article:
Twins with Covid-19 help scientists untangle the diseases genetic roots. - The New York Times

Human Behavior

3 ways to turn that failing New Year’s resolution into a habit – 4029tv

Have a bad relationship with New Year's resolutions? Many people start strong and then peter out by mid-January as work deadlines, home chores and the latest Netflix binge takes precedence over good intentions. Some even thought this year would be different due to being homebound. (Laughable!)Instead of a resolution, it may be worth trying a "tiny habit," a term coined by behavioral science expert B.J. Fogg, who founded and directs research and innovation at Stanford University's Behavior Design Lab. As Fogg explains in his best-selling book "Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything," the key to building a better habit is tying each action to something you already do while also matching location, frequency and theme. Fogg's tips are based, he said, on mountains of research on human behavior modification and the many people he has coached over some 40 years.Here's a look at how tiny habits work:CNN: What's the secret sauce to making a new behavior a habit?B.J. Fogg: Emotion is what forms the habit. It's not repetition. It's not willpower. It's not discipline. It's the emotions you feel when you do a behavior. If you have a feeling of success when doing that behavior, it will start wiring as a habit. If it's an intense feeling of success, it will substantially wire.What doesn't work is trying to get somebody to do something they don't want to do. You can nag them into compliance, maybe but that's not a habit.What also doesn't work is picking a habit that's painful, or causes you to feel awkward or causes you to feel negative. You want to do the opposite you want the habit to help you feel successful or give you joy or pleasure or satisfaction in some way.CNN: A lot of the habits we want to do for our health are not necessarily enjoyable, at least at first. Fogg: If someone wants to exercise or feels they should, the key is to find an exercise that makes them feel successful or they find enjoyable one or the other.The third approach is to redesign your environment so the only way you can get to work is walking or biking, so you must do it. That's an environmental change sell your car. Then the only way you can do something is by walking or biking so you'll get exercise. That's not really practical for most people.In reality, the only habits that wire in readily are behaviors you already want to do, and you feel successful doing them.CNN: What are your three criteria for a successful habit?Fogg: My method is a system. As you're picking a new habit, it's got to match three criteria.Number one: It needs to be effective. Take meditation as stress reduction. For a lot of people meditation is not effective for reducing stress because all they do is become aware of how scattered their mind is, so that's a bad idea for those people.For me, what's effective is going out into nature. Even a short little walk to the ocean or a short walk into the garden is very effective.Number two: It needs to be behavior people want to do. If you don't want to do that behavior, maybe you can manipulate yourself into it a few times but it won't become a habit.Number three: It needs to be a behavior you can do. So I talked about walking out and looking at the ocean or looking at tadpoles. Well, I live in a place I can do that.If someone can't do that, they've got to pick something else, like hanging out with their dog.CNN: You say the new behavior has to fit into your routine to become a habit. I want to start drinking more water, so how should I do that?Fogg: That's one of the keys in my work. It's not just about picking the habit, you have to design it into your routine. And that means, what will that action come after naturally? Starting the coffee maker happens in the kitchen, it happens in the morning, and it happens once a day.After I start the coffee maker, after I feed the dog, then I will drink a glass of water. if you can design it into your routine, if you know what this habit comes after, then your chances of succeeding go way up.I call that an anchor. You want the anchor and the new habit to happen in the same location. If the new habit can be associated with the kitchen, then find a kitchen anchor for it. What doesn't work is like, "Oh, I start the coffee maker then I have to go out to the garage to do the new habit." That does not work. Location matters.Next is frequency. If you want the habit to happen once a day, then you want an anchor routine that happens once a day. Like, in my life I want to do push-ups throughout the day. So I attached that behavior to when I have to pee. So after I go to the bathroom, I do two push-ups because then I get to do push-ups throughout the day.The next thing that matters is the theme. Now this matters the least the first two matter more but if I see feeding the dog as a nurturing ritual, a good habit to follow would be a way that I nurture myself.You're looking for same location, same frequency, and if you can, the same theme. And if you get those lined up, then the habit can just click into place.CNN: Why doesn't your approach include such typical recommendations as repeating the behavior for 66 days so it becomes automatic?Fogg: There are a bunch of things that aren't required to create habits that people think they must do like, "Oh, you have to write, set a goal." You don't have to set a goal. That's not true.The whole thing about repetition is misguided. It's the emotion that wires the habit in if you repeat it and you hate it, it does not wire in as a habit. It will never become a habit.Or people say only work on one habit at a time. No, that's not true at all. You have to have an accountability partner is another recommendation. You don't have to.There are all these myths out there around habits and change. My work is saying, "No, people. Here's how to do it quickly and easily, and all those other old things are either wrong or optional."CNN: How did you come to choose these criteria for habit building?Fogg: In 2007, I discovered what I called the behavior model all human behavior comes down to only three things: Is there motivation to do that behavior? Is there an ability to do the behavior? Is there a prompt for that behavior?A prompt is something that reminds you, and you use an existing routine to prompt you. Feeding the dog is going to be my prompt. It's not going to be a Post-It note; it's not going to be an alarm; it's not going to be just trying to remember.You're hacking the prompt by using an existing routine to remind yourself.When you see how the pieces work, it's like, "Oh my gosh, is it really that simple?" And the answer is yes. CNN: You've launched a tool that people can use on their smartphones to help them form healthy habits. How does it work?Fogg: The tool provides "recipes" for successful tiny habits. It can be found at recipemaker.tinyhabits.com. It just launched and is still being tweaked but It's free, open to all. It's designed for mobile phones so people can use it anywhere.Along the top are various categories you might want to choose from, such as nutrition, fitness, brain health, productivity. Those aren't random, those are informed by my research at Stanford that finds these are the things that people want most. There is a lot of data and research behind it, but we keep the tool itself really simple.Under each category, you can swipe through the top cards to look at the new habits you might choose. I'm only including habits that I think are effective. And once you settle on one that you like, you go to the cards below and say, "When am I going to do this? When is it going to fit into my routine?'You can choose the card "think of something I'm grateful for" and pair that with the card representing an existing habit like "put my head on my pillow." And that's your recipe for a new habit you're going to practice. You're not going to be perfect, but you're going to practice and see if it works for you.The tool can be used without signing up for emails, but if you want to hear more from me about that habit, you can enter your email.The ultimate goal is anybody in the world can benefit from this without installing anything, without giving up your email. It's a tool to help me with my life's mission to help people to be happier and healthier.

