Fossils from the Oligocene Cycle Reveal Pollination Interactions Between Flowers and Marchalace

Posted on September 23, 2025 by Igor Mitreski

Paleontologists have examined fossilized flowers and bees dating back 24 million years, following the scarcity in Enspel, Germany, and unveiled new species of Linden. These include Tilia Magna Separa and two newly identified bumblebee species, Bombos (Chrono Bombos) Mesegas and Timebombus Palaeocrater. The presence of identical tyria pollen in both the flowers and on the outer surfaces of the bumblebees serves as direct evidence of their interactions, identifying Bombos as a pollinator of Tyria. At least due to the late decline, we remain anchored in the present.

Tilia Magna Separa. Image credit: Christian Geier.

“We analyzed countless fossil flowers and insect pollens in hopes of understanding the evolution of flowers, their visitors, and the pollination process,” stated Dr. Friðgeir Grímsson, a researcher at the University of Vienna.

“These microscopic pollen grains were made visible using UV and blue light, and then extracted individually from flower or insect hair, or aggregated from insects, with the aid of extremely thin needles and minimal invasive techniques.”

The pollen grains underwent careful washing and were analyzed using high-resolution light and electron microscopes.

Many of the flowers studied originated from Linden trees, with numerous bumblebees visiting Linden flowers prior to their fossilization in an ancient volcanic crater lake.

“The newly identified linden flower has been named Tilia Magna Separa,” said Christian Geier, a doctoral student at the University of Vienna.

“Additionally, two new bumblebee species have been identified: Bombos (Chrono Bombos) Mesegas and Bombos (Time Bombos) Pereoctor.”

The fossils were uncovered during the excavation of lake sediments from the former volcanic lake near Enspel in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.

“Tilia Magna Separa marks the first recorded flowers from the European continent, characterized and described as per pollenological standards—the science of pollen,” the researchers noted.

“The fossil bumblebees rank among the oldest representatives of their genus, with only one species from Colorado, USA, predating them.”

“This is the first instance globally where a fossil flower and its pollinator bee have been described arising from the same deposits, with pollen linking them directly,” Geier remarked.

“Such research holds significant potential to enhance our understanding of past pollinator dynamics.”

The Fossil Record offers insights into the evolutionary developments of the past, revealing changes due to climate shifts, species extinction, and evolutionary adaptation.

By analyzing fossilized animal and plant groups, we can infer their behaviors and reactions to environmental changes.

“Our research allowed us to identify specific flower homeostasis among the bumblebees studied,” Geier explained.

“This indicates that they tend to visit only one type of plant during a single flight.”

“These findings are crucial for gaining a deeper understanding of the delicate interactions and resilience within today’s ecosystems.”

The study was published today in the journal New Botanist.

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Christian Gayer et al. 24 million years of pollination interaction between European linden flowers and bumble bees. New Botanist, published online on September 22, 2025. doi: 10.1111/nph.7053

Source: www.sci.news

Roblox Enhances Age Verification to Limit Adult-Child Interactions | Games

Posted on September 4, 2025 by Igor Mitreski

Roblox, the popular gaming platform, is set to restrict communication between adult strangers and children by the end of the year in an effort to eliminate “bad actors.”

With over 110 million users engaged in games like Grow a Garden and Brookhaven RP, the platform has faced scrutiny over child safety as studies have indicated that children can interact with adults during gameplay.

Last month, the platform announced a ban on vigilantes attempting to confront predators. In the previous year, Roblox submitted over 24,000 reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, addressing allegations of child sexual exploitation in the U.S.

On Wednesday, it was announced that by the end of 2025, all users will be required to utilize text and chat communication tools alongside thousands of games and pass age verification. Users who cannot prove they are over 18 must show that they know who they wish to communicate with. Currently, Roblox mandates proof that the user is over 13 years old to enable communication.

“We’re instituting two major changes,” stated Matt Kaufman, the chief safety officer of the $92 billion gaming company. “By the end of the year, we will require all users with access to Roblox communications to undergo an age verification or estimation process.”

“This process will provide better insight into the user’s age, rather than solely relying on self-reported age at registration. This is especially crucial for younger users, making it imperative to use communication features appropriately based on age.”

The platform continues to expand rapidly, recently allowing companies like Netflix, Lionsgate, and Sega to develop games using their intellectual property on Roblox.

In April, The Guardian published a “deeply intrusive” study highlighting how easily children can encounter inappropriate content and unmonitored interactions with adults. One parent reported that adult strangers could contact their child on the platform, soliciting them to share explicit images. Others have expressed concerns regarding exposure to violent and sexual content, leading to distress for their children.

Roblox stated in a blog post, “Our users, creator community, parents, partners, and lawmakers strive for the same goal as us: to ensure young people remain safe while using Roblox. We are committed to continually innovating and enhancing our safety systems, policies, and moderation tools.”

