The rockefeller university

Locating sound sources such as prey or predators is critical for survival in many vertebrates. Terrestrial vertebrates locate sources by measuring the time delay and intensity difference of sound pressure at each ear 1-5 . Underwater, however, the physics of sound makes interaural cues very small, suggesting that directional hearing in fish should be nearly impossible 6 . Yet, directional hearing has been confirmed behaviourally, although the mechanisms have remained unknown for decades. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain this remarkable ability, including the possibility that fish evolved an extreme sensitivity to minute interaural differences or that fish might compare sound pressure with particle motion signals 7,8 . However, experimental challenges have long hindered a definitive explanation. Here we empirically test these models in the transparent teleost Danionella cerebrum, one of the smallest vertebrates 9,10 . By selectively controlling pressure and particle motion, we dissect the sensory algorithm underlying directional acoustic startles. We find that both cues are indispensable for this behaviour and that their relative phase controls its direction. Using micro-computed tomography and optical vibrometry, we further show that D. cerebrum has the sensory structures to implement this mechanism. D. cerebrum shares these structures with more than 15% of living vertebrate species, suggesting a widespread mechanism for inferring sound direction. A study demonstrates that the fish Danionella cerebrum is able to discriminate the direction of sound by comparing the relative phase of pressure and particle motion.

A search for heavy neutral leptons (HNLs) decaying in the CMS muon system is presented. A data sample is used corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb(-1) of proton-proton collisions at root s = 13 TeV, recorded at the CERN LHC in 2016-2018. Decay products of long-lived HNLs could interact with the shielding materials in the CMS muon system and create hadronic and electromagnetic showers detected in the muon chambers. This distinctive signature provides a unique handle to search for HNLs with masses below 4 GeV and proper decay lengths of the order of meters. The signature is sensitive to HNL couplings to all three generations of leptons. Candidate events are required to contain a prompt electron or muon originating from a vertex on the beam axis and a displaced shower in the muon chambers. No significant deviations from the standard model background expectation are observed. In the electron (muon) channel, the most stringent limits to date are set for HNLs in the mass range of 2.1-3.0 (1.9-3.3) GeV, reaching mixing matrix element squared values as low as 8.6(4.6) x 10(-6).

The ecological success of social insects makes their colony organization fascinating to scientists studying collective systems. In recent years, the combination of automated behavioural tracking and social network analysis has deepened our understanding of many aspects of colony organization. However, because studies have typically worked with single species, we know little about interspecific variation in network structure. Here, we conduct a comparative network analysis across five ant species from five subfamilies, separated by more than 100 Myr of evolution. We find that social network structure is highly conserved across subfamilies. All species studied form modular networks, with two social communities, a similar distribution of individuals between the two communities, and equivalent mapping of task performance onto the communities. Against this backdrop of organizational similarity, queens of the different species occupied qualitatively distinct network positions. The deep conservation of the two community structure implies that the most fundamental behavioural division of labour in social insects is between workers that stay in the nest to rear brood, and those that leave the nest to forage. This division has parallels across the animal kingdom in systems of biparental care and probably represents the most readily evolvable form of behavioural division of labour.

How does the brain process the faces of familiar people? Neuropsychological studies have argued for an area of the temporal pole (TP) linking faces with person identities, but magnetic susceptibility artifacts in this region have hampered its study with fMRI. Using data acquisition and analysis methods optimized to overcome this artifact, we identify a familiar face response in TP, reliably observed in individual brains. This area responds strongly to visual images of familiar faces over unfamiliar faces, objects, and scenes. However, TP did not just respond to images of faces, but also to a variety of high- level social cognitive tasks, including semantic, episodic, and theory of mind tasks. The response profile of TP contrasted with a nearby region of the perirhinal cortex that responded specifically to faces, but not to social cognition tasks. TP was functionally connected with a distributed network in the association cortex associated with social cognition, while PR was functionally connected with face- preferring areas of the ventral visual cortex. This work identifies a missing link in the human face processing system that specifically processes familiar faces, and is well placed to integrate visual information about faces with higher- order conceptual information about other people. The results suggest that separate streams for person and face processing reach anterior temporal areas positioned at the top of the cortical hierarchy.

Ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions create a strongly interacting state of hot and dense quark-gluon matter that exhibits a remarkable collective flow behavior with minimal viscous dissipation. To gain deeper insights into its intrinsic nature and fundamental degrees of freedom, we determine the speed of sound in an extended volume of quark-gluon plasma using lead-lead (PbPb) collisions at a center-of-mass energy per nucleon pair of 5.02 TeV. The data were recorded by the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 0.607 nb(-1). The measurement is performed by studying the multiplicity dependence of the average transverse momentum of charged particles emitted in head-on PbPb collisions. Our findings reveal that the speed of sound in this matter is nearly half the speed of light, with a squared value of 0.241 +/- 0.002 (stat) +/- 0.016 9(syst) in natural units. The effective medium temperature, estimated using the mean transverse momentum, is 219 +/- 8 The measured squared speed of sound at this temperature aligns precisely with predictions from lattice quantum chromodynamic (QCD) calculations. This result provides a stringent constraint on the equation of state of the created medium and direct evidence for a deconfined QCD phase being attained in relativistic nuclear collisions.

Receptor activity-modifying proteins (RAMPs) form complexes with G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) and may regulate their cellular trafficking and pharmacology. RAMP interactions have been identified for about 50 GPCRs, but only a few GPCR-RAMP complexes have been studied in detail. To elucidate a comprehensive GPCR-RAMP interactome, we created a library of 215 dual epitope-tagged (DuET) GPCRs representing all GPCR subfamilies and coexpressed each GPCR with each of the three RAMPs. Screening the GPCR-RAMP pairs with customized multiplexed suspension bead array (SBA) immunoassays, we identified 122 GPCRs that showed strong evidence for interaction with at least one RAMP. We screened for interactions in three cell lines and found 23 endogenously expressed GPCRs that formed complexes with RAMPs. Mapping the GPCR-RAMP interactome expands the current system-wide functional characterization of RAMP-interacting GPCRs to inform the design of selective therapeutics targeting GPCR-RAMP complexes.

T follicular regulatory (T-fr) cells can counteract the B cell helper activity of T follicular helper (T-fh) cells and hinder the production of antibodies against self-antigens or allergens. A mechanistic understanding of the cytokines initiating the differentiation of human regulatory T (T-reg) cells into T-fr cells is still missing. Herein, we report that low doses of the pro-T-fh cytokine interleukin-12 (IL-12) drive the induction of a T-fr cell program on activated human T-reg cells while also preserving their regulatory function. Mechanistically, we found that IL-12 led to STAT4 (signal transducer and activator of transcription 4) phosphorylation and binding to IL-12-driven follicular signature genes. Patients with inborn errors of immunity in the IL12RB1 gene presented with a strong decrease in circulating T-fr cells and produced higher levels of anti-actin autoantibodies in vivo. Overall, this study unveils IL-12 as an inducer of T-fr cell differentiation in vivo and provides an approach for the in vitro generation of human T-fr-like cells.

The first search for singly produced narrow resonances decaying to three well-separated hadronic jets is presented. The search uses proton-proton collision data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb(-1) at root s = 13 TeV, collected at the CERN LHC. No significant deviations from the background predictions are observed between 1.75 and 9.00 TeV. The results provide the first mass limits on a right-handed boson Z(R) decaying to three gluons and on an excited quark decaying via a vector boson to three quarks, as well as updated limits on a Kaluza-Klein gluon decaying via a radion to three gluons.

To the Editor: In their study investigating the presence of autoantibodies against interleukin-23 in patients with various types of infection, Cheng et al. (March 21 issue)(1) found interleukin-23 neutralizing antibodies in 34 of 249 patients. These included 27 patients who had one or more types of infection: 1 with parasitic infection, 10 with fungal infections, and 11 with bacterial infections; 7 of these patients were asymptomatic. However, the authors' data do not support a connection between these infections and interleukin-23 neutralizing antibodies. Causality between the presence of cytokine neutralizing antibodies and an infectious disease can be established if the same . . .

Ongoing, early-stage clinical trials illustrate the translational potential of human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC)based cell therapies in Parkinson's disease (PD). However, an unresolved challenge is the extensive cell death following transplantation. Here, we performed a pooled CRISPR-Cas9 screen to enhance postmitotic dopamine neuron survival in vivo . We identified p53-mediated apoptotic cell death as a major contributor to dopamine neuron loss and uncovered a causal link of tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-a)-nuclear factor kB (NF-kB) signaling in limiting cell survival. As a translationally relevant strategy to purify postmitotic dopamine neurons, we identified cell surface markers that enable purification without the need for genetic reporters. Combining cell sorting and treatment with adalimumab, a clinically approved TNF-a inhibitor, enabled efficient engraftment of postmitotic dopamine neurons with extensive reinnervation and functional recovery in a preclinical PD mouse model. Thus, transient TNF-a inhibition presents a clinically relevant strategy to enhance survival and enable engraftment of postmitotic hPSC-derived dopamine neurons in PD.