A recent neuroimaging study has identified a link between respiration and neural activity changes in rats. The findings, which have been published in the journal eLife, suggest that breathing might modulate neural responses across the brain. “Breathing is an essential physiologic process for a living organism,” said study author Nanyin Zhang, the Lloyd & Dorothy Foehr Huck Chair in Brain Imaging and director of the Center for Neurotechnology in Mental Health Research at Penn State. “Scientists know that respiration is controlled by the brain stem, and the breathing process can modulate neural ...
Like no game before it, "The Last of Us" tackled complex social issues in a gripping post-apocalyptic narrative. It's no wonder the game's adaptation for HBO is now one of the most hotly awaited series of 2023. Sony/dpa
Sony's landmark 2013 game "The Last of Us" didn't make it easy on players. But the difficulty curve was more emotional than technical, for the game delivered the zombie genre at its most heady, grief-stricken and intimate.
How it started: Grim.
Joel, a down-on-his-luck single dad, can't catch a break. Then comes a viral outburst that has all of Texas going mad trying to avoid flesh eaters, which sends him and his daughter on the run. Full credits haven't even rolled before the child doesn't make it — shot dead on government orders.
While there's no shortage of violence in the video game space, "The Last of Us" did it differently. Action was treated as something to be avoided; Joel's trigger hand would wobble, a reluctant shot in a world in which each close kill would come with suffering. In a genre where action and story were often disconnected — serious cinematic scenes against cartoonish violence — "The Last of Us" wanted to keep it real. Camera angles were often closely cropped, framing enemies — and infected humans — not as obstacles but as tragedies.
And it worked. The game went on to sell about 20 million copies for Sony's PlayStation consoles and spawned both a limited-run comic and a hit sequel. Now, "The Last of Us" is a hotly anticipated HBO series starring Pedro Pascal as Joel, the latest in a long line of prestigious bleak TV.
But the hype preceding the HBO series, which premiered Sunday, has less to do with the checkered past of video game adaptations or the pedigree of the show's co-creator, "Chernobyl" architect Craig Mazin. No, it's because "The Last of Us" always felt like a mission statement, a game that wanted to prove that big-budget action shooters — "AAA games" in industry speak — could not only have a sense of gravitas but could advance the medium in narrative, gameplay and representation. "The Last of Us" raised moral quandaries about choice, or the lack thereof, in interactive entertainment, questioned masculinity in games and ultimately proved to the industry that a gay teenage girl could be a protagonist in a genre overrun with tired machismo.
"What 'The Last of Us' did for US games is it showed that we could handle tremendous complexity in a narrative structure about social issues," says Jennifer deWinter, a game scholar, author and dean at the Illinois Institute of Technology. "And in an action game, a game historically made for the 'hardcore player,' 'The Last of Us' starts helping us rethink what we can do in AAA games."
Neil Druckmann, the game's writer and the show's co-creator, still speaks proudly of the way "The Last of Us" pushed boundaries, whether that was in its diversity or simply in its willingness to nudge players to feel the extremities of anguish.
"You almost never showed a kid dying in a video game," Druckmann says when asked about the game's difficult opening moments. "That was such a taboo thing. ... One thing 'Grand Theft Auto' doesn't have are kids in that world. But if we're going to tell a story about the love a parent has for their child, we have to deal with the worst fear a parent has, which is any sort of harm coming to their child, and realize that through that opening sequence. Our approach was, as much as we can, let's treat it as grounded as possible and as realistic as possible."
To Druckmann, 44, the story was personal. He began developing what would become "The Last of Us" while a master's student at Carnegie Mellon University. Long before pitching it to Sony-owned development studio Naughty Dog, at the time known best for its "Indiana Jones"-inspired "Uncharted" series, Druckmann had tried to spin the story into a comic.
"It was always about the sacrifices my parents have made," Druckmann, an Israeli immigrant, says. "As I got older, and came closer to making it as a game, I started thinking about having my own kids and the fear of raising a kid and what could happen. While making the game, my daughter was born, and that added another layer of complexity to how I approached those characters. There's something about living some of the experience that your characters have, to imbue it with more authenticity.
