(566,'COVID-19: Tannic acid targets key stages in the fight against SARS-CoV-2 infection','covid-19-tannic-acid-targets-key-stages-in-the-fight-against-sars-cov-2-infection','2022-03-10 19:44:25.886172','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Professor Charles Ramassamy and his postdoctoral researcher Mohamed Haddad at Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), in collaboration with scientists from Université de Montréal, McGill University, and Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), believe that tannic acid plays a role in inhibiting three important molecular pathways involved in the SARS-CoV-2 infection. Their work was published recently in the <em>International Journal of Molecular Sciences (IJMS).</em></p><p>Using a multidisciplinary approach, the teams showed that tannic acid inhibits the viral protein (RBD) of the British variant of SARS-CoV-2 from binding to its biological target, the ACE2 receptor. This receptor, which is found on the surface of many cells in the body, allows the virus to latch on and infect them. \"Tannic acid binds to the RBD protein and prevents it from binding to the ACE2 receptor,\" said Professor Ramassamy. He explained that in blocking the viral protein, tannic acid does not alter the physiological functions of ACE2 receptors, which have physiological functions in the body\'s respiratory, cardiovascular, and renal systems, among others.</p><p>His team further investigated the effects of tannic acid on other key mechanisms involved in SARS-CoV-2 infection downstream of the RBD-ACE2 bond. The team showed that this polyphenol can inhibit the activity of the enzyme that allows the virus to enter our cells (TMPRSS2), as well as the viral enzyme responsible for replicating the virus (3CLpro).</p><p><strong>An alternative to antivirals </strong></p><p>The effects of tannic acid on the RBD protein and these enzymes pave the way for further research on the entire virus in contact with human cells. If the beneficial properties are similar on a larger scale, tannic acid tablets or nasal spray could be envisaged as a means for preventing or blocking SARS-CoV-2 infection.</p><p>Tannic acid is a natural polyphenol found in many beverages such as red wine or tea, but in much lower quantities. Although they contain tannins, their consumption would not have any protective effects because of their low concentration of tannic acid.</p><p>\"It would be less expensive than the antivirals currently on the market, and there would be fewer side effects because of the low toxicity of tannic acid and other polyphenols. In addition, tannic acid and its physiological derivatives have anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties, both of which are beneficial if you are infected with SARS-CoV-2,\" said Professor Ramassamy.</p><p>The research builds on the teams\' previous work on two other types of polyphenols -- TGG and corilagin -- and their interaction with a number of SARS-CoV-2 variants. The two compounds had similar beneficial effects, but were less effective than tannic acid.</p><p><strong>About the study</strong></p><p>The article \"Molecular Interactions of Tannic Acid with Proteins Associated with SARS-CoV-2 Infectivity,\" by Mohamed Haddad, Roger Gaudreault, Gabriel Sasseville, Phuong Trang Nguyen, Hannah Wiebe, Theo G.M. van de Ven, Steve Bourgault, Normand Mousseau, and Charles Ramassamy, was published in the <em>International Journal of Molecular Sciences</em> on Febuary 27th 2022. The study received financial support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Institut sur la nutrition et les aliments fonctionnels (INAF) and Fonds de recherche du Québec -- Nature et technologies (FQRNT).</p>','2022-03-09 16:41:59.472621','uploads/news/download_42.jpg',1,'Institut national de la recherche scientifique - INRS','Researchers believe that tannic acid plays a role in inhibiting three important molecular pathways involved in the SARS-CoV-2 infection.',1,178,'<li>Mohamed Haddad, Roger Gaudreault, Gabriel Sasseville, Phuong Trang Nguyen, Hannah Wiebe, Theo Van De Ven, Steve Bourgault, Normand Mousseau, Charles Ramassamy. <strong>Molecular Interactions of Tannic Acid with Proteins Associated with SARS-CoV-2 Infectivity</strong>. <em>International Journal of Molecular Sciences</em>, 2022; 23 (5): 2643 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijms23052643\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.3390/ijms23052643</a>\r\n</li>'),(567,'Some of the world’s lowest rates of dementia found in Amazonian indigenous groups','some-of-the-worlds-lowest-rates-of-dementia-found-in-amazonian-indigenous-groups','2022-03-10 19:46:21.455914','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">As scientists around the world seek for solutions for Alzheimer\'s disease, a new study reveals that two indigenous groups in the Bolivian Amazon have among the lowest rates of dementia in the world.</p><p>An international team of researchers found among older Tsimane and Moseten people, only about 1% suffer from dementia. In contrast, 11% of people age 65 and older living in the United States have dementia, according to the Alzheimer\'s Association.</p><p>\"Something about the pre-industrial subsistence lifestyle appears to protect older Tsimane and Moseten from dementia,\" said Margaret Gatz, the lead study author and professor of psychology, gerontology and preventive medicine at the Center for Economic and Social Research at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.</p><p>Researchers used computed tomography (CT) brain scan images, cognitive and neurological assessments and culturally appropriate questionnaires -- facilitated by a local team of trained translators and Bolivian physicians -- to diagnose dementia and cognitive impairment among the Tsimane and Moseten.</p><p>The study, published in <em>Alzheimer\'s &amp; Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer\'s Association</em>, found only five cases of dementia among 435 Tsimane people and just one case among 169 Moseten age 60 and over.</p><p>In the same over-60 groups, the research team diagnosed about 8% of Tsimane and 10% of Moseten with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), which is typically marked by early stage memory loss or decline of other cognitive ability, such as language or spatial perception. The study\'s authors pointed out these rates are more comparable to MCI in high-income countries like the U.S.</p><p>Researchers were surprised to find that the study participants found to have dementia or MCI frequently had unusual and prominent calcifications of their intracranial arteries. These study participants frequently displayed parkinsonian symptoms during neurological examinations and cognitive deficits in attention, spatial awareness and executive functioning.</p><p>Although calcifications were more common among the cognitively impaired, researchers also observed these vascular calcifications in the CT scans of those without dementia or MCI. They say more research is needed to understand the role of vascular factors as well as infectious and inflammatory disorders -- which are highly prevalent in these populations -- along with other risks for dementia. To this end, the research team is currently returning to all the Tsimane and Moseten villages to revisit those who were previously assessed.</p><p><strong>Comparing dementia among Tsimane, Moseten and other indigenous peoples</strong></p><p>The roughly 17,000 Tsimane remain physically very active throughout their lifespans as they fish, hunt and farm with hand tools and gather food from the forest. The 3,000 Moseten also reside in rural villages and engage in subsistence agricultural work. Unlike the more isolated Tsimane, they live closer to towns and have schools, access to clean water and medical services, and are more likely to be literate.</p><p>The study authors compared their results to a systematic review of 15 studies of indigenous populations in Australia, North America, Guam and Brazil. That earlier review found dementia prevalence ranging from 0.5% to 20% among indigenous older adults.</p><p>The fact that indigenous populations in other parts of the world have high rates of dementia may be due to a higher amount of contact with -- and adoption of lifestyles of -- their non-indigenous neighbors. They also face greater risks of diabetes, hypertension, alcohol abuse, obesity and cardiovascular disease.</p><p>These dementia risk factors are extremely low among the Tsimane and Moseten populations. Prior research published in The Lancet showed the Tsimane people have extraordinarily healthy hearts in older age and the lowest prevalence of coronary atherosclerosis (a disease that shows in the form of fatty deposits inside arteries) of any population known to science. This distinction may be linked to their subsistence lifestyle.</p><p>Another study published last year in The Journal of Gerontology -- led by USC assistant professor Andrei Irimia, also a co-author on the new publication -- found that the Tsimane experience less brain atrophy than their American and European peers.</p><p>Researchers say in contrast to the Tsimane, lifestyle factors in higher-income countries -- including lack of physical activity and diets rich in sugars and fats -- contribute to heart disease and may also accelerate brain aging.</p><p><strong>A race for Alzheimer\'s disease solutions</strong></p><p>Aging is the most important known risk factor for Alzheimer\'s and other dementias. Converging evidence points to low formal education, midlife hypertension and diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, physical inactivity and -- most recently -- air pollution as the major modifiable risk factors for dementia and Alzheimer\'s disease.</p><p>An aging global population, along with the proliferation of those modifiable risk factors, will lead to a tripling of the number of people with dementia worldwide by 2050, to more than 152 million, according to estimates.</p><p>\"We\'re in a race for solutions to the growing prevalence of Alzheimer\'s disease and related dementias,\" said Hillard Kaplan, a study co-author and professor of health economics and anthropology at Chapman University who has studied the Tsimane for two decades. \"Looking at these diverse populations augments and accelerates our understanding of these diseases and generate new insights.\"</p><p>\"By working with populations like the Tsimane and the Moseten, we can get a better understanding of global human variation and what human health was like in different environments before industrialization,\" said Benjamin Trumble, a study co-author and an associate professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University. \"What we do know is the sedentary, urban, industrial life is quite novel when compared with how our ancestors lived for more than 99% of humanity\'s existence.\"</p><p><strong>Story Source:</strong></p>','2022-03-09 16:42:02.095201','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Southern California','A new study reveals that two indigenous groups in the Bolivian Amazon have among the lowest rates of dementia in the world. An international team of researchers found among older Tsimane and Moseten people, only about 1% suffer from dementia. In contrast, 11% of people age 65 and older living in the United States have dementia, according to the Alzheimer\'s Association.',1,179,'<li>Margaret Gatz, Wendy J. Mack, Helena C. Chui, E. Meng Law, Giuseppe Barisano, M. Linda Sutherland, James D. Sutherland, Daniel Eid Rodriguez, Raul Quispe Gutierrez, Juan Copajira Adrian, Jesus Bani Cuata, Amy R. Borenstein, Ellen E. Walters, Andrei Irimia, Christopher J. Rowan, L. Samuel Wann, Adel H. Allam, Randall C. Thompson, Michael I. Miyamoto, David E. Michalik, Daniel K. Cummings, Edmond Seabright, Angela R. Garcia, Paul L. Hooper, Thomas S. Kraft, Caleb E. Finch, Gregory S. Thomas, Jonathan Stieglitz, Benjamin C. Trumble, Michael D. Gurven, Hillard Kaplan. <strong>Prevalence of dementia and mild cognitive impairment in indigenous Bolivian forager‐horticulturalists</strong>. <em>Alzheimer\'s &amp; Dementia</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/alz.12626\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1002/alz.12626</a>\r\n</li>'),(569,'New antimicrobial air filters tested on trains rapidly kill SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses','new-antimicrobial-air-filters-tested-on-trains-rapidly-kill-sars-cov-2-and-other-viruses','2022-03-10 19:50:24.393390','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Researchers at the University of Birmingham working in partnership with firms NitroPep Ltd and Pullman AC have developed new antimicrobial technology for air filters which can in seconds kill bacteria, fungi and viruses including SARS-CoV-2 -- providing a potential solution to prevent the spread of airborne infections.</p><p>In a study, published today (9 March 2022) in journal <em>Scientific Reports</em>, the antimicrobial treatment for air filters -- coated with a chemical biocide called chlorhexidine digluconate (CHDG) -- were rigorously tested and compared to commonly used standard \'control\' filters in the laboratory, in industrial air condensing units, and in a trial on-board trains operating on the UK\'s railways.</p><p>In the laboratory, cells of the Wuhan strain of SARS-CoV-2 -- the virus that causes COVID-19 -- were added to the surface of both the treated and control filters and measured at intervals over a period of more than an hour. The results showed that, while much of the virus remained on the surface of the control filter for an hour, all SARS-CoV-2 cells were killed within 60 seconds on the treated filter. Similar results were seen in experiments testing bacteria and fungi that commonly cause illness in humans -- including E. coli, S. aureus, and C. albicans -- proving the novel technology to be both highly effective anti-fungal and anti-bacterial air filter treatments.</p><p>Meanwhile, in order to determine how effective the filters are in a real-world setting, both the control and treated filters were installed in heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems on train carriages. The filters were installed for three months in matched pairs across carriages on the same train-line, before being removed and shipped for analysis with researchers counting colonies of bacteria remaining on them. The trial found no pathogens survived on the treated filter, even after three months on-board the train.</p><p>Further tests also found the treated filters are durable, and are able to maintain their structure and filtration function over the lifetime of their use.</p><p>Dr Felicity de Cogan, Royal Academy of Engineering Industry Fellow at the University of Birmingham, said: \"The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the forefront of public consciousness the real need for new ways to control the spread of airborne respiratory pathogens. In crowded spaces, from offices to large indoor venues, shopping malls, and on public transport, there is an incredibly high potential for transmission of COVID-19 and other viruses such as flu. Most ventilation systems recycle air through the system, and the filters currently being used in these systems are not normally designed to prevent the spread of pathogens, only to block air particles. This means filters can actually act as a potential reservoir for harmful pathogens. We are excited that we have been able to develop a filter treatment which can kill bacteria, fungi and viruses -- including SARS-CoV-2 -- in seconds. This addresses a global un-met need and could help clean the air in enclosed spaces, helping to prevent the spread of respiratory disease.\"</p><p>Dr de Cogan said that, while there have been other novel filters to \'purify air\' -- from high-efficiency particulate air filters used in aerospace cabins, to UV light, and silver nanoparticles added to filter mesh -- these have fallen short as they either lack energy efficiency or speed in effectiveness and are not ideal for the majority of existing heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems which would require significant infrastructure upgrades to use them.</p><p>Dr de Cogan adds: \"In comparison, the technology we have developed can be applied to existing filters and can be used in existing heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems with no need for the cost or hassle of any modifications. This level of compatibility with existing systems removes many of the barriers encountered when new technologies are brought onto the market.\"</p><p>NitroPep Ltd is now further developing the filters to deliver them as a product on the market. The new technology is the latest stage of Dr de Cogan\'s ongoing research creating patented antimicrobial technologies, which has included the development of a coating for surfaces called NitroPep that is also effective against SARS-CoV-2.</p><p>The latest study comes after previous research carried out globally has found that the risk of developing COVID-19 increases with greater public transport use, while other former studies have shown higher rates of flu-like illnesses in people travelling on London\'s underground, as well as a 6-fold increase in respiratory infection in people using a tram or bus.