#Physics 🧪

[hypercubecats]

Page 8 - 11: This issue of The Apple®™ was made possible by the @abluskittle Krita brush pack. Stay tuned for more wacky science adventures!

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[4chilleangel]

ANEMOPARTICULA [anemoparticula]

DESC: “ A gender that, upon seeing anything in regards to their anemia, feels a particular emotion, positive or negative. exclusive to those with anemia. alternatively, a person whose particular experience with their body shape can only be described by their anemia. ”

Do not use this term if you are pro-ED, pro-ana, or any variations.

Coined by Plague Knight (🧪) !!! Hee hee, free to use for any other anemic individuals like us!

Read our pinned for our DNI and boundaries! We are pro-endo and pro-mspec!

NOTES: we actually do have low iron irl, it makes us pretty weak and low on stamina. we just wanted to make sure of our existence <:) flag drawn by 🧪 in ibis 8>

[xtruss]

After 20 Years, Math Couple Solves Major Group Theory Problem

Britta Späth Has Dedicated Her Career To Proving A Single, Central Conjecture. She’s Finally Succeeded, Alongside Her Partner, Marc Cabanes.

— By Leila Sloman, Contributing Correspondent | February 19, 2025 | QuantumMagazine.Org

Kristina Armitage/Quanta Magazine

In 2003, a German graduate student named Britta Späth (opens a new tab) encountered the McKay conjecture, one of the biggest open problems in the mathematical realm known as group theory. At first her goals were relatively modest: She hoped to prove a theorem or two that would make incremental progress on the problem, as many other mathematicians had done before her. But over the years, she was drawn back to it, again and again. Whenever she tried to focus on something else, she said, “it didn’t connect.”

There was a risk that such a single-minded pursuit of so difficult a problem could hurt her academic career, but Späth dedicated all her time to it anyway. It brought her to the office of Marc Cabanes (opens a new tab), a mathematician now at the Institute of Mathematics of Jussieu in Paris who, inspired by her efforts, became consumed by the conjecture, too. While working together, the pair fell in love and eventually started a family.

The problem that absorbed them takes a key theme in mathematics and turns it into a concrete tool for group theorists. Math is full of enormously complicated abstract objects that are impossible to study in their entirety. But often, mathematicians have discovered, it’s enough to look at a small fragment of such an object to understand its broader properties. In the third century BCE, for instance, the ancient Greek mathematician Eratosthenes estimated the circumference of the Earth — roughly 25,000 miles — by measuring shadows cast by the sun in just two cities about 500 miles apart. Similarly, when mathematicians want to understand an impossibly convoluted function, they might only need to look at how it behaves for a small subset of possible inputs. That can be enough to tell them what the function does for all possible inputs.

The McKay conjecture is another example of this principle. It says that if you want to formulate a thorough description of a group — an important mathematical entity that can get prohibitively difficult to study — you only need to look at a tiny piece of it.

While working together on the McKay conjecture, Britta Späth and Marc Cabanes fell in love and started a family. Günther Späth

After the conjecture was posed in the 1970s, dozens of mathematicians tried their hand at proving it. They made partial progress — and in the process they learned a great deal about groups, which are abstract objects that describe the various symmetries of a mathematical system. But a full proof seemed out of reach.

Then Späth came along. Now, 20 years after she first learned about the problem and more than a decade after she met Cabanes, the two mathematicians have finally completed the proof (opens a new tab).

When the couple announced their result, their colleagues were in awe. “I wanted there to be parades,” said Persi Diaconis (opens a new tab) of Stanford University. “Years of hard, hard, hard work, and she did it, they did it.”

The Power of Primes

The McKay conjecture began with the observation of a strange coincidence.

John McKay — described by one friend (opens a new tab) as “brilliant, soft-spoken, and charmingly disorganized” — was known for his ability to spot numerical patterns in unexpected places. The Concordia University mathematician is perhaps most famous for his “monstrous moonshine” conjecture, which was proved in 1992 and established a deep connection between the so-called monster group and a special function from number theory.

