The U.S. Department of Agriculture–Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) has been a leader in weed science research covering topics ranging from the development and use of integrated weed management (IWM) tactics to basic mechanistic studies, including biotic resistance of desirable plant communities and herbicide resistance. ARS weed scientists have worked in agricultural and natural ecosystems, including agronomic and horticultural crops, pastures, forests, wild lands, aquatic habitats, wetlands, and riparian areas. Through strong partnerships with academia, state agencies, private industry, and numerous federal programs, ARS weed scientists have made contributions to discoveries in the newest fields of robotics and genetics, as well as the traditional and fundamental subjects of weed–crop competition and physiology and integration of weed control tactics and practices. Weed science at ARS is often overshadowed by other research topics; thus, few are aware of the long history of ARS weed science and its important contributions. This review is the result of a symposium held at the Weed Science Society of America’s 62nd Annual Meeting in 2022 that included 10 separate presentations in a virtual Weed Science Webinar Series. The overarching themes of management tactics (IWM, biological control, and automation), basic mechanisms (competition, invasive plant genetics, and herbicide resistance), and ecosystem impacts (invasive plant spread, climate change, conservation, and restoration) represent core ARS weed science research that is dynamic and efficacious and has been a significant component of the agency’s national and international efforts. This review highlights current studies and future directions that exemplify the science and collaborative relationships both within and outside ARS. Given the constraints of weeds and invasive plants on all aspects of food, feed, and fiber systems, there is an acknowledged need to face new challenges, including agriculture and natural resources sustainability, economic resilience and reliability, and societal health and well-being.

Antarctica's ice shelves modulate the grounded ice flow, and weakening of ice shelves due to climate forcing will decrease their ‘buttressing’ effect, causing a response in the grounded ice. While the processes governing ice-shelf weakening are complex, uncertainties in the response of the grounded ice sheet are also difficult to assess. The Antarctic BUttressing Model Intercomparison Project (ABUMIP) compares ice-sheet model responses to decrease in buttressing by investigating the ‘end-member’ scenario of total and sustained loss of ice shelves. Although unrealistic, this scenario enables gauging the sensitivity of an ensemble of 15 ice-sheet models to a total loss of buttressing, hence exhibiting the full potential of marine ice-sheet instability. All models predict that this scenario leads to multi-metre (1–12 m) sea-level rise over 500 years from present day. West Antarctic ice sheet collapse alone leads to a 1.91–5.08 m sea-level rise due to the marine ice-sheet instability. Mass loss rates are a strong function of the sliding/friction law, with plastic laws cause a further destabilization of the Aurora and Wilkes Subglacial Basins, East Antarctica. Improvements to marine ice-sheet models have greatly reduced variability between modelled ice-sheet responses to extreme ice-shelf loss, e.g. compared to the SeaRISE assessments.

Breakthrough Listen is a 10-yr initiative to search for signatures of technologies created by extraterrestrial civilisations at radio and optical wavelengths. Here, we detail the digital data recording system deployed for Breakthrough Listen observations at the 64-m aperture CSIRO Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia. The recording system currently implements two modes: a dual-polarisation, 1.125-GHz bandwidth mode for single-beam observations, and a 26-input, 308-MHz bandwidth mode for the 21-cm multibeam receiver. The system is also designed to support a 3-GHz single-beam mode for the forthcoming Parkes ultra-wideband feed. In this paper, we present details of the system architecture, provide an overview of hardware and software, and present initial performance results.

We undertook observations with the Green Bank Telescope, simultaneously with the 300 m telescope in Arecibo, as a follow-up of a possible flare of radio emission from Ross 128. We report here the non-detections from the GBT observations in C band (4–8 GHz), as well as non-detections in archival data at L band (1.1–1.9 GHz). We suggest that a likely scenario is that the emission comes from one or more satellites passing through the same region of the sky.