</p><p>The new research, published today (9 March 2022) in <em>Scientific Reports</em>, was funded by the Wellcome Trust, Medical Research Council, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Medical Research Foundation, and Engineering X Pandemic Preparedness, run by the Royal Academy of Engineering. It was carried out in collaboration with NitroPep Ltd, Pullman AC Ltd, and the University of Nottingham.</p>','2022-03-09 16:42:12.149185','uploads/news/antimicrobial-air-filters-800.jpg',1,'University of Birmingham','Researchers have developed new antimicrobial technology for air filters which can in seconds kill bacteria, fungi and viruses including SARS-CoV-2 -- providing a potential solution to prevent the spread of airborne infections.',1,52,'<li>Rowan Watson, Morwenna Oldfield, Jack A. Bryant, Lily Riordan, Harriet J. Hill, Julie A. Watts, Morgan R. Alexander, Michael J. Cox, Zania Stamataki, David J. Scurr, Felicity de Cogan. <strong>Efficacy of antimicrobial and anti-viral coated air filters to prevent the spread of airborne pathogens</strong>. <em>Scientific Reports</em>, 2022; 12 (1) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-06579-9\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41598-022-06579-9</a>\r\n</li>'),(571,'Human actions accelerate climate-driven floods and droughts','human-actions-accelerate-climate-driven-floods-and-droughts','2022-03-09 16:42:17.219050',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">A study of more than 2,000 streams around North America found that those altered by human activity are at greater risk of flooding.</p><p>The study from the University of Waterloo analyzed the seasonal flow patterns of 2,272 streams in Canada and the U.S. and found that human-managed streams -- those impacted by developments like dams, canals, or heavy urbanization -- had significantly different flow patterns compared to streams in natural watersheds.</p><p>Greater flow increases in managed watersheds indicates more severe flooding -- possibly as a result of the increased paved surfaces in urban regions. Flow dampening on the other hand can lead to water shortages and a loss in biodiversity in managed streams.</p><p>The study used natural watersheds untouched by human activity to measure the impact of climate change on streamflow. Using them as a baseline, the researchers then compared flow in managed streams within a radius of 115 kilometers to measure the impact of human developments.</p><p>\"Compared to their natural neighbours, about 48 per cent of the human-altered streams had significant increases in seasonal flow trends, while 44 per cent showed a significant decrease in the seasonal flow tends,\" said Nitin Singh, a postdoctoral fellow in Waterloo\'s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and lead author of this work. \"We used machine learning to show conclusively that these changes are caused by human activity.\"</p><p>While previous studies have looked at stream flows at the annual scale, this study considers seasonal effects like spring flooding and summer droughts, which are critical for water management.</p><p>\"It is important to recognize human modifications of the landscape often amplify the effects of climate change on streamflow,\" said Nandita Basu, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Civil and Environmental Engineering. \"We need to take responsibility to manage our landscape sustainably, because it\'s not just climate that is changing it.\"</p>','2022-03-09 16:42:17.219050','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Waterloo','A study of more than 2,000 streams around North America found that those altered by human activity are at greater risk of flooding.\n',1,27,'<li>Nitin K. Singh, Nandita B. Basu. <strong>The human factor in seasonal streamflows across natural and managed watersheds of North America</strong>. <em>Nature Sustainability</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00848-1\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41893-022-00848-1</a>\n</li>'),(573,'Mathematical discovery could shed light on secrets of the Universe','mathematical-discovery-could-shed-light-on-secrets-of-the-universe','2022-03-09 16:43:01.057123',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">How can Einstein\'s theory of gravity be unified with quantum mechanics? It is a challenge that could give us deep insights into phenomena such as black holes and the birth of the universe. Now, a new article in <em>Nature Communications,</em> written by researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and MIT, USA, presents results that cast new light on important challenges in understanding quantum gravity.</p><p>A grand challenge in modern theoretical physics is to find a \'unified theory\' that can describe all the laws of nature within a single framework -- connecting Einstein\'s general theory of relativity, which describes the universe on a large scale, and quantum mechanics, which describes our world at the atomic level. Such a theory of \'quantum gravity\' would include both a macroscopic and microscopic description of nature.</p><p>\"We strive to understand the laws of nature and the language in which these are written is mathematics. When we seek answers to questions in physics, we are often led to new discoveries in mathematics too. This interaction is particularly prominent in the search for quantum gravity -- where it is extremely difficult to perform experiments,\" explains Daniel Persson, Professor at the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Chalmers university of technology.</p><p>An example of a phenomenon that requires this type of unified description is black holes. A black hole forms when a sufficiently heavy star expands and collapses under its own gravitational force, so that all its mass is concentrated in an extremely small volume. The quantum mechanical description of black holes is still in its infancy but involves spectacular advanced mathematics.</p><p><strong>A simplified model for quantum gravity </strong></p><p>\"The challenge is to describe how gravity arises as an \'emergent\' phenomenon. Just as everyday phenomena -- such as the flow of a liquid -- emerge from the chaotic movements of individual droplets, we want to describe how gravity emerges from quantum mechanical system at the microscopic level,\" says Robert Berman, Professor at the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Chalmers University of Technology.</p><p>In an article recently published in the journal Nature Communications, Daniel Persson and Robert Berman, together with Tristan Collins of MIT in the USA, showed how gravity emerges from a special quantum mechanical system, in a simplified model for quantum gravity called the \'holographic principle\'.</p><p>\"Using techniques from the mathematics that I have researched before, we managed to formulate an explanation for how gravity emerges by the holographic principle, in a more precise way than has previously been done,\" explains Robert Berman.</p><p><strong>RIpples of dark energy </strong></p><p>The new article may also offer new insight into mysterious dark energy. In Einstein\'s general theory of relativity, gravity is described as a geometric phenomenon. Just as a newly made bed curves under a person\'s weight, heavy objects can bend the geometric shape of the universe. But according to Einstein\'s theory, even the empty space -- the \'vacuum state\' of the universe -- has a rich geometric structure. If you could zoom in and look at this vacuum on a microscopic level, you would see quantum mechanical fluctuations or ripples, known as dark energy. It is this mysterious form of energy that, from a larger perspective, is responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe.</p><p>This new work may lead to new insights into how and why these microscopic quantum mechanical ripples arise, as well as the relationship between Einstein\'s theory of gravity and quantum mechanics, something that has eluded scientists for decades.</p><p>\"These results open up the possibility to test other aspects of the holographic principle such as the microscopic description of black holes. We also hope to be able to use these new connections in the future to break new ground in mathematics,\" says Daniel Persson.</p><p>The scientific article, <em>Emergent Sasaki-Einstein geometry and AdS/CFT </em>is published in <em>Nature Communications</em> and is written by Robert Berman, Tristan Collins and Daniel Persson at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.</p>','2022-03-09 16:43:01.057123','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Chalmers University of Technology','How can Einstein\'s theory of gravity be unified with quantum mechanics? It is a challenge that could give us deep insights into phenomena such as black holes and the birth of the universe. Now, a new article presents results that cast new light on important challenges in understanding quantum gravity.\n',1,27,'<li>Robert J. Berman, Tristan C. Collins, Daniel Persson. <strong>Emergent Sasaki-Einstein geometry and AdS/CFT</strong>. <em>Nature Communications</em>, 2022; 13 (1) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-27951-9\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41467-021-27951-9</a>\n</li>'),(580,'Nature-based solutions in mountains can reduce climate change impact on drought','nature-based-solutions-in-mountains-can-reduce-climate-change-impact-on-drought','2022-03-09 18:12:48.288959',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">New research, led by Dr Petra Holden from the African Climate and Development Initiative (ACDI) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), has shown how catchment restoration -- through the management of alien tree infestation in the mountains of the southwestern Cape -- could have lessened the impact of climate change on low river flows during the Cape Town \"Day Zero\" drought.</p><p>Climate change is impacting extreme weather events such as droughts and floods. Nature-based solutions, such as catchment restoration, involve working with ecosystems and landscapes to address societal challenges. These challenges include the impacts of climate change on water resources. Up to now, studies have not separated the role of nature-based solutions in reducing the human-driven climate change impacts of extreme events on water availability from that of natural climate variability.</p><p>Wanting to inform water resource adaptation planning, this new study by an all-southern African based research team published in a Nature portfolio journal, <em>Earth Communications &amp; Environment, </em>set out to do this using the Cape Town Day Zero drought as an example. Their focus was on a typical type of catchment restoration in South Africa -- invasive alien tree management.</p><p>\"Invasive alien trees have higher transpiration rates, compared to the native vegetation of the Cape mountains, and thus reduce streamflow,\" Holden explained.</p><p>The research team linked climate models and a hydrological model to simulate streamflow during the \"Day Zero\" drought. They then tested how severe the hydrological drought would have been if there had been no human-driven climate change. Their focus was specifically on the impacts of climate change and alien tree management on streamflow from mountainous catchments that supply dams critical for water supply to Cape Town.</p><p>Holden shared: \"Existing studies do not isolate the effect of nature-based solutions on the anthropogenically derived (i.e., human-derived) portion of climate change, especially for drought events that have already occurred. Few studies attribute biophysical impacts to human-caused climate change impact on drought events while simultaneously investigating the role of nature-based solutions in modulating this impact.\"</p><p>This new analysis shows that climate change reduced streamflow during the drought by 12-29% relative to a world without human-influence on the climate. Furthermore, it shows that clearing alien trees that were present in the catchments before the drought hit could have reduced the anthropogenic climate change impact on streamflow, but the effect was dependent on the extent of invasion.</p><p>Clearing moderate levels of invasion (such as 40% coverages seen in some catchments) would have resulted in a 3-16% amelioration of the human-derived climate change impact on streamflow. Preventing the spread of alien trees from current levels to full catchment invasion avoided additional reductions of 10-27% in streamflow due to anthropogenic climate change.</p><p>The researchers also found that the impact of climate change was amplified due to catchment hydrological processes. For example, the reductions in streamflow (12-29%) were larger than the reductions in rainfall caused by anthropogenic climate change (7-15%). Despite the role that evapotranspiration can play in drought events, the researchers found some but not a large impact of climate change on reference evapotranspiration.</p><p>This is an important study for highlighting the power of quantitative assessments for informing climate change adaptation planning. The researchers were able to show that catchment restoration reduced the impact of anthropogenic climate change but was not able to remove the full signal of human-driven climate change completely, even under current levels of warmings. Given this, the researchers highlight that it is critical to combine nature-based solutions with other adaptation strategies and options for water resource planning to combat accelerated climate change impacts.</p><p>\"Teasing out the contribution of adaptation strategies -- be they nature-based or not -- for buffering society from human-driven versus natural variability in climate can be challenging. However, it is important to inform adaptation planning so that climate risk management strategies can be combined in ways that consider thresholds and limits to change,\" concluded Holden.</p>','2022-03-09 18:12:48.288959','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Cape Town','New research has shown how catchment restoration -- through the management of alien tree infestation in the mountains of the southwestern Cape -- could have lessened the impact of climate change on low river flows during the Cape Town \'Day Zero\' drought.\n',1,27,'<li>Petra B. Holden, Alanna J. Rebelo, Piotr Wolski, Romaric C. Odoulami, Kamoru A. Lawal, Joyce Kimutai, Tiro Nkemelang, Mark G. New. <strong>Nature-based solutions in mountain catchments reduce impact of anthropogenic climate change on drought streamflow</strong>. <em>Communications Earth &amp; Environment</em>, 2022; 3 (1) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s43247-022-00379-9\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s43247-022-00379-9</a>\n</li>'),(581,'New study sheds light on early human hair evolution','new-study-sheds-light-on-early-human-hair-evolution','2022-03-09 18:19:14.970753',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Hair is an important feature of primate -- including human -- diversity and evolution, serving functions tied to thermoregulation, protection, camouflage and signaling. However, the evolution of wild primate hair remained relatively understudied until recently.</p><p>Researchers in the Primate Genomics Lab at the George Washington University examined what factors drive hair variation in a wild population of lemurs known as Indriidae. Specifically, the researchers aimed to assess the impacts of climate, body size and color vision on hair evolution. They found:</p><p>\"Human hair evolution remains a mystery, largely because hair does not fossilize,\" Elizabeth Tapanes, lead author on the paper and a postdoctoral scholar at the University of San Diego, California, said. (Tapanes conducted the study while a doctoral student at GW.) \"The lemurs we studied exhibit an upright posture like humans and live in a variety of ecosystems like early humans, so our results provide a unique window into human hair evolution.\"</p><p>Brenda Bradley, an associate professor of anthropology who directs GW\'s Primate Genomics Lab and is a co-author on the study, explained our understanding of hair evolution and diversity in other primates helps us fill in the gaps of our own human evolutionary story.</p><p>\"Most people are intrigued by the diversity of hair on their own bodies, and the variety of hair types among people around the world,\" Bradley said. \"Understanding hair patterns in non-human primates, such as these lemurs, may provide a comparative context for understanding how variation arose in human hair.\"</p><p>The researchers note future work should focus on samples across smaller geographic or phylogenetic (family-level, genus-level) scales and from diverse non-human and human populations.</p>','2022-03-09 18:19:14.970753','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'George Washington University','Researchers have examined what factors drive hair variation in a wild population of lemurs known as Indriidae. Specifically, the researchers aimed to assess the impacts of climate, body size and color vision on hair evolution.