Have a bad relationship with New Year's resolutions? Many people start strong and then peter out by mid-January as work deadlines, home chores and the latest Netflix binge takes precedence over good intentions. Some even thought this year would be different due to being homebound. (Laughable!)

Instead of a resolution, it may be worth trying a "tiny habit," a term coined by behavioral science expert B.J. Fogg, who founded and directs research and innovation at Stanford University's Behavior Design Lab.

As Fogg explains in his best-selling book "Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything," the key to building a better habit is tying each action to something you already do while also matching location, frequency and theme.

Fogg's tips are based, he said, on mountains of research on human behavior modification and the many people he has coached over some 40 years.

Here's a look at how tiny habits work:

CNN: What's the secret sauce to making a new behavior a habit?

B.J. Fogg: Emotion is what forms the habit. It's not repetition. It's not willpower. It's not discipline. It's the emotions you feel when you do a behavior. If you have a feeling of success when doing that behavior, it will start wiring as a habit. If it's an intense feeling of success, it will substantially wire.

What doesn't work is trying to get somebody to do something they don't want to do. You can nag them into compliance, maybe but that's not a habit.

What also doesn't work is picking a habit that's painful, or causes you to feel awkward or causes you to feel negative. You want to do the opposite you want the habit to help you feel successful or give you joy or pleasure or satisfaction in some way.

CNN: A lot of the habits we want to do for our health are not necessarily enjoyable, at least at first.

Fogg: If someone wants to exercise or feels they should, the key is to find an exercise that makes them feel successful or they find enjoyable one or the other.

The third approach is to redesign your environment so the only way you can get to work is walking or biking, so you must do it. That's an environmental change sell your car. Then the only way you can do something is by walking or biking so you'll get exercise. That's not really practical for most people.

In reality, the only habits that wire in readily are behaviors you already want to do, and you feel successful doing them.

CNN: What are your three criteria for a successful habit?

Fogg: My method is a system. As you're picking a new habit, it's got to match three criteria.

Number one: It needs to be effective. Take meditation as stress reduction. For a lot of people meditation is not effective for reducing stress because all they do is become aware of how scattered their mind is, so that's a bad idea for those people.

For me, what's effective is going out into nature. Even a short little walk to the ocean or a short walk into the garden is very effective.

Number two: It needs to be behavior people want to do. If you don't want to do that behavior, maybe you can manipulate yourself into it a few times but it won't become a habit.

Number three: It needs to be a behavior you can do. So I talked about walking out and looking at the ocean or looking at tadpoles. Well, I live in a place I can do that.

If someone can't do that, they've got to pick something else, like hanging out with their dog.

CNN: You say the new behavior has to fit into your routine to become a habit. I want to start drinking more water, so how should I do that?

Fogg: That's one of the keys in my work. It's not just about picking the habit, you have to design it into your routine. And that means, what will that action come after naturally? Starting the coffee maker happens in the kitchen, it happens in the morning, and it happens once a day.

After I start the coffee maker, after I feed the dog, then I will drink a glass of water. if you can design it into your routine, if you know what this habit comes after, then your chances of succeeding go way up.

I call that an anchor. You want the anchor and the new habit to happen in the same location. If the new habit can be associated with the kitchen, then find a kitchen anchor for it. What doesn't work is like, "Oh, I start the coffee maker then I have to go out to the garage to do the new habit." That does not work. Location matters.

Next is frequency. If you want the habit to happen once a day, then you want an anchor routine that happens once a day. Like, in my life I want to do push-ups throughout the day. So I attached that behavior to when I have to pee. So after I go to the bathroom, I do two push-ups because then I get to do push-ups throughout the day.

The next thing that matters is the theme. Now this matters the least the first two matter more but if I see feeding the dog as a nurturing ritual, a good habit to follow would be a way that I nurture myself.

You're looking for same location, same frequency, and if you can, the same theme. And if you get those lined up, then the habit can just click into place.

CNN: Why doesn't your approach include such typical recommendations as repeating the behavior for 66 days so it becomes automatic?

Fogg: There are a bunch of things that aren't required to create habits that people think they must do like, "Oh, you have to write, set a goal." You don't have to set a goal. That's not true.

The whole thing about repetition is misguided. It's the emotion that wires the habit in if you repeat it and you hate it, it does not wire in as a habit. It will never become a habit.

Or people say only work on one habit at a time. No, that's not true at all. You have to have an accountability partner is another recommendation. You don't have to.

There are all these myths out there around habits and change. My work is saying, "No, people. Here's how to do it quickly and easily, and all those other old things are either wrong or optional."

CNN: How did you come to choose these criteria for habit building?

Fogg: In 2007, I discovered what I called the behavior model all human behavior comes down to only three things: Is there motivation to do that behavior? Is there an ability to do the behavior? Is there a prompt for that behavior?

A prompt is something that reminds you, and you use an existing routine to prompt you. Feeding the dog is going to be my prompt. It's not going to be a Post-It note; it's not going to be an alarm; it's not going to be just trying to remember.

