Publications

Aesthetic values are often categorised as a type of relational values, yet their shared characteristics with other relational values remain largely unexplored. To address this gap, we turn to Emily Brady’s theory of environmental aesthetics; her interpretation of aesthetic value exhibits important parallels with the concept of relational values. We then build on this framework when analysing go-along interviews conducted in rural Switzerland. In these interviews, participants were asked about personally meaningful places in nature, which often led them to spontaneously describe aesthetic experiences in nature. We found that central concepts of environmental aesthetics are reflected in the participants’ narratives, such as the ability of aesthetic values to establish certain types of human–nature relationships, the framing of these values by memories or scientific beliefs and the possibility of intersubjective understanding and sharing of others’ aesthetic values. Drawing on the theoretical and practical overlaps in the characterisation of aesthetic and relational values, we propose that aesthetic values, as defined in Brady’s aesthetical theory, can be categorised as relational values. This understanding of aesthetic values as relational values can also inform our understanding of other types of relational values, for instance, by demonstrating a role that imagination could play in framing relational values and proposing a model of how other relational values could be intersubjective. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

This article addresses a pivotal group of abstractions by the American painter James Bishop. During the early 1970s, the artist completed an expansive suite of paintings in oil on canvas in various shades of brown. Situating these paintings as a complex investigation of the limits between self and other, between a certain aspiration to neutrality and the no less powerful claims of the erotic, I suggest they are best understood in terms articulated by the French writer Jean Genet’s ‘What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Little Squares All the Same Size and Shot Down the Toilet’, a text famously published in Tel Quel in the spring of 1967. Special attention is paid to the essay’s provocative assertion that Rembrandt’s late portraits ‘refer to no identifiable person’: that they show us the deep equivalence of all men, a commonality rooted in flesh.

The eusocial naked mole rat exhibits extreme reproductive skew, with a single queen monopolizing breeding through behavioral dominance. When the queen is removed or dies, reproductive suppression is lifted, leading to aggression and intracolony conflict. While this may be advantageous under stable conditions, reliance on a single breeder may create vulnerabilities during environmental stress. Here, we report a longitudinal study of a captive colony identifying a mechanistically distinct, nonviolent mode of queen succession. Elevated colony density impaired pup survival but did not alleviate reproductive suppression or trigger aggression. In contrast, relocating the colony to a new facility caused a prolonged pause in the queen’s reproduction, without social disturbance. During this period, her daughters sequentially emerged as additional breeders, resulting in a period of peaceful plural breeding before one daughter ultimately assumed the primary reproductive status. Thus, reproductive ascension can be socially tolerated when queen reproduction declines, expanding the mechanistic framework of naked mole rat eusociality to include peaceful, fertility-based succession.

Social behavior in vertebrates is tightly regulated through hypothalamic circuits. Molecularly defined hypothalamic neuron types were recently identified to encode social need in a homeostatic manner. Here, we describe a step-by-step protocol for performing in vivo calcium imaging in the hypothalamic medial preoptic nucleus (MPN) using a head-mounted miniaturized microscope (miniscope) in freely behaving mice. This method permits longitudinal recordings of neuronal population dynamics during social isolation and reunion, thus enabling mechanistic studies of social need and social satiety at single-neuron resolution. Specifically, adult mice receive stereotaxic injections of an adeno-associated virus (AAV) expressing a genetically encoded calcium indicator into the MPN, followed by implantation of a gradient-index (GRIN) lens and a miniscope baseplate. After recovery, mice are habituated to the miniscope imaging setup and are subjected to scheduled social isolation and reunion, during which neuronal activities are imaged. Calcium signals are synchronized to animal behaviors for further analysis. This protocol provides comprehensive guidance for in vivo calcium imaging with miniscope in the mouse hypothalamus during social behaviors. It can be readily adapted for imaging in other deep brain regions and across different behavioral contexts. This approach bridges cellular-level neural activity and social behavior, advancing our understanding of the neural basis of complex behavior in freely moving animals.

Mapping behavior of individual vertebrate animals across lifespan could provide an unprecedented view into the lifelong process of aging. We created a platform for high-resolution continuous behavioral tracking of the African killifish across natural lifespan from adolescence to death. We found that animals follow distinct individual aging trajectories. The behaviors of long-lived animals differed markedly from those of short-lived animals, even relatively early in life, and were linked to organ-specific transcriptomic shifts. Machine-learning models accurately inferred age and even forecasted an individual’s future lifespan, given only behavior at a young age. Finally, we found that animals progressed through adulthood in a sequence of stable and stereotyped behavioral stages with abrupt transitions, revealing precise structure for an architecture of aging.

Social information expands individual sensing of resources in dynamic ecosystems, yet why social strategies evolve in resource pursuit remains unsettled. We posit that resource variability along three axes mediates the emergence of collective sensing by altering the value of social information for maximizing individual resource gain and minimizing its variance. Drawing from empirical examples across taxa and scales, we offer testable predictions under the hypothesis that resource variability shapes this dual value of social information. Variance-induced risks to survival represent an underappreciated factor amplifying the value of social signals and cues, especially when resources are patchy, ephemeral, and abundant. This perspective bridges classical ecological models and burgeoning interest in collective behavior, providing the ‘why’ underlying the ‘how’ of sensory collectives.

A crucial factor governing the habitability of exoplanets is the availability of bioessential elements such as nitrogen (N) and phosphorous (P), which foster prebiotic chemistry and sustain life after its emergence. However, concentrations of P and N in planetary mantles vary, owing to initial availability and oxidation conditions during planet formation, and thus their characterization and availability in planetary environments are challenging. Here we use a core-formation model to show that moderate oxygen fugacity during core formation is the key parameter to the availability of these two elements, with the existence of a narrow ‘chemical Goldilocks zone’ that allows both P and N to be present with the right abundances in the mantle. Earth falls within this zone, whereas planets with more reducing/oxidizing conditions will sequester P/N into the core, hindering their availability for life. Future observations refining estimates of the oxygen fugacity prevalent during exoplanet core formation will be crucial to properly evaluate exoplanetary habitability and correctly interpret possible biosignatures.