Fossils suggest early primates lived in a once-swampy Arctic

The Arctic today is a hostile place for most primates. But a series of fossils found since the 1970s suggest that wasn’t always the case.

Dozens of fossilized teeth and jaw bones unearthed in northern Canada belonged to two species of early primates — or at least close relatives of primates — that lived in the Arctic around 52 million years ago, researchers report January 25 in PLOS ONE. These remains are the first primate-like fossils ever discovered in the Arctic and tell of a groundhog-sized animal that may have skittered across trees in a swamp that once existed above the Arctic Circle.
The Arctic was significantly warmer during that time. But creatures still had to adapt to extreme conditions such as long winter months without sunlight. These challenges make the presence of primate-like creatures in the Arctic “incredibly surprising,” says coauthor Chris Beard, a paleontologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. “No other primate or primate relative has ever been found this far north so far.”

Between frigid temperatures, limited plant growth and months of perpetual darkness, living in the modern Arctic isn’t easy. This is especially true for primates, which evolved from small, tree-dwelling creatures that largely fed on fruit (SN: 6/5/13). To this day, most primates — humans and few other outliers like Japan’s snow monkeys excepted — tend to stick to tropical and subtropical forests, largely found around the equator.

But these forests haven’t always been confined to their present location. During the early Eocene Epoch, which started around 56 million years ago, the planet underwent a period of intense warming that allowed forests and their warm-loving residents to expand northward (SN: 11/3/15).

Scientists know about this early Arctic climate in part because of decades of paleontological work on Ellesmere Island in northern Canada. These digs revealed that the area was once dominated by swamps not unlike those found in the southeastern United States today. This ancient, warm, wet Arctic environment was home to a wide array of heat-loving animals, including giant tapirs and crocodile relatives.
For the new study, Beard and his colleagues examined dozens of teeth and jawbone fossils found in the area, concluding that they belong to two species, Ignacius mckennai and Ignacius dawsonae. These two species belonged to a now-extinct genus of small mammals that was widespread across North America during the Eocene. The Arctic variants probably made their way north as the planet warmed, taking advantage of the new habitat opening up near the poles.

Scientists have long debated whether this lineage can be considered true primates or whether they were simply close relatives. Regardless, it’s still “really weird and unexpected” to find primates or their relatives in the area, says Mary Silcox, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

For one thing, Ellesmere Island was already north of the Arctic Circle 52 million years ago. So while conditions may have been warmer and wetter, the swamp was plunged into continuous darkness during the winter months.

Newly arrived Ignacius would have had to adapt to these conditions. Unlike their southern kin, the Arctic Ignacius had unusually strong jaws and teeth suited to eating hard foods, the researchers found. This may have helped these early primates feed on nuts and seeds over the winter, when fruit wasn’t as readily available.

This research can shed light on how animals can adapt to live in extreme conditions. “Ellesmere Island is arguably the best deep time analog for a mild, ice-free Arctic,” says Jaelyn Eberle, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Studying how plants and animals adapted to this remarkable period in Arctic history, Beard says, could offer clues to the Arctic’s future residents.

What you need to know about the new omicron booster shots

Revamped COVID-19 vaccines are poised to do battle with the super-contagious omicron variant.

On September 1, U.S. health officials greenlit the first major update of the mRNA-based shots, reformulated to recognize both the original version of SARS-CoV-2 and the recently circulating versions of omicron. Those mRNA vaccine boosters could start going into arms within days.

“They can help restore protection that has waned since previous vaccination and were designed to provide broader protection against newer variants,” Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a statement after endorsing a vaccine advisory committee’s approval of the shots.
Both Moderna and Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech created boosters that contain instructions for making the BA.4 and BA.5 omicron subvariants’ spike protein as well as the original virus’ spike protein (SN: 6/30/22). Those two variants now account for nearly all the new cases in the United States. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization for the shots August 31. The CDC action means the Pfizer booster is now OK’d for those 12 and older; Moderna’s shot is for those 18 and older.