You're hacking the prompt by using an existing routine to remind yourself.

When you see how the pieces work, it's like, "Oh my gosh, is it really that simple?" And the answer is yes.

CNN: You've launched a tool that people can use on their smartphones to help them form healthy habits. How does it work?

Fogg: The tool provides "recipes" for successful tiny habits. It can be found at recipemaker.tinyhabits.com. It just launched and is still being tweaked but It's free, open to all. It's designed for mobile phones so people can use it anywhere.

Along the top are various categories you might want to choose from, such as nutrition, fitness, brain health, productivity. Those aren't random, those are informed by my research at Stanford that finds these are the things that people want most. There is a lot of data and research behind it, but we keep the tool itself really simple.

Under each category, you can swipe through the top cards to look at the new habits you might choose. I'm only including habits that I think are effective. And once you settle on one that you like, you go to the cards below and say, "When am I going to do this? When is it going to fit into my routine?'

You can choose the card "think of something I'm grateful for" and pair that with the card representing an existing habit like "put my head on my pillow." And that's your recipe for a new habit you're going to practice. You're not going to be perfect, but you're going to practice and see if it works for you.

The tool can be used without signing up for emails, but if you want to hear more from me about that habit, you can enter your email.

The ultimate goal is anybody in the world can benefit from this without installing anything, without giving up your email. It's a tool to help me with my life's mission to help people to be happier and healthier.

Link:
3 ways to turn that failing New Year's resolution into a habit - 4029tv

Human Behavior

Extraversion is more than a trait, it’s an adaptive tool – MSUToday

Researchers from Michigan State University havediscoveredtwo insights related toextraversionandpersonalitybeliefsthatcaninfluencebehavior andwell-being.

Jason Huang, an associate professorin theMSUSchool of Human Resources and Labor Relations in the College of Social Science,andformer doctoral student DongyuanWuhave found a nuanced way that people adapttheir behavior during interactions withothersthat can alsoaffecttheir satisfaction witha social experience.

Theresearchwas published onlineDec. 2 in the Journal of Individual Differences.

We make observations of people and their personalities, Huang said. If someone isgenerallyquitetalkative and energeticthen we would call them anextravert, but thisgeneral tendency does notaccurately capture how people respond to different social interactions with different cues.

During a three-week observation period,Huang and Wu surveyedmore than80 college students daily andfound that being anextravertis not only a personality trait,but also an adaptive behavior.Extravertsarecharacterizedas sociable andgregariousbut even introverts,characterizedasbeing shy or quiet, can deployextraversionas a contingencyin certainsocialsituations.

Attendinga conference for work wherean introvertneedsto meet and interact with alargegroupof new peoplemight trigger extraverted behavior. People arealsomore likely toshowextravertedbehavior when theyareinteracting with friendly people.

We call thisadaptivetendencyother-contingent extraversion, Huang said. Thisdescribesthemoment-to-moment change in behavior when people generallyswitchto extraversionin orderto adapttoacordialsituation.

Previous studies have shown a link between extraversion and increased satisfaction. So, Huang andWusought to understandifcontingent extraversion was also linked to increased happiness.Sincebehavior also influences what humans thinkand believe,theyalsoexaminedwhether the relationship betweencontingent extraversion and satisfaction depended on whether peoplebelievedtheirpersonality traitswerefixed or flexible.

If they thinkpersonalitytraitsareflexible, they(the students surveyed)were more likely to be satisfiedwith their college experiencewhen they acted extravertedin response tofriendly others, Huang said. Butfor those who think personality traits are fixedbutstillactedin that waythenthere was a conflict betweentheir behaviorandbeliefs,andthey reported being less satisfiedwith theircollege experience.

Howcan this information help peoplelive their beliefsand have greater life satisfaction?

People need to interact withothersbased on how they see themselves and how they want to behave, Huang said. Behave in a way that you feel you should behave. Be true to yourself,and youare likely tobe more satisfied in your environment.

Read the original:
Extraversion is more than a trait, it's an adaptive tool - MSUToday

Human Behavior

Researchers Examine Three Intrinsic Motivation Types To Stimulate Intrinsic Objectives Of Reinforcement Learning (RL) Agents – MarkTechPost

Reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled tools to make decisions and solve complex problems in unknown environments directly from high-dimensional image inputs, such as locomotion, robotic manipulation, and game playing. However, these successes are built upon in-depth supervision in manually crafted reward functions. The agents are rewarded and punished based on their performance and eventually learn a reward function maximizing rewards and minimizing punishment. But designing informative reward functions is costly, time-consuming, and likely to have an error. Also, these difficulties can increase with the complexity of the concerned task.

Unlike RL agents, natural agents learn through intrinsic objectives without externally provided assignments. For example, children are not assigned to crawl, but they naturally crawl and play around to explore their surroundings. This has motivated researchers to identify and provide RL agents with mathematical objectives that do not depend on a specific task and can be applied to any unknown environment.

Recently, researchers at the Vector Institute, University of Toronto, and Google Brain have examined three intrinsic motivation types to stimulate RL agents intrinsic objectives. It is observed that all three intrinsic goals correlate more strongly with a human behavior similarity metric than with any task reward.

The researchers have tested the following three common types of intrinsic motivation while evaluating agents without rewards:

Input entropy encourages encountering rare sensory inputs (measured by a learned density model) The agents are rewarded for learning the rule of their environment by Information gain. The agents are rewarded for maximizing their influence over their sensory inputs or environment by empowerment.

The team collected a diverse dataset of different environments and behaviors and retrospectively computing agent objectives for evaluation. They analyzed the correlations between intrinsic objectives and supervised objectives (such as task reward and human similarity) and established a relationship between different intrinsic objectives without training a new agent for each objective.