Before his death a few years ago, McKay unearthed lots of other important connections, too, many involving groups. A group is a set of elements combined with a rule for how those elements relate to one another. It can be thought of as a collection of symmetries — transformations that leave a shape, a function or some other mathematical object unchanged in specific ways. For all their abstraction, groups are immensely useful, and they play a central role in mathematics.

In 1972, McKay was focused on finite groups (opens a new tab) — groups that have a finite number of elements. He observed that in many cases, you can deduce important information about a finite group by looking at a very small subset of its elements. In particular, McKay looked at elements that form a special, smaller group — called a Sylow normalizer — inside the original group.

Imagine you have a group with 72 elements. This alone doesn’t tell you much: There are 50 different groups (opens a new tab) of that size. But 72 can also be written as a product of prime numbers, 2 × 2 × 2 × 3 × 3 — that is, as 2^3 × 3^2. (Generally, the more distinct primes you need to describe the size of your group, the more complicated your group is.) You can decompose your group into smaller subgroups based on these primes. In this case, for instance, you could look at subgroups with eight (2^3) elements and subgroups with nine (3^2) elements. By studying those subgroups, you can learn more about the structure of your overall group — what other building blocks the group is composed of, for instance.

Now take one of those subgroups and add a few particular elements to it to create a special subgroup, the Sylow normalizer. In your 72-element group, you can build a different Sylow normalizer for each eight-element and nine-element subgroup — these are the 2-Sylow normalizers and 3-Sylow normalizers, respectively.

Sylow normalizers, like the subgroups they’re built out of, can tell mathematicians a lot about the original group. But McKay hypothesized that this connection was far stronger than anyone had imagined. It wasn’t just that a Sylow normalizer could give insights into a finite group’s overall structure. He asserted that if mathematicians wanted to compute a crucial quantity that would help them characterize their group, they’d just have to look at one of a particular set of Sylow normalizers: The Sylow normalizer would be characterized by the exact same number.

This quantity counts the number of “representations” of a certain type — ways you can rewrite elements of the group using arrays of numbers called matrices. Such a tally might seem arbitrary, but it gives mathematicians a sense of how the group’s elements relate to each other, and it is involved in calculations of other important properties.

There seemed to be no good reason why McKay’s quantity should always be the same for a finite group and its Sylow normalizers. A Sylow normalizer might contain just a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the number of elements in the larger group. Moreover, the Sylow normalizer often has a very different structure.

It would be as if “in every U.S. election, you count the votes in general, and in this little town in Montana, they are exactly the same proportionally,” said Gabriel Navarro (opens a new tab) of the University of Valencia. “Not similar, not more or less. Exactly the same.”

But that’s what McKay conjectured — for all finite groups. If true, it would make mathematicians’ lives much easier: Sylow normalizers are much easier to work with than their parent groups. It would also hint at the presence of a deeper mathematical truth, one that mathematicians don’t yet have a handle on.

A year after McKay first observed the coincidence, a mathematician named Marty Isaacs proved that it held for a large class of groups (opens a new tab). But then mathematicians got stuck. They were able to show that it held up for one specific group or another, but there were still infinitely many groups left to tackle.

Proving the full conjecture seemed prohibitively difficult. As it turned out, the next major advance on the problem would require the completion of one of the most herculean mathematical projects in history.

One Giant Leap For Group Theory, One Small Step For McKay

The project — an effort to classify all the building blocks of finite groups — ultimately required thousands of proofs and took more than 100 years to complete. But in 2004, mathematicians finally succeeded in showing that all the building blocks must fall into one of three categories, or else belong to a list of 26 outliers.

Mathematicians had long suspected that, once complete, this classification would help simplify problems such as the McKay conjecture. Maybe they didn’t have to prove the conjecture for all finite groups. Maybe they only had to prove an alternative statement covering the 29 types of building blocks — or for some related set of straightforward groups — that would automatically imply the full McKay conjecture.

“I Wanted There To Be Parades. Years Of Hard, Hard, Hard Work, And She Did It, They Did It.” — Persi Diaconis

But first, someone had to show that this strategy would actually work. The very year that the classification was officially completed, Isaacs, Navarro and Gunter Malle figured out (opens a new tab) the right way to reframe the McKay conjecture so that they only had to focus on a narrow set of groups.

