Environmental drivers of increased ecosystem respiration in a warming tundra.

Arctic and alpine tundra ecosystems are large reservoirs of organic carbon1,2. Climate warming may stimulate ecosystem respiration and release carbon into the atmosphere3,4. The magnitude and persistency of this stimulation and the environmental mechanisms that drive its variation remain uncertain5-7. This hampers the accuracy of global land carbon-climate feedback projections7,8. Here we synthesize 136 datasets from 56 open-top chamber in situ warming experiments located at 28 arctic and alpine tundra sites which have been running for less than 1 year up to 25 years. We show that a mean rise of 1.4 °C [confidence interval (CI) 0.9-2.0 °C] in air and 0.4 °C [CI 0.2-0.7 °C] in soil temperature results in an increase in growing season ecosystem respiration by 30% [CI 22-38%] (n = 136). Our findings indicate that the stimulation of ecosystem respiration was due to increases in both plant-related and microbial respiration (n = 9) and continued for at least 25 years (n = 136). The magnitude of the warming effects on respiration was driven by variation in warming-induced changes in local soil conditions, that is, changes in total nitrogen concentration and pH and by context-dependent spatial variation in these conditions, in particular total nitrogen concentration and the carbon:nitrogen ratio. Tundra sites with stronger nitrogen limitations and sites in which warming had stimulated plant and microbial nutrient turnover seemed particularly sensitive in their respiration response to warming. The results highlight the importance of local soil conditions and warming-induced changes therein for future climatic impacts on respiration.

Confronting racially exclusionary practices in the acquisition and analyses of neuroimaging data.

Across the brain sciences, institutions and individuals have begun to actively acknowledge and address the presence of racism, bias, and associated barriers to inclusivity within our community. However, even with these recent calls to action, limited attention has been directed to inequities in the research methods and analytic approaches we use. The very process of science, including how we recruit, the methodologies we utilize and the analyses we conduct, can have marked downstream effects on the equity and generalizability of scientific discoveries across the global population. Despite our best intentions, the use of field-standard approaches can inadvertently exclude participants from engaging in research and yield biased brain-behavior relationships. To address these pressing issues, we discuss actionable ways and important questions to move the fields of neuroscience and psychology forward in designing better studies to address the history of exclusionary practices in human brain mapping.

Magnetoresistance of oblique angle deposited multilayered Co/Cu nanocolumns measured by a scanning tunnelling microscope.

In this work we present the first magnetoresistance measurements on multilayered vertical Co(∼6 nm)/Cu(∼6 nm) and slanted Co(x nm)/Cu(x nm) (with x≈6, 11, and 16 nm) nanocolumns grown by oblique angle vapour deposition. The measurements are performed at room temperature on the as-deposited nanocolumn samples using a scanning tunnelling microscope to establish electronic contact with a small number of nanocolumns while an electromagnet generates a time varying (0.1 Hz) magnetic field in the plane of the substrate. The samples show a giant magnetoresistance (GMR) response ranging from 0.2 to 2%, with the higher GMR values observed for the thinner layers. For the slanted nanocolumns, we observed anisotropy in the GMR with respect to the relative orientation (parallel or perpendicular) between the incident vapour flux and the magnetic field applied in the substrate plane. We explain the anisotropy by noting that the column axis is the magnetic easy axis, so the magnetization reversal occurs more easily when the magnetic field is applied along the incident flux direction (i.e., nearly along the column axis) than when the field is applied perpendicular to the incident flux direction.