The researchers used 100 million frames from the three Atari game environments to train seven RL agents with and without a task reward. As the 3D game Minecraft environment simulation is slower than Atari, they applied 12 million frames per agent. Human behavior was taken as the ground truth for the human similarity objective, and the team estimated the similarity between agents and humans actions in the shared environment.

All examined intrinsic objectives across all environments correlate more strongly with human similarity than the task rewards do. It recommends inherent goals over task rewards when designing general agents that behave like humans. It is also noticed that the input entropy and information gain are similar objectives while empowerment may offer complementary benefits, and therefore they recommend future work on combining intrinsic goals.

The human dataset is currently comparatively small to identify human similarity values, and it is unclear what instructions the human players received. Using additional human data and control over players instructions can help this areas work. The team stated that to assign the agent observations to buckets, they have downscaled them. This is simple but does not account for the semantic similarity between images. Therefore they suggest learning the representations using deep neural networks for future work.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.11538.pdf

Codes: https://danijar.com/project/agenteval/

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Researchers Examine Three Intrinsic Motivation Types To Stimulate Intrinsic Objectives Of Reinforcement Learning (RL) Agents - MarkTechPost

Human Behavior

Starting Line On Hiatus As We Consider Future – iowastartingline.com

As youve probably noticed, Iowa Starting Line has been rather quiet lately. Ive decided to stop publishing for the time being as I consider significant changes to our operation or whether to continue on at all.

In reality, this hiatus began at the start of December, its just taken me this long to finally write the official post about it. I had intended to only take a personal break for a couple of days, but ended up crashing so hard that Ive barely been able to string together a few sentences for weeks. Working 60 to 80-hour weeks for the past six years straight with practically no breaks probably contributed to that.

This decision is for two reasons, both related to the 2020 election.

The first is financial. While weve had considerable success in building up a news outlet from scratch and expanding it significantly in the past two years, our funding situation is always fluid and comes from different sources each year.

With Democrats getting blown out in Iowa yet again this November, Im concerned about how much left-leaning money will be coming into Iowa in the immediate future. Starting Line was able to expand how it did in part thanks to interest in the Iowa Caucus race and competitive 2020 general election campaigns, along with the advertising revenue that came with those.

If the general mood is that people believe Iowa to be a red-leaning, non-competitive state, getting investments here for the broader progressive infrastructure gets more difficult. I actually think that our race for governor will be very close, but it will probably be early to mid-2022 when some polls come out showing that, and national folks will then engage here in a big way again. My concern for Starting Line is getting through 2021.

As such, if we do continue publishing at Starting Line, the staff will unfortunately be reduced to just myself going forward, though I hope to add back on as things improve. Still, its a very frustrating decision to make, as I very much wanted to keep longterm, permanent positions intact after expanding.

The second reason is with the disappointment in how those November elections turned out not so much that Republicans swept nearly every contested race, but how and why it happened.

Theres three major issues that made this election so particularly demoralizing.

Since 2010, Iowa has experienced four Republican wave years (2010, 2014, 2016 and 2020), one good Democratic year (2018) and one relatively neutral year (2012). This has become an exhausting phenomenon to live through, where it seems that everything gets decided by the national mood or larger factors far outside the control of any person or campaign or issue. So you end up with good public servants that just get wiped out regardless (thats not to say there havent been many bad campaigns run in Iowa there most certainly have its just that the good ones lose too). And then you have total idiots unfit for office elevated by blind party voting.

These wave years have essentially made everything that happens on the ground seem that much less important, including good journalism, which is my next point.

Iowa handled the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 worse than nearly any other government in the entire world, resulting in thousands of unnecessary deaths. And at every step along the way, Iowas press corp held Gov. Kim Reynolds and other leaders feet to the fire, asking tough questions and exposing ways in which the state was covering up the extent of the outbreak and failing to contain it.

And it feels like none of it mattered. Iowans continued to engage in reckless behavior that resulted in killing their neighbors or themselves. And Reynolds and her fellow Republicans were rewarded for their ineptitude we found and heard stories of many first-time voters who came out to support the GOP ticket as a backlash to how they felt COVID changed their lives (despite living in a state with some of the weakest restrictions).

I do want to be clear: I dont think the worth of a Brianne Pfannenstiel or Dave Price or Tony Leys or Kate Payne article rests on whether it costs Republicans votes. Nor does a good piece of journalisms impact need to have anything to do with an election good policy decisions or consequences from reporting can happen regardless of whos in power.

But good lord, youd think Iowas disastrous experience with COVID (or, you know, everything else) would have at least given Iowa voters second thoughts about delivering a massive political win to the party in charge of this mess. It would have been one thing if Joni Ernst and Iowa House Republicans had just barely hung on, where you could attribute the narrow victory to other issues. But Ernsts comfortable victory and Republicans upsets to improve their House majority were striking given the environment they ran in.

There are many, many reasons as to why journalisms impact was limited, all of which we wont even begin to get into here, but the bottom line is this: good journalism should hold the powerful accountable, but it should do so in reality, not just theory. And if voters arent listening to it, then what are we doing here?

When Reynolds held her first press conference after the election, I sat down ready to type up something on it. But as I looked around on Twitter, I noticed how everyone was reporting on her latest COVID briefing in the exact same manner they had before the election. There were the same righteous outrage takes, the same in-depth informative posts on the numbers. We just had an election where voters said resoundingly we dont care to Iowas COVID disaster, and no one was trying to present that information in a different way.

In fairness, there hadnt been much time for reflection yet, but as the weeks drew on, I mostly saw a similar lack of introspection on the political front.