For each group in this new set, they’d have to show something a bit stronger than what McKay had proposed: Not only would the number of representations have to be the same for both the group and the Sylow normalizer, but those representations would have to relate to each other according to certain rules. Isaacs, Navarro and Malle showed that if this stronger statement held for these particular groups, then the McKay conjecture had to be true for every finite group. (“This was during the Euro 2004,” Navarro recalled. His co-authors “didn’t know that I was sneaking off sometimes to see some games. But important things are important things.”)

Gabriel Navarro and two colleagues turned one of group theory’s biggest open conjectures into a tractable problem. Javier Navarro

The trio’s reformulation of the problem was a major breakthrough. Within a few years, mathematicians had used it to resolve most cases of the McKay conjecture. Moreover, it helped them simplify related questions that also involved using one part of an object to study the whole. “Tons and tons of conjectures have now been reduced using this as a blueprint,” said Mandi Schaeffer Fry (opens a new tab), a mathematician at the University of Denver.

But there was one class of groups — “groups of Lie type” — for which the new version of the McKay conjecture remained open. The representations of these groups were particularly difficult to study, and it was challenging to prove that the relationships among them satisfied the conditions that Isaacs, Navarro and Malle had outlined.

But one of Malle’s graduate students was on the case. Britta Späth.

‘Our Obsession’

In 2003, Späth arrived at the University of Kassel to start her doctorate with Malle. She was almost perfectly suited for working on the McKay conjecture: Even in high school, she could spend days or weeks on a single problem. She particularly reveled in ones that tested her endurance, and she fondly recalls long hours spent searching for “tricks that are, in a way, not even so deep.”

Späth spent her time studying group representations as deeply as she could. After she completed her graduate degree, she decided to use that expertise to continue chipping away at the McKay conjecture. “She has this crazy, really good intuition,” said Schaeffer Fry, her friend and collaborator. “She’s able to see it’s going to be like this.”

A few years later, in 2010, Späth started working at Paris Cité University, where she met Cabanes. He was an expert in the narrower set of groups at the center of the reformulated version of the McKay conjecture, and Späth often went to his office to ask him questions. Cabanes was “always protesting, ‘Those groups are complicated, my God,’” he recalled. Despite his initial hesitancy, he too eventually grew enamored with the problem. It became “our obsession,” he said.

There are four categories of Lie-type groups. Together, Späth and Cabanes started proving the conjecture for each of those categories, and they reported several (opens a new tab) major results (opens a new tab) over the next decade.

Their work led them to develop a deep understanding of groups of Lie type. Although these groups are the most common building blocks of other groups, and therefore of great mathematical interest, their representations are incredibly difficult to study. Cabanes and Späth often had to rely on opaque theories from disparate areas of math. But in digging those theories up, they provided some of the best characterizations yet of these important groups.

As they did so, they started dating and went on to have two children. (They eventually settled down together in Germany, where they enjoy working together at one of the three whiteboards in their home.)

By 2018, they had just one category of Lie-type groups left. Once that was done, they would have proved the McKay conjecture.

That final case took them six more years.

A ‘Spectacular Achievement’

The fourth kind of Lie group “had so many difficulties, so many bad surprises,” Späth said. (It didn’t help that in 2020, the pandemic kept their two young children home from school, making it difficult for them to work.) But gradually, she and Cabanes managed to show that the number of representations for these groups matched those of their Sylow normalizers — and that the way the representations matched up satisfied the necessary rules. The last case was done. It followed automatically that the McKay conjecture was true.

In October 2023, they finally felt confident enough in their proof to announce it to a room of more than 100 mathematicians. A year later, they posted it online (opens a new tab) for the rest of the community to digest. “It’s an absolutely spectacular achievement,” said Radha Kessar (opens a new tab) of the University of Manchester.

Mathematicians can now confidently study important properties of groups by looking at their Sylow normalizers alone — a much easier approach to making sense of these abstract entities, and one that might have practical applications. And in the process of establishing this connection, Navarro said, the researchers developed “beautiful, wonderful, deep mathematics.”