"Obviously," Druckmann continues, "I've never murdered a person, so I don't quite have that experience."
'This was a game wehadn't played'
After its harrowing beginning, "The Last of Us" — both the game and the HBO series — jumps 20 years into the future, where an even more hardened Joel has failed to process his grief over losing his daughter. This is when he meets Ellie, a 14-year-old he's hired to smuggle halfway across the country. Played by Bella Ramsey in the series, Ellie is bitten but not turned, and is seen as a potential key to a vaccine: a cure, at long last, for a broken world. This is when "The Last of Us" begins to shine, as tension often comes from an underutilized gameplay tactic: conversation.
"The Last of Us" was the rare game that sought to avoid action, letting Ellie pester Joel with questions about what it was like to be alive before the apocalypse. Did he frequent coffee shops? Did he ever stay in a fancy hotel? What kind of music was on his old cassettes? Depending on how one played, there could be as much as two hours between action sequences. At the time of its release, no major big-budget action game had been as patient.
Those moments, says Druckmann, heightened the game's anxiety.
"The clock is ticking," he says. "The longer you stay away from those core loops, the more frustrated the player might get, so you can only do these deviations for so long before you have to come back. 'The Last of Us' is an action game, and a lot of that action is violent, so the more we get away from it, there's a certain tension that starts building."
It was all in the name of fostering intimacy, both in the game's quiet moments and its savage ones, says Bruce Straley, the game's director and one of its key world builders. One of Straley's central directorial objectives is for the player never to set down the controller — that is, to avoid long cinematic scenes in which the player has nothing to do. "The Last of Us" has its share of those, but by and large they're unexpectedly brief and often interrupted with opportunities to guide the character or to initiate an optional conversation.
"The goal was pretty evolutionary," Straley says. "As Neil and I were talking about the world and the characters, there was an energy in the room between us as to what type of experience this had the possibility of creating. ... This was a game we hadn't played that we wanted to play. The concept of creating a relationship between two characters that evolves over the course of the game — that's fully playable — and that got the players more involved with those characters than any other game had before, that was really exciting for us."
As Joel and Ellie traversed a ravaged America, "The Last of Us" started to feel less like something that belonged to the zombie genre and more like a game about unprocessed trauma. Druckmann and Straley have cited Cormac McCarthy's demanding, world-weary post-apocalyptic novel "The Road," and revolutionary Japanese game "Ico," in which a horned boy must protect a young woman named Yorda, among their influences.
In "The Last of Us," Joel starts to see the world through the eyes of Ellie, and Ellie, who has never been out of militarized zones, often finds the beauty in ruins. Ellie zeros in on life and survivors rather than America's horrors, and the game starts to become one of hope as control shifts between Joel and Ellie. It also becomes two distinct character studies, building to a conclusion in which Joel is confronted with the reality of what may happen to Ellie if she becomes a lab rat.
This further adds to the game's pressure. Unlike a TV series or film, in "The Last of Us" game we're often confined to Joel or Ellie's point of view, depending on which character we are navigating at the time. As we propel them forward through the narrative, we acknowledge that they may be making choices we disagree with, even as we're the ones leading them in and out of obstacles. This is the beauty of interactive entertainment: dialogue with those characters whom we are steering through the world.
"'The Last of Us,' when it first came out, game scholars were like, 'It's still centering the male gaze and blah blah,'" says deWinter. "But when you compare it to one of its influences, which was 'Ico,' when you play 'Ico,' Yorda is a lump you drag around. She doesn't do anything. Ellie does things. Then you get to play her. ... It's such a different relationship. It's not one perspective. It was so different from 'Ico' and it had the moral ambiguity of 'The Walking Dead.'"
The HBO series deviates from the game in multiple ways. For one, it can center entire episodes around smaller characters in the game, such as one that focuses on gay survivalist Bill (Nick Offerman), a character that Druckmann gives credit to Straley and Mazin for fleshing out, Straley in the game and Mazin in the series. And, freed from the need for a major action sequence at a regular cadence, it can heighten intimate moments that even the most patient of games had to leave out.