The way Democratic campaigns are run in this state is not working. The longterm infrastructure here is lacking. And many of the suggestions of how to do things differently are the same things Ive heard after 2010, 2014, 2016

So many of the post-2020 takes boiled down to this simply proves what Ive said all along. Others are in denial that anything needs to change (in part because it would mean theyd need to) and are dismissing the election results as solely due to it being a bad year.

I am deeply skeptical that the Democratic campaigns run in 2022 (or the broader party/progressive infrastructure) will look much different from 2020.

So, what to do? I see a couple of different options of what Starting Line and I could do in the future and would be happy to hear your feedback on it. It may be another month or two until we get started back up, as if we do keep going, I would actually like to put deep thought into how we can do things better.

Heres some possibilities:

In some ways, I just want to be done with politics. Ive been involved here in Iowa for nearly 18 years, and I feel like Ive more than done my part. Starting Line has been exhausting, sometimes unrewarding work, and the amount of toxicity you have to put up with in Iowa politics increases every year. It might be nice to have a job with normal hours and reasonable pay for once.

Meanwhile, everything in the U.S. feels like its on a continual downward slide that nothing is going to reverse. And if were really in a lol nothing mattes world, then whats the point of spending all this energy in a broken political system when facts simply dont matter?

And the most depressing aspect is this: if youve followed my work over the years, you know I like to highlight younger political leaders. Regardless of their backgrounds or ideological stances, its good to have fresh eyes and new ways of thinking in politics. But lately, I see some of Iowas up-and-coming leaders making the exact same mistakes their older predecessors did.

Of course, we have built up something important and rather influential here at Starting Line. Making a complete break with it might be good for the mental health, but theres a lot of potential still here. And I unfortunately think that operations like Starting Line could be a big part of the solution to todays news/disinformation problem in politics.

We have quite the property here with Starting Line. I try (and often fail) to explain this to Iowa donors, but Starting Lines influence and national reach with our social media feeds and behind-the-scenes relationships is immense. Nearly every national political reporter follows us. Any time I see an interesting tweet from a national policy leader, elected official, well-known activist or opinion writer, I find that theyre already following us.

For any national news outlet or organization who wanted to make a big jump into Iowa political reporting, purchasing the Starting Line outlet or doing a partnership with us could make a lot of sense.

Like it or not, Iowa always finds its way into the middle of national politics. The Republican presidential primary will likely still start here regardless of what happens with Democrats caucus. The campaigns for the Senate seat and governorship here in 2022 will be important. Starting Line could retain its left-leaning bent or just go straight analytical as it covers all of this for a larger organization.

While Im extremely frustrated by 2020 and the lack of change afterwards in everything, Im also hesitant to just throw out our current model. Ive always tried to keep our focus narrow with Starting Line so that we could be really good at one thing this wasnt ever supposed to revolutionize journalism as we know it or single-handedly change Iowa politics. And we have really excelled at what we do go back and check our accomplishments post in case you missed it.

But if were only playing a role in a larger broken political system, how effective is it? A big part of our success is in influencing the broader Iowa politics conversation and how the media covers certain topics, but if voters arent paying attention to those outlets, what can we accomplish?

Still, I also wonder if this could end up as a situation of you dont know what youve got til its gone if we move away from this model. This past year, Republicans did a far better job at pushing their oppo research on Democrats out to friendly outlets like the Free Beacon, Breitbart, Daily Caller, Fox News and even the Epoch Times. They produced countless stories damaging to Iowa candidates, but it had a limited effect coming from national outlets.

If that continues unchecked, however, we could end up in a situation where right-wing outlets funded by billionaires produce the majority of content on key Iowa races, and that could have a big impact over time.

I also know how to fund this kind of operation, which is extremely cost-efficient for what it produces and accomplishes. If Im feeling more optimistic of where Iowa politics is going in the future, sticking with what were good at (while still constantly working on what we can improve, obviously), might be the smarter thing to do.

One other quick note: if were to continue this, I hope people actually take better advantage of what were producing. Weve written countless stories that you would think campaigns would want to get in front of an audience with digital ads. There are many legislative candidates who weve written up profiles of that would seem to benefit from voters reading them, but instead their Facebook ads are all just replaying their TV ads. I truly dont understand what some Democrats digital teams are thinking if a problem is that there isnt enough news about your candidate, then maybe you should boost the news that is there into peoples social media feeds.

The biggest problem we have right now in American democracy is the spread of misinformation and voters getting trapped in media echo chambers where not only are their views reinforced, they also plain dont hear about a lot of actual news that happens. How many Donald Trump voters will literally never hear of his impeachable phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State from yesterday?

Many in politics do not fully understand the role of what you could call outsider voters, people who are deeply distrustful of the system, dont listen to mainstream news, and who respond strongly to any kind of anti-establishment or anti-expert messaging. Their news comes up in YouTube ads, online forums, and in their social media feed. Those are the kind of people who voted for the first time for Trump and who political ads and factual news articles simply arent getting to.

And its getting easier for people to tune out mainstream news as that news gets harder to access. Newspapers increasingly strict paywalls are dramatically reducing their influence in the world. If the Register has a big investigative report thats a subscriber exclusive that only several tens of thousands of people will read at best, whats its real impact? We know that Reynolds and other Republicans can simply ignore these things when their political base doesnt even know about it or doesnt believe it.

Starting Line does have a very large and rather influential audience, but its largely made up of people already engaged in politics. The most impactful mission we could focus on might be figuring out how to present factual information that is more engaging and trusted by people who are outside the normal political process.

ACRONYM attempted this by establishing local online progressive news outlets and pushing their and others content out through social media ads, which had some fascinating successes and setbacks.

