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Featured news

06 Dec 2022

10 Frontiers articles that caught the world’s attention in 2022

By Frontiers’ science writers Image: Shutterstock.com As part of Frontiers’ passion to make science available to all, we highlight just a small selection of the most fascinating research published with us each month to help inspire current and future researchers to achieve their research dreams. 2022 was no different, and saw many game-changing discoveries contribute to the world’s breadth of knowledge on topics ranging from the climate crisis to robotics, and exercise to the lives of our ancestors. So to round of the year, here are 10 Frontiers articles from this year that got the world’s top media talking. 1. This illusion, new to science, is strong enough to trick our reflexes Have a look at the image below. Do you perceive that the central black hole is expanding, as if you’re moving into a dark environment, or falling into a hole? If so, you’re not alone: a study published to Frontiers in Human Neuroscience showed that this ‘expanding hole’ illusion, which is new to science, is perceived by approximately 86% of people. The researchers don’t yet know why a minority seem unsusceptible to the ‘expanding hole’ illusion. Nor do they know whether other vertebrate species, or even nonvertebrate animals […]

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05 Dec 2022

Scientists find inorganic food additives might make babies more vulnerable to allergies

By Angharad Brewer Gillham, Frontiers science writer Image/Shutterstock.com Inorganic nanoparticles used to help process food may be crossing the placental barrier and getting into breastmilk, potentially damaging intestinal regulation and compromising babies’ oral tolerance, predisposing them to food allergies. Nanotechnologies have revolutionized food technology with changes to food production, manufacture, and processing that are intended to make our food safer and healthier. Phytosanitary products, processing aids, food additives, and surfaces that touch food in storage can all transfer nanoparticles that might be consumed by humans. In a review published in Frontiers in Allergy today, Mohammad Issa, at the Université Paris-Saclay, and colleagues pointed out that such a significant change to food production could have unforeseen health consequences. The team presented evidence that suggested that nanoparticles not only cross the placenta to reach developing fetuses but leave them at greater risk of potentially life-threatening food allergies. “Due to the immunotoxic and biocidal properties of nanoparticles, exposure may disrupt the host-intestinal microbiota’s beneficial exchanges and may interfere with intestinal barrier and gut-associated immune system development in fetus and neonate,” said Dr Karine Adel-Patient, corresponding author of the study. “This may be linked to the epidemic of immune-related disorders in children, such as […]

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02 Dec 2022

Open access publisher Frontiers strengthens its global public affairs team

Research publisher Frontiers appoints Dr Anke Beck and Ms Nancy (Yinan) Chen as heads of public affairs and advocacy for Europe and China respectively. They have been appointed to lead advocacy initiatives in support of Frontiers’ mission to make all science open.  Europe and China are the unique hubs for research and high-potential innovations. The diverse nature of these research communities requires stronger links between academia and policy makers in line with regional or national smart specialization strategies. It also requires a deep understanding of the different stakeholders and their needs, as well as the willingness to engage and collaborate on all sides. Anke and Nancy’s deep knowledge of the challenges, as well as their combined twenty-two years’ industry experience, makes them perfectly suited to reinforce Frontiers’ community engagement.  Photo credit: Frontiers Over the past ten years, Dr Anke Beck has been at the forefront of open access publishing. As a managing director at Walter de Gruyter, she was responsible for the portfolio growth in both traditional and open access publishing. To maintain a market-leading position in open access book publishing, Anke took the role of chief executive officer of IntechOpen, where she developed new institutional partnerships across academia. In 2018, she […]

Featured news

02 Dec 2022

‘The Maya had, and continue to have, a creative impact on forest composition’ – Dr Anabel Ford