Other mathematicians now hope to explore the even deeper conceptual reason why the strange coincidence McKay uncovered is true. Although Späth and Cabanes have proved it, mathematicians still don’t understand why a comparatively tiny set is enough to tell you so much about its larger parent group.

“There has to be some structural reason why these numbers are the same,” Kessar said.

Some mathematicians have done preliminary work to try to understand this connection, but so far it remains a mystery.

Späth and Cabanes are moving on, each searching for their next obsession. So far, according to Späth, nothing has consumed her like the McKay conjecture. “If you have done one big thing, then it’s difficult to find the courage, the excitement for the next,” she said. “It was such a fight sometimes. It also gave you, every day, a purpose.”

[latestdreamgirl]

True! he IS beautiful!

[the-unofficial-village-idiot]

(Feeling extra mentally ill and dehydrated this evening) do you guys think gus was touch starved

[scienceroach]

verses tag dump bc my stupid ass never did that

🧪 // v ; childhood / i was but a little lad ; my head filled with dreams of particle physics and candy 🧪 // v ; human / this handsome fella is doctor cockroach ph.d ; the most brilliant man in the world 🧪 // v ; post mutation / science doesn't have to be practical ; it has to be science 🧪 // v ; imprisonment / no monster has ever gotten out of here 🧪 // v ; movie / the only way to save the earth is to blow up the ship before the invasion starts 🧪 // v ; post movie / count me in too ! 🧪 // v ; city of the dead / welcome to the city of the dead where the lost are found 🧪 // v ; dance with the devil / don't you dare look at him in the eye as we dance with the devil tonight 🧪 // v ; world domination / they tell me i'm a god ; i'm lost in the facade 🧪 // v ; crossover / if i didn't have a cockroach head myself ; i'd be freaking out right now

[advnterccs-archive]

what horror trope are you?

the monster

it was not your fault– at first, at least. you can not help being the way you are. and even if you could, would you choose to change? they met you with torches raised and screaming mouths, the only choice you had was to flee. but you will not stay away forever. they whisper your name in fear, and you will make sure you hurt them just as much as they hurt you.

the lover

love has brought you to this place, and it will not let you leave. fear clutches you, constricts you, and it will have you killed– and yet, it is still no match for the bounty of your heart. you will try as hard as you can to protect the object of your affections. evil is nothing in the face of your warmth. even if you are successful in protecting your lover, that does not guarantee your own survival. your heart has doomed you, but what greater death is there than dying for love?

TAGGED BY: @countlessrealities !! <3 TAGGING: no one, just steal it from me

[boundbyshimmer]

There's a snow storm rolling in about now that's gonna make the roads unable to be used for a day or so here, so I'm taking advantage of that to imagine forcing Silco to take a personal day from his busy schedule to spend it entirely nice and warm under the covers with me <3

I'm still quite sick though and the last thing I want is to get him sick too, but he doesn't give me a choice, he will take care of me and give me all the affection in the world, damn it :,)

[grrlscientist]

The seventh starling (Murmuration)

What do particle physics, statistics and poetry have in common? (includes videos)

by @grrlscientist via Substack

[torchiiko]

the worst thing u can do as a selfshipper is look up merch of ur f/os online bc i do Not have enough money to buy a $40 handmade plush and several $10+ keychains

[loveemagicpeace]

🎈Jupiter & Your Spouse🎱

🎈Jupiter is the planet that indicates what characteristics your husband/wife will have. Which zodiac sign can it be and where can you meet the person.🎈

❤️‍🔥Jupiter in the 1st house - your spouse can be fiery, independent, intense, daring, fearless. Can have a lot of energy and can also invest a lot in things he is passionate about. It gives a lot to the appearance. A person's energy and expression can mean a lot to him. A spouse may like someone who is fearless or a risk-taker himself. Having Jupiter in the first house indicates that the right partner can help you discover your true self and bring out your best qualities. They expand your sense of self and can make you feel very self-assured. You can meet your spouse at an event, sporting event, competition or somewhere related to you. You can just when you go outside the comfort zone.