Hans Holbein the Younger produced a large corpus of illustrations that appeared in an astonishing variety of Bibles, including Latin Vulgate editions, Desiderius Erasmus's Greek New Testament, rival German translations by Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli, the English Coverdale Bible, as well as in Holbein's profoundly influential Icones veteris testamenti (Images of the Old Testament)—to name only his better-known contributions. This essay discusses strategies that the artist developed for accommodating the heterogeneity of the various humanist and Reformation Bibles. For Erasmus's innovative Bibles, Holbein connected the text to the expansive concept of Renaissance humanist art, simultaneously portraying the new Bible and humanist art as part of a broadly defined cultural-philosophical discourse. Similarly, Holbein's production of Protestant Bibles, most importantly the epochal Luther Bible, associated the new text with the humanist Bible and, in so doing, conceptualized the humanist biblical image as a validation of religious art in a new context. Ultimately, the reliance on humanist art as a cultural authority mitigated perception of the heterogeneity of the text to the point that the publishers of Holbein's Icones completely displaced the text with the daring creation of a new genre: the picture Bible. With the exception of the iconography of royal supremacy in England, Holbein's Bible image was exceedingly movable, an artistic efficiency designed to contribute to the stability of the Bible image across a wide humanist and multiconfessional spectrum.

Ten ice-sheet models are used to study sensitivity of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to prescribed changes of surface mass balance, sub-ice-shelf melting and basal sliding. Results exhibit a large range in projected contributions to sea-level change. In most cases, the ice volume above flotation lost is linearly dependent on the strength of the forcing. Combinations of forcings can be closely approximated by linearly summing the contributions from single forcing experiments, suggesting that nonlinear feedbacks are modest. Our models indicate that Greenland is more sensitive than Antarctica to likely atmospheric changes in temperature and precipitation, while Antarctica is more sensitive to increased ice-shelf basal melting. An experiment approximating the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s RCP8.5 scenario produces additional first-century contributions to sea level of 22.3 and 8.1 cm from Greenland and Antarctica, respectively, with a range among models of 62 and 14 cm, respectively. By 200 years, projections increase to 53.2 and 26.7 cm, respectively, with ranges of 79 and 43 cm. Linear interpolation of the sensitivity results closely approximates these projections, revealing the relative contributions of the individual forcings on the combined volume change and suggesting that total ice-sheet response to complicated forcings over 200 years can be linearized.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has long been recognized as a heterogeneous illness, with a common clinical presentation of progressive amnesia and less common “atypical” clinical presentations, including syndromes dominated by visual, aphasic, “frontal,” or apraxic symptoms. Our knowledge of atypical clinical phenotypes of AD comes from clinicopathologic studies, but with the growing use of in vivo molecular biomarkers of amyloid and tau pathology, we are beginning to recognize that these syndromes may not be as rare as once thought. When a clinician is evaluating a patient whose clinical phenotype is dominated by progressive aphasia, complex visual impairment, or other neuropsychiatric symptoms with relative sparing of memory, the differential diagnosis may be broader and a confident diagnosis of an atypical form of AD may require the use of molecular biomarkers. Despite the evolving sophistication in our diagnostic tools, and the acknowledgment of atypical AD syndromes in the 2011 revised diagnostic criteria for AD, the assessment of such patients still poses substantial challenges. We use a case-based approach to review the clinical and imaging phenotypes of a series of patients with typical and atypical AD, and discuss our current approach to their evaluation. One day, we hope that regardless of whether a patient exhibits typical or atypical symptoms of AD pathology, we will be able to identify the condition at a prodromal phase and institute a combination of symptomatic and disease-modifying therapies to support cognitive processes, function, and behavior, and slow or halt progression to dementia.

The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that orbitofrontal cortical volume would be reduced following anterior cingulotomy for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Whole brain cortical parcellation was performed on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data from nine patients, before and 9(±6) months following anterior cingulotomy. No significant volumetric reductions were found in the orbitofrontal cortex. Exploratory findings of reduced volume in ventral temporo-fusiform and posterior cingulate regions were consistent with chance differences, in the face of multiple comparisons. Therefore, though the circumscribed lesions of anterior cingulotomy have recently been associated with corresponding volumetric reductions in the caudate nucleus, no comparable volumetric reductions are evident in cortical territories. Taken together, these results are most consistent with a model of cingulo-striatal perturbation as a putative mechanism for the efficacy of this procedure. While limitations in sensitivity may have also contributed to these negative findings, the methods employed have previously proven sufficient to detect cortical volumetric abnormalities in OCD. The current results may reflect a relatively diffuse pattern of cortico-cortical connections involving the neurons at the site of cingulotomy lesions. Future functional neuroimaging studies are warranted to assess possible cortical or subcortical metabolic changes associated with anterior cingulotomy, as well as predictors of treatment response.