El Pilar, an ancient Maya site in Belize In our Frontier Scientists series, we talk to Dr Anabel Ford, a leading researcher on the ancient Maya, about her career and research interests. Ford recently published a study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution in which she stressed the importance of the traditional milpa land use system for the Maya civilization, not only in the Classical Period, but also today. Dr Anabel Ford is a US archeologist who specializes in the ancient Maya of Central America. In 1983, she led the team that encountered the ancient Maya city of El Pilar in Belize. Ford is a faculty member of the Institute of Social Behavioral and Economic Research at the University of California Santa Barbara and the director of the MesoAmerican Research Center at the same university. She is an expert on the still-flourishing forest gardens of the Maya region, built up over several millennia of traditional land use by the Maya people. Recently she published the study, “Scrutinizing the paleoecological record of the Maya forest” in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. In the paper, she focuses on the traditional milpa-forest garden cycle, where maize, beans, squashes, tomatoes, and many others are […]

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30 Nov 2022

How to write a manuscript: Expert advice on getting published

By: John R. Porter, Helen Kimbell, Aida Finn, Catarina Alves, and Bhagirath Chauhan There’s a saying in science – ‘publish or perish’, meaning your ability to pursue a scientific career is highly dependent on the number and quality of papers you produce. In short, publications are your scientific currency. Writing papers helps your results to be confirmed or challenged by other scientists, allowing your findings to help move your field of interest forward. So how do you write a manuscript? First, prepare your paper. The most important thing to remember is the order in which other scientists will read your paper is not the same as the order in which you should prepare it. A good rule at the start of your career is to focus on writing about what you know before drawing up the introduction and summary. Materials and methods come first because writing about these should come naturally – you know this better than anyone else. Following this will be the results section. This means analyzing and deciding which data you wish to present and then formulating it into tables or graphs. You don’t have to present all the data you’ve collected in your paper. In fact, […]

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30 Nov 2022

Biomarker in urine could be the first to reveal early-stage Alzheimer’s disease

By Conn Hastings, science writer Image: BlurryMe/Shutterstock.com Alzheimer’s disease can remain undetected until it is too late to treat. Large-scale screening programs could help to detect early-stage disease, but current diagnostic methods are too cumbersome and expensive. A new study published to Frontiers is the first to identify formic acid as a sensitive urinary biomarker that can reveal early-stage Alzheimer’s disease, potentially paving the way for inexpensive and convenient disease screening.   Could a simple urine test reveal if someone has early-stage Alzheimer’s disease and could this pave the way for large-scale screening programs? A new study in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience certainly suggests so. The researchers tested a large group of patients with Alzheimer’s disease of different levels of severity and healthy controls with normal cognition to identify differences in urinary biomarkers. They found that urinary formic acid is a sensitive marker of subjective cognitive decline that may indicate the very early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Current methods to diagnose Alzheimer’s are expensive, inconvenient, and unsuitable for routine screening. This means that most patients only receive a diagnosis when it is too late for effective treatment. However, a non-invasive, inexpensive, and convenient urine test for formic acid could be […]

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29 Nov 2022

Philipp University of Marburg forms publishing agreement with Frontiers

Philipps University Marburg has formed an institutional membership agreement for open access publishing with Frontiers. This institutional agreement means that eligible researchers of Philipps University Marburg may benefit from 10 % membership discount. To check your eligibility, for information on how much of the APCs can be covered by the Open Access Publishing Fund or if you require any further details, please visit the libraries Open Access Publishing page or contact openaccess@ub.uni-marburg.de, a prerequisite for eligibility is that the corresponding author of the article is a member of Philipps University Marburg Philipps University of Marburg supports its researchers in making their research more widely available. This agreement will further encourage researchers of Philipps University Marburg to publish open access, increasing the volume of research openly available. While this reduces costs for the researcher, it also benefits the wider research community and the public at large.   For more information on Frontiers’ institutional agreements please visit our institutional memberships page or contact institutions@frontiersin.org to discuss the possibilities for your own organization.  Information for researchers  If you are a researcher of Philipps University Marburg, please select Philipp University Marburg in the payment information section (“Frontiers institutional members”) when submitting your article. Frontiers will verify your […]

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24 Nov 2022

How you help a child go to sleep is related to their behavioral development, finds new study