🤎Jupiter in 2nd house- your spouse can be stable, materialistic, stubborn, likes comfort, luxury, money. Can spends a lot on food, movies, music and above all enjoyment. Determined and fixed. Your partner will be vocal about their beliefs and seek a partner who shares their perspective. You can meet a spouse at the bank, at a concert, in the cinema, or at a hotel. You could also meet them out in public while indulging in your favorite things.

🧪 Jupiter in 3rd house - your spouse can be communicative, talkative, intelligent, quick to respond, rational, likes many different things and topics. Spouse can put a lot on communication and the mind. He could be younger than you. This gives you good and understanding partners, and they will support you in every phase. You also tend to attract overly complicated relationships that can cause you a headache. Jupiter in the third house shows you might fall in love with someone you grew up with, like a classmate from school, a neighbor, or a family friend. You can meet a spouse through siblings, relatives, at school, quizzes, social games, it can also be your neighbor, roommate.

⛵️Jupiter in 4th house- your spouse can be caring, compassionate, emotional, can help you and is always there for you. A person who values ​​privacy and likes to be at home or in the comfort zone. A person who gives a lot to family and home. Can be very protective and tough. Sometimes also capricious. You can meet them through your mother, close people, at a house party, in your home environment, somewhere near where you live, dinner party or out walking your dog or housewarming hosted by friends.

🎡Jupiter in the 5th house - your spouse can be proud, playful, strong, always carry an inner child, loud, fun, romantic. He gives a lot to hobbies, fun, socializing. He likes things that are light and pleasant. Can be warm, confident, determined, generous and also selfish. It indicates that your future spouse will be the center of attention, an outgoing person who is widely known. You can meet them at some activities, casino, can also be love at first sight, at the summer time, out on the town, whether dancing, singing karaoke, or exploring a new city with your friends.

🖼️Jupiter in the 6th house - your spouse is caring, takes care of health, can be a perfectionist, sees details, hardworking, organized, critical. It gives a lot to lifestyle and movement. He knows what he wants out of life. He might seem particular to some, but he's just the right brand of neurotic for you. You can meet them at work, in your everyday life (for example, in a store, pharmacy, physical exercises, fitness center), at the doctor's.

🧸Jupiter in the 7th house - your spouse is romantic, harmonious, fair, balanced. A spouse can give a lot of peace and attitude around him. The spouse can be harmonious, beautiful and like orderliness and beauty from the outside and from the inside. He knows how to see the beauty in everything. Marriage is important to him. You can meet them at a beauty competition, through friends, you can also through your ex, in court.

🦋Jupiter in the 8th house - your spouse can be intense, mysterious, deep, persistent, obsessive, self-sacrificing. Does everything for the people he loves. A spouse can give a lot on privacy, secrets, sharing things with another person. It may be important for them to share everything with you. You can meet them in the financial administration, deeper places, secret places, intimate places, can also be your psychologist or meet them there. You may meet them at a spiritual retreat, religious gathering, or group event where you can meet like-minded individuals.

🪂Jupiter in the 9th house - your spouse can be optimistic, happy, religious, even from another country, adventurous, open, direct, passionate. It can have a lot of life in it. Live in the moment and for the moment. A spouse can give a lot to education, novelty, innovation. Can always support you in everything you do. You can meet them on a trip, adventure parks, church, at someone's wedding, university, lecture.

🎱Jupiter in the 10th house - your spouse can be determined, strong, powerful, serious, responsible, older, more mature, hard-working. It can be someone who is recognizable and a public figure. Jupiter here make spouses more responsible and loving. They just aren't dominant or commanding by nature. On the flip side, no matter what transpires in their lives, these gentlemen will always encourage and believe in their spouses. You can meet them in a public place, public institutions, through parents, father or grandfather.

🪁Jupiter in the 11th house - your spouse is unique, different, dreamy. He always has a set goal and vision. A free person who gives a lot to independence. Can be a person who is sociable or can be a loner. Very smart and intelligent. Can also be famous on social networks. Different from the others. Someone who is smart and intelligent and know all about social media and can also be a logical person who think with logical mind. They may be your best friend. You can meet them through friends, social networks, lonely places, can also be in unpredictable way.