\n',1,27,'<li>Elizabeth Tapanes, Rachel L. Jacobs, Ian Harryman, Edward E. Louis, Mitchell T. Irwin, Jason M. Kamilar, Brenda J. Bradley. <strong>Hair phenotype diversity across            Indriidae            lemurs</strong>. <em>American Journal of Biological Anthropology</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.24508\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1002/ajpa.24508</a>\n</li>'),(582,'Electronic pneumonia decision support helps reduce mortality by 38 percent in community hospitals','electronic-pneumonia-decision-support-helps-reduce-mortality-by-38-percent-in-community-hospitals','2022-03-09 18:19:21.252007',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">A real-time electronic decision support system helped clinicians at community hospitals provide best practice care for emergency department patients with pneumonia, resulting in decreased intensive care unit admission, more appropriate antibiotic use, and 38% lower overall mortality according to a new study by researchers at Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City.</p><p>Results of the study are published online today in the <em>American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. </em></p><p>\"Treating pneumonia in emergency departments is challenging, especially in community hospitals that don\'t see severe pneumonia as often as urban academic medical centers,\" said Nathan Dean, MD, section chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Intermountain Medical Center and principal investigator of this study.</p><p>Pneumonia was the leading cause of death from infectious diseases in the United States, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, and continues to be a leading cause of death.</p><p>In the study, researchers at Intermountain Healthcare deployed the health system\'s electronic, open loop, clinical decision support (ePNa) system to 16 of its community hospitals between December 2017 to June 2019.</p><p>In that time, those hospitals had 6,848 pneumonia cases, and ePNa was used by a bedside clinician in 67% of eligible patients.</p><p>The Intermountain decision support tool gathers key patient indicators including age, fever, oxygen saturation, laboratory and chest imaging results, and vital signs to made recommendations on care, including appropriate antibiotic therapy, microbiology studies, and care setting recommendations (i.e., whether a patient should be sent to the ICU, admitted to the hospital, or is safe to go home).</p><p>Using the tool, Intermountain researchers found a range of positive outcomes for patients, including:</p><p>Researchers say results of the study are consistent with a prior study deploying ePNa in Intermountain\'s larger hospitals.</p><p>\"In giving clinicians a real-time assessment tool that pulls together over 50 factors that can determine how a patient will do with pneumonia, our study found that clinicians were able to make better treatment decisions with this resource,\" noted Dr. Dean. \"Some of our community hospitals have as little as 20 beds. We wanted to validate the effectiveness of ePNa in very different healthcare settings.\"</p><p>During the time of this study, U.S. News and World Report also ranked Intermountain as high performing in pneumonia care with excellent outcomes.</p><p>Dr. Dean added that not only did ePNa make recommendations that helped clinicians, but it also enabled clinicians to be more structured and consistent in making decisions about patients with pneumonia.</p><p>\"Even if they don\'t follow the recommendation, decision-making is more consistent with best practices,\" he said.</p><p>For example, ePNa might recommend a patient be admitted to the intensive care unit, but a clinician knows that it\'s not the right care setting for an elderly, stage IV cancer patient.</p>','2022-03-09 18:19:21.252007','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Intermountain Healthcare','A real-time electronic decision support system helped clinicians at community hospitals provide best practice care for emergency department patients with pneumonia, resulting in decreased intensive care unit admission, more appropriate antibiotic use, and 38 percent lower overall mortality, according to a new study.\n',1,27,'<li>Nathan C Dean, Caroline G Vines, Jason R. Carr, Jenna G. Rubin, Brandon J Webb, Jason R Jacobs, Allison M. Butler, Jaehoon Lee, Al R Jephson, Nathan Jenson, Missy Walker, Samuel M Brown, Jeremy A Irvin, Matthew P. Lungren, Todd L. Allen. <strong>A Pragmatic Stepped-wedge, Cluster-controlled Trial of Real-time Pneumonia Clinical Decision Support</strong>. <em>American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1164/rccm.202109-2092OC\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1164/rccm.202109-2092OC</a>\n</li>'),(584,'Following rain, desert microbes exhale potent greenhouse gas','following-rain,-desert-microbes-exhale-potent-greenhouse-gas','2022-03-09 18:19:47.251292',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">New UC Riverside research shows how, after it rains, microbes in desert soil convert one form of pollution into another -- laughing gas.</p><p>No laughing matter, nitrous oxide or N<sub>2</sub>O is the third most potent greenhouse gas. Scientists conducting the research were surprised to measure N<sub>2</sub>O production in the desert heat.</p><p>\"It only happens in waterlogged soils. Since the desert is dry most of the year, we didn\'t think this process could occur in arid soils,\" said Alex Krichels, UCR environmental scientist and first author on the new study.</p><p>This study, published in the journal <em>Biogeochemistry</em>, examines how and why desert-dwelling bacteria are producing N<sub>2</sub>O emissions. It builds on work published in 2020, when a team led by UCR landscape ecologist Darrel Jenerette found desert soils produce substantial amounts of N<sub>2</sub>O after a rain.</p><p>The traditional view, Krichels explained, is that N<sub>2</sub>O comes from heavily fertilized agricultural fields like those in the Midwest. Growers add more nitrogen, ammonium and nitrates than plants need, and after a rain, bacteria convert the excess into N<sub>2</sub>O, a process called denitrification.</p><p>\"This is a strategy for the bacteria to survive after a ton of water is added and there\'s no oxygen for them in the soil,\" Krichels said. \"When that happens, instead of oxygen they use nitrate, and breathe out nitrous oxide, a process called denitrification.\"</p><p>Unlike fertilization in agricultural fields, denitrification in deserts may have a different source of nitrate. \"Nitrate pollution in deserts originates from fossil fuel combustion, not fertilization,\" Krichels said. \"Combustion releases pollution that hangs around, gets deposited into soils over time, and re-emerges after a rain as N<sub>2</sub>O.\"</p><p>Automobiles or industrial processes send a few different forms of nitrogen into the atmosphere. \"Combined, they\'re called NOx, and they can produce tropospheric ozone, which is bad for your lungs and is also a greenhouse gas. It is not to be confused with good ozone higher up in the stratosphere that protects us from UV rays,\" explained Peter Homyak, UCR environmental scientist and paper co-author.</p><p>To determine if fossil fuel byproducts could drive the desert denitrification, the researchers picked two Southern California sites in the University of California Natural Reserve System. They used a box \"resembling a coffin,\" Krichels said, with instruments to measure the chemical composition of air emerging from the soil after the addition of nitrate.</p><p>The box also contained an air conditioning unit, as temperatures often reached 120 degrees. \"Temperatures much higher than 100 degrees Fahrenheit are thought to prevent microbial processes. Given the heat at our sites, it was surprising to see so much N<sub>2</sub>O,\" Krichels said.</p><p>Krichels, who previously studied similar processes in Illinois cornfields, said what emerges from deserts after rains is 10 times higher than anything he saw in the Midwest. \"The rates of emission are really high, but short lived,\" he said. \"This only occurs when water is added to dry soils.\"</p><p>Much evidence suggests droughts are becoming more common globally, and that these droughts will be punctuated by large rain events. Since droughts dry out soil, these climate changes will make drying and wetting cycles more common and increase the likelihood that these processes will become more important sources of greenhouse gas.</p><p>Moving forward the researchers will replicate the study with sites in Riverside and Joshua Tree, to measure whether proximity to cities increases post-rain nitrous oxide emissions from soils.</p><p>In general, Krichels said he hopes awareness of these results moves people to limit fossil fuel emissions that drive desert soil denitrification.</p><p>\"On a broader scale, a lot of people don\'t know these processes happen in soils in general, or that the nitrogen humans add to the atmosphere can end up affecting climate change and human health in this way,\" Krichels said. \"There\'s a lot of life in these soils, and it can affect the entire globe.\"</p>','2022-03-09 18:19:47.251292','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of California - Riverside','New research shows how, after it rains, microbes in desert soil convert one form of pollution into another -- laughing gas.\n',1,27,'<li>Alexander H. Krichels, Peter M. Homyak, Emma L. Aronson, James O. Sickman, Jon Botthoff, Hannah Shulman, Stephanie Piper, Holly M. Andrews, G. Darrel Jenerette. <strong>Rapid nitrate reduction produces pulsed NO and N2O emissions following wetting of dryland soils</strong>. <em>Biogeochemistry</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10533-022-00896-x\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1007/s10533-022-00896-x</a>\n</li>'),(585,'Immunological signature against SARS-CoV-2','immunological-signature-against-sars-cov-2','2022-03-09 18:19:53.300004',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">LMU scientists have investigated how most people\'s immune defenses are able to curb the coronavirus so effectively that pneumonia does not occur.</p><p>The immune defenses of most people are able to curtail the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the body so effectively that they do not get pneumonia. But researchers have been largely at a loss to explain how exactly the invader is contained in the upper respiratory tract. Scientists at LMU\'s University of Munich Hospital led by Dr. med. Kami Pekayvaz, Alexander Leunig, Associate Professor Dr. med. Konstantin Stark, and Dr. med. Leo Nicolai, working in cooperation with other research institutions, have discovered that patients with mild disease courses had a specific, effective antiviral upregulation of so-called interferon-stimulated genes. The team\'s results have been published in the journal <em>Nature Communications</em>.</p><p>According to current research, 90 percent of infected persons are able to successfully ward off SARS-CoV-2 such as to prevent a severe course with infection of the lungs. To find out why this is the case, the team investigated blood samples and nasal swabs from over 100 patients -- and did so using various methods for the analysis of genes, proteins, and other molecules that play a role in an immune response. They combined their findings with existing clinical data. Investigating patient samples over the entire course of the disease was the main focus of the study. First, the researchers closely monitored and analyzed a cohort of patients with risk factors for a severe course of the disease, distinguishing patients with and without pulmonary involvement. The findings obtained in this way were then validated in a large cohort of outpatients with mild courses of the disease.</p><p>\"We discovered that early on in the disease, patients who had hardly any or no symptoms at all exhibited a very strong antiviral response in the immune cells in the blood,\" say the authors from the Medical Clinic and Polyclinic I located in the Munich district of Großhadern. The response is characterized by upregulation of interferon-stimulated genes (ISGs). \"You can picture these as a whole arsenal of proteins that cells can use against viral intruders,\" explain the authors. \"We think that this type of immune response prevents further spread of the virus, as the body is put on alert, meaning for example that the lung tissue is prepared for the intruder.\" Moreover, in mild cases so-called natural killer cells and T cells seem to be less aggressive towards other cells. This probably prevents the body\'s own cells becoming damaged. Finally, there was also an anti-inflammatory monocyte signature characteristic of a protective response.</p><p>In summary, the researchers say they have found a \"specific immunological signature\" that can prevent the SARS-CoV-2 virus from spreading in the body. Interestingly, this immune response is initially independent of antibodies, as they are produced later in the course of the illness.</p><p>\"One goal now would be to modulate the immune system of high-risk patients or of individuals after viral exposition to activate these antiviral mechanisms,\" say the authors. And: \"Approaches already exist towards this -- for example, nasal sprays have been used that trigger such a response via interferon alfa or other mechanisms.\" These approaches should now be optimized, urge the authors, noting that such promising strategies could also prove helpful in the next pandemic against other viral pathogens than SARS-CoV-2.</p>','2022-03-09 18:19:53.300004','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München','Scientists have investigated how most people\'s immune defenses are able to curb the coronavirus so effectively that pneumonia does not occur.\n',1,27,'<li>Kami Pekayvaz, Alexander Leunig, Rainer Kaiser, Markus Joppich, Sophia Brambs, Aleksandar Janjic, Oliver Popp, Daniel Nixdorf, Valeria Fumagalli, Nora Schmidt, Vivien Polewka, Afra Anjum, Viktoria Knottenberg, Luke Eivers, Lucas E. Wange, Christoph Gold, Marieluise Kirchner, Maximilian Muenchhoff, Johannes C. Hellmuth, Clemens Scherer, Raquel Rubio-Acero, Tabea Eser, Flora Deák, Kerstin Puchinger, Niklas Kuhl, Andreas Linder, Kathrin Saar, Lukas Tomas, Christian Schulz, Andreas Wieser, Wolfgang Enard, Inge Kroidl, Christof Geldmacher, Michael von Bergwelt-Baildon, Oliver T. Keppler, Mathias Munschauer, Matteo Iannacone, Ralf Zimmer, Philipp Mertins, Norbert Hubner, Michael Hoelscher, Steffen Massberg, Konstantin Stark, Leo Nicolai. <strong>Protective immune trajectories in early viral containment of non-pneumonic SARS-CoV-2 infection</strong>. <em>Nature Communications</em>, 2022; 13 (1) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28508-0\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41467-022-28508-0</a>\n</li>'),(587,'Ongoing \'immune injuries\' might cause persistent breathlessness after COVID-19','ongoing-\'immune-injuries\'-might-cause-persistent-breathlessness-after-covid-19','2022-03-09 18:19:56.491945',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Long-lasting immune activity in the airways might be the cause of persistent breathlessness following COVID-19.</p><p>This is according to a new study of 38 people who were previously hospitalised with severe COVID-19.</p><p>The results, published in <em>Immunity,</em> suggest these patients have an altered landscape of immune cells in their airways and signs of ongoing lung damage. However, the preliminary results hint that this might improve over time.</p><p>The researchers say that their findings need to be confirmed by a larger study, but suggest that recovery from COVID-19 might be accelerated by treatments that dampen the immune system and reduce inflammation.</p><p>Joint lead author, Dr James Harker, from Imperial\'s National Heart &amp; Lung Institute, said: \"Our study found that many months after SARS-CoV-2 infection, there were still abnormal immune cells in the airways of patients with persistent breathlessness. We also identified a protein \'signature\' in the lungs indicating ongoing injury to the airways.\"</p><p>Joint senior author, Professor Pallav Shah, also from Imperial\'s National Heart &amp; Lung Institute, said: \"These findings suggest that persistent breathlessness in our group of COVID-19 patients is being caused by failure to turn off the immune response, which leads to airway inflammation and injury. The next steps of our research will be to see if there are treatments that can reduce the immune activity and whether they help to reduce the persistent breathlessness some patients experience.\"</p><p>Previous studies have examined the causes of post-COVID-19 breathlessness by looking at markers in the blood, but the new study looks directly at which immune cells are active in the lungs too.</p><p>The researchers studied CT scans of the lungs and how well the lungs functioned, as well as analysing samples of fluid from within the lungs and blood samples to determine the presence of nearly 500 proteins.</p><p>Overall, the study included 38 post-COVID-19 patients three to six months after they left hospital and 29 healthy volunteers (who had no underlying diseases and had not had COVID-19) to compare against.</p><p>At three to six months, the researchers found that there were more immune cells in the lungs of the post-COVID-19 participants than in the healthy controls. However, there appeared to be no difference in the immune cells seen in the blood of the post-COVID-19 and the healthy participants.