I also have a theory that might be fun to test out: if you make regular news items sound mysterious, they might resonate more with those who distrust the system. I mean, there are legit, real-life, true conspiracies being perpetrated on Iowans all the damn time powerful, wealthy interests working with corrupt or complicit politicians to enrich themselves and screw over working-class people. And yet, the way the news and political campaigns present these facts somehow get dismissed by voters who at the same time believe wild Q-Anon theories about every elected official being involved in a child sex trafficking ring.

Anyway, this approach would require a significant retooling of how we write and who our audience is, which would abandon some of the advantages weve built up over six years. And this idea also veers very close to my concern of trying to do too much can one news outlet with a small or one-person staff fundamentally change how a significant number of Iowans get their news? Im not so sure, but it might be worth it to try.

5. Investigative News

Perhaps what I would personally enjoy most is doing a one-man investigative site, spending days and weeks at a time digging into stories no one else is and uncovering what I can discover. Dont worry about website traffic, just break stories that people cant ignore. Theres many little unsolved threads from Iowas COVID pandemic that we didnt have enough time to chase down even with a full staff.

But, as discussed above, how much impact would it have if so many people can just ignore it or would never see it through our site or even mainstream news outlets? Im also less sure how to fund this approach.

6. YOLO It

I am not happy with how Democratic campaigns are run in this state. I am not happy with how nothing ever changes cycle to cycle.

Throughout this past year, I expressed my concerns and suggestions to friends who work on campaigns privately. Sometimes it has an effect, sometimes it doesnt. My own personal preference is to not put people on public blast on decisions that have already been made, where your criticism isnt going to change anything I personally see that as performative, but to each their own. People also simply cannot handle public constructive criticism in any manner, and I cannot single-handedly change human behavior on that front.

However, the number of bad strategies that get repeated year in and year out is just ridiculous, and I may have finally hit my breaking point. There are many individual bad actors in Iowa politics that need to get called out and see their influence reduced or removed, and I certainly know who those people are.

The problem is, would it actually change anything? The power of self-interest in literally everything is strong, and doing a one-man crusade against it, as good as it may feel to do, could go nowhere. And I certainly dont see other folks making sacrifices, so why should I?

As always, Ill end with a very big thank you to our readers and supporters over the year. Continuing to write and operate just for our many loyal fans is very nearly worth it alone. But we do have some decisions to make.

While we likely wont get back to regular publishing for a month or two (if we do at all), Ill probably write stories every now and then or post some guest pieces. With this overly-long piece out of the way, it may be easier to write up some of the many, many ideas Ive had since the election that I simply havent had the energy to do.

by Pat RynardPosted 1/4/21

Iowa Starting Line is an independently owned progressive news outlet devoted to providing unique, insightful coverage on Iowa news and politics. We need reader support to continue operating please donate here. Follow us onTwitterandFacebookfor more coverage.

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Starting Line On Hiatus As We Consider Future - iowastartingline.com

Physiology

Using computational models for better thermoregulation in the ICU – Advanced Science News

Models that can predict and help us to understand the body's thermal state could help optimize temperature management strategies in a clinical setting.

Image credit: Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Regulation of body temperature or thermoregulation is an important function and is vital for maintaining health. In mammals, various temperature-controlling biological mechanisms are crucial for sustaining thermal equilibrium, i.e., the balance between the rate of heat production and the rate of heat loss, for which countless organisms have evolved characteristically flexible mechanisms and behavioural adaptations.

Deviations from normal core body temperatures are in general harmful, but there are also circumstances in which they can be beneficial. For instance, an elevated body temperature during fever can help fight off pathogens. In a clinical setting, the precise regulation of body temperature in the form of targeted temperature management is an instrumental part of hospital intensive care. Lowering the bodys core temperature to 32-34 C (mild hypothermia) to counteract severe hyperthermia that develops after successful resuscitation from cardiac arrest, for example, has been a part of therapeutic guidelines for almost two decades and has helped save many lives. Mortality rates improve with thermoregulation in these patients. The therapies also provide better neurological outcomes by protecting the brain against lack of oxygen and reduced perfusion.

While potentially lifesaving, inducing changes in body temperature in a clinical environment is difficult and associated with many secondary changes in physiology that can be detrimental, such as a profound lowering of the heart rate, increased urine output, and changes in electrolyte concentrations. With temperature management also come numerous additional therapeutic and diagnostic procedures (e.g., emergency coronary catheterization, CT scans, insertion of vascular catheters), all of which are time sensitive.

Additional challenges arise from variability in patient response as well as the fact that a variety of different methods to achieve temperature reduction exist, such as intravenous infusion of cold fluids, cooling blankets, endovascular cooling catheters, among others. Each of these has its benefits as well as drawbacks but predicting how a patient will respond and what the best course of action is can be difficult to predict. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to find new and even better temperature management techniques.

In recent years, computational bioheat models have been proposed to better understand the underlying bio-thermal processes and to predict changes in a patients thermal state. In these models, the human body is typically represented by two interacting systems of thermoregulation: the controlling active system, which represents the human bodys regulatory responses (e.g., vasoconstriction, vasodilation, shivering, sweating, and metabolic heat production) and the controlled passive system (e.g., thermal interactions between the body and the environment).

Many models available today are based on a composite model of the human body that consists of several cylinders representing the head, the corpus, and the upper and lower extremities. Heat exchange occurs between different body segments via blood flow and also within the segments by means of different heat transfer processes between the core, skin and blood.

Biothermal models of the human body are becoming increasingly comprehensive and an ambitious goal would be to combine a real-time and easy-to-use measuring device with a computational thermal model that is tailored to individual patients and can be used to predict and precisely regulate patients temperature changes during a hospital stay. The hope is that they will also aid in the design of special-purpose devices to control the delivery of thermal energy to targeted regions and to improve the treatment of diseases such as the delivery of therapeutics in cancer patients. This method is also known under the name temperature-controlled drug release.