"There's this concept art that we had when we were working on the game made by Hyoung Nam that I have hanging in my house," Druckmann says. "It's Joel and Ellie sitting by a campfire and laughing, and it was something I always wanted to put in the game but there was never a good spot for it. Just to stop the journey and have them talk. We get to do that in a few points in the season. We get to explore the downbeats of these characters and we get to flesh them out in ways we couldn't in the game."
'They hated it'
"The Last of Us" was no sure bet. In fact, early reaction, as Druckmann recalls of one marketing focus group, was strongly negative.
"We had the concept for the story, and some concept art, and the way it works is you show it to some gamers that they poll, and they respond to it," he says. "They hated it. They're like, 'I have to escort a 14-year-old girl across the country? My sister is 14 and she's annoying. I don't want to play a game like that.' The benefit of working at PlayStation and Naughty Dog is that PlayStation has complete trust in us. At Naughty Dog, we could look at the marketing focus group and ignore it, but it would have been a challenge to get those people to try the game. I think now things are very different."
The studio support was always there, says Asad Qizilbash, the head of PlayStation Productions, who was working in Sony's marketing department when "The Last of Us" was released. "When they pitched it, I was absolutely enamored," Qizilbash says. "I remember we worked with Neil and everyone at Naughty Dog to do some research on how to best talk about this. Very early on, we were clear to not label this a zombie game. At that time, there was zombie fatigue, and it really wasn't. It was a heartfelt story that happened to be in a post-apocalyptic world."
That's not to say that the game wasn't violent. But it drew inspiration for that violence from award-winning literature and films as much as from its video game predecessors.
"I invited Neil to see 'No Country for Old Men,' and I remember walking out of the theater and telling him, breathlessly, 'I've never played a game that had that kind of tension in it before,'" Straley says. "The street fight in 'No Country' was one of the most intense fights I had seen on film, and I wondered if you could play something that had that level of groundedness to it, that intensity. There's something primal to having the controller in your hand and being in the world. Most fighting games at the time had pulled-out cameras where you saw hordes of 20-30 (non-playable characters) that you just plow through."
Straley's relationship with Sony and Naughty Dog has since become strained. Straley left Naughty Dog not long after the release of 2016's "Uncharted 4: A Thief's End," before HBO was involved in a "Last of Us" series, and is not credited on the HBO series. He is working these days on building his own studio, Wildflower Interactive. He says the lack of credit has made him think more about workers' rights in the video game space. "It's an argument for unionization that someone who was part of the co-creation of that world and those characters isn't getting a credit or a nickel for the work they put into it," he says. "Maybe we need unions in the video game industry to be able to protect creators." HBO and Sony declined to comment on the record.
Still, Straley remains a believer in the relevance of "The Last of Us." If anything, recent history has him thinking the game could have been even darker.
"We weren't real enough about the level of anxiety and tension that all of the characters would have had in that world," Straley says. "If you go back to those early days of the pandemic — we're not even talking about infected breaking through your front window and chewing your face off; this is just the news that there's the possibility that you could get horribly ill, possibly die from this virus — there's so much trauma from living through that, that I think the world of 'The Last of Us' would have had way more broken characters. I think people hold it together pretty well for the world that we put them in, compared to what I know about living through a pandemic."
What made "The Last of Us" a lasting success, however, is that it coupled the trauma with a certain optimism: "I'm an immigrant," says Druckmann, who grew up on the West Bank, "and to me, 'The Last of Us' is a love letter to what I love about this country.
"That's why you see such beautiful landscapes. It was important to me to express the beauty of what I see in this country. There's a lot to criticize about the United States, and we won't get into that in this interview, but America's superpower is this melting pot, in that everywhere you look you see a different person from a different walk of life — a different political spectrum, race, identity. I think there's something beautiful about that. I think 'The Last of Us,' for it to be authentic to take place in the United States, has to explore all those kinds of characters."