Source: www.theguardian.com

Research: Bottlenose dolphins communicate through “smiles” during playful interactions

Posted on October 4, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Play is a widespread behavior in distant species, and its social form relies on complex communication. Playful communication has been largely ignored in marine mammals. In a new study, scientists from the University of Pisa focused on playful visual communication. bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus).

“We revealed that bottlenose dolphins have a unique facial expression of open mouth, and showed that dolphins can also mirror other people’s facial expressions.” Dr. Elisabetta Palagian evolutionary biologist at the University of Pisa.

“Open-mouth cues and quick imitations are repeated throughout the mammalian family tree. This shows that in many species, not just dolphins, visual communication is important for forming complex social interactions. This suggests that it has played a role.”

Dolphin play includes acrobatics, surfing, playing with objects, chasing and fighting, but it is important that these activities are not mistaken for aggression.

Other mammals use facial expressions to convey playfulness, but it has not been investigated whether marine mammals also use facial expressions to signal play.

“The mouth-opening gesture probably evolved from the chewing motion, breaking down the chewing sequence to leave only the ‘intention to bite’ without contact,” Palagi said.

“The relaxed, open mouth seen in sociable carnivores, the playful faces of monkeys, and even the laughter of humans is a universal sign of playfulness and signals enjoyment to animals, and to us. , helps avoid conflict.”

marieri others. They investigated the presence and possible functions of open-mouth displays in solitary play, interspecific (human-dolphin) play, and intraspecific free play. Image credit: Marieli others., doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2024.110966.

To investigate whether dolphins visually communicate playfulness, Dr Palagi and colleagues studied captive bottlenose dolphins when they were playing in pairs and when they were playing freely with a human handler. recorded.

They showed that dolphins frequently use the open-mouthed expression when playing with other dolphins, but do not seem to use it when playing with humans or alone. .

Although only one open-mouth incident was recorded during solitary play, the researchers recorded a total of 1,288 open-mouth incidents during social play sessions, and these 92% of the incidents occurred during dolphin-dolphin play sessions.

Dolphins were also more likely to make open-mouthed expressions when their faces were within the field of view of their playmates, with 89% of recorded open-mouthed expressions produced in this situation. When this “smile” was recognized, the playmate smiled back. With a probability of 33%.

“Given that dolphins frequently participate in the same activities and situations, some might argue that dolphins are simply copying each other’s open-mouthed facial expressions by chance, but this This does not explain why the probability of imitating another dolphin’s open-mouth expression within 1 second is 13 times higher if the recipient actually saw the original expression. ” said Dr. Palagi.

“This rate of mimicry in dolphins is consistent with what has been observed in certain carnivores, such as meerkats and sun bears.”

of study Published in a magazine iscience.

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veronica marieri others. Smiling underwater: Exploring the playful signals and rapid imitation of bottlenose dolphins. isciencepublished online October 2, 2024. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2024.110966

Source: www.sci.news

Chimpanzee mother’s engage in playful interactions with their offspring during challenging circumstances

Posted on March 14, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Chimpanzee mother and child in Kibale National Park, Uganda

Dr. Chris Sabbi, Tufts University

When they have less to eat, most chimpanzees stop playing altogether to conserve energy, but mothers continue to spend a lot of time playing with their children. Because play is essential to the physical and psychological development of young chimpanzees, mothers may channel their energy into this behavior to nurture their young, even during difficult times.

Great apes such as gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees all tend to engage in play, such as tickling, pecking, and chasing each other. “Play helps develop both motor and social skills,” he says. Zarin Machanda At Tufts University, Massachusetts. “That's really what the baby needs to develop properly.”

For more than a decade, Machanda and colleagues have been observing a community of about 60 Eastern chimpanzees.Pan Troglodytes Schweinfurti) lives in Kibale National Park, Uganda. The team played a total of 3,891 games between 2010 and 2019.

“We had a great summer in 2016 or 2017 when there was nothing but food everywhere on site,” says Manchanda. “And one of the things we noticed was a lot of adult chimpanzees playing with each other.”

When food was abundant, teams recorded at least one play on 97% of observation days, but when food was scarce, this decreased to only 38%.

However, mother chimpanzees continued to play with their children at even higher rates during times of low food availability.

“We were really surprised,” team members say. Chris Sabbi Food is generally more important to female chimpanzees because the energetic cost of reproduction is much higher, according to a Harvard University study.

During periods of food stress, chimpanzees tend to spend more time alone to avoid competing for resources, so mothers are often the only social partners for their babies. As a result, the mother spends even more time playing with her children to compensate for the lack of interaction with her peers and other adults.

“The fact that mothers continue to play with their babies, even at personal sacrifices, shows how important this is to the child's development,” Machanda said. “It's like the hidden cost of being a mother.”

