The Chalcidoidea bush of life: evolutionary history of a massive radiation of minute wasps.

Chalcidoidea are mostly parasitoid wasps that include as many as 500 000 estimated species. Capturing phylogenetic signal from such a massive radiation can be daunting. Chalcidoidea is an excellent example of a hyperdiverse group that has remained recalcitrant to phylogenetic resolution. We combined 1007 exons obtained with Anchored Hybrid Enrichment with 1048 ultra-conserved elements (UCEs) for 433 taxa including all extant families, >95% of all subfamilies, and 356 genera chosen to represent the vast diversity of the superfamily. Going back and forth between the molecular results and our collective knowledge of morphology and biology, we detected bias in the analyses that was driven by the saturation of nucleotide data. Our final results are based on a concatenated analysis of the least saturated exons and UCE datasets (2054 loci, 284 106 sites). Our analyses support an expected sister relationship with Mymarommatoidea. Seven previously recognized families were not monophyletic, so support for a new classification is discussed. Natural history in some cases would appear to be more informative than morphology, as illustrated by the elucidation of a clade of plant gall associates and a clade of taxa with planidial first-instar larvae. The phylogeny suggests a transition from smaller soft-bodied wasps to larger and more heavily sclerotized wasps, with egg parasitism as potentially ancestral for the entire superfamily. Deep divergences in Chalcidoidea coincide with an increase in insect families in the fossil record, and an early shift to phytophagy corresponds with the beginning of the "Angiosperm Terrestrial Revolution". Our dating analyses suggest a middle Jurassic origin of 174 Ma (167.3-180.5 Ma) and a crown age of 162.2 Ma (153.9-169.8 Ma) for Chalcidoidea. During the Cretaceous, Chalcidoidea may have undergone a rapid radiation in southern Gondwana with subsequent dispersals to the Northern Hemisphere. This scenario is discussed with regard to knowledge about the host taxa of chalcid wasps, their fossil record and Earth's palaeogeographic history

Para-infectious brain injury in COVID-19 persists at follow-up despite attenuated cytokine and autoantibody responses

To understand neurological complications of COVID-19 better both acutely and for recovery, we measured markers of brain injury, inflammatory mediators, and autoantibodies in 203 hospitalised participants; 111 with acute sera (1–11 days post-admission) and 92 convalescent sera (56 with COVID-19-associated neurological diagnoses). Here we show that compared to 60 uninfected controls, tTau, GFAP, NfL, and UCH-L1 are increased with COVID-19 infection at acute timepoints and NfL and GFAP are significantly higher in participants with neurological complications. Inflammatory mediators (IL-6, IL-12p40, HGF, M-CSF, CCL2, and IL-1RA) are associated with both altered consciousness and markers of brain injury. Autoantibodies are more common in COVID-19 than controls and some (including against MYL7, UCH-L1, and GRIN3B) are more frequent with altered consciousness. Additionally, convalescent participants with neurological complications show elevated GFAP and NfL, unrelated to attenuated systemic inflammatory mediators and to autoantibody responses. Overall, neurological complications of COVID-19 are associated with evidence of neuroglial injury in both acute and late disease and these correlate with dysregulated innate and adaptive immune responses acutely

Comparing service-oriented and distributed object architectures

Abstract. Service-Oriented Architectures have been proposed as a replacement for the more established Distributed Object Architectures as a way of developing loosely-coupled distributed systems. While superficially similar, we argue that the two approaches exhibit a number of subtle differences that, taken together, lead to significant differences in terms of their large-scale software engineering properties such as the granularity of service, ease of composition and differentiation – properties that have a significant impact on the design and evolution of enterprise-scale systems. We further argue that some features of distributed objects are actually crucial to the integration tasks targeted by service-oriented architectures.

The cost of natural gas shortages in Ireland

This paper investigates the economic implications of disruptions of one to ninety days to the supply of natural gas in Ireland. We assess the impact of a hypothetical gas supply disruption in both winter and summer in 2008 (with observed market characteristics) and in 2020 (with projected market characteristics). The cost of a natural gas outage includes the cost of natural gas being unavailable for heating and other purposes in the industrial and commercial sectors, lost consumer surplus in the residential sector, the cost of lost electricity in all sectors and lost VAT on the sale of gas and electricity. Ireland generates much of its electricity from natural gas and the loss of this electricity accounts for the majority of the cost of a natural gas outage. Losing gas-fired electricity would cost 0.1–1.0 billion euro per day, depending on the time to the week, the time of year and rationing. Industry should be rationed before households to minimise economic losses, but current emergency protocols do the opposite. If gas-fired electricity is unavailable for three months, the economic loss could be up to 80 billion euro, about half of Gross Domestic Product. Losing gas for heating too would add up to approximately 8 billion euro in economic losses. We also discuss some options to increase Ireland’s security of supply, and find that the cost is a small fraction of the avoided maximum damage

Cultural meaning for women composers: Charlotte (“Minna”) Brandes and the Beautiful Dead in the German Enlightenment

This article explores the cultural meanings of female musical authorship in the late German Enlightenment through a case study of Charlotte ("Minna") Brandes, a composer, keyboardist, and opera singer. With Minna's death in 1788 at the age of twenty-three, her father, the playwright Johann Christian Brandes, and her close friend and teacher Johann Friedrich Hönicke prepared two memorials to her memory, a biography and a collection of her music, the latter titled Musikalische Nachlass von Minna Brandes (Hamburg, 1788). These memorials situated her authorship in the contexts of pedagogy and education, the composition of occasional works for the home, and the solace offered by music amidst bereavement and illness. The principal discourse was of death itself. Minna's memorialization shared with the novels of Goethe a topos of the beautiful female dead in which the female corpse (or its representation) was exhibited as a beautiful artifact. Death turned Minna from composer into a passive, aestheticized object of male authorship. These discursive contexts contained Minna's activities as a composer within a framework of bourgeois femininity. Both Minna's father and her teacher were at pains to stress that she sought neither fame nor fortune from her compositions. However, such representations of Minna were misleading. Her collected works suggest she was working toward a published collection of strophic German songs and toward the composition of operatic music for her own performance. The idealizing tropes of the memorials are also challenged by Johann Christian's later memoirs in which his daughter's turn to composition is situated in what he described as her multiple breaches of deferential daughterly conduct. Minna's reported profligacy during her final illness may have stimulated the posthumous publication of her music, which was possibly a form of fund raising for her multiply bereaved father, a corrective to his emotional and financial loss. The healthy list of 518 subscribers indicates that youthful female death was marketable as a topos occasioning the pleasures of melancholy