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The first issue of Nature Reviews Neuroscience was published 20 years ago, in 2000. To mark this anniversary, in this Viewpoint article we asked a selection of researchers from across the field who have authored pieces published in the journal in recent years for their thoughts on notable and interesting developments in neuroscience, and particularly in their areas of the field, over the past two decades. They also provide some thoughts on current lines of research and questions that excite them.

We propose a new approach to estimate the causal effects of maritime traffic when natural or policy experiments are not available. We apply this method to the case of Marseille, a large Mediterranean port city, where air pollution emitted by cruise vessels is a growing concern. Using a recent matching algorithm designed for time series data, we create hypothetical randomized experiments to estimate the change in local air pollution caused by a short-term increase in cruise traffic. We then rely on randomization inference to compute nonparametric 95% uncertainty intervals. We find that cruise vessels' arrivals have large impacts on city-level hourly concentrations of nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide. At the daily level, road traffic seems however to have a much larger impact than cruise traffic. Our procedure also helps assess in a transparent manner the identification challenges specific to this type of high-frequency time series data.

This paper presents, for the first time, the evolution of the local heterogeneous strain field around intra-granular cracking in polycrystalline ice, at the onset of tertiary creep. Owing to the high homologous temperature conditions and relatively low compressive stress applied, stress concentration at the crack tips is relaxed by plastic mechanisms associated with dynamic recrystallization. Strain field evolution followed by digital image correlation (DIC) directly shows the redistribution of strain during crack opening, but also the redistribution driven by crack tip plasticity mechanisms and recrystallization. Associated local changes in microstructure induce modifications of the local stress field evidenced by crack closure during deformation. At the ductile-to-brittle transition in ice, micro-cracking and dynamic recrystallization mechanisms can co-exist and interact, the later being efficient to relax stress concentration at the crack tips. International audience

What controls the location and segmentation of mega-earthquakes in subduction zones is a long-standing problem in Earth sciences. Prediction of earthquake rupture extent mostly relies on interplate coupling models based on Global Navigation Satellite Systems providing patterns of slip deficit between tectonic plates. We here investigate if and how the strongly and weakly coupled patches revealed by these models relate to the distribution of deformation along the plate interface, i.e., basal erosion and/or underplating. From a mechanical analysis of the topography applied along the Chilean subduction zone, we show that extensive plate interface deformation takes place along most of the margin. We show that basal erosion occurs preferentially at 15 km depth while underplating does at 35 ± 10 and 60 ± 5 km depth, in agreement with P-T conditions of recovered underplated material, expected pore pressures and the spatial distribution of marine terraces and uplift rates. South of the Juan Fernández Ridge, large sediment input favors shallow accretion and underplating of subducted sediments, while along northern Chile, extensive basal erosion provides material for the underplating. We then show that, along the accretionary margin, the two last major earthquakes were limited along their down-dip end by underplating while, along the erosive margin, they were surrounded by both basal erosion and underplating. Segments with heterogeneously distributed deformation largely coincide with lateral earthquake terminations. We therefore propose that long-lived plate interface deformation promotes stress build-up and leads to earthquake nucleation. Earthquakes then propagate along fault planes shielded from this long-lived permanent deformation, and are finally stopped by segments of heterogeneously distributed deformation. Slip deficit patterns and earthquake segmentation therefore reflect the along-dip and along-strike distribution of the plate interface deformation. Topography acts as a mirror of distributed plate interface deformation and should be more systematically studied to improve the prediction of earthquake ruptures.

Most stained-glass windows installed during the Middle Ages have deteriorated over time due to climate and pollution. To reconstruct their alteration history over the centuries, evaluate the current environmental risk, and predict their alteration in the future, two modelling methodologies have been used. First, based on the short-term exposure of medieval-type glass in different sites, dose–response functions (DRFs) were established. These DRFs correlate relevant environmental factors (temperature, rain quantity, rain pH, relative humidity, and SO2 concentration) with the response of the material in terms of alteration layer thickness. The second methodology consists of laboratory experiments that aim at parametrising kinetic laws as a function of specific parameters (temperature, rain pH, and relative humidity). These kinetic laws can be extrapolated over long periods, contrary to DRFs. In this study, we compared both methodologies to simulate the alteration of a model stained glass at different European sites or over different time periods. The results highlighted that the kinetic laws were able to closely represent the data, except for the polluted sites where the alteration was underestimated. This indicated that the dependence of the alteration rate on the pollutant concentrations should be included to improve the model.

Collecting relations between chemicals and drugs is crucial in biomedical research. The pre-trained transformer model, e.g. Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), is shown to have limitations on biomedical texts; more specifically, the lack of annotated data makes relation extraction (RE) from biomedical texts very challenging. In this paper, we hypothesize that enriching a pre-trained transformer model with syntactic information may help improve its performance on chemical–drug RE tasks. For this purpose, we propose three syntax-enhanced models based on the domain-specific BioBERT model: Chunking-Enhanced-BioBERT and Constituency-Tree-BioBERT in which constituency information is integrated and a Multi-Task-Learning framework Multi-Task-Syntactic (MTS)-BioBERT in which syntactic information is injected implicitly by adding syntax-related tasks as training objectives. Besides, we test an existing model Late-Fusion which is enhanced by syntactic dependency information and build ensemble systems combining syntax-enhanced models and non-syntax-enhanced models. Experiments are conducted on the BioCreative VII DrugProt corpus, a manually annotated corpus for the development and evaluation of RE systems. Our results reveal that syntax-enhanced models in general degrade the performance of BioBERT in the scenario of biomedical RE but improve the performance when the subject–object distance of candidate semantic relation is long. We also explore the impact of quality of dependency parses. International audience

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) includes a range of hepatic manifestations, starting with liver steatosis and potentially evolving towards non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), cirrhosis or even hepatocellular carcinoma. NAFLD is a major health burden, and its incidence is increasing worldwide. Although it is primarily a disease of disturbed metabolism, NAFLD involves several immune cell-mediated inflammatory processes, particularly when reaching the stage of NASH, at which point inflammation becomes integral to the progression of the disease. The hepatic immune cell landscape is diverse at steady state and it further evolves during NASH with direct consequences for disease severity. In this Review, we discuss current concepts related to the role of immune cells in the onset and progression of NASH. A better understanding of the mechanisms by which immune cells contribute to NASH pathogenesis should aid the design of innovative drugs to target NASH, for which current therapeutic options are limited. Non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) is a serious chronic liver disorder of increasing prevalence worldwide. Metabolic by nature, the disease also mobilizes the immune system. Here, Huby and Gautier discuss current knowledge regarding how diverse immune cell subsets affect NASH onset and progression.