Critics appear cautiously optimistic that HBO's 2023 "The Last of Us" series could be the first adaptation of a game to live up to its original. HBO Max/dpa
Joel and Ellie have to cross a completely devastated country together in "The Last of Us". Sony Computer Entertainment/dpa
"The Last of Us Part 2" later brought back the same zombies turned into grotesque monsters by a mushroom infection. Sony Computer Entertainment/dpa
As the air gets colder and the sun goes down earlier, some people find themselves less inclined to complete their daily tasks. Although it is normal to feel a bit more bummed than usual during these months, it’s imperative to know the difference between being in a funk and having a disorder, experts say. Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a form of depression that happens during periods of less sunlight and shorter days, according to John Hopkins Medicine. The disorder is linked to a “chemical change in the brain” and usually results in the body making more melatonin, the sleep hormone, beca...
Almost a century ago, German physicist Werner Heisenberg realized the laws of quantum mechanics placed some fundamental limits on how accurately we can measure certain properties of microscopic objects.
However, the laws of quantum mechanics can also offer ways to make measurements more accurate than would otherwise be possible.
In new research published in Nature Physics, we have outlined a way to achieve more accurate measurements of microscopic objects using quantum computers. This could prove useful in a huge range of next-generation technologies, including biomedical sensing, laser ranging and quantum communications.
We were also able to push beyond the limits of a variation of Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” in certain circumstances, suggesting different uncertainty principles may be necessary in different scenarios.
Quantum uncertainties
If you want to examine the properties of a large everyday object like a car, it’s a simple process.
For example, a car has a well-defined position, color and speed. You can measure them one after another or all at once with no issues. Measuring the position of your car will not change its color or speed.
However, this becomes much trickier if you’re trying to examine microscopic quantum objects like electrons or photons (which are tiny little particles of light).
Certain properties of quantum objects are connected to each other. Measuring one property can influence another property.
For example, measuring the position of an electron will affect its speed and vice versa.
These properties are called “conjugate” properties.
The link between these properties is a direct manifestation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. It is not possible to simultaneously measure two conjugate properties of a quantum object to whatever degree of accuracy you like: the more you know about one, the less you know about the other.
While the uncertainty principle imposes a limit on how accurate some measurements can be, reaching that limit in practice can be very challenging. However, measuring quantum objects in the greatest amount of detail possible is important for advancing fundamental science as well as developing new technologies.
Entangled objects
In our new research, we designed a way to determine conjugate properties of quantum objects more accurately. Our collaborators were then able to carry out this measurement in various labs around the world.
The new technique revolves around a strange quirk of quantum systems, known as entanglement. When two objects are entangled, we can measure them more accurately than if they weren’t entangled.
We realized we could use quantum computers, which can precisely control the state of quantum objects, to create two identical quantum objects and entangle them. By measuring the entangled objects together, we could determine their properties more precisely than if they were measured individually.
Measuring the two entangled identical quantum objects reduces the noise in the measurement, making it more accurate.
A less noisy future
In theory, it is also possible to entangle and measure three or more quantum systems to achieve even better precision. However, we haven’t been able to make this work experimentally as yet.
The results of measuring three identical entangled objects together were very noisy. However, as quantum computers improve and become more accurate, it may be possible to faithfully measure three copies of a quantum system simultaneously in the future.
Quantum computers of the future may be less noisy. Shutterstock
One of the key strengths of this work is that a quantum enhancement can still be observed in very noisy scenarios. This bodes well for future practical applications, such as in biomedical measurements, which will inevitably occur in noisy real-world environments.
What about the uncertainty principle?
This research also has implications for the aforementioned uncertainty principle.
One interpretation of the uncertainty principle is that it is impossible to measure conjugate properties of quantum objects with unlimited accuracy. But another interpretation is that measuring one conjugate property of a quantum object must necessarily disturb the second conjugate property by some minimum amount.
In this research, we were able to violate an uncertainty principle based on the second interpretation. This suggests that, depending on what physical setting is considered, different uncertainty principles may be necessary for different scenarios.