The European Medicines Agency and Health Canada also authorized use of an updated booster vaccine on September 1. That one, made by Moderna, contains mRNA instructions for building the original coronavirus spike protein and the spike protein from the omicron BA.1 subvariant. The United Kingdom, Switzerland and Australia have already given the nod for use of that dual, or bivalent, booster.

Here’s what to know about the new shots:

Should I get a booster shot?
Probably. The CDC now recommends that all fully vaccinated people 12 and older get the bivalent shot, provided it has been at least two months since their last vaccine dose. “If you are eligible, there is no bad time to get your COVID-19 booster and I strongly encourage you to receive it,” Walensky said.

That recommendation comes regardless of how many boosters people have already had.

“If you perceive this as big change … you’re right,” Evelyn Twentyman, who leads CDC’s vaccine policy unit, said September 1 during the vaccine advisory committee meeting. “We want to emphasize we’re no longer looking at total number of doses,” she said. From now on, the agency hopes to transition into a more regular schedule for COVID-19 vaccines, similar to getting annual flu shots.

The original vaccines will still be used for the first two doses, but bivalent vaccines will replace the old boosters for all but 5- to 11-year-olds. Pfizer’s original vaccine booster is still available for that age group but bivalent vaccines may come later this year for children as young as 6 months old.

There was another big difference this time around: The decision to move forward with the BA.4/5 boosters was made without data from human trials. Such trials are under way, but results won’t be known until the end of the year.
In authorizing the new boosters without clinical trial data, the agencies are treating COVID-19 vaccines more like annual flu vaccines.

Data collected from people immunized with the BA.1 boosters and data from studies of mice inoculated with the BA.4/5 vaccine were used as evidence of the new boosters’ likely safety and effectiveness. The European Medicines Agency said in a Sept. 2 press briefing that it would also use the BA.1 booster to evaluate the new shots.

Why do the shots target the BA.4 and BA.5 omicron subvariants?
“We very deliberately picked BA.4/5,” Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which oversees vaccines, said in a news briefing August 31.

Both companies have tested vaccines based on the omicron BA.1 variant in humans. But BA.1, which caused the massive surge earlier in the year, is no longer circulating in the United States. As of the week of August 21 through 27, BA.5 was projected to cause about 89 percent of COVID-19 cases, with BA.4 variants responsible for about 11 percent of cases.

“This gives us a variant that is most up-to-date, and most likely looks closer to something that may evolve further in the fall,” Marks said. “The more up-to-date you are, the better chance we have of [the vaccine] working for what comes afterward.”

All omicron subvariants share common mutations. But the shape of BA.4/5’s spike protein looks much different to the immune system than other omicron subvariants do, the CDC’s Natalie Thornburg said at the advisory committee meeting. Those differences may train immune cells to build a wider variety of antibodies that can latch onto a broad array of variants.

Mice inoculated with a BA.4/5 containing booster had fewer viruses in their lungs than mice given a BA.1 boosters, Moderna’s Jacqueline Miller said at the CDC meeting. The mice make a human version of ACE2, the protein on the surface of cells that the coronavirus uses to gain entry. Mouse studies of earlier variant boosters corresponded well to levels of protection seen in human clinical trials, Miller said, so the company is hopeful that the BA.4/5 booster will provide good protection, too.

Bivalent vaccines perform better — raising antibody levels higher in people and animals — than ones that contain just the original spike protein or only a variant spike protein, Miller said. The spike protein that grabs onto human cells is a three-pronged claw. With the bivalent vaccine, each prong could be either an original or an omicron version. The mixed claw may expose parts of the spike to the immune system that are normally hidden, Miller suggested.
Why now?
Though the mouse data suggest the BA.4/5 booster will work, some of the CDC advisers said they’d be more comfortable having data from the ongoing human clinical trials before recommending the new shots. That data could be available in a couple of months, so why not wait?

The wait could cost lives and money, computer projections suggest. The COVID-19 scenario modeling hub, a consortium of pandemic forecasters who predict COVID-19 patterns over the next six months under varying conditions, considered what would happen in the United States if the boosters were given in September or not until November. Waiting would lead to 137,000 more hospitalizations and 9,700 more deaths, the researchers projected.

An early fall booster campaign could save more than $62 billion in direct medical costs, an analysis from the Commonwealth Fund projects.