</p><p>Co-author, Dr Bavithra Vijayakumar, also from Imperial\'s National Heart &amp; Lung Institute, said: \"Other research has found that the immediate response to COVID-19 involves an uptick in various types of immune cells in the blood and in the lungs to fight the virus. For severe infections, like those seen in our study participants, there also tends to be heightened signs of inflammation. However, after three to six months, it appears that these signs in the blood return to normal, while those in the lungs take longer to resolve. Our finding that the immune response in the blood doesn\'t appear to match that of the lungs emphasizes the importance of assessing airway immunity in order to better understand persistent respiratory symptoms post COVID-19.\"</p><p>Although the immune cells in the lungs varied for each post-COVID-19 patient, they all tended to have higher levels of immune cells linked to cell death, epithelial damage and tissue repair.</p><p>There also appeared to be distinct roles for the different immune cells in the lungs. For example, higher numbers of cytotoxic T cells led to damage to the lung tissue and greater airway dysfunction, while having more B cells was associated with greater signs of lung abnormalities on CT scans (such as scarring and physical changes in the lung tissue).</p><p>A group of 17 post-COVID-19 participants were re-assessed a year after they had left hospital, and 14 of them saw improvements in their symptoms and fewer lung abnormalities on CT scans. The other three participants still showed lung abnormalities on CT scans, but the numbers of immune cells present in their airways was greatly reduced compared to their earlier assessments. The researchers say that this suggests that these immune responses may improve over time.</p><p>The authors note that their study includes patients who had severe COVID-19 disease (requiring hospitalisation and ongoing monitoring) and it is unclear if their results would apply to people with less severe disease. They were only able to study the participants\' lungs after COVID-19, and so are unable to determine if any of the signs they discovered were present before infection.</p><p>They note that the participants of their study had COVID-19 before vaccines were available.</p><p>The study was funded by the Wellcome Trust, with staff supported by the UKRI, CW+ and the Westminster Medical School Research Trust, Asthma UK, Community Jameel and the Imperial College London President\'s excellence fund. The study included collaborators from the National Heart and Lung Institute and the Department of Immunology and Inflammation at Imperial College London, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Royal Brompton and Harefield Hospitals and the Asthma UK Centre for Allergic Mechanisms of Asthma.</p>','2022-03-09 18:19:56.491945','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Imperial College London','Long-lasting immune activity in the airways might be the cause of persistent breathlessness following COVID-19, according to new research.\n',1,27,'<li>Bavithra Vijayakumar, Karim Boustani, Patricia P. Ogger, Artemis Papadaki, James Tonkin, Christopher M. Orton, Poonam Ghai, Kornelija Suveizdyte, Richard J. Hewitt, Sujal R. Desai, Anand Devaraj, Robert J. Snelgrove, Philip L. Molyneaux, Justin L. Garner, James E. Peters, Pallav L. Shah, Clare M. Lloyd, James A. Harker. <strong>Immuno-proteomic profiling reveals aberrant immune cell regulation in the airways of individuals with ongoing post-COVID-19 respiratory disease</strong>. <em>Immunity</em>, 2022; 55 (3): 542 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.immuni.2022.01.017\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1016/j.immuni.2022.01.017</a>\n</li>'),(588,'A nanoscale look at coronavirus infection','a-nanoscale-look-at-coronavirus-infection','2022-03-09 18:20:13.270700',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">A human cell being infected by a coronavirus is a crowded place as the virus turns its host into a virus-replicating machine. Now, for the first time, Stanford scientists have used super-resolution light microscopy to sift through the crowd and determine where in the cell viral molecules lie.</p><p>W.E. Moerner, professor of chemistry, and Stanley Qi, assistant professor of bioengineering and Institute Scholar at Stanford ChEM-H, have used the method, which gives scientists a nanoscale view into the cell, to pinpoint exactly where in the cell certain pieces of the coronavirus -- like the spike protein and the genetic material -- are at different points post-infection. They found that, unlike what lower-resolution confocal microscopy has indicated, the virus-replicating machinery and the RNA product of that process are physically separated in the cell, which could indicate new details about the viral life cycle.</p><p>Moerner, the Harry S. Mosher Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and professor, by courtesy, of applied physics, and Qi studied a coronavirus called HCoV-229E that, like its cousin SARS-CoV-2, is made up of a spike protein-studded envelope surrounding a strand of RNA, the virus\' genetic material. That single strand of genomic RNA, or gRNA, contains the instructions for making all the proteins that the virus needs, including those that make copies of the gRNA and those that assemble into the packaging that wraps around the RNA to make a new, intact virus.</p><p>\"When infected, the cell turns itself into a zombie, completely mind controlled into producing more virus,\" said Qi, who is also an assistant professor of chemical and systems biology.</p><p>Scientists know a lot about which molecules are involved in which steps of viral life cycle. But precisely where in the cell all the virus\' molecules are during those steps has remained largely unanswered. Understanding these subtle details could give greater insight into precisely how the virus infects cells and help researchers find vulnerabilities or develop better treatments for infection.</p><p>In the study, which was published in <em>Cell Reports Methods</em> Feb. 28, the team zeroed in on two different forms of RNA: double-stranded RNA, or dsRNA, which is an intermediate along the way to making new copies of the virus, and gRNA, one strand of which gets injected into the cell, replicated and then packaged into new viruses. Knowing exactly where in the cell those pieces are could tell scientists not only where the virus-replicating steps (dsRNA) and virus-assembly steps (gRNA) are taking place, but how those steps are coordinated spatially.</p><p><strong>Cellular galaxy</strong></p><p>Confocal fluorescence microscopy is a common method for seeing objects within a cell by recording light emitted from fluorescent labels or tags, not that different from the molecules that give rise to \"day-glo\" socks. But confocal microscopy can only be precise with structures that are about 250 nanometers (nm) across or larger. Coronavirus particles are much smaller, at about 120 nm in diameter, and the proteins and RNA within them even smaller. (For reference, a strand of hair is about 100,000 nm thick.)</p><p>\"There is no getting around the fundamental blurriness of confocal microscopy,\" said Moerner. \"Many important cellular objects are very small; some 50 nm, some 10 nm, and some even smaller.\"</p><p>Super-resolution fluorescence microscopy uses carefully controlled single-molecule imaging to bring these cellular objects into sharper focus, allowing scientists to see objects as small as 10 nm across. Scientists can only look at a single cell at a time using these techniques, and the experiments require lot of time and specialized resources. Despite the challenges, the unrivaled detail with which scientists can view the cell makes the process invaluable. And that jump in clarity revealed something unexpected to Moerner and Qi.</p><p>The research team used two differently colored tags to look at their two molecules, magenta for gRNA and green for dsRNA. In addition to spots of green and magenta, confocal images showed blurry white clouds that suggested that dsRNA and gRNA could be in the same spot throughout the cell, possibly enveloped together in some kind of particle. But by using super-resolution techniques, the team saw something very different.</p><p>\"When I saw those images for the first time, it was like looking at some amazing galaxy,\" said Moerner, who received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2014 for developing the microscopy techniques that give scientists these detailed views into the cell. The super-resolution images showed a dark sky of bright magenta clusters and green stars -- and none of them ever overlapped. Contrary to what confocal images had hinted at, dsRNA and gRNA are never in the same place at the same time.</p><p>Separate experiments, in which they also looked at proteins from the virus and the host cell, confirmed that the virus-replicating dsRNA and the RNA product of that replication are never found floating through the cell together. Their results confirmed that viral replication occurs in a part of the cell known as the endoplasmic reticulum, or ER, as was already known. The gRNA formed then buds off into the cell to get packaged into a fully formed virus. Unlike what previous studies have shown, however, Moerner and Qi now saw that in addition to being found inside the ER, the virus-replicating dsRNA is also found in large (up to 450 nm) spheres that do not contain any gRNA throughout the cell. They suspect that these bubbles of dsRNA, which are not actively replicating, might be a sort of temporary dsRNA storage while new viruses are being packaged and shipped out.</p><p><strong>Exploring antiviral treatments</strong></p><p>Viral infection is a complex process, and while the team does not know exactly what drives the virus to produce these temporary stores of dsRNA, they hope that super resolution can also answer those questions and others in the future. By learning more about when and where certain viral infection steps take place, scientists may also be able to develop and evaluate treatments.</p><p>In this study, the researchers in the Moerner and Qi labs also joined forces to look at what happens after treatment with the antiviral remdesivir. They saw that the while the levels of gRNA and dsRNA overall decreased in the cell, the size of the dsRNA bubbles remained the same, which supports their temporary storage theory. The team hopes that further studies with the super-resolution toolkit could help determine if other antivirals might target those spheres. \"When people don\'t have tools, they have no way of making new findings,\" said Qi.</p><p>\"This is a great example of how you can\'t predict what you will find until you go looking,\" said Moerner. \"Much can be learned about the biology of these complex systems with modern nanoscale optical tools.\"</p><p>Other Stanford coauthors include former graduate student Jiarui Wang, postdoctoral scholars Mengting Han and Leiping Zeng, graduate student Anish Roy and former postdoctoral scholars Haifeng Wang and Leonhard Möckl.</p><p>Moerner is a professor in the School of Humanities in Sciences, a faculty fellow at Stanford ChEM-H and a member of Bio-X and of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. Qi is a member of Bio-X, the Maternal &amp; Child Health Research Institute, Stanford Cancer Institute and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.</p><p>The work was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the National Institutes of Health. Wang is a Mona M. Burgess Stanford Bio-X Fellow.</p>','2022-03-09 18:20:13.270700','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Stanford University','Using super-resolution microscopy, scientists uncovered new details about the location of viral molecules in a cell after coronavirus infection.\n',1,27,'<li>Jiarui Wang, Mengting Han, Anish R. Roy, Haifeng Wang, Leonhard Möckl, Leiping Zeng, W.E. Moerner, Lei S. Qi. <strong>Multi-color super-resolution imaging to study human coronavirus RNA during cellular infection</strong>. <em>Cell Reports Methods</em>, 2022; 2 (2): 100170 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.crmeth.2022.100170\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1016/j.crmeth.2022.100170</a>\n</li>'),(590,'Global warming combined with other changes in the environment presents \'double whammy\' for birds','global-warming-combined-with-other-changes-in-the-environment-presents-\'double-whammy\'-for-birds','2022-03-09 18:20:15.426901',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">A new study from researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) rolls back the curtain on half a century of evidence detailing the impact of climate change on more than 60 different bird species.</p><p>It found that half of all changes to key physical and behavioural bird characteristics since the 1960s can be linked to climate change.</p><p>The other 50 per cent is due to other unknown environmental factors that have changed at the same time as our climate.</p><p>The research, published in the <em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences </em>and carried out in conjunction with James Cook University (JCU), focused on birds in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.</p><p>\"We have shown that climate change is a major driver of these changes in the birds, but there is more at play here than we originally thought,\" lead author Dr Nina McLean, from the ANU Research School of Biology, said.</p><p>\"Not only were other unknown changes in the environment equally important in driving changes in the birds, surprisingly they generally did so in the same direction as climate change, such that their effects compounded.</p><p>\"This study shows that the impact of climate change does not act in isolation and its effects are occurring in a world where the resilience of wildlife is already pushed to the limits due to the many other challenges they are experiencing in a human-dominated landscape.</p><p>\"These non-climate change driven factors could include urbanisation, changing land use, habitat loss or introducing invasive species into ecosystems, but we can\'t know their identity for sure yet.\"</p><p>The researchers analysed three key traits as part of their study: the timing of egg laying, body condition of birds, and the number of offspring produced. All the data was collected by volunteers, otherwise known as citizen scientists.</p><p>The study found that across the board almost all birds laid their eggs earlier because of climate change.</p><p>\"For example, climate change caused chiffchaffs to lay their eggs six days earlier over the last 50 years, but other unknown environmental factors led to an additional six days, meaning in total they now lay their eggs 12 days earlier than they did half a century ago,\" Dr Martijn van de Pol, from the JCU College of Science and Engineering, said.</p><p>Dr McLean said there are \"winners and losers\" of these environmental changes driven by rising temperatures.</p><p>\"For offspring number and body condition we see that it\'s a mixed bag,\" she said.</p><p>\"Some species are clearly increasing their body condition and offspring number, whereas others are suffering from it.</p><p>\"For example, garden warblers in the UK have experienced a 26 per cent decrease in their average number of offspring over the past half century, which is really concerning for the long-term fate of this species, but only half of this reduction, 13 per cent, can be attributed to climate change.</p><p>\"By comparison, the redstart experienced a 27 per cent increase in offspring numbers over the past half century, but again only part of that increase is due to global warming.\"</p><p>The researchers say continued global warming could present a \"double whammy\" for species that are already struggling to adapt to other non-climatic environmental changes.</p><p>\"Rising temperatures, compounded with these unknown environmental factors, could pose a significant threat to the livelihoods of certain species that are already suffering,\" study co-author Dr Loeske Kruuk, also from ANU, said</p><p>This study also involved researchers from the University of Edinburgh, the British Trust for Ornithology, Sovon Dutch Centre for Field Ornithology and the Dutch Centre for Avian Migration and Demography.</p>','2022-03-09 18:20:15.426901','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Australian National University','A new study rolls back the curtain on half a century of evidence detailing the impact of climate change on more than 60 different bird species.  It found that half of all changes to key physical and behavioral bird characteristics since the 1960s can be linked to climate change.\n',1,27,'<li>Nina McLean, Loeske E. B. Kruuk, Henk P. van der Jeugd, David Leech, Chris A. M. van Turnhout, Martijn van de Pol. <strong>Warming temperatures drive at least half of the magnitude of long-term trait changes in European birds</strong>. <em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</em>, 2022; 119 (10) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2105416119\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1073/pnas.2105416119</a>\n</li>'),(591,'Sharing memories sets children on path to better well-being','sharing-memories-sets-children-on-path-to-better-well-being','2022-03-09 18:20:18.617991',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Toddlers whose mothers received special coaching in talking about memories grew into teenagers who experience better wellbeing, University of Otago research shows.</p><p>The study found that 15-year-olds told more coherent stories about turning points in their lives if their mothers had been taught the new conversational techniques 14 years earlier.