The Washington Post - 20.10.2019

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A

F. BRIAN FERGUSON/CHARLESTON GAZETTE-MAIL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A lone BASE jumper takes the plunge off the New River Gorge Bridge and into a wall of fog during the Bridge Day festival Saturday in
Fayetteville, W.Va. Hundreds of participants could BASE jump, rappel or zip-line from the bridge during the annual festival, which started in

1980. Thousands of less-adventurous spectators are able to walk across the bridge, which runs 876 feet above the gorge.

FLORIDA

Post-tropical cyclone

Nestor makes landfall

Post-tropical cyclone Nestor
made landfall in Florida on
Saturday afternoon, bringing
tornadoes that downed trees and
shredded roofs in Gulf Coast
towns and a storm surge that
washed over streets.
Nestor was downgraded from
a tropical storm, its sustained
winds decreasing to 45 mph as it
reached Florida’s St. Vincent
Island, the National Hurricane
Center said in an afternoon
update.
“There still is a threat of
severe weather, with potentially
a few tornadoes across the
peninsula as we go through the
afternoon and evening hours
today,” said meteorologist
Andrew Orrison of the National
Weather Service. “A nd there will
be possibly a couple of tornadoes
across coastal areas of Georgia,
South Carolina and southeast
North Carolina as we go through
the overnight hours and into

part of Sunday.”

The drought-stricken

southeastern United States could

actually benefit from the two to

four inches of rain that Nestor

was expected to dump on

Florida, Georgia, South and

North Carolina and Virginia

before moving out to sea Sunday

night, Orrison said.

— Reuters

ILLINOIS

Families cope with

Chicago teacher strike

Chicago parents leaned on

family, friends and community

groups as 25,000 teachers in the

nation’s third-largest school

district went on strike this past

week, canceling classes for more

than 300,000 kids.

For some families, the Chicago

Te achers Union walkout meant a

day off and inconvenience for

parents juggling work schedules.

For the city’s most vulnerable

families, though, the strike

triggered a hasty search for a

solution to help children and let

their parents make it to work.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot and

union leaders said negotiators

have several major disputes to

resolve, including pay and

benefits, class size and school

staffing.

Classes were canceled

Thursday and Friday, and it is

not clear when the first major

walkout since 2012 by the city’s

teachers will end. The two sides

were meeting Saturday.

— Associated Press

Lost Pacific Crest Trail hiker

rescued in snowstorm: Hiker

Robert Campbell — thoroughly

soaked, shivering, his wet

sleeping bag covering him — was

forced to take shelter in a pit

toilet in a closed campground

after getting lost in a snowstorm

in Oregon while hiking the

Pacific Crest Trail. He was saved

Friday by a search team from the

local sheriff’s department, who

found his footprints in the snow.

Heavy snow was forecast

through Saturday evening in the

Cascade Range. “I really think I

owe them my life because... I

couldn’t have made it another

night,” Campbell said from a

motel Friday night in Detroit,

Ore. He said he intends to finish

his hike when he recovers.

2 charged in triple homicide

during drug deal in Missouri:

Two people were charged in the

killings of three people who

police said were shot during a

drug deal at a Kansas City, Mo.,

home. The Kansas City Star

reported that Jackson County

prosecutors charged Lynnsey

Jones, 35, and Victor Sykes, 43,

with three counts of first-degree

murder and armed criminal

action each on Friday in the

shootings Thursday night.

Kansas City police identified the

victims as Larry Barnes, 40,

Brandy Jones, 38, and Larona

Jones, 42. Court records say

Lynnsey Jones told police she

killed all three “because I’m a

bad person.” Sykes denied any

involvement in the shootings.

According to court records,

Sykes was on parole for a Kansas

killing.

— From news services

DIGEST

Politics & the Nation

BY CAROLYN Y. JOHNSON

One key to a longer life could

be a quieter brain without too

much neural activity, according

to a new study that examined

postmortem brain tissue from

extremely long-lived people for

clues about what made them

different than people who died in

their 60s and 70s.

“Use it or lose it” has dominat-

ed thinking on how to protect the

aging brain, and extensive re-

search shows that there are many

benefits to remaining physically

and mentally active as people get

older. But the new study, pub-

lished in the journal Nature,

suggests that more is not always

better. Excessive activity — at

least at the level of brain cells —

could be harmful.

“The completely shocking and

puzzling thing about this new

paper is... [brain activity] is

what you think of as keeping you

cognitively normal. There’s the

idea that you want to keep your

brain active in later life,” said

Michael McConnell, a neurosci-

entist at the Lieber Institute for

Brain Development who was not

involved in the study. “The thing

that is super unexpected is...

limiting neural activity is a good

thing in healthy aging. It’s very

counterintuitive.”

