The remnants of galaxy formation from a panoramic survey of the region around M31

In hierarchical cosmological models, galaxies grow in mass through the continual accretion of smaller ones. The tidal disruption of these systems is expected to result in loosely bound stars surrounding the galaxy, at distances that reach $10 - 100$ times the radius of the central disk. The number, luminosity and morphology of the relics of this process provide significant clues to galaxy formation history, but obtaining a comprehensive survey of these components is difficult because of their intrinsic faintness and vast extent. Here we report a panoramic survey of the Andromeda galaxy (M31). We detect stars and coherent structures that are almost certainly remnants of dwarf galaxies destroyed by the tidal field of M31. An improved census of their surviving counterparts implies that three-quarters of M31's satellites brighter than $M_V < -6$ await discovery. The brightest companion, Triangulum (M33), is surrounded by a stellar structure that provides persuasive evidence for a recent encounter with M31. This panorama of galaxy structure directly confirms the basic tenets of the hierarchical galaxy formation model and reveals the shared history of M31 and M33 in the unceasing build-up of galaxies.Comment: Published in Nature. Supplementary movie available at https://www.astrosci.ca/users/alan/PANDAS/Latest%20news%3A%20movie%20of%20orbit.htm

High school drinking mediates the relationship between parental monitoring and college drinking: A longitudinal analysis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>College drinking is a significant public health problem. Although parental monitoring and supervision reduces the risk for alcohol consumption among younger adolescents, few studies have investigated the impact of earlier parental monitoring on later college drinking. This study examined whether parental monitoring indirectly exerts a protective effect on college drinking by reducing high school alcohol consumption.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A longitudinal cohort of 1,253 male and female students, ages 17 to 19, attending a large, public, mid-Atlantic university was studied at two time points. First, data on high school parental monitoring and alcohol consumption were gathered via questionnaire during the summer prior to college entry. Second, during the first year of college, past-year alcohol consumption was measured via a personal interview. Multiple regression models tested the relationship between parental monitoring and past year alcohol use (i.e., number of drinks per drinking day).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Holding constant demographics, SAT score, and religiosity, parental monitoring had a significant protective effect on both high school and college drinking level. However, the association between parental monitoring and college drinking level became non-significant once high school drinking level was held constant.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>While parental monitoring did not directly influence college alcohol consumption, evidence for mediation was observed, whereby parental monitoring had an indirect influence on college drinking through reductions in high school drinking. Initiatives that promote effective parenting might be an important strategy to curb high-risk drinking among older adolescents. More research is needed to understand the nature and degree of parent-child communication that is necessary to extend the protective influence of parents into the college years.</p

Genome-Wide Analysis of the World's Sheep Breeds Reveals High Levels of Historic Mixture and Strong Recent Selection

Genomic structure in a global collection of domesticated sheep reveals a history of artificial selection for horn loss and traits relating to pigmentation, reproduction, and body size

Coral disease outbreak at the remote Flower Garden Banks, Gulf of Mexico

East and West Flower Garden Bank (FGB) are part of Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary (FGBNMS) in the northwest Gulf of Mexico. This geographically-isolated reef system contains extensive coral communities with the highest coral cover (&gt;50%) in the continental United States due, in part, to their remoteness and depth, and have historically exhibited low incidence of coral disease and bleaching despite ocean warming. Yet in late August 2022, disease-like lesions on seven coral species were reported during routine monitoring surveys on East and West FGB (2.1–2.6% prevalence). A series of rapid response cruises were conducted in September and October 2022 focused on 1) characterizing signs and epidemiological aspects of the disease across FGB and within long-term monitoring sites, 2) treating affected coral colonies with Base 2B plus amoxicillin, and 3) collecting baseline images through photostations and photomosaics. Marginal and/or multi-focal lesions and tissue loss were observed, often associated with substantial fish and invertebrate predation, affecting the dominant coral species Pseudodiploria strigosa (7–8% lesion prevalence), Colpophyllia natans (11–18%), and Orbicella spp. (1%). Characterizing this disease event during its early epidemic phase at East and West FGB provides a critical opportunity to observe how coral disease functions in a relatively healthy coral ecosystem versus on reefs chronically affected by various stressors (e.g., Caribbean reefs adjacent to urban centers). Insights into the etiology, spread, and impacts of the disease can ultimately inform efforts to mitigate its effects on coral communities

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission: Optical Telescope Element Design, Development, and Performance

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a large, infrared space telescope that has recently started its science program which will enable breakthroughs in astrophysics and planetary science. Notably, JWST will provide the very first observations of the earliest luminous objects in the Universe and start a new era of exoplanet atmospheric characterization. This transformative science is enabled by a 6.6 m telescope that is passively cooled with a 5-layer sunshield. The primary mirror is comprised of 18 controllable, low areal density hexagonal segments, that were aligned and phased relative to each other in orbit using innovative image-based wavefront sensing and control algorithms. This revolutionary telescope took more than two decades to develop with a widely distributed team across engineering disciplines. We present an overview of the telescope requirements, architecture, development, superb on-orbit performance, and lessons learned. JWST successfully demonstrates a segmented aperture space telescope and establishes a path to building even larger space telescopes.Comment: accepted by PASP for JWST Overview Special Issue; 34 pages, 25 figure