</p><p>These adolescents also reported fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety compared to adolescents in the study whose mothers had conversed with their toddlers as usual.</p><p>Published in the <em>Journal of Personality</em>, the research is a follow-up of a reminiscing intervention in which 115 mothers of toddlers were assigned to either a control group or given training in elaborative reminiscing for a year. Elaborative reminiscing involves open and responsive conversations with young children about everyday past events, such as feeding ducks at the park.</p><p>Project lead Professor Elaine Reese, of the Department of Psychology, says adolescents whose mothers had participated in the earlier coaching sessions narrated difficult events from their lives -- such as parental divorce or cyber-bullying -- with more insight into how the experience had shaped them as people.</p><p>The research, initially funded by the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society Te Apārangi, is the first to show long-term benefits of mother-child reminiscing for adolescents\' development.</p><p>\"Our findings suggest that brief coaching sessions with parents early in children\'s lives can have long-lasting benefits, both for the way adolescents process and talk about difficult life events and for their well-being,\" Professor Reese says.</p><p>\"We believe parents\' elaborative reminiscing helps children develop more complete, specific, and accurate memories of their experiences, providing a richer store of memories to use when forming their identities in adolescence. Elaborative reminiscing also teaches children how to have open discussions about past feelings when they\'re no longer in the heat of the moment.\"</p><p>She hopes parents and policy makers realise the importance of early childhood as the ideal time for starting to have positive conversations with children, and to know that these conversations can make a difference as children grow older.</p><p>\"The ultimate goal is to encourage parents to have more sensitive and responsive conversations about events in their children\'s lives.\"</p><p>Lead author and clinical psychologist Dr Claire Mitchell says a great deal of research now shows well-being can drop dramatically in adolescence.</p><p>\"For some young people, this dip is the beginning of more severe mental health issues that can be difficult to treat. Thus, it is important to find ways to prevent mental health difficulties earlier in life if possible.</p><p>\"As a parent of a toddler myself, I can confirm that these elaborative reminiscing techniques are enjoyable and easy to learn. Our study helps pave the way for future work with parents of young children to promote healthy interactions from the beginning that could have enduring benefits,\" she says.</p><p>The researchers intend to continue the study, following up with participants in emerging adulthood to determine any ongoing effects of their mothers\' elaborative reminiscing.</p>','2022-03-09 18:20:18.617991','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Otago','Toddlers whose mothers received special coaching in talking about memories grew into teenagers who experience better wellbeing, research shows.\n',1,27,'<li>Claire Mitchell, Elaine Reese. <strong>Growing Memories            Coaching mothers in elaborative reminiscing with toddlers benefits adolescents\' turning‐point narratives and wellbeing</strong>. <em>Journal of Personality</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12703\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1111/jopy.12703</a>\n</li>'),(592,'Treatment of long COVID could be hampered by lack of consensus in identifying and diagnosing the condition, researchers say','treatment-of-long-covid-could-be-hampered-by-lack-of-consensus-in-identifying-and-diagnosing-the-condition,-researchers-say','2022-03-09 18:20:21.121659',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">In a new report, researchers say the challenges of treating long COVID are amplified by a critical issue: we do not know what constitutes long COVID or how to formally diagnose it, an issue that is further exacerbated by limited research data of varying quality and consistency.</p><p>Early reports foretell a difficult challenge with long COVID, which researchers call Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC). Some patients with prior acute COVID-19 cases have continued to report new or persistent health issues affecting nearly every organ system.</p><p>Writing in the March 8 Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers from UCLA Health and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, with a colleague at the University of Washington in Seattle, point out that while PASC has been approved for inclusion and protections within the Americans with Disabilities Act, which has strict medical and legal paperwork requirements, there is limited study data or medical consensus on what constitutes long COVID.</p><p>\"The first challenge when studying any disease is knowing how to diagnose it, and although we have seen serious medical consequences stemming from COVID-19, we do not yet have definitive diagnostic criteria,\" said Lauren E. Wisk, PhD, a researcher with the Division of Internal Medicine and Health Services Research in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, the article\'s first author. \"We believe that as more high-quality data emerges, the current list of symptoms will become better refined, and the timing and duration of symptoms will become clearer. So far, however, these have remained elusive.\"</p><p>\"We need high-quality data and information that supports an accurate diagnosis before patients can receive appropriate supportive care and effective, disease-specific therapy,\" said Joann G. Elmore, MD, MPH, professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, the article\'s senior author. \"The scientific research community will need to be able to provide data that helps the medical community to distinguish long COVID symptoms from those of other illnesses.\"</p><p>Although multiple studies are in progress, the authors say making useful comparisons across studies are nearly impossible without uniformly applied criteria. They also point out that researchers must contend with confounding issues in study design that can skew results, such as biases that can result from patient\'s own recollection and clinicians\' interpretation of symptoms.</p><p>\"Due to the dynamic nature of the virus itself and the technology available to test, monitor, and treat infection, substantial variation may exist in apparent clinical presentation of PASC,\" the authors write. \"Now more than ever, we must implement robust, standardized, longitudinal assessments of health and well-being across systems and settings, including premorbid evaluation, to facilitate real-time monitoring of trends.\"</p><p>In addition to recall and surveillance bias, study selection bias and health care access could produce misleading results, according to the article.</p><p>\"People who were already vulnerable to socioeconomic and racial or ethnic disparities -- people who often have limited access to health care -- have disproportionately borne the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, inequities in the development, presentation and documentation of long COVID-19 may also be accentuated,\" said Dr. Wisk.</p><p>The authors offer potential solutions to ensure equity in future study and treatment, first urging the medical community to come together on a case definition that can be consistently applied. They further recommend that researchers implement robust and standardized measures of potential risk factors and outcomes; consider risk of bias when designing studies; take steps to facilitate cross-study comparisons; and to \"be judicious in application of this evolving evidence as we all strive to provide effective and efficient care that reduces prior inequities.\"</p>','2022-03-09 18:20:21.121659','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of California - Los Angeles Health Sciences','In a new report, researchers say the challenges of treating long COVID are amplified by a critical issue: we do not know what constitutes long COVID or how to formally diagnose it, an issue that is further exacerbated by limited research data of varying quality and consistency.\n',1,27,'<li>Lauren E. Wisk, Graham Nichol, Joann G. Elmore. <strong>Toward Unbiased Evaluation of Postacute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 Infection: Challenges and Solutions for the Long Haul Ahead</strong>. <em>Annals of Internal Medicine</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.7326/M21-4664\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.7326/M21-4664</a>\n</li>'),(593,'Large mammals can help climate change mitigation and adaptation','large-mammals-can-help-climate-change-mitigation-and-adaptation','2022-03-09 18:20:26.365765',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">When it comes to helping mitigate the effects of climate change by absorbing carbon, flora rather than fauna usually comes to mind. A new study published in <em>Current Biology</em> now explores the role of large wild animals in restoring ecosystems and battling climate change.</p><p>Professor Yadvinder Malhi, Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, said:</p><p>\'Conservation efforts usually focus on either trees and carbon or the broad conservation appeal of large mammals. This study looked at whether it was possible to align these agendas -- under what context could protecting and restoring large animal wildlife help us tackle and adapt to climate change.\'</p><p>The researchers highlighted three key eco-touchpoints where large animals such as elephants, rhinoceroses, giraffes, whales, bison, and moose had the greatest potential to mitigate climate change: carbon stocks, albedo (the ability of surfaces to reflect solar radiation (energy from the sun) and fire regimes.</p><p>When they graze, large herbivores disperse seeds, clear vegetation and fertilise the soil, which helps build more complex and more resilient ecosystems. These activities can maintain and increase carbon stocks in the soil, roots and above-ground parts of plants, helping to reduce CO<sub>2</sub> in the atmosphere.</p><p>When large animals graze and trample vegetation they can change the habitat from dense shrubs and trees to open mixes of grass and shrubs or trees, which can also reveal snow-covered ground in polar regions. These open habitats tend to be paler (with higher albedo) and reflect more solar radiation into the atmosphere, cooling the Earth\'s surface, rather than absorbing it and warming the Earth\'s surface.</p><p>In 2021, global wildfire CO<sub>2</sub> emissions reached a record high. When wildfires burn, the carbon stored in trees and vegetation is released into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases. Elephants, rhinoceroses, zebras and other large grazing animals can lessen wildfire risk by browsing on woody vegetation that could otherwise fuel the fires, trampling paths and making other gaps in vegetation that act as firebreaks.</p><p>The research, commissioned by wildlife charity Tusk, also looked at how protecting and restoring large animal wildlife could support climate change efforts and found several animal-climate interaction points that could provide \'win-win\' opportunities.</p><p>In temperate, tropical and subtropical grassland ecosystems, large animals can reduce forest and bush fires, increase albedo and help retain carbon in the vegetation and the soil. Protecting large animal wildlife and their role in these complex ecosystems supports local biodiversity and ecological resilience.</p><p>Dr Tonya Lander, Department of Plant Sciences at Oxford University said:</p><p>\'Animals can also help with localised adaptation to climate change in these environments by diversifying vegetation and increasing habitat heterogeneity. Diversity of species and microhabitats can make the ecosystem as a whole more able to resist climate change, return to a stable state following a climate-related disturbance, or find a new stable state that functions within the changed and changing climate.\'</p><p>When large herbivores are present in tundra ecosystems, they help to keep down woody plant encroachment which encourages local flowering plants and grasses -- and exposes more of the ground to the cold air. That exposure maintains the permafrost and prevents the carbon in the soil from getting released into the atmosphere. Programmes that rewild bison and other animals into the arctic tundra can play important roles in both conservation and climate change adaptation at a local scale.</p><p>In marine ecosystems, whales and other large animals fertilise phytoplankton. Phytoplankton is estimated to capture 37 billion tonnes of CO<sub>2</sub> each year and may release particles into the air which can help seed clouds and reflect sunlight into the atmosphere.</p><p>Large terrestrial and marine carnivores also affect these processes through their influence on herbivore abundance and behaviour.</p><p>Professor Malhi concluded:</p><p>\'The report also highlights where there are gaps in our knowledge, such as in our understanding of soils and the deep oceans, where more research may identify new opportunities for both restoring large animal wildlife and tackling climate change.\'</p>','2022-03-09 18:20:26.365765','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Oxford','A new study investigates whether protecting and restoring large animal wildlife can help to support climate change goals.\n',1,27,'<li>Yadvinder Malhi, Tonya Lander, Elizabeth le Roux, Nicola Stevens, Marc Macias-Fauria, Lisa Wedding, Cécile Girardin, Jeppe Ågård Kristensen, Christopher J. Sandom, Tom D. Evans, Jens-Christian Svenning, Susan Canney. <strong>The role of large wild animals in climate change mitigation and adaptation</strong>. <em>Current Biology</em>, 2022; 32 (4): R181 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/J.CUB.2022.01.041\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1016/J.CUB.2022.01.041</a>\n</li>'),(595,'X-ray view of subducting tectonic plates','x-ray-view-of-subducting-tectonic-plates','2022-03-09 18:45:37.775921',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Earth\'s thin crust softens considerably when it dives down into the Earth attached to a tectonic plate. That is demonstrated by X-ray studies carried out using DESY\'s X-ray source PETRA III on a mineral which occurs in large quantities in basaltic crust. This softening can even cause the crust to peel away from the underlying plate, as an international team led by Hauke Marquardt from the University of Oxford reports in the scientific journal <em>Nature</em>. The delaminated crust has different physical properties from the rest of the mantle, which may explain anomalies in the speed with which seismic waves propagate through the mantle.</p><p>For the first time, the scientists have managed to measure the deformation of the mineral davemaoite under the conditions that prevail inside the Earth\'s mantle. \"Davemaoite belongs to the widespread group of materials known as perovskites, but it is only formed from other minerals at depths of about 550 kilometres and beyond, due to the increasing pressure and temperature,\" explains lead author Julia Immoor from the Bavarian Research Institute of Experimental Geochemistry and Geophysics at the University of Bayreuth. The existence of the mineral had been predicted for decades, but it was not until 2021 that a natural sample of it was found. Davemaoite differs from other perovskites in its cubic crystal structure, among other things. At great enough depths, it can account for about a quarter of the descending basaltic oceanic crust.</p><p>Using a special apparatus at DESY\'s Extreme Conditions Beamline (P02.2) at PETRA III, the team has now succeeded in artificially producing davemaoite and examining it with X-rays. To do this, the scientists heated finely ground wollastonite (CaSiO3) to around 900 degrees Celsius at high pressure, until davemaoite was formed. The mineral was then deformed by applying an increasing pressure of up to 57 gigapascals -- around 570,000 times atmospheric pressure at sea level -- and examined using X-rays. These parameters correspond to the conditions encountered at depths of up to 1300 kilometres.</p><p>\"Our measurements show that davemaoite is surprisingly soft within Earth\'s lower mantle,\" reports Hauke Marquardt, who led the research. \"This observation completely changes our ideas about the dynamic behaviour of subducting slabs in the lower mantle.\" The dynamics in these so-called subduction zones, where one tectonic plate dives underneath another, depend very much on how hard the minerals present are. Being surprisingly soft, davemaoite can cause the descending crust to detach from the underlying plate, whereby the subduction process then proceeds separately for the crust and the remaining plate.</p><p>Scientists have long speculated about such a detachment because the separated crust could cause the characteristic changes in the velocities of seismic waves that are observed at different depths. Until now, however, it has been unclear what causes could lead to such a delamination. \"I am glad that the experimental setup we have come up with here is able to help solve important questions linked to processes occurring deep inside our planet,\" says DESY\'s Hanns-Peter Liermann, who is in charge of the Extreme Conditions Beamline at PETRA III and a co-author of the study.