A global collaboration
We tested our theory on a total of 19 different quantum computers, which used three different quantum computing technologies: superconductors, trapped ions and photonics. These devices are located across Europe and America and can be accessed via the internet, allowing researchers from across the globe to connect and carry out important research.
We carried out the study with colleagues at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T), in collaboration with researchers from the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering at A*STAR in Singapore, the University of Jena, the University of Innsbruck, Macquarie University and Amazon Web Services.
As with weeds in a garden, it is a challenge to fully get rid of cancer cells in the body once they arise. They have a relentless need to continuously expand, even when they are significantly cut back by therapy or surgery. Even a few cancer cells can give rise to new colonies that will eventually outgrow their borders and deplete their local resources. They also tend to wander into places where they are not welcome, creating metastatic colonies at distant sites that can be even more difficult to detect and eliminate.
One explanation for why cancer cells can withstand such inhospitable environments and growing conditions is an old adage: What doesn’t kill them makes them stronger.
At the very earliest stage of tumor formation, even before cancer can be diagnosed, individual cancer cells typically find themselves in an environment lacking nutrients, oxygen or adhesive proteins that help them attach to an area of the body to grow. While most cancer cells will quickly die when faced with such inhospitable conditions, a small percentage can adapt and gain the ability to initiate a tumor colony that will eventually become malignant disease.
Weareresearchers studying how these microenvironmental stresses affect tumor initiation and progression. In our new study, we found that the harsh microenvironments of the body can push certain cancer cells to overcome the stress of being isolated and make them more adept at initiating and forming new tumor colonies. Moreover, these cancer cells may adapt even better in the inhospitable and stressful conditions they encounter while trying to establish metastases in other areas of the body or after they are challenged by treatment with chemotherapy or surgery.
The microenvironment of a cell can significantly influence its function.
Cancer cells overcoming isolation stress
We focused on pancreatic cancer,
one of the most lethal cancers and one that is notoriously resistant to chemotherapy and often not curable with surgery. Almost 90% of pancreatic patients will succumb to cancer recurrence or metastasis within five years after diagnosis.
We wanted to study how tumor formation is affected by what we call “isolation stress, when cells are deprived of nutrients or oxygen supply because of poor blood vessel formation or because they cannot benefit from making contact with nearby cancer cells. To study how cancer cells respond to these situations, we recreated different forms of isolation stress in cell cultures, in mice and in patient samples by depriving them of oxygen and nutrients or by exposing them to chemotherapeutic drugs. We then measured which genes were turned on or off in pancreatic cancer cells.
We found that pancreatic cancer cells challenged with conditions that mimic isolation stress gain a new receptor on their surface that unstressed cancer cells don’t typically have: lysophosphatidic acid receptor 4, or LPAR4, a protein involved in tumor progression.
When we forced the cancer cells to produce LPAR4 on their surfaces, we found that they were able to form new tumor colonies two to eight times faster than average cancer cells under isolation stress conditions. Also, preventing cancer cells from gaining LPAR4 when they were stressed reduced their ability to form tumor colonies by 80% to 95%. These findings suggest that the ability of cancer cells to gain LPAR4 when they are exposed to stress is both necessary and sufficient to promote tumor initiation.
We also found that LPAR4 helps cancer cells achieve tumor initiation by giving them the ability to produce a web of macromolecules, or an extracellular matrix network, that provides them an adhesive foothold within an otherwise inhospitable environment. By producing a halo of their own matrix, cancer cells with LPAR4 can start building their own tumor-supporting niche that provides a refuge from isolation stresses.
We determined that a key component of this extracellular matrix is fibronectin. When this protein binds to receptors called integrins on the surface of cells, it triggers a cascade of events that results in the expression of new genes promoting tumor initiation, stress tolerance and cancer progression. Eventually, other cancer cells are recruited into the fibronectin-rich matrix network, and a new satellite tumor colony starts to form.
Considering that tumor cells with LPAR4 can create their own tumor-supporting matrix on the fly, this suggests that LPAR4 may allow individual tumor cells to overcome isolation stress conditions and survive in the bloodstream, the lymphatic system involved in immune responses or distant organs as metastases.