Researchers at Harvard Medi-

cal School analyzed brain tissue

donated to human brain banks by

people ranging in age from their

60s and 70s to 100 or older. They

found that people who died be-

fore their mid-80s had lower

levels in their brains of a protein

called REST that tamps down

genes involved in sparking brain

activity, compared with the old-

est people. REST had already

been shown to be protective

against Alzheimer’s disease. But

researchers weren’t sure whether

REST somehow protected people

from death or was just a sign of

further aging.

Since it is not possible to

measure REST in the brains of

living people, the scientists began

experiments in roundworms and

mice to test whether it plays a

role in life span. When research-

ers increased the activity of a

worm version of REST, the

worms’ brain activity decreased

and they lived longer. The oppo-

site happened when scientists

disabled the REST-like gene in

“Methuselah” roundworms that

have very long life spans; the

worms’ neural activity increased

— and their lives were dramati-

cally shortened. Mice lacking

REST were also more likely to

have busier brains, including sei-

zure-like bursts of activity.

“I think this is overactivity,

out-of-control excitation — it’s

not good for the brain. You want

the neurons to be active when

and where you want them to be

active, not to be just generally

firing off,” said Cynthia Kenyon,

vice president of aging research

at Calico Labs. She praised the

study design but said she thinks

the nervous system is just one of

the many tissues that have an

influence on life span.

It is not yet clear how these

differences in brain activity at t he

level of cells could translate to

differences in cognition or behav-

ior in people. Bruce Yankner, a

professor of genetics and neurol-

ogy at Harvard Medical School

who led the work, said that his

lab is already following up to see

whether targeting REST with

drugs could lead to new ways to

treat neurodegenerative diseases

or aging itself. This line of re-

search could also be of interest in

trying to understand how alter-

native interventions such as med-

itation, which affects neural

rhythms, might work as a treat-

ment for early memory loss,

Yankner said.

“I think the implication of our

study is that with aging, there is

some aberrant or deleterious

neural activity that not only

makes the brain less efficient but

is harmful to the physiology of

the person or the animal, and

reduces life span as a result,”

Yankner said.

The donated brains that re-

searchers studied came from peo-

ple who died of various causes,

making it impossible to know

whether the difference in REST

was related to the likelihood of

death.

Angela Gutchess, a professor

of psychology at B randeis Univer-

sity, said that when people age

and are tested in brain scanners,

there are many changes in activi-

ty in the prefrontal cortex, the

part of the brain where the Har-

vard researchers studied REST.

In some cases, she said, studies

have shown that older adults

activate more brain circuits, com-

pared with younger people, to

complete a task. But the implica-

tion of this change is unclear:

These patterns of activation may

be an indication of a less efficient

brain in older people, or of at-

tempts to compensate.

One model, called “CRUNCH,”

tries to explain changes in pat-

terns of brain activation with age.

It says that when people attempt

harder and harder tasks, more

regions of their brain are activat-

ed, until they reach a crunch

point where they run out of

mental resources. Older people

have an earlier crunch point and

cannot activate as many regions.

Another model, called “STAC,”

says that older adults have varia-

tion in their basic scaffolding of

natural cognitive resources, and

that those variations influence

how and whether people can

engage more neural regions

when faced with difficult tasks.

Gutchess said the new study

was intriguing and a reminder

that to really understand the

aging brain will require connect-

ing the dots among observations

and models from scientific labs

that focus on very different

scales, ranging from human be-

havior to brain imaging to the

functioning of individual cells.

“We need to bridge across

different levels of expertise,”

Gutchess said.

[email protected]

‘Use it or lose it’? Study

links excessive brain

activity to shortened life.

BY SARAH KAPLAN

Brightly colored corals are sup-
planted by dark, undulating sea-
weeds. Familiar fish species van-
ish — to be replaced by unknown
strangers, or nothing at all.
Pushed to the brink by warm-
ing oceans and human threats,
“the places that we used to recog-
nize as coral reefs no longer look
the same,” said Gabby Ahmadia,
director of ocean science at the
World Wildlife Fund.
It’s a metamorphosis unfolding
in ecosystems around the globe.
A sweeping survey published
last week looked at tens of thou-
sands of species counts from the
past few decades and found that
the world’s ecosystems are rapid-
ly reorganizing. On average, more
than a quarter of all plant and
animal species within an ecosys-
tem are being replaced every dec-
ade — probably the result of local
extinctions, the introduction of
invasive species and migrations
motivated by climate change.
In the midst of a global envi-
ronmental crisis, when an esti-
mated 1 million species are said to
be at risk of extinction, the study
offers an important look at biodi-
versity on the level of individual
ecosystems, the authors said. It
suggests that for now, at least,
human activities have resulted
not so much in outright losses as
in large-scale reorganization.
But the function of ecosystems
— their capacity to filter water
and clean air, to sustain the plants
and animals we rely on and ad-
mire — depends on the activities
and health of their inhabitants.
And those qualities are at risk.
“It’s a little bit like we’re play-
ing musical chairs at the mo-
ment,” s aid macroecologist Maria
Azeredo de Dornelas, a co-author
on the report. “You have a lot of

things moving around, and

chances are that some things are

going to end up without a chair.”