Is it safe?
Based on studies with the BA.1 bivalent booster, yes. That shot produced similar side effects to the original shots.

And it’s also safe to get flu shots and other vaccines, including ones used against monkeypox, at the same time as the COVID-19 booster. In fact, doctors should offer all vaccines for which a person is eligible at the same visit, Elisha Hall of the CDC said.

Some data indicate that the chance of serious side effects, like heart inflammation called myocarditis, happen at similar or lower rates with boosters than with the second doses of the mRNA vaccines. The side effect is rare; CDC has verified 131 myocarditis cases out of more than 126 million booster doses given, Tom Shimabukuro of the CDC COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Unit reported. The rate of myocarditis is 1.8 to 5.6 times higher after a COVID-19 infection than after vaccination for 12- to 17-year-old males — the group for which the condition has the highest risk, the CDC’s Sara Oliver said. Spacing the booster at least two months after the last dose of vaccine may help to head off any increase in myocarditis, Marks said in the FDA press briefing.

“We have a tremendous amount of experience with the monovalent, original vaccine,” the FDA’s Doran Fink said during the CDC advisory meeting. That experience made the FDA comfortable extrapolating data from the BA.1 booster trials to decide that the new shots are also safe.

“We don’t usually have too much clinical information … when we are thinking about changing influenza vaccines,” said Sarah Long, an infectious diseases pediatrician at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia. Much like the flu vaccine remodels last season’s version, the updated COVID-19 booster is built on the same scaffolding as the original version. “It’s part of the same roof. We’re just putting in some dormers and windows.”

Pablo Sanchez, a pediatric infectious diseases doctor at The Ohio State University and Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, cast the sole dissenting vote against recommending the BA.4/5 boosters. Other committee members voted to recommend the boosters, but they voiced reservations about those votes.

“I really don’t want to establish a precedent of recommending a vaccine that we don’t have clinical data on,” Sanchez said. He added, “I’m comfortable that the vaccine will likely be safe like the others,” but having the human data may help counter vaccine hesitancy.

In dark fishing spiders, males’ postmating nap is permanent

Once is apparently enough for male dark fishing spiders. After delivering only half of their available sperm to a single female, males curl up and wait for death.

In the considerable annals of spider sex ending badly, male Dolomedes tenebrosus suffer a fate not described before, says behavioral ecologist Steven K. Schwartz of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Males of this widespread North American species prepare sperm for two matings but spontaneously fall into a spidery version of a coma during the first one. Their legs crumple and their bodies hang terminally motionless without any sign of the female having injured them, Schwartz and his colleagues report June 18 in Biology Letters.
Male spiders deliver sperm via a pair of boxing-glove shaped projections, or pedipalps. Male dark fishing spiders load both pedipalps with sperm, but in lab and outdoor matings, males used only one before curling into a deathlike posture. Even when protected from any female attack, males’ hearts stopped beating about two hours after mating, Schwartz says.

If females eat the inert male, his death may gain him especially abundant or healthy offspring, Schwartz speculates. Or a recently fed female may be less likely to mate with the next suitor that comes along.

As dark male fishing spiders prepare to mate, the male (smaller than the female) rocks the female’s body. When he finally inserts one of his sperm-delivery organs into one of her reproductive openings, he suddenly collapses. He no longer responds when researchers pick up or poke at him.
Credit: S.K. Schwartz

Hubble finds hints of a planet oddly far-flung from its star

A mysterious gap in a star’s dusty shell of debris could be the signature of a young planet circling its sun at twice the distance of Pluto’s orbit. If it does exist, the far-flung planet’s birth may be hard for astronomers to explain.

“If this is a planet, it is extremely challenging for existing planet formation theories,” says Katherine Kretke, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Most planets are thought to begin their lives as small clumps of hot, rapidly moving dust and gas within vast disks of debris that orbit newborn stars. As a planet grows it behaves like a snow plow, scooping up some material to bulk up while flinging other material away, until it has cleared a smooth orbital path.
John Debes, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, used the Hubble Space Telescope to study a disk around TW Hydrae, a 10-million-year-old star located about 176 light-years from Earth.