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Clinically Suspected Myocarditis Temporally Related to COVID-19 Vaccination in Adolescents and Young Adults: Suspected Myocarditis After COVID-19 Vaccination

Background: Understanding the clinical course and short-term outcomes of suspected myocarditis after the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination has important public health implications in the decision to vaccinate youth. Methods: We retrospectively collected data on patients <21 years old presenting before July 4, 2021, with suspected myocarditis within 30 days of COVID-19 vaccination. Lake Louise criteria were used for cardiac MRI findings. Myocarditis cases were classified as confirmed or probable on the basis of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention definitions. Results: We report on 139 adolescents and young adults with 140 episodes of suspected myocarditis (49 confirmed, 91 probable) at 26 centers. Most patients were male (n=126, 90.6%) and White (n=92, 66.2%); 29 (20.9%) were Hispanic; and the median age was 15.8 years (range, 12.1–20.3; interquartile range [IQR], 14.5–17.0). Suspected myocarditis occurred in 136 patients (97.8%) after the mRNA vaccine, with 131 (94.2%) after the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine; 128 (91.4%) occurred after the second dose. Symptoms started at a median of 2 days (range, 0–22; IQR, 1–3) after vaccination. The most common symptom was chest pain (99.3%). Patients were treated with nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (81.3%), intravenous immunoglobulin (21.6%), glucocorticoids (21.6%), colchicine (7.9%), or no anti-inflammatory therapies (8.6%). Twenty-six patients (18.7%) were in the intensive care unit, 2 were treated with inotropic/vasoactive support, and none required extracorporeal membrane oxygenation or died. Median hospital stay was 2 days (range, 0–10; IQR, 2–3). All patients had elevated troponin I (n=111, 8.12 ng/mL; IQR, 3.50–15.90) or T (n=28, 0.61 ng/mL; IQR, 0.25–1.30); 69.8% had abnormal ECGs and arrhythmias (7 with nonsustained ventricular tachycardia); and 18.7% had left ventricular ejection fraction <55% on echocardiogram. Of 97 patients who underwent cardiac MRI at a median 5 days (range, 0–88; IQR, 3–17) from symptom onset, 75 (77.3%) had abnormal findings: 74 (76.3%) had late gadolinium enhancement, 54 (55.7%) had myocardial edema, and 49 (50.5%) met Lake Louise criteria. Among 26 patients with left ventricular ejection fraction <55% on echocardiogram, all with follow-up had normalized function (n=25). Conclusions: Most cases of suspected COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis occurring in persons <21 years have a mild clinical course with rapid resolution of symptoms. Abnormal findings on cardiac MRI were frequent. Future studies should evaluate risk factors, mechanisms, and long-term outcomes

Population- and individual-specific regulatory variation in Sardinia

Genetic studies of complex traits have mainly identified associations with noncoding variants. To further determine the contribution of regulatory variation, we combined whole-genome and transcriptome data for 624 individuals from Sardinia to identify common and rare variants that influence gene expression and splicing. We identified 21,183 expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) and 6,768 splicing quantitative trait loci (sQTLs), including 619 new QTLs. We identified high-frequency QTLs and found evidence of selection near genes involved in malarial resistance and increased multiple sclerosis risk, reflecting the epidemiological history of Sardinia. Using family relationships, we identified 809 segregating expression outliers (median z score of 2.97), averaging 13.3 genes per individual. Outlier genes were enriched for proximal rare variants, providing a new approach to study large-effect regulatory variants and their relevance to traits. Our results provide insight into the effects of regulatory variants and their relationship to population history and individual genetic risk.M.P. is supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement 633964 (ImmunoAgeing). Z.Z. is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) GRFP (DGE- 114747) and by the Stanford Center for Computational, Evolutionary, and Human Genomics (CEHG). Z.Z., J.R.D., and G.T.H. also acknowledge support from the Stanford Genome Training Program (SGTP; NIH/NHGRI T32HG000044). J.R.D. is supported by the Stanford Graduate Fellowship. K.R.K. is supported by Department of Defense, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEQ) Fellowship 32 CFR 168a. S.J.S. is supported by the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre. The SardiNIA project is supported in part by the intramural program of the National Institute on Aging through contract HHSN271201100005C to the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche of Italy. The RNA sequencing was supported by the PB05 InterOmics MIUR Flagship grant; by the FaReBio2011 “Farmaci e Reti Biotecnologiche di Qualità” grant; and by Sardinian Autonomous Region (L.R. no. 7/2009) grant cRP3-154 to F. Cucca, who is also supported by the Italian Foundation for Multiple Sclerosis (FISM 2015/R/09) and by the Fondazione di Sardegna (ex Fondazione Banco di Sardegna, Prot. U1301.2015/AI.1157.BE Prat. 2015-1651). S.B.M. is supported by the US National Institutes of Health through R01HG008150, R01MH101814, U01HG007436, and U01HG009080. All of the authors would like to thank the CRS4 and the SCGPM for the computational infrastructure supporting this project