One potential and promising example is the release of molecules from mesoporous silica nanoparticles that can be intravenously administered and react to an external heat stimulus (e.g., magnetic field). Especially in combination with advances in smart bio-measurement technologies, such interdisciplinary approaches have great potential for optimizing temperature management strategies in a variety of clinical settings. This is another example of how interdisciplinary endeavors at the interface of physiology, clinical research, biometrics, and biophysical modelling can lead to novel and innovative solutions.

Written by:

Kristijan Skok, General Hospital Graz II, Location West, Institute of Pathology, Gstinger Strae 22, 8020 Graz, Austria and University of Maribor, Faculty of Medicine, Taborska ulica 8, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia

Maja Duh, University of Maribor, Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Koroka cesta 160, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia

Andra Stoer, University of Maribor, Faculty of Medicine, Taborska ulica 8, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia

Andrej Markota, University of Maribor, Faculty of Medicine, Taborska ulica 8, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia and University Medical Centre Maribor, Medical Intensive Care Unit, Ljubljanska 5, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia

Marko Gosak, University of Maribor, Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Koroka cesta 160, 2000, Maribor, Slovenia and University of Maribor, Faculty of Medicine, Taborska ulica 8, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia

Reference: Kristijan Skok et al., A Journey from Physiology to Computational Models and the Intensive Care Unit, WIREs Systems Biology and Medicine (2020). DOI: 10.1002/wsbm.1513

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Using computational models for better thermoregulation in the ICU - Advanced Science News

Physiology

Are sports hurting the climate? (And other awkward questions) – Stuff.co.nz

Professor Jim Cotter stops to think carefully about what hes going to say.

He wants it to come across the right way. Plus, its tricky asking tough questions about sport, the sacred cow of New Zealand society.

But its time: I don't really don't want to put blame anywhere because in many ways they're trying to do the right thing, says the Otago University environmental exercise physiologist.

Yet when Cotter was asked to deliver a keynote address at the Sports and Exercise Science Conference last month, he found there was only one thing he wanted to talk about: climate change.

Specifically, are high performance sports hurting the very conditions we rely on for a healthy life? And for those sitting on the couch watching from home, are our sedentary lifestyles leaving us more vulnerable as the planet warms up?

READ MORE:* New Transport Minister promises to 'get moving quickly' to cut emissions* Round the Bays: How not to go backwards in your training this festive period* New Zealanders are fat and in denial about it, says survey

It seems counterintuitive to have a dig at sports. After all, when people think of sports, they often think of being outside in the fresh air, wild and free, running around at a park: what could be better for the environment?

But Cotter says, whoa, hold on a second theres a lot more to it than that.

In elite sport, there are things which have become accepted norms that he thinks need seriously reconsidering: altitude training and overseas competitions, for instance.

Even in kids sports: do parents really need to be dropping their kids off for lengthy warm-ups?

And, as a society, he says, its time to think about how the way we live is diminishing our ability to cope with climate change.

In the process of us making a built, protected environment were making the real environment more extreme, and we're also making ourselves less resilient, says Cotter.

We're going towards a train wreck, and we know it's happening.

Supplied

A Cotter family adventure at Mt Titiroa, with Professor Jim Cotter's children Lucy, Hamish, and Grace. Cotter grew up on the West Coast, where he developed a love for the outdoors.

You could say that Cotter's connection to the environment is coursing in his veins. He grew up in Rotomanu, in the wilds of the West Coast; a childhood filled with grazed knees from scrambling through the bush and wet hair from floating down the river on tractor tyre inner tubes.

We were free to explore, which was acutely dangerous, probably, but it gives you a capability, mentally as much as anything. You just relish in that freedom, and your parents literally didnt know where you were as long as you were home for dinner.

Cotter studied for a science degree at Otago, majoring in physiology and physical education, before completing a doctorate in environmental physiology at the University of Wollongong. He landed a job at the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation where he investigated how people cope with adverse environmental conditions, a field of research he has kept up for the past two decades.

Cotter has been back at Otago University for almost 20 years, during which time hes also sustained his love of the outdoors and competing himself. He was an original at the first Kepler Challenge, a 60 km mountain race over the Great Walk in Fiordland, and fondly remembers early Coast to Coast races, just for the adventure of it.

Other favourite outdoor memories include taking on traverses of the Southern Alps, especially being a useful part of a small, well-functioning group negotiating through some pretty amazing places.

Supplied

Cotter's daughter, Grace, on a family adventure at Ball Pass, Aoraki. For the past few decades he has studied how humans cope in extreme environments.

For someone who has enjoyed a life of fitness, then, you can sense a tinge of sadness from Cotter about the decline in the countrys fitness levels. He cites figures from the Dunedin longitudinal multidisciplinary study that show how much fitness has slipped. Fathers are about 20 per cent fitter than their sons, and mothers are about 35 per cent fitter than their daughters that's one generation.

As well as the health impacts of declining fitness and increasing weight (at the moment, theres one person in the world dying every eight seconds from Covid-19 theres one person every six seconds dying from Type Two diabetes alone), he worries about how we are becoming less conditioned to cope with climate change.

There are physical benefits of fitness your body is more efficient at coping with heat, for instance but theres a mental benefit too.

Fitter people have more mental resilience, he says. In one study of this, endurance athletes, team sport players and sedentary people held their arms in ice-cold water to see how long they could last.

After two minutes, 90 per cent of the endurance athletes still had their arms in the water, whereas only half of the other two groups did. That either tells you endurance athletes are stupid or theyre stubborn, he laughs, or theyre mentally resilient. Cotter believes its the third option.

James Allan/Getty Images

Jim Cotter says fitness helps build mental resilience.

