In democracies around the world, societies have demonstrated that elections can have major consequences for the environment. In Colombia, the 2022 presidential elections will take place at a time when progress towards peace has stalled and socioeconomic, security, and environmental conditions have deteriorated. The recent declines in these conditions largely coincide with the change of government after the 2018 elections, and the associated rise to power of a party that boycotted the peace negotiations from the beginning. These indicators suggest that 2018 marked the end of a decade of improvements in safety, wealth, and equality-societal factors that can interact with the environment in multiple ways. A spike in assassinations of land and environmental defenders in 2019 and 2020 made Colombia one of the most dangerous places in the world for environmentalists. With the 2022 presidential election, Colombians will once again decide who will govern the country and what new social, economic, and environmental policies will be implemented. In preparation for elections like this, we believe that it is important for scientists with relevant backgrounds to highlight relationships between political events and the environment, to enrich the political debate, help prioritize public resources, and inform policymaking. Here, we provide a multidisciplinary analysis of different socioeconomic and environmental trends that can help inform the public and decision-makers. We intend for this analysis to be useful not only in Colombia, but also to other societies under similar situations, managing biodiversity-rich ecosystems in sociopolitical environments of increasing violence, poverty, and inequality.

Tropical ecosystems strongly influence Earth's climate and weather patterns. Most tropical ecosystems remain warm year-round; nonetheless, their plants undergo seasonal cycles of carbon and water exchange. Previous research has shown the importance of precipitation and radiation as drivers of the seasonality of photosynthetic activity in the tropics. Although data are scarce, field-based studies have found that seasonal cycles at a handful of tropical sites do not match those in the land surface model (LSM) simulations. A comprehensive understanding and model comparison of how seasonal variations in tropical photosynthetic activity relate to climate is lacking. Here, we identify the relationships of precipitation and radiation with satellite-based proxies for photosynthetic activity (e.g., GOME-2 SIF, MAIAC EVI) for the pantropical region. Three dominant and spatially distinct seasonal relationships emerge: photosynthetic activity that is positively correlated with both drivers (36% of tropical pixels), activity that increases following rain but decreases with radiation (28%), and activity that increases following bright seasons but decreases with rain (14%). We compare distributions of these observed relationships with those from LSMs. In general, compared to satellite-based proxies of photosynthetic activity, model simulations of gross primary productivity (GPP) overestimate the extent of positive correlations of photosynthetic activity with water and underestimate positive correlations with radiation. The largest discrepancies between simulations and observations are in the representation of regions where photosynthetic activity increases with radiation and decreases with rain. Our clear scheme for representing the relationship between climate and photosynthetic activity can be used to benchmark tropical seasonality of GPP in LSMs.

Magnetic fields can drastically change predictions of evolutionary models of massive stars via mass-loss quenching, magnetic braking, and efficient angular momentum transport, which we aim to quantify in this work. We use the mesa software instrument to compute an extensive main-sequence grid of stellar structure and evolution models, as well as isochrones, accounting for the effects attributed to a surface fossil magnetic field. The grid is densely populated in initial mass (3-60 M-circle dot), surface equatorial magnetic field strength (0-50 kG), and metallicity (representative of the Solar neighbourhood and the Magellanic Clouds). We use two magnetic braking and two chemical mixing schemes and compare the model predictions for slowly rotating, nitrogen-enriched ('Group 2') stars with observations in the Large Magellanic Cloud. We quantify a range of initial field strengths that allow for producing Group 2 stars and find that typical values (up to a few kG) lead to solutions. Between the subgrids, we find notable departures in surface abundances and evolutionary paths. In our magnetic models, chemical mixing is always less efficient compared to non-magnetic models due to the rapid spin-down. We identify that quasi-chemically homogeneous main sequence evolution by efficient mixing could be prevented by fossil magnetic fields. We recommend comparing this grid of evolutionary models with spectropolarimetric and spectroscopic observations with the goals of (i) revisiting the derived stellar parameters of known magnetic stars, and (ii) observationally constraining the uncertain magnetic braking and chemical mixing schemes.