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Kadena SpireKey Teams Up with WebAuthn for Smooth Web3 Interactions: Blockchain News, Opinion, TV, Jobs

Posted on February 16, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

New York City, NY, February 16, 2024, Chainwire

Kadena SpireKey is a human-friendly and secure way to seamlessly interact with any application by eliminating complex signing processes.

Kadena Spire Key

“Unlike today’s complex Web3 wallets that require you to remember every wallet you’ve ever created, Kadena’s SpireKey uses WebAuthn, a technology developed by Google and Apple over the past 20 years, to Make digital assets securely available to anyone directly on their phone or computer. It’s as easy as receiving a prompt on your mobile device and providing your fingerprint as a signature. Family Holiday Dinner Even your uncle who asks you about cryptocurrencies every time can do it. Kadena makes the application accessible to everyone, whether you’re an experienced “degener” or someone new to blockchain. said Mike Herron, CMO of Kadena.

SpireKey creates seamless interactions between humans and technology, delivering Web2 experiences with Web3 innovations. SpireKey allows users to sign transactions and their Web3 applications, just like it works with Apple Pay and Google Pay. However, it can be run directly on the user’s device without opening multiple windows or copying and pasting key pairs, eliminating potential vulnerabilities found in traditional wallets.

Enhanced security with built-in multisig

“Multi-sig signatures built into Kadena enable an additional layer of security for SpireKey, which can only be provided through our proprietary language, Pact. With multi-signatures, SpireKey allows For example, if you’re transferring more than $10,000, you can set a parameter to require signatures from three different devices: your phone, your laptop, and your cold storage wallet. Because a malicious attacker would need access to three devices, multisig functionality reduces the risk of your account being compromised. This reduces the risk of alternative attack vectors and increases overall security. “Stuart Popejoy, co-founder and CEO of Kadena, said:

SpireKey represents how Kadena thinks about the level of usability that Web3 technology should have. At the heart of SpireKey is connecting humans and allowing them to interact with blockchain. SpireKey believes that by showing real-life examples, she can get everyone equally interested in how Spirekey can impact the world beyond her Web3. Masu.

About Kadena

Kadena is a blockchain technology protocol founded in 2017 by Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino. Kadena is the industry’s only scalable layer 1 proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain. This scalability allows Kadena to provide infrastructure-grade performance for any blockchain project. Along with Kadena’s proprietary smart contract language, Pact, Kadena’s platform provides the world with the tools and environment to turn ideas and ambitions into reality. Founded by Stuart Popejoy and William Martino, who developed JPMorgan’s first blockchain and headed the SEC’s Crypto Committee, Kadena aims to enable mass adoption of true blockchain. .

For more information, users can follow Kadena’s information. twitter | telegram | discord | YouTube

contact

Kadena Press
press@kadena.io

Source: the-blockchain.com

New Map Reveals Pregnancy’s Impact on Organ Interactions

Posted on February 2, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Mapping how interactions between different organs change during pregnancy could help us better understand conditions such as pre-eclampsia.

Tetra Images, LLC / Alamy

Scientists have mapped for the first time the metabolic changes that different parts of a primate's body undergo during pregnancy. The results suggest that pregnancy-related conditions such as preeclampsia and gestational diabetes may be due to “rewiring” errors when these changes occur.

Outside of pregnancy, different body systems normally “supply” each other with molecular nutrients, known as metabolites, in relatively equal exchange.

However, during pregnancy, major changes occur in tissues throughout the body. for example, Heart pumps up to 40% more. However, the thymus gland, which is involved in the immune system, “shrinks very quickly” to prevent rejection of the fetus. See Chan Ng at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

After studying Effects of metabolites on stem cells, Ng was curious about the role they play during pregnancy. During this period, “a lot of things are growing and regenerating…It's something you only see in comic books and superhero movies where people transform,” he says.

To learn more, Ng et al. collected 273 tissue samples from 12 cynomolgus monkeys (cynomolgus monkey), including when the monkey was in each trimester of pregnancy and when it was not pregnant. Samples were taken from 23 body parts, including five areas of her body: uterus, liver, spinal cord, skin, blood and heart.

The researchers analyzed the samples for metabolites and compared each site during non-pregnancy to the equivalent site during the third trimester.

As expected, when the macaques were not pregnant, Ng said, the metabolites were distributed fairly evenly across the body. But to her surprise, pregnancy caused her interactions to be “dramatically reprogrammed.”

For example, during the first trimester, the uterus reduced communication with the heart and skeletal muscles and instead “coupled” with the developing placenta. During the second trimester of pregnancy, the fully formed placenta began pumping “large amounts of metabolites” to the heart, ovaries, and liver. On the other hand, the uterus gradually migrated towards union with the scalp by the third trimester of pregnancy.