Hubble images revealed an unmistakable gap 12 billion kilometers from the star, 80 times farther than Earth is from the sun. “It’s very striking,” says Phil Armitage, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “It looks like what you’d expect from a forming planet.”

If the planet’s existence is confirmed, astronomers have their work cut out for them explaining how it got there. Compared with particles in tighter orbits, ones near that gap are less densely packed and move much more slowly, Kretke says. As a result, it would be difficult for a potential planet to accrue enough material to clear its own orbit.

An alternative theory of planet formation posits that clumps of gas within a disk can rapidly collapse together in a process similar to the one that forms stars. That could account for the outer bulky planets recently discovered around the star HR 8799 (SN Online: 12/3/10). But Kretke says that process is capable only of building worlds more massive than Jupiter, while this potential planet would be the size of Neptune or a large Earth.

“No matter how you look at it, if there’s a planet there it’s going to change theories of how planets form,” Debes says. His team’s results appear June 14 in the Astrophysical Journal.

The next step is to find the planet, Debes says, which will be no easy task. Just identifying the gap in TW Hydrae’s disk was akin to seeing a groove in an LP record from six kilometers away; now astronomers hope to find a speck hidden within that groove.

Debes notes that the Hubble photos were taken by a nearly 20-year-old instrument; he is confident that next-generation telescopes will see the planet if it exists.

Ebola thwarted in mice by drugs for infertility, cancer

Two drugs already on the market for other purposes can halt Ebola virus in mice. The findings open the way for further testing of the drugs, clomiphene and toremifene, against the deadly virus.

Scientists screened more than 2,000 drugs against Ebola, a process that required the highest level of safety precautions because the virus is so lethal. Several drugs called selective estrogen receptor modulators showed promise, including clomiphene, marketed as Clomid and prescribed to treat infertility, and toremifene, used to treat advanced breast cancer.
In the June 19 Science Translational Medicine, researchers report that each drug prevented Ebola virus from commandeering cells in lab-dish experiments. The researchers also injected mice with one form of the Ebola virus, and nine of 10 mice given clomiphene one hour after exposure survived a month-long observation period. Five of 10 mice getting toremifene died within 10 days, but the other five survived the month. All mice given the virus without the drugs died within a week.

The drugs bottled up Ebola in a cell compartment called an endosome, which the virus uses as a way station when it invades a cell. How the drugs thwart the virus there is unclear, says study coauthor Gene Olinger, a virologist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Frederick, Md. But the results suggest that the drugs might stop other versions of the Ebola virus and the related Marburg virus, another deadly pathogen. In theory, the drugs would be given to patients and health care workers in an outbreak, he says.

“This is an interesting study, and it’s the way one wants to go with these viruses,” says Stephan Becker, a virologist at Philipps University in Marburg, Germany. Ebola burst on the scene in 1976 with deadly outbreaks in Zaire and Sudan. But it has been a sporadic menace, racking up about 2,300 victims worldwide. Despite a stunning mortality rate, Becker says, the small numbers suggest that the best strategy against Ebola is to repurpose drugs already cleared for other uses.

While testing an established drug for a new use is faster than starting from scratch, Olinger says, approval of these drugs for Ebola might still take five to 10 years. There is currently no cure for an Ebola infection.

Snails trace Stone Age trek from Iberia to Ireland

Stone Age people may have carried land snails on a voyage from the Pyrenees to Ireland, an examination of the snails’ DNA reveals.

Scientists have struggled to explain why Ireland shares some plant and animal species with the Iberian Peninsula, but not with the rest of Europe or the British Isles. For example, Cepaea nemoralis land snails on Ireland’s western coast and in the southern Pyrenees share unique white-lipped shells.

To find out if the two populations of white-lipped snails are related, Angus Davison and Adele Grindon of the University of Nottingham in England took DNA samples from the species all over Europe. The researchers found that snails in Ireland and the Pyrenees share a variation in one gene that distinguishes them from other European specimens.

The simplest explanation, Davison and Grindon report June 19 in PLOS ONE, is that humans journeying to Ireland about 8,000 years ago brought along escargot as a food source. “Other explanations get quite convoluted,” Davison says.

