Vertebrate

• The Italian Ministry of Health granted emergency use authorization for SPEAR LEP, Vestaron’s peptide-based insecticide.
• Available for growers in Italy to use on tomatoes from March 28 to July 25, SPEAR LEP is a biological product that targets lepidopteran pests such as tomato leafminer, navel orangeworm, European grapevine moth, codling moth, loopers, and caterpillars.
• An emergency use authorization for SPEAR LEP was granted by the Greek Ministry of Agriculture for use on tomato crops in February 2024.
• “Farmers in Italy and Greece will now have access to a much-needed new mode of action to help them continue producing the food our growing society requires.

• As a pioneer of ecological civilization, Yunnan will prioritize protection of the environment, animals and plants, while utilizing its green resources to develop related industries.
• Back in the 13th century, Italian traveler Marco Polo visited Yunnan and praised Kunming, its capital, as a magnificent city, immortalizing the beauty of Yunnan in his travelogue and sharing it with the world.
• Wang added that the ecological environment is a precious asset of Yunnan, serving as a solid foundation for accelerating development and catching up.
• "To prioritize the ecological environment is to secure the sustainable development of Yunnan and to ensure the well-being of future generations," he said.

• More than 380 million years ago, a sleek, air-breathing predatory fish patrolled the rivers of central Australia.
• Known from at least 17 fossil specimens, Harajicadectes is the first reasonably complete bony fish found from Devonian rocks in central Australia.

Meet the biter

• This group had strongly built paired fins and usually only a single pair of external nostrils.
• Tetrapodomorph fish from the Devonian period (359–419 million years ago) have long been of great interest to science.
• They include the forerunners of modern tetrapods – animals with backbones and limbs such as amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals.

A long road to discovery

• Packed within red sandstone blocks on a remote hilltop were hundreds of fossil fishes.
• The vast majority of them were small Bothriolepis – a type of widespread prehistoric fish known as a placoderm, covered in box-like armour.
• These included a lungfish known as Harajicadipterus youngi, named in honour of Gavin Young and his years of work on material from Harajica.

• There were early attempts at figuring out the species, but this proved troublesome.
• Then, our Flinders University expedition to the site in 2016 yielded the first almost complete fossil of this animal.

A strange apex predator

• Likely the top predator of those ancient rivers, its big mouth was lined with closely-packed sharp teeth alongside larger, widely spaced triangular fangs.
• It seems to have combined anatomical traits from different tetrapodomorph lineages via convergent evolution (when different creatures evolve similar features independently).

• Similar giant spiracles also appear in Gogonasus, a marine tetrapodomorph from the famous Late Devonian Gogo Formation of Western Australia.
• They are also seen in the unrelated Pickeringius, an early ray-finned fish that was also at Gogo.

The earliest air-breathers?

Other Devonian animals that sported such spiracles were the famous elpistostegalians – freshwater tetrapodomorphs from the Northern Hemisphere such as Elpistostege and Tiktaalik. These animals were extremely close to the ancestry of limbed vertebrates. So, enlarged spiracles seem to have arisen independently in at least four separate lineages of Devonian fishes.

• The only living fishes with similar structures are bichirs, African ray-finned fishes that live in shallow floodplains and estuaries.
• It was recently confirmed they draw surface air through their spiracles to aid survival in oxygen-poor waters.

Brian Choo receives funding from the Australian Research Council and is employed by Flinders University. Alice Clement receives funding from the Australian Research Council and is employed by Flinders University. John Long receives funding from The Australian Research Council.

• All have one thing in common: they can make you feel miserable.
• These illnesses often come with fatigue, lack of appetite and concentration difficulties.
• To be successful, they need to rally other immune cells as well as several organs of your body.
• But you can also be more sensitive to negative stimuli, which can easily make you sad and anxious.

That means that the psychological experience of sickness is not just triggered by your brain or the pathogen itself – it seems to be unleashed by your own immune system.

Making people sick for one day

• Researchers have actually shown that such feelings can be brought about without a true pathogen being present.
• My research group, and a few others in the world, purposely activate the natural immune defences of healthy and young volunteers, without using a pathogen.
• And the sickness feelings, including the strong negative emotions that were triggered only a few hours earlier, also subsided within this time frame.

Why do we feel miserable during infections?

• Well, even if you are not fully aware of it, fighting a pathogen requires an incredible amount of energy.
• Both the activity of your immune cells and the increase in body temperature take a heavy toll.
• Do not feel guilty or worried about feeling miserable – it’s only natural.
• And by the way, if you feel miserable in the days following a vaccination… Don’t worry – it similarly means your immune system is at work.

Julie Lasselin receives funding from the Swedish Research Council (vetenskapsrådet), Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, and the Osher center for Integrative Health at Karolinska Institutet.