</p><p>Researchers from the Universities of Bayreuth, Oxford and Utah, as well as from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, the California Institute of Technology and DESY were involved in the study. The project was funded in part by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG.</p><p><strong>Story Source:</strong></p>','2022-03-09 18:45:37.775921','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY','Earth\'s thin crust softens considerably when it dives down into the Earth attached to a tectonic plate. That is demonstrated by X-ray studies carried out on a mineral which occurs in large quantities in basaltic crust. This softening can even cause the crust to peel away from the underlying plate. The delaminated crust has different physical properties from the rest of the mantle, which may explain anomalies in the speed with which seismic waves propagate through the mantle.\n',1,27,'<li>J. Immoor, L. Miyagi, H.-P. Liermann, S. Speziale, K. Schulze, J. Buchen, A. Kurnosov &amp; H. Marquardt. <strong>Weak cubic CaSiO3 perovskite in the Earth’s mantle</strong>. <em>Nature</em>, 2022 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04378-2\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41586-021-04378-2</a>\n</li>'),(596,'Forget mammoths: These researchers are exploring bringing back the extinct Christmas Island rat','forget-mammoths:-these-researchers-are-exploring-bringing-back-the-extinct-christmas-island-rat','2022-03-09 18:45:50.516497',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, mammoths 4,000 years ago, and the Christmas Island Rat 119 years ago. Since becoming a popular concept in the 1990s, de-extinction efforts have focused on grand animals with mythical stature, but in a paper published March 9 in the journal <em>Current Biology</em>, a team of paleogeneticists turn their attention to <em>Rattus macleari</em>,and their findings provide insights into the limitations of de-extinction across all species.</p><p>De-extinction work is defined by what is unknown. When sequencing the genome of an extinct species, scientists face the challenge of working with degraded DNA, which doesn\'t yield all the genetic information required to reconstruct a full genome of the extinct animal. With the Christmas Island rat, which is believed to have gone extinct because of diseases brought over on European ships, evolutionary geneticist Tom Gilbert (@Evohologen) at University of Copenhagen and his colleagues lucked out.</p><p>Not only was the team able to obtain almost all of the rodent\'s genome, but since it diverged from other <em>Rattus </em>species relatively recently, it shares about 95% of its genome with a living rat, the Norway brown rat. \"It was a quite a nice test model,\" says Gilbert. \"It\'s the perfect case because when you sequence the genome, you have to compare it to a really good modern reference.\"</p><p>After the DNA has been sequenced as well as possible and the genome is matched up against the reference genome of the living species, the scientists identify the parts of the genomes that don\'t match up and, in theory, would then use CRISPR technology to gene edit the DNA of the living species to match that of the extinct one. The brown-rat-to-Christmas-Island-rat scenario is a particularly good test case because the evolutionary divergence is similar to that of the elephant and the mammoth.</p><p>Though the sequencing of the Christmas Island rat was mostly successful, a few key genes were missing. These genes were related to olfaction, meaning that a resurrected Christmas Island Rat would likely be unable to process smells in the way as it would have originally. \"With current technology, it may be completely impossible to ever recover the full sequence, and therefore it is impossible to ever generate a perfect replica of the Christmas Island rat,\" says Gilbert.</p><p>\"It is very, very clear that we are never going to be able to get all the information to create a perfect recovered form of an extinct species,\" he says. \"There will always be some kind of hybrid.\" Though a replica will never be perfect, the key is that scientists are able to edit for the DNA that makes the extinct animal functionally different from the living one.</p><p>Gilbert says that in order to make an ecologically functional mammoth, for example, it might be enough to edit elephant DNA to make the animal hairy and able to live in the cold. \"If you\'re making a weird fuzzy elephant to live in a zoo, it probably doesn\'t matter if it is missing some behavioral genes,\" he says. \"But that brings up a whole lot of ethical questions.\"</p><p>Gilbert plans to try doing the actual gene editing on rats but would like to start with species that are still living. He intends to begin by doing CRISPR edits on a black rat genome to change it to a Norway brown rat before attempting to resurrect the Christmas Island rat. Though he is excited about his future research, the whole process still gives him pause. \"I think it\'s a fascinating idea in technology, but one has to wonder if that\'s the best use of money as opposed to keeping the things alive that are still here,\" he says.</p>','2022-03-09 18:45:50.516497','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Cell Press','Dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, mammoths 4,000 years ago, and the Christmas Island Rat 119 years ago. Since becoming a popular concept in the 1990s, de-extinction efforts have focused on grand animals with mythical stature, but now a team of paleogeneticists has turned their attention to Rattus macleari, and their findings provide insights into the limitations of de-extinction across all species.\n',1,27,'<li>Jianqing Lin, David Duchêne, Christian Carøe, Oliver Smith, Marta Maria Ciucani, Jonas Niemann, Douglas Richmond, Alex D. Greenwood, Ross MacPhee, Guojie Zhang, Shyam Gopalakrishnan, M. Thomas P. Gilbert. <strong>Probing the genomic limits of de-extinction in the Christmas Island rat</strong>. <em>Current Biology</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.02.027\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1016/j.cub.2022.02.027</a>\n</li>'),(597,'Scientists identify possible new treatment for COVID-19','scientists-identify-possible-new-treatment-for-covid-19','2022-03-09 18:45:52.620339',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Investigators at Cedars-Sinai have identified a potential new therapy for COVID-19: a biologic substance created by reengineered human skin cells.</p><p>Scientists found the substance stopped SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, from reproducing itself and also protected infected cells when tested in human lung cells. Although still in the early stages, the findings open the possibility of having a new therapy for COVID-19 patients. The details of the potential therapy are published in the journal <em>Biomaterials and Biosystems</em>.</p><p>\"We were surprised to find this potential therapy shuts down a novel pathway for viral replication and also protects infected cells,\" saidAhmed G. Ibrahim, PhD, MPH, assistant professor in the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai and first author of the study.</p><p>Few treatments currently exist for COVID-19 and the ones that do primarily focus solely on preventing the virus from replicating. This new potential treatment inhibits replication but also protects or repairs tissue, which is important because COVID-19 can cause symptoms that affect patients long after the viral infection has been cleared.</p><p>The potential therapy investigated in this study was created by scientists using skin cells called dermal fibroblasts. The investigators engineered the cells to produce therapeutic extracellular vesicles (EVs), which are nanoparticles that serve as a communication system between cells and tissue. Engineering these fibroblasts allowed them to secrete EVs -- which the investigators dubbed \"ASTEX\" -- with the ability to repair tissue.</p><p>In previous experiments, the investigators demonstrated that ASTEX can repair heart tissue, lung tissue and muscle damage in laboratory mice. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, the investigators turned to studying whether ASTEX could be used as treatment against SARS-CoV-2.</p><p>The study was done through a collaboration with investigators at UCLA who tested ASTEX by applying it to human lung epithelial cells, cells that line the pulmonary tract and are the targets of SARS-CoV-2 infection.</p><p>They discovered that ASTEX prevented cells from launching an inflammatory process that could lead to cell death. Cells treated with ASTEX also made fewer of a type of protein called ACE that SARS-CoV-2 may use to infect cells.</p><p>The team then compared the potential treatment with remdesivir, a drug currently used to treat COVID-19, and found that remdesivir did not inhibit production of ACE. Instead, remdesivir stops the virus from latching on to a protein called ACE2. ASTEX, therefore, may present another way to prevent the virus from entering cells.</p><p>\"Viruses don\'t have their own machinery to get into cells, so they use proteins,\" Ibrahim said. \"We believe targeting ACE proteins is just one way SARS-CoV-2 infiltrates cells, hijacks their genetic information and replicates itself in the body.\"</p><p>ASTEX appears to have stopped this hijacking process.</p><p>\"This potential anti-COVID-19 biological therapyis novel in that it has two facets: It protects infected cells, which remdesivir does not do, and also inhibits viral replication,\" said senior author Eduardo Marbán, MD, PhD, executive director of the Smidt Heart Institute and the Mark S. Siegel Family Foundation Distinguished Professor at Cedars-Sinai.</p><p>Investigators are planning future studies.</p><p>Funding: The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health under award numbers RO1124074, 1RO1EY032149, the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, the UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center, and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine Discovery Award.</p>','2022-03-09 18:45:52.620339','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Cedars-Sinai Medical Center','Researchers have identified a potential new therapy for COVID-19: a biologic substance created by reengineered human skin cells.\n',1,27,'<li>A.G. Ibrahim, A. Ciullo, C. Li, G. Garcia, K. Peck, K. Miyamoto, V. Arumugaswami, E. Marbán. <strong>Engineered extracellular vesicles antagonize SARS-CoV-2 infection by inhibiting mTOR signaling</strong>. <em>Biomaterials and Biosystems</em>, 2022; 6: 100042 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bbiosy.2022.100042\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1016/j.bbiosy.2022.100042</a>\n</li>'),(598,'How the transition to agriculture affects populations in the present day','how-the-transition-to-agriculture-affects-populations-in-the-present-day','2022-03-09 18:46:17.239142',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">The transition of human societies from hunter-gatherers to farmers and pastoralists is a more nuanced process than generally thought, according to a new study of peoples living in the highlands of southwest Ethiopia. The work was published March 9 in <em>Current Biology</em>.</p><p>Much of the study of how people transitioned away from a lifestyle based mostly on food collected from the wild to one based on cultivated crops has focused on Europe, where the shift to agriculture, or \"Neolithic transition,\" concluded thousands of years ago. Based largely on genetic studies, the prevailing view is that the transition occurred mainly by population replacement rather than cultural change, said first author Shyamalika Gopalan, a graduate student at the time of the work advised by Brenna Henn, associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis.</p><p>\"The prevailing view has been that in Europe it was a wave of people that came through and replaced everyone,\" Gopalan said.</p><p>The transition to agriculture is still underway in the highlands of southwest Ethiopia. Farmers and pastoralists started moving into the area 1,500 to 2,000 years ago, encroaching on the resident hunter-gatherers, and the groups have since been living alongside each other. That presents an opportunity to study this transition and the degree to which it represents replacement versus cultural change in the present day and a different global context.</p><p>The team, led by Henn and Barry Hewlett at Washington State University, Vancouver, collected DNA samples from five groups of people in the southwest highlands: the hunter-gatherer Chabu; the Majang, who practice small-scale cultivation of crops; and the Shekkacho, Bench and Sheko, who practice more intensive farming. The goals were to assess both the genetic ancestry of the different groups and demographic trends in the recent past.</p><p>\"Based on genetics we can estimate the effective population size over the past 60 generations, or about 2,000 years,\" Gopalan said.</p><p><strong>Last hunter-gatherers</strong></p><p>The Chabu are the last hunter-gatherers in the area. They were considered a subgroup of the Majang, but the research team found they have a distinct genetic profile, said Justin Myrick, field manager for the Henn laboratory and a staff researcher at the UC Davis Genome Center.</p><p>The new analysis shows that the Chabu are related to a hunter-gatherer ancestor who lived in the area about 4,500 years ago. Contrary to expectations based on the European Neolithic transition, the other agricultural groups in the study also have a majority genetic affinity with these hunter-gatherer ancestors, though they differ in their other ancestries. The Majang have genetic input from Nilo-Saharan speaking agriculturalists. The Bench and Sheko, in contrast, have contributions from East African Afro-Asiatic agricultural ancestors -- from whom the Shekkacho are mainly descended.</p><p>The population size estimates show that the Chabu have been declining over the past 2,000 years. That is often, but not always, the case for hunter-gatherer groups during an agricultural transition, Gopalan said, although at least from what we can see in Africa, demographic responses are heterogenous.</p><p>Hunter-gatherers may find new roles living alongside agriculturalists as specialists, providing services such as blacksmithing.</p><p>\"What\'s really interesting here is that we have groups in this study from the same area who have transitioned to agriculture at different times, with the Chabu in transition right now,\" Myrick said. \"What we see is a lot of variation in response to agriculture. The Chabu and Majang\'s population sizes have been declining, though the Bench and Sheko have not despite all of them having majority indigenous hunter-gatherer ancestry.\"</p><p>\"The European Neolithic agriculturalist replacement model isn\'t bearing out in East Africa -- there\'s more admixture going on and culture change,\" Myrick said. \"The process is very complicated, and there may be many factors contributing.\"</p><p>Gopalan is now a postdoctoral scholar at Duke University. Additional authors of the paper are: at UC Davis, Austin Reynolds and Mira Mastoras; Richard Berl and Zachary Garfield, Washington State University; Barnabas Bafens, Bench Sheko Zone Administration, Mizan, Ethiopia; Gillian Belbin, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York; Cole Williams and Michelle Daya, University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus; Akmel Negash, Hawassa University, Ethiopia; and Marcus Feldman, Stanford University. The work was partly supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.</p>','2022-03-09 18:46:17.239142','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of California - Davis','The transition of human societies from hunter-gatherers to farmers and pastoralists is a more nuanced process than generally thought, according to a new study of peoples living in the highlands of southwest Ethiopia.\n',1,27,'<li>Shyamalika Gopalan, Richard E.W. Berl, Justin W. Myrick, Zachary H. Garfield, Austin W. Reynolds, Barnabas K. Bafens, Gillian Belbin, Mira Mastoras, Cole Williams, Michelle Daya, Akmel N. Negash, Marcus W. Feldman, Barry S. Hewlett, Brenna M. Henn. <strong>Hunter-gatherer genomes reveal diverse demographic trajectories during the rise of farming in Eastern Africa</strong>. <em>Current Biology</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.02.050\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1016/j.cub.2022.02.050</a>\n</li>'),(600,'Skin cancer cells use Alzheimer’s protein to sabotage brain\'s immune defenses','skin-cancer-cells-use-alzheimer’s-protein-to-sabotage-brain\'s-immune-defenses','2022-03-09 20:29:54.776961',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Amyloid beta, a protein known to build-up in the brains of Alzheimer\'s patients, also helps skin cancer cells thrive when they spread to the brain, a new study finds.</p><p>Published online March 9 in <em>Cancer Discovery</em>, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, the study found that in melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, cancer cells that have spread to the brain depend on amyloid beta to survive there. The study authors focused on melanoma because it spreads (metastasizes) to the brain in 40 percent of patients with advanced (Stage IV) disease, the highest rate among common cancer types.