On the trail of a new virus

A new, deadly respiratory virus spreads easily in hospital settings, a team of investigators has found.

The virus, called the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus, or MERS, reminds Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist Trish Perl of SARS. “The cases are eerily similar,” she says. Perl and two colleagues investigated a SARS outbreak in Toronto 10 years ago. This spring, they helped unravel the chain of infection of a MERS outbreak in Saudi Arabia.

By examining medical records and carefully tracking where patients and hospital personnel had been, Perl’s team discovered that dialysis clinics played an important role in the outbreak. One man, designated Patient C, infected seven others, six of whom had undergone dialysis at the same time he did, the team reports June 19 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Patient C caught MERS from patient A, who was staying in the hospital room next door. Patient A ended up transmitting the virus to three people in total.
Once a person has been infected, it takes an average of 5.2 days for symptoms to appear and 7.6 days for MERS to spread to the next victim, the researchers calculate. MERS seems to spread earlier in the infection than SARS did. It is also more deadly.

SARS infected 8,098 people and killed 9.5 percent of them, or 774 people, between November 2002 and July 2003. To date, MERS has infected 64 people worldwide, killing 38, or about 59 percent. In the Saudi outbreak, 65 percent of the 23 people confirmed to have caught the virus died; most were elderly and had other health problems.

Aerial radar sizes up ancient urban sprawl

Laser pulses beamed from a low-flying airplane into northwestern Cambodia’s dense jungles have revealed ancient remnants of extensive, carefully planned settlements of rice farmers. These settlements were part of Angkor, the capital of the region’s Khmer empire.

Angkor flourished from around 900 to 1500, but forests now obscure much of the city’s urban sprawl. Laser technology called lidar has now seen through the jungle to the ground. It shows that, starting around 1100, roadways and canals formed rectangular grids — much like modern city blocks — around Angkor’s central temples and royal palaces, say archaeologist Damian Evans of the University of Sydney and his colleagues. Similar grids containing villages, ponds and small temples spread out far into the countryside over the next few centuries, covering as many as 1,000 square kilometers, the researchers report June 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

New probes of Angkor’s landscape support an increasingly popular idea: The city grew so large that its canals and reservoirs could not provide enough water when severe droughts hit around 1400. Residents may have gradually abandoned Angkor for cities built near rivers, in the region of today’s Phnom Penh.

Cabbage circadian clocks tick even after picking

Cabbages with jet lag are less nutritious and more vulnerable to insect pests.
Fruits and vegetables have an internal clock that can be reset by a daily cycle of light and dark, but storing produce in darkened refrigerators could disrupt this natural rhythm, researchers report June 20 in Current Biology.

Plants, even after being cropped from the stalk, are much more responsive to their external environment than we give them credit for, says Janet Braam, a plant biologist at Rice University. “When we harvest them they’re still metabolizing,” she says. “They’re still alive.”
Braam normally studies circadian rhythms in plants that are growing, but an offhand comment by her son inspired her to turn to the grocery store for new research subjects.

She and her colleagues had previously found that the plant Arabidopsis thaliana schedules production of insect-repelling chemical defenses to match caterpillar feeding peaks. These defenses include compounds called glucosinolates, which are thought to have anticancer and antimicrobial properties in addition to their caterpillar-discouraging ones.

When Braam told her son about these experiments, he joked that now he knew the best time to eat his vegetables. She realized that cabbages — which also produce glucosinolates — might have similar daily cycles even after being picked, packed and shipped.

“So we went to the grocery store, bought some cabbage and put them under dark/light cycles that were either in phase or out of phase with our insects, and then asked whether the insects could tell the difference,” says Braam.

Like Arabidopsis, the cabbage leaves had daily glucosinolate cycles if the vegetables were exposed to alternating 12-hour periods of light and dark. Caterpillars on a cycle offset by 12 hours to the cabbages’ (so the cabbages’ dawn was the caterpillars’ dusk) ate about 20 times more than did caterpillars on a schedule synchronized to their food. Caterpillars also ate twice as much cabbage if the vegetable had been kept either in constant light or constant darkness.