The Carnegie-Chicago Hubble Program (CCHP) is building a direct path to the Hubble constant (H-0) using Population II stars as the calibrator of the Type Ia supernova (SN;Ia)-based distance scale. This path to calibrate the SNe;Ia is independent of the systematics in the traditional Cepheid-based technique. In this paper, we present the distance to M101, the host to SN 2011fe, using the I-band tip of the red giant branch (TRGB) based on observations from the ACS/WFC instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. The CCHP targets the halo of M101, where there is little to no host galaxy dust, the red giant branch is isolated from nearly all other stellar populations, and there is virtually no source confusion or crowding at the magnitude of the tip. Applying the standard procedure for the TRGB method from the other works in the CCHP series, we find a foreground-extinction-corrected M101 distance modulus of ?(0);=;29.07;;0.04(stat);;0.05(sys) mag, which corresponds to a distance of D;=;6.52;;0.12(stat);;0.15(sys) Mpc. This result is consistent with several recent Cepheid-based determinations, suggesting agreement between Population I and II distance scales for this nearby SN;Ia host galaxy. We further analyze four archival data sets for M101 that have targeted its outer disk to argue that targeting in the stellar halo provides much more reliable distance measurements from the TRGB method owing to the combination of multiple structural components and heavy population contamination. Application of the TRGB in complex regions will have sources of uncertainty not accounted for in commonly used uncertainty measurement techniques.

Experimentally determined major and trace element partition coefficients between majoritic garnet, clinopyroxene, and carbon dioxide-rich liquid are reported at 10 GPa and 1800 degrees C in a model carbonated peridotite composition in the system CaO-MgO-Al2O3-SiO2-CO2. Besides majoritic garnet, the liquid coexists with forsterite, orthopyroxene, and clinopyroxene, making melting phase relations invariant at fixed pressure and temperature conditions. Partition coefficients span a wide range of values - for instance, Sr, Nb, Ba, La, and Ce are highly incompatible in majoritic garnet, while Ca, Y, Nb, and Ho are moderately incompatible, and Lu, Si, Al, and Mg are compatible. Strong fractionation of light rare earth elements (e.g., La, Ce, Nd, Sm) and high field strength elements (e.g., Nb, Ta, Zr, Hf, Th) is seen between majoritic garnet and liquid. The experimentally determined partitioning values are used to calculate compositions of melts in equilibrium with majoritic garnet inclusions in diamonds from select localities in Brazil and Guinea. The calculated melts largely straddle those between documented carbonatites, kimberlites, and alkali basalts, low-degree mantle melting products from carbonated peridotite. This resemblance firmly suggests that majoritic garnet inclusions in diamonds from Brazil and Guinea can simply be interpreted as precipitates from such melts, thereby offering an alternative to the hypothesis that the element chemistry of such inclusions in diamonds can largely, and sometimes only, be ascribed to subducted oceanic crust, and further that, fusion of this crust may limit the terrestrial 'carbon recycling' at depths much beyond corresponding to those of Earth's transition zone. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

In mammalian cell nuclei, the nuclear lamina (NL) underlies the nuclear envelope (NE) to maintain nuclear structure. The nuclear lamins, the major structural components of the NL, are involved in the protection against NE rupture induced by mechanical stress. However, the specific role of the lamins in repair of NE ruptures has not been fully determined. Our analyses using immunofluorescence and live-cell imaging revealed that the nucleoplasmic pool of lamin C rapidly accumulated at sites of NE rupture induced by laser microirradiation in mouse embryonic fibroblasts. The accumulation of lamin C at the rupture sites required both the immunoglobulin-like fold domain that binds to barrier-to-autointegration factor (BAF) and a nuclear localization signal. The accumulation of nuclear BAF and cytoplasmic cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS) at the rupture sites was in part dependent on lamin A/C. These results suggest that nucleoplasmic lamin C, BAF, and cGAS concertedly accumulate at sites of NE rupture for rapid repair.

Total RNA from 20 defolliculated, enucleated oocytes of a mature female Xenopus tropicalis frog Data were extracted from the CEL files, RMA normalized across all samples and converted to Log2 notation with Partek Genomics Suite (Partek, Missouri, USA). These values were labeled as to their source and the groups compared.

Total RNA from 716 hand-isolated germinal vesicles from oocytes of a mature Xenopus tropicalis frog Data were extracted from the CEL files, RMA normalized across all samples and converted to Log2 notation with Partek Genomics Suite (Partek, Missouri, USA). These values were labeled as to their source and the groups compared.