</p><p>Led by researchers from NYU Grossman School of Medicine and its Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center, the study revealed that metastatic melanoma cells recovered from human brains and grown in tissue cultures make roughly three times as much amyloid beta as cancer cells that have spread to other parts of the body.</p><p>The research team also found that amyloid beta secreted by cancer cells ramps down immune responses that would otherwise recognize cancer cells as abnormal and attack them, much as they attack invading bacteria. The researchers theorize that amyloid beta shifts brain immune cells into a mode seen as infections fade and tissues begin to heal, enabling cancer cells to evade notice. In addition, the team showed that a treatment known to dramatically reduce amyloid beta levels, the beta secretase inhibitor LY2886721, decreased the sizeof brain melanoma metastases by about half in study mice<strong>.</strong></p><p>\"Our study reveals an unexpected role for tumor-secreted amyloid beta in promoting the survival of melanoma brain metastases, and suggest a new way to counter it,\" says senior study author Eva Hernando, PhD, professor in the Department of Pathology, and assistant dean for Research Integration, at NYU Langone Health.</p><p>The current finding adds to the mystery surrounding amyloid beta, the main component of deposits found in the brains of people with Alzheimer\'s disease. Despite myriad studies, its roles in normal function and Alzheimer\'s disease remain controversial, even as new proposed roles emerge, says Hernando, also a member of Perlmutter Cancer Center.</p><p><strong>Cancer Can\'t Take Root</strong></p><p>The new work featured refinements on standard techniques that captured a more accurate picture of which proteins are made in greater levels in melanoma cells that have spread to the brain. First, the research team grew cells taken from the human metastatic brain tumors in cultures, but only for a short time to keep them from evolving genetically until they no longer resembled the original cancer cells. The authors then measured the proteins produced by the melanoma cells in the first use, to their knowledge, of a whole cell proteomics test to study brain metastases.</p><p>Using 24 human brain and non-brain cancer metastases grown in short term-cultures, the team was able to show that melanoma cells from the brain produce proteins related to Alzheimer\'s, Parkinson\'s, and Huntington\'s diseases. The discovery of a connection between brain cancer and neurodegenerative diseases was made possible, say the authors, by new techniques that let the research team tell proteins made by cancer cells apart from those made in surrounding brain cells.</p><p>From these data, the researchers hypothesized that cancer cells produce amyloid beta in the brain to help their survival. To test the idea, they looked at the effect of silencing the gene that codes for amyloid precursor protein (APP), a protein that is processed by secretase enzymes (beta and gamma) into amyloid beta, in melanoma cells injected into the hearts of study mice. Silencing the APP gene, and therefore cutting off the amyloid beta supply from the cancer cells, dramatically reduced the amount of cancer metastases that formed in the brain, as measured by imaging.</p><p>Other experiments revealed that melanoma cells lacking amyloid beta became unable to successfully grow (divide and multiply) because of immune attack at the stage where they are forming small cell colonies (micro-metastases) needed for spreading cancer cells to \"take root\" in a new tissue.</p><p>Finally, the study found that amyloid beta released by melanoma cells changes gene expression in astrocytes, brain cells that nourish message-carrying brain cells (neurons), such that the astrocytes emit proteins that ramp down immune responses to cancer. Astrocytes are also known to exchange signals with microglia, a type of immune cell in the brain. The researchers further demonstrated that amyloid beta released by melanoma cells prevents them from being destroyed by microglia. It may be that amyloid beta released by melanoma cells is influencing microglia, both through astrocytes and directly, to keep them from \"swallowing\" and destroying melanoma cells, say the authors.</p><p>\"The field has already developed treatments that have been shown in clinical trials to potently and safely reduce amyloid beta levels, but that fail to counter Alzheimer\'s disease for reasons unknown,\" said first study author Kevin Kleffman, PhD, an MD-PhD student at NYU Langone and member of Hernando\'s lab. \"With this in mind, our team is already evaluating whether repurposed, tested anti-amyloid beta antibodies could prevent or reduce brain metastases in animal studies. Another next step is combining immunotherapies, including checkpoint inhibitors, and anti-amyloid beta therapies to ensure they can be used safely together.\"</p>','2022-03-09 20:29:54.776961','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'NYU Langone Health / NYU Grossman School of Medicine','Amyloid beta, a protein known to build-up in the brains of Alzheimer\'s patients, also helps skin cancer cells thrive when they spread to the brain, a new study finds.\n',1,27,'<li>Kevin Kleffman, Grace Levinson, Indigo V.L. Rose, Lili M. Blumenberg, Sorin A.A. Shadaloey, Avantika Dhabaria, Eitan Wong, Francisco Galan-Echevarria, Alcida Karz, Diana Argibay, Richard Von Itter, Alfredo Floristan, Gillian Baptiste, Nicole M. Eskow, James A. Tranos, Jenny Chen, Eleazar C. Vega y Saenz de Miera, Melissa Call, Robert Rogers, George Jour, Youssef Zaim. Wadghiri, Iman Osman, Yue-Ming Li, Paul Mathews, Ronald DeMattos, Beatrix Ueberheide, Kelly V. Ruggles, Shane A. Liddelow, Robert J. Schneider, Eva Hernando. <strong>Melanoma-secreted Amyloid Beta Suppresses Neuroinflammation and Promotes Brain Metastasis</strong>. <em>Cancer Discovery</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1158/2159-8290.CD-21-1006\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1158/2159-8290.CD-21-1006</a>\n</li>'),(607,'Targeting dysregulated kappa-opioid receptors reduces working memory deficits in alcohol use disorder','targeting-dysregulated-kappa-opioid-receptors-reduces-working-memory-deficits-in-alcohol-use-disorder','2022-03-09 20:31:04.127662',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">As heavy or frequent alcohol use escalates, some people continue to drink despite increasingly negative consequences such as poor job or school performance, unraveling family or personal relationships and declining physical health.</p><p>Impaired working memory, a common problem for those with alcohol use disorder (AUD), can interfere with recovery and disease management, and contribute to the risk of relapse. Working memory is one of the processes of executive function, a set of high-level mental skills (also encompassing flexible thinking and self-control) needed to learn and to manage daily life.</p><p>\"People with severe alcohol dependence have reduced ability to make sound decisions, or good choices,\" said Brendan Walker, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at the University of South Florida Health (USF Health) Morsani College of Medicine. \"They ignore the problems created by excessive drinking and give up things of importance to satisfy their craving to drink more.\"</p><p>Dr. Walker studies the biological brain changes that drive addictive behaviors with the aim of finding ways to improve treatment outcomes. A major obstacle to recovery, even months or years after rehabilitation and prolonged abstinence, appears to be physical changes in neurotransmitters and their receptor targets as the brain adapts to abuse of alcohol or other drugs.</p><p>Dr. Walker\'s laboratory and others have focused on the interaction of alcohol-induced \"feel bad\" brain peptides (neurotransmitters) known as dynorphins that bind with kappa-opioid receptors (KORs), naturally occurring receptors for opioids in brain cells.</p><p>Now, for the first time, a preclinical study led by Dr. Walker shows that dysregulated KORs in the brain\'s medial prefrontal cortex region (part of the frontal lobe) contribute to working memory deficiencies in alcohol dependence. Furthermore, the researchers discovered that a compound used to block KORs (an antagonist) alleviated these working memory deficits and may help restore \"normal\" executive function in those with severe AUD, Dr. Walker said.</p><p>The USF Health findings were reported Jan. 20, 2022, in <em>Addiction Biology</em><em>.</em></p><p>\"Collectively, our research is helping establish that targeting the dynorphin-KOR system could be a viable treatment strategy for simultaneously managing the hallmark symptoms of alcohol dependence -- increased motivation for drinking, increased negative emotional states and compromised executive function (decision-making),\" said Dr. Walker, the study\'s principal investigator.</p><p>Earlier preclinical studies looked at how abnormal regulation of the dynorphin-KOR system in another brain region called the amygdala increases both motivation for alcohol consumption and negative emotional states like depression and anxiety that are amplified during sudden withdrawal from drinking.</p><p>In a series of experiments, the USF Health researchers used a rat model mimicking severe human AUD, which was induced by cycles of intoxication (long-term intermittent ethanol vapor exposure) and alcohol withdrawal (exposure to air only). This group of alcohol-dependent rats was compared with two other groups: nondependent rats (a model mimicking social drinking in humans) and alcohol-naïve rats (a control group never exposed to ethanol vapor.) All were trained and tested in a working memory task (delayed nonmatching-to-sample task) involving a T-maze.</p><p><strong>Among the key findings: </strong></p><p>More studies are needed, including in humans, but previous laboratory research has already shown that KOR antagonists curb the desire to excessively consume alcohol and the negative emotions that can drive self-medication with alcohol. This latest USF Health study suggests such a compound also holds promise for restoring executive function needed for people to make better decisions about their alcohol intake and improve their quality of life, Dr. Walker said.</p><p>There is \"no magic bullet\" for AUD, Dr. Walker emphasized, but identifying and developing one medication that alleviates multiple symptoms could make it easier for patients to cut back or quit drinking when combined with cognitive behavioral therapy.</p><p>The USF Health study was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA).</p><p>Alcohol is one of the most common forms of substance abuse and a leading cause of preventable deaths and disease, killing nearly 100,000 Americans yearly. In 2019, almost 15 million people ages 12 and older in the U.S had alcohol use disorder, according to the NIAAA.</p>','2022-03-09 20:31:04.127662','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of South Florida (USF Health)','A preclinical study led by a neuroscientist shows that dysregulated kappa-opioid receptors (KORs) in the brain\'s medial prefrontal cortex region (part of the frontal lobe) contribute to working memory deficits in severe alcohol dependence. The researchers discovered that an antagonist compound used to block KORs alleviated these working memory deficits and may help restore \'normal\' executive function needed to make better decisions about alcohol consumption.\n',1,27,'<li>Gengze Wei, Sunil Sirohi, Brendan M. Walker. <strong>Dysregulated kappa‐opioid receptors in the medial prefrontal cortex contribute to working memory deficits in alcohol dependence</strong>. <em>Addiction Biology</em>, 2022; 27 (2) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/adb.13138\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1111/adb.13138</a>\n</li>'),(609,'Continuing face mask use could save U.S. billions of dollars, study suggests','continuing-face-mask-use-could-save-u.s.-billions-of-dollars,-study-suggests','2022-03-09 20:40:32.756565',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">In recent weeks, many locations in the U.S. have been lifting indoor face mask requirements, despite less than 70 percent of the population being fully vaccinated against Covid-19 and less than 45 percent having received the booster. A new study published March 8 in <em>The</em> <em>Lancet Public Health</em> suggests that consistently maintaining face mask use until, and even two to 10 weeks beyond, reaching various vaccination coverage thresholds (e.g., 70 to 90 percent of people fully vaccinated) could not only prevent a substantial number of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths but also end up saving businesses, the health care system, insurance companies, taxpayers, and others money.</p><p>Results from the study\'s computer simulation model of the entire U.S. suggest that when the reproductive number of the virus (e.g., how contagious and infectious the variant is) is five, corresponding to the delta variant, and 80 percent of the population is fully vaccinated by May 1, maintaining face mask use until then could save a total of $2.9 billion in direct medical costs, which would benefit the healthcare system, insurance companies, and anyone else paying for healthcare. It could save a total of $20.1 billion in productivity losses, which would benefit employers and taxpayers. If the same coverage (e.g., 80 percent) is reached by July 1, maintaining face masks use until then could save a total of $3.3 billion in direct medical costs and $23.4 billion in productivity losses. All of this suggests that it would be worthwhile for employers, governments, and insurance companies to invest into providing face masks and maintaining their use until two to 10 weeks after different target vaccination coverages have been reached.</p><p>The study was led by the Public Health Informatics, Computational, and Operations Research (PHICOR) team at the City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY SPH) along with a team from the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. The team developed a computer simulation model of the entire U.S. that simulated the spread of Covid-19 coronavirus, subsequent outcomes of infection (e.g., symptoms, hospitalizations), vaccination, face mask use at the levels seen in the U.S. from March-July 2020, and the associated costs along the way.</p><p>\"The messaging about face mask use has been inconsistent throughout the pandemic as there has been back and forth about the use of face masks,\" says Dr. Bruce Y. Lee, CUNY SPH professor, executive director of PHICOR, and the study\'s senior author. \"There has been a tendency to focus on one intervention at a time. First there was a focus on social distancing and then the focus turned to face mask wearing. Then, attention turned towards the Covid-19 vaccines once they came out. Instead, as long as the pandemic is continuing, there\'s a need to consistently layer multiple interventions on top of each other since each complement and enhance each other.\"</p><p>The study suggests there are benefits to maintaining face mask use two to 10 weeks beyond achieving target coverage levels (e.g., 70 to 90 percent fully vaccinated). The duration beyond achieving vaccination coverages was greater in the winter (up to 10 weeks) than the summer (at least two weeks). The study found that continuing face mask use for one more month beyond achieving 70 percent coverage by March 1 provided additional value, averting an additional $1.5 billion in societal costs, $148.6 million in direct medical costs, $3.9 billion in productivity losses and 856,000 cases compared to if masks were not maintained for the additional month. Thus, the study provided evidence that Americans will not need to wear face masks forever.</p><p>Face masks could offer even greater benefits with more infectious variants such omicron and its subvariant BA.2. For example, results from the model suggest that when the reproductive number is 10, corresponding to the omicron variant, maintaining face masks would avert $49.5 billion in societal costs (e.g., direct medical costs, productivity losses, face mask costs), $5.2 billion in direct medical costs, $48.8 billion in productivity losses and 17.9 million cases compared to no mask use if 70 percent of the U.S. was fully vaccinated by March 1.</p><p>\"Vaccines save lives but alone are not enough to get our society to a point where we can safely be free of Covid-19 requirements like face mask use yet,\" said Dr. Peter Hotez, professor and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and co-author of the study.</p><p>Of note, the study looked at maintaining the level of face mask use that was seen in the U.S. in March to July 2020 when many medical-grade face masks were not as readily available to the general public. Further increasing face mask use or using more effective masks such as N95 respirators could further increase the cost savings. For example, scenarios revealed that increasing face mask use by 10 percent above the levels seen in March to July 2020 could increase the cost savings and cases, hospitalizations and deaths averted by up to 20 percent.