By Suzanna Burgelman, Frontiers science writer Image: yamasan0708/Shutterstock.com A group of international researchers examined parental methods to help toddlers sleep across 14 cultures and found that these methods are related to the development of a child’s temperament. The researchers suggested focusing on better sleep-related parenting practices to support positive behavioral development across cultures. The importance of good sleep during childhood development has been extensively researched. Bad sleep quality and behaviors are detrimental to neurobehavioral functioning, emotional reactivity and regulation, and can pose a risk for future psychopathology. “Parental sleeping techniques are correlated with children’s sleep quality, and the importance of cultural context in child development has been long recognized,” said corresponding author Ms Christie Pham, of Washington State University. “We wanted to examine whether cross-cultural differences in parental sleep-supporting strategies account for differences in toddler temperament.” In a study published in Frontiers in Psychology, Pham and her colleagues studied the effect of different parental sleep-supporting techniques on child temperament across 14 cultures. They hypothesized that passive ways of helping a child fall asleep (eg, cuddling, singing, and reading), but not active methods (eg, walking, car rides, and playing), would be positively related to a child’s temperament. ► Read original article► Download original […]

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23 Nov 2022

World’s heaviest flying bird may be self-medicating on plants used in traditional medicine

By Mischa Dijkstra, Frontiers science writer Great bustard male displaying on lek. Image credit: Carlos Palacín Researchers show that great bustards in Spain prefer to eat two plant species with compounds active in vitro against protozoa, nematodes, and fungi: corn poppies and purple viper’s bugloss. Males, who spend much time and energy on sexual displays during the mating season, have a stronger preference for these plants than females, and more so during the mating season than at other times of the year. The authors thus consider great bustards as prime candidates for non-human animals that self-medicate, but stress that more research is needed to definitively prove this. If you see a great bustard (Otis tarda) in the wild, you’re unlikely to forget it. Massive, colorful, and impossible to mistake, they are the heaviest birds living today capable of flight, with the greatest size difference between the sexes. They are also ‘lek breeders’, where males gather at chosen sites to put on an audiovisual show for the visiting females, who choose a mate based on his appearance and the quality of his showbirdship. But now, a study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution suggests that great bustards have another claim to […]

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17 Nov 2022

Vast phytoplankton blooms may be lurking beneath Antarctic ice

by Angharad Brewer Gillham, Frontiers science writer Image: Shutterstock.com Researchers using NASA’s Earth observing system find that Antarctic sea ice allows enough light in to let hidden phytoplankton bloom in the Southern Ocean. Until now, we thought the packed sea ice of the Southern Ocean blocked all light from reaching the sea beneath, preventing phytoplankton — tiny algae which are the base of aquatic food webs — from growing there. The less light available, the less the phytoplankton can photosynthesize and therefore the less phytoplankton there will be, heavily restricting life beneath the ice. But research inspired by increasing under-ice blooms of phytoplankton in the Arctic has shown that Antarctic waters also have unexpected denizens, indicating that there is underestimated ecological variability under the ice. Blooms are often spotted as soon as the sea ice begins its seasonal retreat, supported by plenty of light and freshwater with high iron content. Yet a team led by Dr Christopher Horvat of Brown University and the University of Auckland suspected that there would already be potential phytoplankton blooms in waiting. Writing in Frontiers in Marine Science, they described using sampling from independent BGC-Argo floats and climate model output to estimate light availability beneath […]