And resilience is going to come in handy as climate change unfolds with fitness, youve got the capacity to tolerate more.

How do we build resilience? Choosing to bike to work or not turning the air conditioner on. Its not only our physical capabilities its what were prepared to put up with.

Meanwhile, the environment weve built for ourselves is not helping us in our ability to react and adapt.

Our constructed environment insidiously removes transiently useful stresses. What does he mean by this? By making things too easy for our bodies, they dont learn how to deal with the stresses of heat, for instance.

We don't have thermal stress because if it gets hot, we turn the air conditioner on, if it gets cold, we put a heater on. We don't expend physiological costs to move against gravity because we make the remote controls open our doors.

We make it easy for us and in the process, it decays what we are.

Scott Heavey/Getty Images

Sports teams travel the world for competitions but is all that flying the right thing to do?

In his speech to the conference, his early slides made their way through those impacts of fitness and mental resilience topics where, in the most part, there are choices to be made for individuals.

Then it came to the touchier topic: how high performance sport is coping with, and impacting, climate change.

Again, as he speaks, he emphasises he doesnt want to put the boot in, like some thuggish oaf on the rugby field. His preference is to start a conversation, not blow the whistle.

After all, there is plenty at stake for sports themselves. Already, scientists are warning about the impact of climate change on cricket, for instance not just because of increasing temperatures, or loss of topsoil, but raising the question whether increased pressure on resources will lead to conflict in some regions. You cant play a test match in a warzone.

Ryan Pierse/Getty Images

Scientists are already warning about the impact of climate change on the future of sports, including cricket.

Sports organisations, Cotter says, talk about sustainability, but Im asking them to think about whether theyre prioritising this stuff enough.

Were living in the age of decadence. And sport, I think, is part of that decadence.

International competition, for instance, has teams flying around the world, stomping large carbon bootprints around the planet. Again, its not about blame academics are just as bad. We travel the world, and we dont necessarily need to.

But hes calling on sports to reconsider their priorities. Covid taught sports that it was possible to have virtual races, for instance, athletes competing in their home countries and comparing results. Its not the same as racing side-by-side, no, but maybe every second championship could be virtual and then youve immediately halved your footprint.

And when it comes to flying teams around the world, maybe they need to reconsider how big a squad they take, including support staff. Saving just one flight would make a significant reduction in the cost to the environment.

But Cotter is not interested in lecturing sports and their administrators. As a member of the sports science community, he says, he and his colleagues are here to help.

If he has a plea, its that sports listen to the science.

Doug Pensinger/Getty Images

Many endurance athletes head to high altitude areas to try to help their bodies boost their oxygen-carrying capacity but is that a good idea?

Take altitude training, for instance. For decades, athletes in endurance sports have put great stock on going to high altitudes for training camps to gain the benefits of boosting the oxygen-carrying capacity of their blood.

And yet, says Cotter, studies have established that many athletes dont get any benefit from being at altitude its a gene response issue and there are tests that can be done at sea level to see who will or wont gain from being in the mountains.

Weve known this for 20 years, and we still dont even do the basic testing before we send a whole team off to the other side of the world. Its destructive in two respects: ones on the planet, and ones on the individuals adaptability.

If teams want the benefit of being in camp, why not send them to Whngarei instead of Europe or Colorado?

Besides, he says, in a paper published this year scientists showed it was possible to get the same blood-boosting effect without having to go to altitude: by micro-dosing with carbon monoxide.

Before people react to carbon monoxide, Cotter points out, if we live in a city, we have carbon monoxide in our blood.

So, whats he saying, instead of heading for the hills, go sit in traffic?

Cotter laughs. You might say, micro-dosing with carbon monoxide is not ethical. But is this ethical, flying to the other side of the world? Especially when many athletes will get no physiological benefit.

Look, I dont know the answers to these things. But he thinks its important to ask the questions, and think about them.

Otherwise, we just go along with the accepted norms, even when theyre unproven.

This sets Cotter off on another example: warm-ups. Teams and individual athletes build up their warm-up routines which can often take an hour or more.

Supplied

Professor Jim Cotter encourages New Zealanders to get out in the wild outdoors to not only build fitness but to build empathy for the natural environment.

But Cotter says, as far as the body is concerned, this is unnecessary. We've been doing studies on muscle temperature response to exercise and it takes about two minutes to warm a muscle up. We think even for very high intensity using all energy systems at maximum you probably need about six minutes.

Six minutes. Think about that next time you have to be at a ground an hour-and-a-half before kick-off to drop someone off.

Cotter points out this causes fuel pollution and road congestion. As the driver, you dont want to sit there and wait for an hour-and-a-half, so you go away and come back.

Coaches will say, but hang on, players need to get their heads in the game, too thats a part of warm-up. But is that because youve created the expectation that you need to spend an hour warming up? says Cotter.

In the meantime, he says, players unnecessarily burn fuel their muscles will need during the match or race, and kill their enthusiasm.

Joseph Johnson/Stuff

Town planners can create environments that make it easier for people to choose to exercise.

Cotter is conscious of killing peoples enthusiasm. Its why he doesnt want to turn people away from the problems of climate change by bashing their heads over it.

And why he thinks that, as a country, we need to find ways for people to become fitter, and to exercise and compete in a way that has a lower environmental impact.

We have to do something that works with the environment and utilises it, doesnt damage it, and develops empathy for it.

To that end, he says, its not coaches, athletes or scientists who will have the biggest impact.

The most important people are the people who create an environment where people will exercise: so that's city planners.

We can't afford not to prioritise active lifestyles because we simply won't have the health budget to deal with what's coming, and we have climate change we have to engage.

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Are sports hurting the climate? (And other awkward questions) - Stuff.co.nz