Fishing damage to cloud sponges may lead to losses in associated fish communities in Pacific Canada.

Glass sponge gardens are important biogenic habitats that support fish communities in Pacific Canada. However, glass sponges (class Hexactinellida) are delicate and susceptible to damage from fishing gear such as downriggers. In this study we document changes in a fish community before -and after damage from a presumed fishing event that resulted in a reduction of 58.9% of the available sponge habitat in a small cloud sponge garden in British Columbia. This habitat loss coincided with a decline of 76.9% of the relative abundance of rockfish, an economically important group of fishes, at the garden. This decline was particularly pronounced in small size classes with the disappearance of juvenile rockfish after the sponge loss. Although based on a single site, this is the first documentation of how anthropogenic damage in a sponge aggregation may impact the associated fish community. Damage from fishing gear is likely most pronounced in small sponge aggregations, like nearshore gardens, where a single event may result in a disproportionately large loss of available fish habitat. Slow regrowth of sponges suggests the habitat availability may be permanently altered at these sites and can coincide with shifts in the localized fish community that may be long lasting on a local scale. Currently sponge gardens do not have any direct spatial protections in the Pacific Northwest, and this work highlights the importance of considering them in future protection initiatives.

Mitigating losses: how scientific organisations can help address the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on early-career researchers.

Scientific collaborations among nations to address common problems and to build international partnerships as part of science diplomacy is a well-established notion. The international flow of people and ideas has played an important role in the advancement of the 'Sciences' and the current pandemic scenario has drawn attention towards the genuine need for a stronger role of science diplomacy, science advice and science communication. In dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, visible interactions across science, policy, science communication to the public and diplomacy worldwide have promptly emerged. These interactions have benefited primarily the disciplines of knowledge that are directly informing the pandemic response, while other scientific fields have been relegated. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientists of all disciplines and from all world regions are discussed here, with a focus on early-career researchers (ECRs), as a vulnerable population in the research system. Young academies and ECR-driven organisations could suggest ECR-powered solutions and actions that could have the potential to mitigate these effects on ECRs working on disciplines not related to the pandemic response. In relation with governments and other scientific organisations, they can have an impact on strengthening and creating fairer scientific systems for ECRs at the national, regional, and global level.

Correction: Mitigating losses: how scientific organisations can help address the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on early-career researchers.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1057/s41599-021-00944-1.].

Using quasars as standard clocks for measuring cosmological redshift.

We report hitherto unnoticed patterns in quasar light curves. We characterize segments of the quasar's light curves with the slopes of the straight lines fit through them. These slopes appear to be directly related to the quasars' redshifts. Alternatively, using only global shifts in time and flux, we are able to find significant overlaps between the light curves of different pairs of quasars by fitting the ratio of their redshifts. We are then able to reliably determine the redshift of one quasar from another. This implies that one can use quasars as standard clocks, as we explicitly demonstrate by constructing two independent methods of finding the redshift of a quasar from its light curve.

Enhanced brane tunneling and instanton wrinkles.

Stringy effects on vacuum transitions are shown to include surprisingly large decay rates through very high potential barriers. This simple yet counterintuitive result will drastically modify the measure on the landscape of string vacua.

Chameleon fields: awaiting surprises for tests of gravity in space.

We present a novel scenario where a scalar field acquires a mass which depends on the local matter density: the field is massive on Earth, where the density is high, but is essentially free in the solar system, where the density is low. All existing tests of gravity are satisfied. We predict that near-future satellite experiments could measure an effective Newton's constant in space different from that on Earth, as well as violations of the equivalence principle stronger than currently allowed by laboratory experiments.