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16 Nov 2022

Smart ‘Joey’ bots could soon swarm underground to clean and inspect our pipes

By Mischa Dijkstra, Frontiers science writer Joey’s design. Image credit: TL Nguyen, A Blight, A Pickering, A Barber, GH Jackson-Mills, JH Boyle, R Richardson, M Dogar, N Cohen Researchers from the University of Leeds have developed the first mini-robot, called Joey, that can find its own way independently through networks of narrow pipes underground, to inspect any damage or leaks. Joeys are cheap to produce, smart, small, and light, and can move through pipes inclined at a slope or over slippery or muddy sediment at the bottom of the pipes. Future versions of Joey will operate in swarms, with their mobile base on a larger ‘mother’ robot Kanga, which will be equipped with arms and tools for repairs to the pipes. Beneath our streets lies a maze of pipes, conduits for water, sewage, and gas. Regular inspection of these pipes for leaks, or repair, normally requires these to be dug up. The latter is not only onerous and expensive – with an estimated annual cost of £5.5bn in the UK alone – but causes disruption to traffic as well as nuisance to people living nearby, not to mention damage to the environment. Now imagine a robot that can find its […]

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11 Nov 2022

Monica Montgomery – Policies for Peace

Author: Lucy Thompson Monica Montgomery is the Political Director for the non-profit, non-partisan advocacy organization Council for a Livable World. The organization is dedicated to reducing the danger of nuclear weapons and eventually eliminating them through advocating sensible national security policies and helping elect congressional candidates who support them. Today, we discuss Monica’s journey into policymaking, the importance of representation, and the intersection of peace and policy within society.    Photo credit: Monica Montgomery What was your inspiration that led you to your current role?  I first became interested in nuclear arms control, non-proliferation, and disarmament work through my undergraduate studies at University of Notre Dame, where I had a professor who had extensively worked in Washington, DC on disarmament issues. He organized a trip to the Vatican for a conference that was hosted by Pope Francis himself on issues of nuclear disarmament. I attended this conference and I was really inspired by the message of the Pope. I’ve had Catholic schooling all my life, but this was not something that I had really ever engaged in or had ever thought of nuclear arms control within this sphere.  I think that a lot of the younger generation in the US, at […]

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11 Nov 2022

Having good friendships may make for a healthier gut microbiome

By Mischa Dijkstra, Frontiers science writer Grooming rhesus macaques on Cayo Santiago. Image credit: Lauren Brent Researchers show for the first time that monkeys that are more sociable – eg, grooming or being groomed more often, and with more grooming partners – have a healthier gut microbiome. For example, they have more of the beneficial bacteria Faecalibacterium and Prevotella, and fewer of the typically pathogenic bacteria Streptococcus. This is further evidence that in primates, social connectedness translates into good physical and mental health, and vice versa. Social connections are essential for good health and wellbeing in social animals, such as ourselves and other primates. There is also increasing evidence that the gut microbiome – through the so-called ‘gut-brain axis’ – plays a key role in our physical and mental health and that bacteria can be transmitted socially, for example through touch. So how does social connectedness translate into the composition and diversity of the gut microbiome? That’s the topic of a new study in Frontiers in Microbiology on rhesus macaques, Macaca mulatta. Lead author Dr Katerina Johnson, a research associate at the Department of Experimental Psychology and the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Oxford, said: “Here we show […]

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09 Nov 2022

Birkbeck, University of London has joined the Frontiers – JISC national open access deal

We would like to announce that Birkbeck, University of London has joined the national open access deal agreed between Jisc Collections and Frontiers.  This landmark deal provides a simplified and streamlined route to open access publishing for researchers in the UK, who publish 7% of the world’s research.  Eligible authors will benefit from a streamlined invoicing process, relieving authors of the responsibility of payment. Furthermore, Birkbeck, University of London will benefit from a discount on Article Processing Charges (APCs) for articles covered by this agreement.  Birkbeck, University of London supports its researchers in making their research more widely available. This agreement will further encourage Birkbeck, University of London researchers to publish open access, increasing the volume of research openly available. While this reduces costs for the researcher, it also benefits the wider research community and the public at large.    For more information on Frontiers’ institutional agreements please visit our institutional memberships page or contact institutions@frontiersin.org to discuss the possibilities for your own organization.   Information for authors:  To submit your article under this agreement, please select ‘Birkbeck, University of London’ as the payer in the invoice section when submitting your article.  Frontiers will then verify your eligibility with Birkbeck, University of London and, if confirmed, the […]