This article discusses the noteworthy discovery of an ichthyosaur vertebral centrum from a Roman pit dating to the third quarter of the second century a.d. at the site of the former Essex County Hospital, Lexden Road, Colchester. The pit also yielded a toilet spoon (ligula) and a potentially disparate associated animal bone group which could indicate the structured deposition of the centrum. The reason it was collected and then curated may have involved Greco-Roman folklore or mythology. Alternatively, it might have been a curio. The east Kent coast between Folkestone and Hythe is suggested as the most probable source of the fossil. This find represents the first ichthyosaur remains found in a Roman deposit and the earliest known instance of the deliberate acquisition of an ichthyosaur fossil.

Understanding how human activities affect Antarctic ecosystems is essential for both environmental management and the interpretation of ecological change. This is particularly important in Antarctica’s ice-free areas, which contain most of the continent’s terrestrial biodiversity and host the majority of scientific infrastructure. While work has been done to understand short-term impacts of research stations and scientific activity, little is known about the persistence of these impacts on soil ecosystems. Here, we examine the long-term ecological legacy of historical research infrastructure in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, East Antarctica. We collected soil samples from sites of historical research facilities that have since been removed, extracted and identified soil invertebrates and conducted statistical and geospatial analyses to identify spatiotemporal trends and evaluate patterns of abundance relative to distance from disturbance centres and time since abandonment. Soils closer to former infrastructure consistently had lower nematode abundances than soils further away, indicating long-lasting impacts of human activities on soil ecosystems. We also found evidence of potential recovery in some nematode populations, which appears to depend on the type of disturbance and the surrounding environmental setting. At several sites, surface disturbance from historical infrastructure is no longer readily apparent but biological recovery remains incomplete, demonstrating that visual restoration of the landscape does not necessarily correspond to ecological recovery. Measuring the impacts of human activities in these areas is important because they may confound our ability to interpret the subtle but significant effects of climate change and ecosystem responses more generally. This is particularly pressing as research and tourism are expected to increase in these regions. We offer ecological explanations for these patterns and discuss their implications for environmental management and conservation in the McMurdo Dry Valleys and other ice-free areas of Antarctica.

In a retrospective cohort study at three Chicago academic medical centers, 22/81 (27.2%) patients with a clinically adjudicated positive C. difficile test result were colonized. Recent antibiotic usage predicted true infection (adjusted odds ratio: 4.38 for infection). Restriction endonuclease analysis(REA) group Y (29.3%) replaced BI (9.3%) as the dominant strain.

Recent changes to US research funding are having far-reaching consequences that imperil the integrity of science and the provision of care to vulnerable populations. Resisting these changes, the BJPsych Portfolio reaffirms its commitment to publishing mental science and advancing psychiatric knowledge that improves the mental health of one and all.

Objectives/Goals: Transmission-blocking vaccines hold promise for malaria elimination by reducing community transmission. But a major challenge that limits the development of efficacious vaccines is the vast parasite’s genetic diversity. This work aims to assess the genetic diversity of the Pfs25 vaccine candidate in complex infections across African countries. Methods/Study Population: We employed next-generation amplicon deep sequencing to identify nonsynonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 194 Plasmodium falciparum samples from four endemic African countries: Senegal, Tanzania, Ghana, and Burkina Faso. The individuals aged between 1 and 74 years, but most of them ranged from 1 to 19 years, and all presented symptomatic P. falciparum infection. The genome amplicon sequencing was analyzed using Geneious software and P. falciparum 3D7 as a reference. The SPNs were called with a minimum coverage of 500bp, and for this work, we used a very sensitive threshold of 1% variant frequency to determine the frequency of SNPs. The identified SNPs were threaded to the crystal structure of the Pfs25 protein, which allowed us to predict the impact of the novel SNP in the protein or antibody binding. Results/Anticipated Results: We identified 26 SNPs including 24 novel variants, and assessed their population prevalence and variant frequency in complex infections. Notably, five variants were detected in multiple samples (L63V, V143I, S39G, L63P, and E59G), while the remaining 21 were rare variants found in individual samples. Analysis of country-specific prevalence showed varying proportions of mutant alleles, with Ghana exhibiting the highest prevalence (44.6%), followed by Tanzania (12%), Senegal (11.8%), and Burkina Faso (2.7%). Moreover, we categorized SNPs based on their frequency, identifying dominant variants (>25%), and rare variants (Discussion/Significance of Impact: We identified additional SNPs in the Pfs25 gene beyond those previously reported. However, the majority of these newly discovered display low variant frequency and population prevalence. Further research exploring the functional implications of these variations will be important to elucidate their role in malaria transmission.

With wide-field phased array feed technology, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is ideally suited to search for seemingly rare radio transient sources that are difficult to discover previous-generation narrow-field telescopes. The Commensal Real-time ASKAP Fast Transient (CRAFT) Survey Science Project has developed instrumentation to continuously search for fast radio transients (duration $\lesssim$ 1 s) with ASKAP, with a particular focus on finding and localising fast radio bursts (FRBs). Since 2018, the CRAFT survey has been searching for FRBs and other fast transients by incoherently adding the intensities received by individual ASKAP antennas, and then correcting for the impact of frequency dispersion on these short-duration signals in the resultant incoherent sum (ICS) in real time. This low-latency detection enables the triggering of voltage buffers, which facilitates the localisation of the transient source and the study of spectro-polarimetric properties at high time resolution. Here we report the sample of 43 FRBs discovered in this CRAFT/ICS survey to date. This includes 22 FRBs that had not previously been reported: 16 FRBs localised by ASKAP to $\lesssim 1$ arcsec and 6 FRBs localised to $\sim 10$ arcmin. Of the new arcsecond-localised FRBs, we have identified and characterised host galaxies (and measured redshifts) for 11. The median of all 30 measured host redshifts from the survey to date is $z=0.23$. We summarise results from the searches, in particular those contributing to our understanding of the burst progenitors and emission mechanisms, and on the use of bursts as probes of intervening media. We conclude by foreshadowing future FRB surveys with ASKAP using a coherent detection system that is currently being commissioned. This will increase the burst detection rate by a factor of approximately ten and also the distance to which ASKAP can localise FRBs.