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In a fruit fly, nerve cells that detect limb movement are silenced when the insect walks or grooms. This on-off switch may help the nervous system to shift between two states: one helps keep the body steady and the other readies it to move. 

UW Medicine neuroscientist John Tuthill explained the difference through a human analogy: “Stabilizing reflexes enable us, for example, to stay upright on a swaying train, while the active mode supports dynamic motions like walking across uneven terrain.”

“All animals possess a sense of their body’s position and motion, known as proprioception, which is used to stabilize their body posture and guide their movements,” he said.

Tuthill is a professor of neurobiology and biophysics at the University of Washington School of Medicine. His lab studies the cells, signals and circuits that govern proprioception and motor control in flies.

Led by his former postdoctoral fellow Chris Dallmann, the research resulting in the new findings was reported Sept. 17 in Nature. 

The researchers showed that proprioceptive nerve cells for sensing leg motion are deactivated during active movement. They also discovered the neural circuit that gives rise to this state-dependent switch, which the brain uses to toggle between maintaining postural reflexes and sustaining voluntary movement. 

The fly’s ability to selectively suppress movement feedback, the researchers surmised, could make the insect more sensitive to sudden external events that would perturb it, and therefore quicker to respond. 

Advancing basic scientific knowledge of the sensory feedback that is flexibly tuned to manage these dual tasks may lay the foundation for future clinical applications. 

“Understanding how proprioception is used to control the body is important for developing treatments for sensorimotor disorders and supporting rehabilitation after injury,” Tuthill said. 

While carrying out this recent study in fruit flies, Tuthill’s lab used cell-type specific calcium imaging to learn that position-detecting nerve cell projections operate across a range of behaviors. The inhibition of movement feedback during walking and grooming occurred via a specific class of nerve cells – interneurons – that function as a liaison between sensory neurons and motor neurons. 

This selective suppression took place only during active, self-directed movements by the insect, not passive movements of the insect’s limbs. The researchers traced the nerve-signaling pathways that conduct this inhibition in a leg-specific manner.

The researchers indicated that certain findings suggest the inhibition may be carried out predictively when the leg is still at rest, after the interneurons receive signals from the brain and before the onset of movement. 

Dallmann is continuing his research on how neural circuits control movement as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Wuerzburg, Germany. 

This study was supported by a postdoctoral research fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) project 432196121, a Searle Scholar Award, a Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship, a Pew Biomedical Scholar Award, a McKnight Scholar Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the New York Stem Cell Foundation and NIH grants R01NS102333, U19NS104655 and K99NS117657. Tuthill is a New York Stem Cell Foundation Robertson Investigator.

Women, non-native English speakers and those from lower-income countries published fewer English-language peer-reviewed papers than men, native English speakers and those from higher-income countries, according to a study published September 18^th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Tatsuya Amano from The University of Queensland, Australia, and colleagues.

UNESCO posits that ” all scientists … have equal opportunity to access, contribute to and benefit from science, regardless of origin or circumstance .” However, research reports rampant inequities; for example, women are less likely to hold a tenured position, scientists from lower-income countries are less funded than their higher-income counterparts and non-native English speakers experience language-related rejection up to 2.6 times more often than native English speakers. While science undoubtedly benefits from diverse people, ideas and approaches, few studies have assessed how gender, language and income affect scientific productivity.

To quantify barriers faced by scientists identifying as women, non-native English speakers and those from low-income countries, Amano surveyed 908 environmental scientists at varying career stages across eight nationalities: Bangladeshi, Bolivian, British, Japanese, Nepali, Nigerian, Spanish, and Ukrainian. Amano measured each scientist’s productivity, defined as their total number of English and non-English publications.

Results revealed that women — especially early-career women — published 45% fewer English-language papers than men. Women with non-English first languages published 60% fewer papers, and women with non-English first languages from low-income countries published 70% fewer, compared to men with English as the first language from high-income countries.

When the researchers factored in English and non-English scientific publications, they noticed the proportions change. Non-native English speakers at early to mid-career stages published more peer-reviewed papers than native English speakers. Additionally, scientists from lower-income countries published more papers than those from higher-income countries. Even with English and non-English papers combined, women still published fewer articles than men.

The researchers write that these statistics could be erroneously used to position women, non-native English speakers and those from low-income countries as less scientifically productive. They call for an explicit effort to consider gender, income and native language and support incorporating non-English-language publications when assessing scientists’ performance.

The authors add, “This study highlights how language, economic status, and gender combine to create a significant and often overlooked productivity gap in science, especially when measured by English-language publications. We believe that this gap is not a true reflection of individual productivity. Rather, as a growing body of evidence shows, it stems from systemic barriers that continue to limit fair participation and full contribution to science by historically and currently underrepresented groups.”

In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology: https://plos.io/4mJfCGw

Citation: Amano T, Ramírez-Castañeda V, Berdejo-Espinola V, Borokini I, Chowdhury S, Golivets M, et al. (2025) Language, economic and gender disparities widen the scientific productivity gap. PLoS Biol 23(8): e3003372. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003372

Author countries: Australia, United States, Germany, Colombia, Nepal, United Kingdom

Funding: This work was supported by the following grants: Australian Research Council Future Fellowship FT180100354 (TA, V.B.-E.), Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP230101734 (TA, V.B.-E.), University of Queensland strategic funding (TA), and German Research Foundation (DFG-FZT 118, 202548816) (SC). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

GJ 536 is a low-mass star, located 10 pc away from the Sun, that hosts a low-mass planet orbiting with a period of 8.71 days.

Based on an analysis of the radial velocity (RV) time series obtained from the available data of the spectrographs HARPS, HARPS-N, CARMENES and HIRES, we announce the discovery of a second low-mass planet orbiting the star.

We performed a RV global analysis on RV, spectroscopic activity indicators, and ASAS photometry, within the multidimensional Gaussian process framework, updated the parameters of GJ 536 b, and found significant evidence of the presence of a second planet.

GJ 536 c is a low-mass planet (m_psini = 5.89 ± 0.70 M_⊕), orbiting with a period of 32.761 ± 0.015 days, at a distance of 0.1617 ± 0.0028 au from its parent star. It induces an RV semi-amplitude of 1.80 ± 0.20 m⋅s⁻¹. Given its distance to the star, it receives a flux of 1.692 ± 0.069 F_⊕, for an equilibrium temperature of 290.5 ± 9.5 K.

We update the mass of the planet GJ 536 b to m_psini = 6.37 ± 0.38 M_⊕. The orbits of both planets are consistent with circular. We explored the use of statistical Doppler imaging on the photometric and RV data, and find a tentative projected obliquity of the stellar rotation axis of 58+16−19 deg.

Current evidence does not support the presence of additional planets with masses > 5 M_⊕ for orbital periods up to 100 days, or > 10 M_⊕ for periods up to 1000 days.

A. Suárez Mascareño, C. del Burgo, J.-B. Delisle, J. I. González Hernández, N. C. Hara, J. M. Mestre, N. Nari, R. Rebolo, A. K. Stefanov, J. A. Burt

Comments: Accepted for publication in A&A. 19 pages, 15 figures. Hopefully planet 6000 🙂

Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
Cite as: arXiv:2509.03134 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2509.03134v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.03134
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Related DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202555731
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Submission history
From: Alejandro Suárez Mascareño
[v1] Wed, 3 Sep 2025 08:35:16 UTC (3,411 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03134

Astrobiology,