The study, published last week

in the journal Science, draws on a

massive new database called

BioTime. The database, which

Dornelas helped build, contains

more than 8 million measures of

abundance on more than 40,

species in roughly half a million

locations on land and in the

oceans.

This richness, said Sarah Supp,

another co-author, allowed the

researchers to sift through global

biodiversity trends and pinpoint

changes happening on a local

scale.

“This wasn’t really possible be-

fore,” said Supp, a Denison Uni-

versity data scientist who special-

izes in biodiversity studies. “But

it’s i mportant because the scale at

which our actions take place are

often much more pointed toward

specific locations, or political

boundaries that are not at the

scale of the globe.”

The researchers were sur-

prised to find that the heightened

global extinction rate wasn’t re-

flected at t he ecosystem level. In a

few extreme cases, the number of

species in a habitat declined by as

much as 20 percent per year. But

on average, species richness — the

head count of species present in

an ecosystem — didn’t appear to

change over time.

What is changing — with

alarming speed — are the kinds of

creatures present.

“This paper really shows that,

more important than just looking

at the number of species in an

area, we need to look at t he identi-

ty o f those species,” s aid Kimberly

Komatsu, a global change biolo-

gist at the Smithsonian Environ-

mental Research Center who was

not involved in the study. “A nd

even moving beyond that, we

need to think about what the

traits of these species would be

and what that means for the func-

tioning of the ecosystem.”

Marine ecosystems, such as

reefs, are hot spots of transforma-

tion, the scientists found. The

waters of the western Atlantic

and the northwest Australian

shelf experienced rates of species

turnover much higher than the

global average. Tropical regions

also seemed to change more than

temperate ones, perhaps because

these already-warm areas have

now been heated to temperatures

for which most species are not

adapted.

There is not enough data from

the preindustrial era for scien-

tists to know how much faster

turnover is happening because of

humans. But evidence from past

research suggests the current av-

erage rate of 28 percent turnover

per decade is at least two to three

times higher than normal, Dor-

nelas said.

To truly understand the conse-

quences of this change, scientists

will have to take a closer look at

which creatures are vanishing

from individual ecosystems —

and who is arriving to take their

place.

Some turnover, such as New

England sugar maples showing

up in northern Canada, may be a

sign of adaptation to a warming

world. Other kinds of restructur-

ing, such as the replacement of

coral reefs by algae, could have

painful consequences.

Ahmadia, who was not in-

volved in the new study, has sur-

veyed reefs in the Pacific Ocean

and coastal Africa. She said this

kind of turnover leads to less-pro-

ductive reefs.

“The composition of the spe-

cies is going to change. They’re

not going to provide the same

benefits they used to for local

communities,” s he said.

In an accompanying analysis

published by Science, ecologists

Britas Klemens Eriksson and

Helmut Hillebrand pointed out

that some of this rapid turnover

may lead to homogenization of

ecosystems. Better-adapted spe-

cies will spread widely, pushing

out native creatures. Habitats

that once served as home to

unique collections of species may

all start to look the same, they

wrote.

The pace and scale of the trans-

formations Dornelas and Supp

describe are potentially grim. But

the study also points to an oppor-

tunity, the scientists said. By un-

derstanding biodiversity change

at a local scale, conservation sci-

entists can figure out how to focus

their efforts.

The study argues that regions

undergoing rapid transformation

should be prioritized for “reac-

tive” conservation measures —

interventions that help species

adapt to their changing circum-

stances, rather than attempting

to preserve a population the envi-

ronment can no longer sustain.

On the other hand, more stable

systems — like temperate forests

— are good candidates for “proac-

tive” protections. By insulating

these areas from human distur-

bance, people might be able to

preserve the diversity that makes

them unique.

“Climate change is happening

now, and we need to be able to

accommodate the reorganization

that is taking place, to some ex-

tent,” Dornelas said. “There’s no

going back in time... but we can

make informed decisions about

what kind of future we want to

have.”

[email protected]

New research shows the ‘musical chairs’

effect of widespread ecosystem changes