Importantly, we found that isolation stress is not the only way to trigger LPAR4. Exposing pancreatic cancer cells to chemotherapy drugs, which are designed to impose stress upon cancer cells, also triggers an increase of LPAR4 on cancer cells. This finding might explain how such tumor cells could develop drug resistance.
Keeping cancer cells stressed
Understanding how to cut off the cascade of events that allows cancer cells to become stress-tolerant is important, because it provides a new area to explore for future treatments.
Our team is currently considering potential strategies to prevent cancer cells from utilizing the fibronectin matrix to gain stress tolerance, including drugs that can target the receptors that bind to fibronectin on the surface of tumor cells. One of these drugs, being developed by a company one of us co-founded, is poised to enter clinical trials soon. Other strategies include preventing cancer cells from gaining LPAR4 when they sense stress, or interfering with the signals that promote the generation of the fibronectin matrix.
For patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, there is a pressing need to discover how to improve the effectiveness of surgery or chemotherapy. Like combating weeds in your garden, this may require attacking the problem from multiple directions at once.
A group of 10 universities led by the University of California, San Diego is undertaking a $50.5 million effort to greatly improve the speed and efficiency of computers, work that could do everything from make drug discovery faster to create better weather forecasts. The coalition, which includes such schools as Stanford and UCLA, hinges on making advances in software and next-generation computer chips. Among other things, both are needed to more rapidly move data from memory sources to processors. "Right now, it takes an average of 6.5 years and tremendous computing power to determine which p...
Simply looking at pictures of your spouse helps to boost infatuation, attachment, and marital satisfaction, according to new research published in the Journal of Psychophysiology. “It is important to study romantic love because it affects virtually everyone. And when people fall in love, it affects them greatly (both positively and negatively),” said study author Sandra Langeslag, an associate professor at University of Missouri in St. Louis and director of the Neurocognition of Emotion and Motivation Lab. “We know that love feelings typically decline over time in long-term relationships, and ...
New research provides evidence that libertarians in the United States tend to prioritize men’s reproductive autonomy at the expense of women’s. The study, published in Political Psychology, found that libertarianism was associated with both opposition to women’s right to an abortion and support for men’s right to withdraw financial support for a child when women refuse to terminate the pregnancy. Libertarianism is a political philosophy that centers around the concept that each individual should be free to live their life in whatever way they choose, as long as other people’s rights are respec...
“Shark: Why We Need to Save the World’s Most Misunderstood Predator" by Paul de Gelder; Mudlark (240 pages, $26.99) ——— He was their prey, then became their protector. Paul de Gelder was a diver in the Australian Navy, running counterterrorism exercises in Sydney Harbor. In 2009, a 9-foot bull shark mistook him for breakfast. “I was like a chew toy to this predator,” de Gelder writes in “Shark: Why we Need to Save the World’s Most Misunderstood Predator.” “My life did actually flash before my eyes, but then a strange thing happened. It let go. I was pulled out of the water and several surgical...
Three juvenile grizzly bears in Montana were euthanized after they tested positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) last fall in what the state says were the first documented cases of the virus in grizzly bears, according to a news release from Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.
The bears were euthanized because they were in “poor condition” — showing signs of partial blindness, disorientation and neurological issues, FWP said in the news release Tuesday.
The bears are thought to have eaten birds that had the highly contagious virus, FWP Wildlife Veterinarian Jennifer Ramsey said in a statement.
The bears were found near Augusta, Dupuyer and Kalispell, FWP said in the release. The department added that they were the first documented cases of HPAI identified in grizzly bears. The virus was found in brown bears in Alaska late last year, Alaska Public Media reported.
HPAI has also been found in a fox and skunk in Montana, according to FWP. In other states and countries, the virus has been detected in black bears, raccoons and coyotes. An FWP spokesperson said more birds had recently tested positive as well.
FWP said it urges people to avoid contact with sick or dead wildlife and to report any “unusual or unexplained” sicknesses or deaths of wild birds and animals to their local wildlife biologist or the wildlife lab in Bozeman (406-577-7880 or 406-577-7882).
