"RESULTS. Higher plant-sourced nitrate intake was non-linearly associated with lower rates of incident dementia (fifth vs first quintile hazard ratio 95% confidence interval: 0.90 [0.83, 0.98]), while increased risk was seen for higher intakes of animal-sourced, additive-permitted meat-sourced, and tap water-sourced nitrate. Similar associations were seen for source-specific nitrite intake and were more pronounced for early-onset dementia. No clear effect modification was observed."
Abstract: "The gaihōzu (外邦図), ‘maps of outer lands' produced by the Japanese Imperial Army between 1873 and 1945, represent one of the most comprehensive cartographic records of East and Inner Asia. Created during Japan's imperial expansion, the gaihōzu offer rich detail of territories beyond Japanese control. Despite their military origins, the gaihōzu now serve as geographical time capsules, preserving landscapes since transformed by modernization. This study documents the Great Mongolian Road, a major yet understudied east-west caravan route across Inner Asia. Through analysis of the Tōa Yochizu (東亞輿地圖) ‘Maps of East Asia’ series and field verification across 1200 km of southern Mongolia, we document the route's infrastructure for the first time. The gaihōzu capture not merely routes but complete support systems, including water sources, terrain features, and settlements vital for navigation and survival in these harsh arid environments. By mapping this historical corridor, these once-secret military documents provide valuable baseline data for historical geography, cultural heritage preservation, and environmental change assessment across the landscapes of Asia."
Abstract: "Rapid and high-impact journal publications are pivotal for career advancement in the current 'publish or perish' academic climate. In geosciences, such publications often follow catastrophic events like asteroid impacts, global tsunamis, and supervolcanic eruptions. One notable event, the explosive eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai (HTHH) volcano on January 15, 2022, led to six rapid publications in Nature and Science submitted within 2.5 months of the event, and over 200 papers indexed in Web of Science Core Collection in 2022 and 2023. This study quantifies their bibliometric variables and compares them to the bibliometric variables of other catastrophic events like global tsunamis, meteorite impacts, and climate extremes published in 2022. Additionally, survey of corresponding authors assessed opinions on various aspects of publication strategies. Findings reveal that HTHH-related articles experienced significantly faster evaluations and higher citation rates than on other topics, even in top-level letters geosciences journals such as Geophysical Research Letters. Most surveyed researchers viewed rapid publications as beneficial for career advancement but acknowledged the heightened risk of research misconduct. This study highlights the need for balancing the pursuit of knowledge dissemination and career progression with maintaining research integrity and advancing the understanding of Earth systems."
"Significance. The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM; ~56 Ma) was marked by rapid global warming, making it a valuable test bed for the effects of extreme climate change on the environment. Using pollen and spores preserved in a laminated sedimentary sequence, we reconstruct vegetation change at decadal time-scales. Our results, integrated with existing vegetation reconstructions, reveal a widespread geologically synchronous shift to highly disturbed terrestrial ecosystems and biomass loss, that occurred within decades to centuries after massive carbon release during the PETM-onset and lasted millennia. Modeling suggests that carbon release from such perturbed terrestrial reservoirs, including biomass, soils, and buried kerogen, acted as significant positive feedback, underscoring the need to include land carbon reservoirs in future (PETM) carbon cycle assessments."
Abstract: "The environs of other stellar systems may be directly probed by analyzing the cometary activity of interstellar objects. The recently discovered interstellar object 3I/ATLAS was the subject of an intensive worldwide follow-up campaign in its pre-perihelion approach. Now, 3I/ATLAS has begun its post-perihelion departure from the Solar System. In this letter, we report the first post-perihelion blue-sensitive integral-field unit spectroscopy of 3I/ATLAS using the Keck Cosmic Web Imager on November 16, 2025. We confirm previously reported CN, Fe, and Ni outgassing along with detections of carbon chain molecules C2 and C3. We calculate production rates for each species. We find Fe and Ni production rates of QFe=(9.55±3.96)×1025 atoms s−1, and QNi=(6.61±2.74)×1025 atoms s−1, resulting in a ratio of log(QNi/QFe)=−0.16±0.03, which matches Solar System comets well and continues the pre-perihelion trend of declining log(QNi/QFe) with rh. We investigate the radial distributions of these elemental species and find characteristic e-folding radii of 3880±39 km for Ni, 6053±68 km for CN, 4194±45 km for C2, and 3833±45 km for C3. Compared to pre-perihelion measurements, these radii have increased by a factor of ∼6.5--7. Our post-perihelion observations reveal that 3I/ATLAS continues to exhibit cometary behavior broadly consistent with Solar System comets."
Abstract: "We provide the first global, long-run evidence on how war reshapes democratic institutions. Using data on all conflicts since 1948, we show that the onset of conflict causes a large and persistent decline in democracy: institutions weaken immediately, continue to erode for nearly a decade, and do not recover. Yet this deterioration is highly selective. It appears only in first-time conflicts, intrastate wars, highly fractionalized societies, and conflicts that governments win. The decline operates through political channels – media censorship, judicial purges, curtailed civil liberties, irregular leadership turnover, and constitutional suspensions - rather than through any functional requirement of war-making. Autocratization does not increase the probability of victory, and institutional instability reduces it. Taken together, the findings show that war does not require autocracy; it enables executives to expand their authority and implement institutional changes that would be difficult to enact in peacetime."