Also, during the third trimester, important exchanges between skeletal muscles and the spinal cord took place. Researchers have not investigated why these coupling changes occur.

When the flow of “reprogrammed” metabolites deviates from what is considered normal during pregnancy, certain conditions can occur, Ng says.

In a separate experiment, researchers took serum samples from 32 pregnant women and found that levels of the metabolite corticosterone were “significantly reduced” in patients with preeclampsia, Ng said. He states: Then, when they removed corticosterone from human placental cells in the lab, they caused pre-eclampsia-like inflammation. “Corticosterone is an important steroid in human pregnancy,” says Ng. “It’s been undervalued.”

The second important metabolite is thought to be palmitoylcarnitine, which helps process fatty acids and regulate immunity. Ongoing human stem cell research led by Ng suggests that human stem cells may be involved in gestational diabetes, he says.

Based on their findings, the researchers developed an “atlas” of 91 metabolites that consistently change in the tissues of pregnant cynomolgus monkeys. This provides a framework for the involvement of metabolites in regulating health during human pregnancy, Ng said. “There is a treasure trove of small molecules and metabolites that we have discovered. [which] I hope this will further encourage research into new treatments,” he says.

Previous studies have investigated metabolic changes such as: While pregnant rats and mice do, cynomolgus monkeys have reproductive systems much more similar to humans, Ng said. Even though macaques have a shorter gestation period than humans (about 26 weeks compared to the average 40 weeks), they still serve as a reliable model for human reproduction, especially pregnancy-related conditions, he said.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Mechanisms controlling interactions between sensory and memory nervous systems identified by scientists

Posted on January 2, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

The classical understanding of brain organization is that the brain's perceptual areas represent the world 'as it is', and the brain's visual cortex represents the external world 'retinolocally', based on how light hits the retina. That's what it means. In contrast, the brain's memory areas are thought to represent information in an abstract form, stripped of details about physical properties. Now, a team of neuroscientists from Dartmouth College and the University of Edinburgh have identified the neural coding mechanisms that allow information to move back and forth between the brain's sensory and memory regions.

Traditional views of brain organization suggest that regions at the top of the cortical hierarchy process internally directed information using abstract, amodal neural codes. Nevertheless, recent reports have described the presence of retinotopic coding at cortical vertices, including the default mode network.What is the functional role of retinal local coding at the apex of the cortical hierarchy? Steel other. We report that retinotopic coding structures interactions between internally oriented (memory) and externally oriented (perception) brain regions. Image credit: Gerd Altmann.

“We now know that brain regions associated with memory encode the world, like a 'photo negative' of the universe,” said Dr. Adam Steele, a researcher at Dartmouth College.

“And that 'negativity' is part of the mechanism that moves information in and out of memory, and between perceptual and memory systems.”

In a series of experiments, participants were tested on perception and memory while their brain activity was recorded using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner.

Dr. Steele and his colleagues identified a contralateral push-pull-like coding mechanism that governs the interaction between perceptual and memory areas in the brain.

The results showed that when light hits the retina, the brain's visual cortex responds by increasing activity that represents the pattern of light.

Memory areas of the brain also respond to visual stimuli, but unlike visual areas, processing the same visual pattern reduces neural activity.

“There are three unusual findings in this study,” the researchers said.

“The first is the discovery that visual coding principles are stored in the memory system.”

“The second thing is that this visual code is upside down in our memory system.”

“When you see something in your visual field, neurons in your visual cortex become active and neurons in your memory system quiet down.”

“Third, this relationship is reversed during memory recall.”

“If you close your eyes and recall that visual stimulus in the same space, the relationship is reversed. Your memory system kicks in and suppresses the neurons in your sensory area.”

Dr Ed Shilson, a neuroscientist at the University of Edinburgh, said: “Our findings demonstrate how shared visual information is used by the memory system to bring recalled memories into and out of focus. “This provides a clear example of how this can be done.”

of study Published in today's magazine natural neuroscience.

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A. Steel other. Retinotopic codes structure interactions between perceptual and memory systems. nut neurosi, published online on January 2, 2024. doi: 10.1038/s41593-023-01512-3

Source: www.sci.news

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Tag Archives: interactions

Fossils from the Oligocene Cycle Reveal Pollination Interactions Between Flowers and Marchalace

Roblox Enhances Age Verification to Limit Adult-Child Interactions | Games

Research: Bottlenose dolphins communicate through “smiles” during playful interactions

Chimpanzee mother’s engage in playful interactions with their offspring during challenging circumstances

Kadena SpireKey Teams Up with WebAuthn for Smooth Web3 Interactions: Blockchain News, Opinion, TV, Jobs

Kadena Spire Key

Enhanced security with built-in multisig

contact

New Map Reveals Pregnancy’s Impact on Organ Interactions

Mechanisms controlling interactions between sensory and memory nervous systems identified by scientists