🛼Jupiter in the 12th house - your spouse can be spiritual, dreamy, emotional, compassionate, kind. A person who gives a lot to dreams and fantasy. A person who care for others. Can also be very artistic person. Here it is necessary to make sure that the person is not manipulative or addicted to drugs. The image of a person sometimes is not the way they present themselves at first. you can actually find out all of things about them later. So it's important that you get to know the person. You can meet them at a dance, art club, gallery, hospital, prison.

🎸For personal readings u can sign up here: https://snipfeed.co/bekylibra 🎸

-Rebekah🫧🦋🛼

[kurishiri]

ikémen villains content warning list .ᐟ

this is a work-in-progress compilation of complete content warnings per route (because ikévil tends to underwarn a bit maybe to avoid spoilers) that will be updated as we go. please let me know if I missed anything, regardless if it says ‘work in progress’ or not, or pitch in with warnings. ♡ and ↻ are appreciated!

some of the ikévil routes contain sensitive themes that may be triggering. so please remember to take care of yourself while reading 🫶

GENERAL ༉‧��˚. 🕊️

canon-typical violence, (minor but named) character death, depictions of murder.

────────────────────

WILLIAM REX ༉‧₊˚. 🍓

near death experience, drug abuse, sexual coercion (not by love interest), corruption, romanticization of death.

───────── 〔🌹〕 ─────────

HARRISON GRAY ༉‧₊˚. 🦊

corruption of the police and higher-ups, mentions of human trafficking, coercion to commit crimes, mentions of kidnapping.

───────── 〔🍧〕 ─────────

LIAM EVANS ༉‧₊˚. 🐈

attempted suicide, suicide and suicidal ideation, depression, anxiety, implied self-harm, mentions of child abuse (physical and emotional), fire, severe burn wounds, human trafficking, mental breakdowns.

───────── 〔🎟️〕 ─────────

ELBERT GREETIA ༉‧₊˚. 🍎

objectification both by and against love interest, mentions of sexual assault or rape (not by love interest), domestic abuse, attempted child sexual assault, pedophilia, obsessive and possessive behavior, stalkerish behavior, grooming, non-consensual touching, depicted suicide, self-harm, mental breakdowns, mentions of animal death, kidnapping, mentions of human trafficking.

───────── 〔🦋〕 ─────────

ALFONS SYLVATICA ༉‧₊˚. 🪞

description of children’s corpses, symptoms of depression, topics of mortality, attempted suicide, near death experience, self-harm, mental manipulation (?), dub-con: having sexual intercourse while one has “consented” in an intoxicated state or under the influence of a curse, (perceived) non-con, mentions of drug abuse and the effects of drugs, mentions of child abuse or labor, implied animal torture and death.

───────── 〔🐈‍⬛〕 ─────────

ELLIS TWILIGHT ༉‧₊˚. ⛓️ —— warnings provided by @myusuchaa !!

romanticization of murder and death, family murder and death, suppressed emotions, emotional disconnect, people pleasing, attempted kidnapping, negative treatment of disabilities, coercion, child trafficking, gang activity.

───────── 〔🥀〕 ─────────

ROGER BAREL ༉‧₊˚. 🍻

a loott of alcohol consumption, drug usage or abuse (recreational drug use), cult activity, near/death experience of a side character, dub-con, self-harm especially in the past.

───────── 〔🧪〕 ─────────

JUDE JAZZA ༉‧₊˚. ⌛️ —— w. i. p. ┊ warnings provided by @judesmoonbeauty !!

smoking, torture, mentions of drugs and human trafficking, neglect and child abuse, mentions of a child’s death and the death of a family member.

[xtruss]

Improving Climate Predictions By Unlocking The Secrets of Soil Microbes

— By Julie Bobyock, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory | February 5, 2024

Overview of DEBmicroTrait. Credit: Nature Microbiology (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41564-023-01582-W

Climate models are essential to predicting and addressing climate change, but can fail to adequately represent soil microbes, a critical player in ecosystem soil carbon sequestration that affects the global carbon cycle.