It’s not just cabbages that adjust daily rhythm to better fend off caterpillars; the team found similar results for spinach, zucchini, sweet potatoes, carrots and blueberries. These fruits and vegetables don’t produce glucosinolates, so they must make some other kind of defenses on a daily cycle, says Braam.

The researchers suggest that we might improve the health benefits and pest resistance of fruits and vegetables by storing them under lighting conditions that mimic day and night. But Cathie Martin, a plant biologist at the John Innes Centre in England, is skeptical. She says most postharvest vegetable losses are from fungal infections, not the insects that eat vegetables in the field. And cabbages are sometimes cold-stored for months in the dark before being sold. Cabbages lose the clock-regulated pest resistance about a week after harvesting, the new study shows.

“But maybe I’ll be proven completely wrong,” says Martin. “Maybe one day we’ll all have little LEDs in the fridge.”

Human brain mapped in 3-D with high resolution

A new 3-D map of the brain is the best thing since sliced cold cuts, at least to some neuroscientists.
“It’s a remarkable tour-de-force to reconstruct an entire human brain with such accuracy,” says David Van Essen, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis.

Using a high-tech deli slicer and about 100,000 computer processors, researchers shaved a human brain into thousands of thin slivers and then digitally glued them together. The result is the most detailed brain atlas ever published. Dubbed BigBrain, the digital model has a resolution 50 times greater in each of the three spatial dimensions than currently available maps, researchers report in the June 21 Science.
The difference is like zooming from a satellite view of a city down to the street level, says coauthor Alan Evans, a neuroimaging scientist at McGill University in Montreal.

BigBrain allows researchers to navigate the landscape of the human cortex, the rugged outer layer of the brain. And unlike previous maps, the tool also lets scientists burrow beneath the surface, tunnel through the brain’s hemispheres and step slice-by-slice through high-res structural data.

Around 100 years ago, neuroscientists relied on thick slabs of brain tissue to crudely chart out neural regions. More recently, imaging tools such as MRI have let researchers take a more detailed look. But even the very best MRI maps are still a little fuzzy, says Hanchuan Peng, a computational biologist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.

In 2010, a team of Chinese researchers constructed a digital map of the mouse brain using techniques similar to the ones that produced BigBrain. But until now, no one had done it in humans. Because the human brain is thousands of times bigger than the mouse brain, Evans and colleagues had to massively scale up slicing and computing methods. First, Katrin Amunts and colleagues at the Jülich Research Center in Germany carved the donated brain of a 65-year-old woman into 7,404 ultrathin sheets, each about the thickness of plastic wrap.

Next, researchers stained the sheets to boost contrast, took pictures of each sheet with a flatbed scanner, and then harnessed the processing power from seven supercomputing facilities across Canada to digitally stitch together the images. In all, the researchers analyzed about one terabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes, of image data. That’s about the same amount of data as 250,000 MP3 songs.

“Your laptop would choke if it tried to run a typical image-processing program to look at this dataset,” Evans says.

His team designed a software program that lets researchers dig into BigBrain’s data. Users will be able to pick up the brain, rotate it in any direction and cut through any plane they want. “It’s like a video game,” he says.

Evans hopes BigBrain will provide a digital scaffold for other researchers to layer on different kinds of brain data. Scientists could stack on information about chemical concentrations or electrophysical signals, just as climate and traffic data can be layered onto a geographical map.

The 3-D map could also help researchers interpret data from lower-resolution brain-scanning techniques such as MRI and PET, study coauthor Karl Zilles of the Jülich Research Center said during a press briefing June 19. Overlaying images from these scans onto BigBrain might give neuroimagers a better idea of where exactly damaged tissue lies in diseased brains.

And neurosurgeons might use BigBrain to guide placement of electrodes during deep-brain stimulation for Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s diseases, he said.

Though all human brains have largely similar architecture, Evans says, every person has subtle shape variations. As a result, he’d like to make maps of more brains for comparison.

Now that the teams have ironed out BigBrain’s technical kinks, the researchers think they can compile a second brain’s map in about a year. “The computational tools are all largely in place now,” Evans says.