Abstract: "The Hawaiian-Emperor chain has exhibited two distinct Loa-Kea magmatic groups over the past 8 million years, but their origin remains debated. Using paleographically constrained global mantle convection models, we reproduce the present-day location of the Hawaiian hot spot and the associated spatiotemporal geochemical evolution. The composition of the plume conduit shows conventional concentric zoning prior to the Hawaiian-Emperor Bend and gradually evolves to a north-south bilateral zoning pattern afterward, corresponding to the subparallel Loa-Kea trends. Further analysis suggests that the plume originates from ridges of large low-velocity province (LLVP) induced by the push of slabs. Upwelling at the intersections of ridges is more energetic than at the middle of the ridge, causing bottom-up splitting of plume conduit in the lower mantle that propagates upward, forming bilateral zoning and eventually two independent plumes. This process suggests that bilateral zoning is transient and more common in the Pacific than Africa due to the circum-Pacific subduction."
"Abstract. A ~fivefold decrease in the atmospheric concentration of CO<sub>2</sub> took place during the Cenozoic. This has often been viewed within the context of silicate weathering changes, although the specific contributions of the potential drivers remain poorly understood. Indeed, it has been alternatively argued that changes in the sea floor spreading rate contributed to the Cenozoic pCO<sub>2</sub> decline, although the magnitude of the decrease means that this is unlikely to account for the entirety of the pCO<sub>2</sub> change. One previously overlooked factor is the concomitant change in the major element composition of seawater, especially the concentration of calcium ([Ca<sup>2+</sup>sw]), which is typically viewed as responding to processes such as weathering, rather than representing a driver in and of itself. Here, we present the first detailed record of the Cenozoic major ion chemistry of seawater and show that [Ca<sup>2+</sup>sw] has the potential to control key processes that impact the carbon cycle. Although our record cannot determine whether CO<sub>2</sub> is causally driven by [Ca<sup>2+</sup>sw], carbon cycle box modeling identifies that this may have been the case. Whether or not [Ca<sup>2+</sup>sw] indeed directly drove pCO<sub>2</sub> during the Cenozoic principally depends on the strength of the silicate weathering feedback and the magnitude of any possible changes in organic carbon burial, both of which could overwhelm a [Ca<sup>2+</sup>sw]-driven impact on the carbon cycle. As such, determining the sensitivity of the weathering–climate relationship on million-year timescales is key to resolving whether factors such as seawater major ion composition are important carbon cycle drivers."
Abstract: "Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and cancer are among the most devastating diseases worldwide. Epidemiological data indicate that the incidence of AD significantly decreases in patients with a history of cancer. However, whether and how peripheral cancer may affect AD progression is yet to be studied. Here, we find that peripheral cancer inhibits amyloid pathology and rescues cognition via secretion of cystatin-c (Cyst-C), which binds amyloid oligomers and activates triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2 (TREM2) in microglia, enabling microglia to degrade the pre-existing amyloid plaques in AD mice. These effects of Cyst-C are abolished by a cell-type-specific deletion (Cx3cr1TREM2−/−) or mutation of TREM2 (TREM2R47H) or Cyst-C (Cyst-CL68Q) in microglia. Together, these findings provide significant conceptual advances into cancer neuroscience and establish therapeutic avenues that are distinct from the present amyloid-lowering strategies, aiming at degrading the existing amyloid plaques for precision-targeted AD therapy."
Summary: "Autonomous AI-to-AI creative systems promise new frontiers in machine creativity, yet we show that they systematically converge toward generic outputs. We built iterative feedback loops between Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL; image generation) and Large Language and Vision Assistant (LLaVA; image description), forming autonomous text → image → text → image cycles. Across 700 trajectories with diverse prompts and 7 temperature settings over 100 iterations, all runs converged to nearly identical visuals—what we term 'visual elevator music.' Quantitative analysis revealed just 12 dominant motifs with commercially safe aesthetics, such as stormy lighthouses and palatial interiors. This convergence persisted across model pairs, indicating structural limits in cross-modal AI creativity. The effect mirrors human cultural transmission, where iterated learning amplifies cognitive biases, but here, diversity collapses entirely as AI loops gravitate to high-probability attractors in training data. Our findings expose hidden homogenizing tendencies in current architectures and underscore the need for anti-convergence mechanisms and sustained human-AI interplay to preserve creative diversity."
Original article: "Source-specific nitrate intake and incident dementia in the Danish Diet, Cancer and Health Study" - https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/alz...
"RESULTS. Higher plant-sourced nitrate intake was non-linearly associated with lower rates of incident dementia (fifth vs first quintile hazard ratio 95% confidence interval: 0.90 [0.83, 0.98]), while increased risk was seen for higher intakes of animal-sourced, additive-permitted meat-sourced, and tap water-sourced nitrate. Similar associations were seen for source-specific nitrite intake and were more pronounced for early-onset dementia. No clear effect modification was observed."
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