A team of scientists led by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has developed a new model that incorporates genetic information from microbes. This new model enables the scientists to better understand how certain soil microbes efficiently store carbon supplied by plant roots, and could inform agricultural strategies to preserve carbon in the soil in support of plant growth and climate change mitigation.

"Our research demonstrates the advantage of assembling the genetic information of microorganisms directly from soil. Previously, we only had information about a small number of microbes studied in the lab," said Berkeley Lab Postdoctoral Researcher Gianna Marschmann, the paper's lead author.

"Having genome information allows us to create better models capable of predicting how various plant types, crops, or even specific cultivars can collaborate with soil microbes to better capture carbon. Simultaneously, this collaboration can enhance soil health."

This research is described in a new paper that was recently published in the journal Nature Microbiology. The corresponding authors are Eoin Brodie of Berkeley Lab, and Jennifer Pett-Ridge of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, who leads the "Microbes Persist" Soil Microbiome Scientific Focus Area project.

Seeing the Unseen: Microbial Impact on Soil Health and Carbon

Soil microbes help plants access soil nutrients and resist drought, disease, and pests. Their impacts on the carbon cycle are particularly important to represent in climate models because they affect the amount of carbon stored in soil or released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide during the process of decomposition.

By building their own bodies from that carbon, microbes can stabilize (or store) it in the soil, and influence how much, and for how long carbon remains stored belowground. The relevance of these functions to agriculture and climate are being observed like never before.

However, with just one gram of soil containing up to 10 billion microorganisms and thousands of different species, the vast majority of microbes have never been studied in the lab. Until recently, the data scientists had to inform these models came from only a tiny minority of lab-studied microbes, with many unrelated to those needing representation in climate models.

"This is like building an ecosystem model for a desert based on information from plants that only grow in a tropical forest," explained Brodie.

The World 🌎 Beneath Our Feet 🦶🦶

To address this challenge, the team of scientists used genome information directly to build a model capable of being tailored to any ecosystem in need of study, from California's grasslands to thawing permafrost in the Arctic. With the model using genomes to provide insights into how soil microbes function, the team applied this approach to study plant-microbiome interactions in a California rangeland. Rangelands are economically and ecologically important in California, making up more than 40% of the land area.

Research focused on the microbes living around plant roots (called the rhizosphere). This is an important environment to study because, despite being only 1-2% of Earth's soil volume, this root zone is estimated to hold up to 30-40% of Earth's carbon stored in soils, with much of that carbon being released by roots as they grow.

To build the model, scientists simulated microbes growing in the root environment, using data from the University of California Hopland Research and Extension Center. Nevertheless, the approach is not limited to a particular ecosystem. Since certain genetic information corresponds to specific traits, just as in humans, the relationship between the genomes (what the model is based on) and the microbial traits is transferable to microbes and ecosystems all over the world.

The team developed a new way to predict important traits of microbes affecting how quickly they use carbon and nutrients supplied by plant roots. Using the model, the researchers demonstrated that as plants grow and release carbon, distinct microbial growth strategies emerge because of the interaction between root chemistry and microbial traits.

In particular, they found that microbes with a slower growth rate were favored by types of carbon released during later stages of plant development and were surprisingly efficient in using carbon—allowing them to store more of this key element in the soil.

The Root of the Matter

This new observation provides a basis for improving how root-microbe interactions are represented in models, and enhances the ability to predict how microbes impact changes to the global carbon cycle in climate models.

"This newfound knowledge has important implications for agriculture and soil health. With the models we are building, it is increasingly possible to leverage new understanding of how carbon cycles through soil. This in turn opens up possibilities to recommend strategies for preserving valuable carbon in the soil to support biodiversity and plant growth at scales feasible to measure the impact," Marschmann said.

The research highlights the power of using modeling approaches based on genetic information to predict microbial traits that can help shed light on the soil microbiome and its impact on the environment.

[latestdreamgirl]

i shuold really put together a compilation of my fav doom covers sometime ... ~_~ i have soo many covers w him that i love but . i end up forgetting them allllll the time

[the-unofficial-village-idiot]

I just keep thinking about the way lalo describes gus