Daily Montanan is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Daily Montanan maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Darrell Ehrlick for questions: info@dailymontanan.com. Follow Daily Montanan on Facebook and Twitter.
Nearly two thirds of the sharks and rays that live among the world's corals are threatened with extinction, according to new research published Tuesday, with a warning this could further imperil precious reefs.
Coral reefs, which harbor at least a quarter of all marine animals and plants, are gravely menaced by an array of human threats, including overfishing, pollution and climate change.
Shark and ray species -- from apex predators to filter feeders -- play an important role in these delicate ecosystems that "cannot be filled by other species", said Samantha Sherman, of Simon Fraser University in Canada and the wildlife group TRAFFIC International.
But they are under grave threat globally, according to the study in the journal Nature Communications, which assessed extinction vulnerability data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to look at 134 species of sharks and rays linked to reefs.
The authors found 59 percent of coral reef shark and ray species are threatened with extinction, an extinction risk almost double that of sharks and rays in general.
Among these, five shark species are listed as critically endangered, as well as nine ray species, all so-called "rhino rays" that look more like sharks than stingrays.
Keeping reefs healthier
"It was a bit surprising just how high the threat level is for these species," Sherman told AFP.
"Many species that we thought of as common are declining at alarming rates and becoming more difficult to find in some places."
Sherman said the biggest threat to these species by far is overfishing.
Sharks are under most threat in the Western Atlantic and parts of the Indian Ocean, whereas the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia are the highest risks for rays.
These regions are heavily fished and do not currently have management in place to reduce the impact on these species, said Sherman.
Coral reef fisheries directly support the livelihoods and food security of over half a billion people, but this crucial ecosystem is facing an existential threat.
Human-driven climate change has spurred mass coral bleaching as the world's oceans get warmer.
Modeling research has shown that even if the Paris climate goal of holding global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is reached, 99 percent of the world's coral reefs will not be able to recover.
At two degrees of warming, the number rose to 100 percent.
"We know coral reef health is declining, largely due to climate change, however, coral reef sharks and rays can help keep reefs healthier for longer," said Sherman.
The study was carried out by an international team of experts from universities, government and regional oceanic and fishery organizations as well as non-governmental organizations across the world.
Norwegian archaeologists believe they have found the world's oldest runestone inscribed almost 2,000 years ago, making it several hundred centuries older than previous discoveries, they announced on Tuesday.
The square brown sandstone rock, measuring about 30 by 30 centimeters (12 by 12 inches), was found during the excavation of an ancient burial ground in late 2021, at Tyrifjorden northwest of Oslo, ahead of construction on a railway line.
Carbon dating of bones and wood found in a grave beside the rune suggest that it was inscribed sometime between year one and 250 AD, Oslo's Museum of Cultural History said.
Normally erected at gravesites, especially during the Viking era, runes are stones inscribed with runic letters, the oldest alphabet known in Scandinavia.
The discovery, which could date from the time of Jesus Christ, is "a dream for runologists", who study ancient runic alphabets, inscriptions and their history, the museum in Oslo said.
"We thought that the first ones in Norway and Sweden appeared in the years 300 or 400, but it turns out that some runestones could be even older than we previously believed", runologist Kristel Zilmer told Norwegian news agency NTB.
"It's a unique discovery", she said.
The origin of runestones remains largely a mystery.
Re-transcribed into the Latin alphabet, the inscription on the Tyrifjorden rune forms the unknown word "idiberug", perhaps a reference to the person lying in the grave.
The runestone will go on display at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo from January 21 to February 26.
Solomon’s paradox describes the tendency to engage in more wise reasoning for others’ problems than one’s own. This phenomenon is named after King Solomon of the Hebrew Bible, the third leader of ancient Israel who asked God to grant him wisdom. People would travel from afar to seek Solomon’s wisdom; however, when it came to his personal life, Solomon lacked insight, which eventually led to the downfall of his kingdom. A study published in Frontiers in Psychology suggests Solomon’s Paradox can be explained by the difference between positive affect and self-transcendence when thinking about per...