</p><p>Moreover, anything that further increases Covid-19 coronavirus\' infectiousness (e.g., variants and subvariants), decreases vaccine effectiveness (e.g., waning immunity, lack of boosters, emerging variants), or increases social interactions only increased face masks\' value. The study\'s results highlight the importance and value of implementing multilayered interventions such as continuing to use face masks while vaccinating and social distancing.</p><p>\"The study\'s results suggest that it could be economically worthwhile for businesses to provide and encourage face mask use,\" said study co-author Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi, associate dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. \"The results also provide targets to aim for in which we can drop the mask requirements indoors.\"</p><p>\"Maintaining face mask use before and after achieving different COVID-19 vaccination coverage levels: a modelling study\" was written by Sarah M. Bartsch, Kelly J. O\'Shea, Kevin L. Chin, Ulrich Strych, Marie C. Ferguson, Maria Elena Bottazzi, Patrick T. Wedlock, Sarah N. Cox, Sheryl S. Siegmund, Peter J. Hotez, and Bruce Y. Lee.</p><p>This work was supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) via grant 1R01HS028165-01, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) as part of the Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study network under grants R01GM127512 and 3R01GM127512-01A1S1, the National Science Foundation (NSF) proposal number 2054858, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) of the National Institutes of Health via award number U54TR004279, and the City University of New York (CUNY) in support of the Pandemic Response Institute (PRI). Statements in the manuscript do not necessarily represent the official views of, or imply endorsement by, the National Institutes of Health, AHRQ, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the CUNY, or the PRI.</p>','2022-03-09 20:40:32.756565','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy','A new study suggests that consistently maintaining face mask use until, and even two to 10 weeks beyond, reaching various vaccination coverage thresholds could not only prevent a substantial number of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths but also end up saving businesses, the health care system, insurance companies, taxpayers, and others money.\n',1,27,'<li>Sarah M Bartsch, Kelly J O\'Shea, Kevin L Chin, Ulrich Strych, Marie C Ferguson, Maria Elena Bottazzi, Patrick T Wedlock, Sarah N Cox, Sheryl S Siegmund, Peter J Hotez, Bruce Y Lee. <strong>Maintaining face mask use before and after achieving different COVID-19 vaccination coverage levels: a modelling study</strong>. <em>The Lancet Public Health</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(22)00040-8\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1016/S2468-2667(22)00040-8</a>\n</li>'),(610,'An ‘oracle’ for predicting the evolution of gene regulation','an-‘oracle’-for-predicting-the-evolution-of-gene-regulation','2022-03-09 20:53:25.201596',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Computational biologists have created a neural network model capable of predicting how changes to non-coding DNA sequences in yeast affect gene expression. They also devised a unique way of representing this data in two dimensions, making it easy to understand the past and future evolution of non-coding sequences in organisms beyond yeast -- and even design custom gene expression patterns for gene therapies and industrial applications.</p><p>Despite the sheer number of genes that each human cell contains, these so-called \"coding\" DNA sequences comprise just 1% of our entire genome. The remaining 99% is made up of \"non-coding\" DNA -- which, unlike coding DNA, does not carry the instructions to build proteins.</p><p>One vital function of this non-coding DNA, also called \"regulatory\" DNA, is to help turn genes on and off, controlling how much (if any) of a protein is made. Over time, as cells replicate their DNA to grow and divide, mutations often crop up in these non-coding regions -- sometimes tweaking their function and changing the way they control gene expression. Many of these mutations are trivial, and some are even beneficial. Occasionally, though, they can be associated with increased risk of common diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, or more life-threatening ones, including cancer.</p><p>To better understand the repercussions of such mutations, researchers have been hard at work on mathematical maps that allow them to look at an organism\'s genome, predict which genes will be expressed, and determine how that expression will affect the organism\'s observable traits. These maps, called fitness landscapes, were conceptualized roughly a century ago to understand how genetic makeup influences one common measure of organismal fitness in particular: reproductive success. Early fitness landscapes were very simple, often focusing on a limited number of mutations. Much richer data sets are now available, but researchers still require additional tools to characterize and visualize such complex data. This ability would not only facilitate a better understanding of how individual genes have evolved over time, but would also help to predict what sequence and expression changes might occur in the future.</p><p>In a new study published on March 9 in <em>Nature</em>, a team of scientists has developed a framework for studying the fitness landscapes of regulatory DNA. They created a neural network model that, when trained on hundreds of millions of experimental measurements, was capable of predicting how changes to these non-coding sequences in yeast affected gene expression. They also devised a unique way of representing the landscapes in two dimensions, making it easy to understand the past and forecast the future evolution of non-coding sequences in organisms beyond yeast -- and even design custom gene expression patterns for gene therapies and industrial applications.</p><p>\"We now have an \'oracle\' that can be queried to ask: What if we tried all possible mutations of this sequence? Or, what new sequence should we design to give us a desired expression?\" says Aviv Regev, a professor of biology at MIT (on leave), core member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT (on leave), head of Genentech Research and Early Development, and the study\'s senior author. \"Scientists can now use the model for their own evolutionary question or scenario, and for other problems like making sequences that control gene expression in desired ways. I am also excited about the possibilities for machine learning researchers interested in interpretability; they can ask their questions in reverse, to better understand the underlying biology.\"</p><p>Prior to this study, many researchers had simply trained their models on known mutations (or slight variations thereof) that exist in nature. However, Regev\'s team wanted to go a step further by creating their own unbiased models capable of predicting an organism\'s fitness and gene expression based on any possible DNA sequence -- even sequences they\'d never seen before. This would also enable researchers to use such models to engineer cells for pharmaceutical purposes, including new treatments for cancer and autoimmune disorders.</p><p>To accomplish this goal, Eeshit Dhaval Vaishnav, a graduate student at MIT and co-first author, Carl de Boer, now an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, and their colleagues created a neural network model to predict gene expression. They trained it on a dataset generated by inserting millions of totally random non-coding DNA sequences into yeast, and observing how each random sequence affected gene expression. They focused on a particular subset of non-coding DNA sequences called promoters, which serve as binding sites for proteins that can switch nearby genes on or off.</p><p>\"This work highlights what possibilities open up when we design new kinds of experiments to generate the right data to train models,\" Regev says. \"In the broader sense, I believe these kinds of approaches will be important for many problems -- like understanding genetic variants in regulatory regions that confer disease risk in the human genome, but also for predicting the impact of combinations of mutations, or designing new molecules.\"</p><p>Regev, Vaishnav, de Boer, and their coauthors went on to test their model\'s predictive abilities in a variety of ways, in order to show how it could help demystify the evolutionary past -- and possible future -- of certain promoters. \"Creating an accurate model was certainly an accomplishment, but, to me, it was really just a starting point,\" Vaishnav explains.</p><p>First, to determine whether their model could help with synthetic biology applications like producing antibiotics, enzymes, and food, the researchers practiced using it to design promoters that could generate desired expression levels for any gene of interest. They then scoured other scientific papers to identify fundamental evolutionary questions, in order to see if their model could help answer them. The team even went so far as to feed their model a real-world population data set from one existing study, which contained genetic information from yeast strains around the world. In doing so, they were able to delineate thousands of years of past selection pressures that sculpted the genomes of today\'s yeast.</p><p>But, in order to create a powerful tool that could probe any genome, the researchers knew they\'d need to find a way to forecast the evolution of non-coding sequences even without such a comprehensive population data set. To address this goal, Vaishnav and his colleagues devised a computational technique that allowed them to plot the predictions from their framework onto a two-dimensional graph. This helped them show, in a remarkably simple manner, how any non-coding DNA sequence would affect gene expression and fitness, without needing to conduct any time-consuming experiments at the lab bench.</p><p>\"One of the unsolved problems in fitness landscapes was that we didn\'t have an approach for visualizing them in a way that meaningfully captured the evolutionary properties of sequences,\" Vaishnav explains. \"I really wanted to find a way to fill that gap, and contribute to the longstanding vision of creating a complete fitness landscape.\"</p><p>Martin Taylor, a professor of genetics at the University of Edinburgh\'s Medical Research Council Human Genetics Unit who was not involved in the research, says the study shows that artificial intelligence can not only predict the effect of regulatory DNA changes, but also reveal the underlying principles that govern millions of years of evolution.</p><p>Despite the fact that the model was trained on just a fraction of yeast regulatory DNA in a few growth conditions, he\'s impressed that it\'s capable of making such useful predictions about the evolution of gene regulation in mammals.</p><p>\"There are obvious near-term applications, such as the custom design of regulatory DNA for yeast in brewing, baking, and biotechnology,\" he explains. \"But extensions of this work could also help identify disease mutations in human regulatory DNA that are currently difficult to find and largely overlooked in the clinic. This work suggests there is a bright future for AI models of gene regulation trained on richer, more complex, and more diverse data sets.\"</p><p>Even before the study was formally published, Vaishnav began receiving queries from other researchers hoping to use the model to devise non-coding DNA sequences for use in gene therapies.</p><p>\"People have been studying regulatory evolution and fitness landscapes for decades now,\" Vaishnav says. \"I think our framework will go a long way in answering fundamental, open questions about the evolution and evolvability of gene regulatory DNA -- and even help us design biological sequences for exciting new applications.\"</p>','2022-03-09 20:53:25.201596','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Biology','Computational biologists have created a neural network model capable of predicting how changes to non-coding DNA sequences in yeast affect gene expression. They also devised a unique way of representing this data in two dimensions, making it easy to understand the past and future evolution of non-coding sequences in organisms beyond yeast -- and even design custom gene expression patterns for gene therapies and industrial applications. Despite the sheer number of genes that each human cell contains, these so-called \'coding\' DNA sequences comprise just 1% of our entire genome. The remaining 99% is made up of \'non-coding\' DNA -- which, unlike coding DNA, does not carry the instructions to build proteins.\n',1,27,'<li>Eeshit Dhaval Vaishnav, Carl G. de Boer, Jennifer Molinet, Moran Yassour, Lin Fan, Xian Adiconis, Dawn A. Thompson, Joshua Z. Levin, Francisco A. Cubillos, Aviv Regev. <strong>The evolution, evolvability and engineering of gene regulatory DNA</strong>. <em>Nature</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04506-6\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41586-022-04506-6</a>\n</li>'),(611,'New technology enables unprecedented glimpse inside single brain cells','new-technology-enables-unprecedented-glimpse-inside-single-brain-cells','2022-03-09 20:53:28.309077',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Salk Institute researchers have developed a new genomic technology to simultaneously analyze the DNA, RNA and chromatin -- a combination of DNA and protein -- from a single cell. The method, which took five years to develop, is an important step forward for large collaborations where multiple teams are working simultaneously to classify thousands of new cell types. The new technology, published in <em>Cell Genomics</em> on March 9, 2022, will help streamline analyses.</p><p>\"This multimodal platform is going to be useful by providing a comprehensive database that can be used by the groups trying to integrate their single-modality data,\" says Joseph Ecker, director of the Genomic Analysis Laboratory at Salk, the Salk International Council Chair in Genetics and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. \"This new information can also inform and guide future cell-type classification.\"</p><p>Ecker believes this technology will be vital for large-scale efforts, such as the National Institutes of Health\'s BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network, which he co-chairs. A major effort of the BRAIN Initiative is to develop catalogues of mouse and human brain cell types. This information can then be used to better understand how the brain grows and develops, as well as the role different cell types play in neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer\'s.</p><p>Current single-cell technology works by extracting either DNA, RNA or chromatin from a cell\'s nucleus, and then analyzing its molecular structure for patterns. However, this method destroys the cell in the process, requiring researchers to rely on computational algorithms to analyze more than one of these components per cell or to compare the results.</p><p>For the new method, called snmCAT-seq, scientists used biomarkers to tag DNA, RNA and chromatin without removing them from the cell. This allowed the researchers to measure all three types of molecular information in the same cell. The scientists then used this method to identify 63 cell types in the frontal cortex region of the human brain and benchmarked the efficacy of computational methods for integrating multiple single-cell technologies. The team found the computational methods have high accuracy in characterizing broadly defined brain-cell populations but show significant ambiguity in analyzing finely defined cell types, suggesting the necessity to define cell types by diverse measurements for more accurate classification.</p><p>The technology could also be used to better understand how genes and cells interact to cause neurodegenerative diseases.</p><p>\"These diseases can broadly affect many cell types. But there could be certain cell populations that are particularly vulnerable,\" says co-first author Chongyuan Luo, assistant professor of human genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. \"Genetic research has pinpointed the regions of the genome that are relevant for diseases like Alzheimer\'s. We\'re providing another data dimension and identifying the cell types affected by these genomic regions.\"</p><p>As a next step, the team plans to use the new platform to survey other areas of the brain, and to compare cells from healthy human brains with those from brains affected by Alzheimer\'s and other neurodegenerative diseases.</p><p>Other authors included Hanqing Liu, Bang-An Wang, Zhuzhu Zhang, Dong-Sung Lee, Jingtian Zhou, Sheng-Yong Niu, Rosa Castanon, Anna Bartlett, Angeline Rivkin, Jacinta Lucero, Joseph R. Nery, Jesse R. Dixon and M. Margarita Behrens of Salk; Fangming Xie, Ethan J. Armand, Wayne I. Doyle, Sebastian Preissl and Eran A. Mukamel of the University of California San Diego; Kimberly Siletti, Lijuan Hu and Sten Linnarsson of the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden; Trygve E. Bakken, Rebecca D. Hodge and Ed Lein of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle; Rongxin Fang, Xinxin Wang, and Bing Ren of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in La Jolla, California; Tim Stuart and Rahul Satija of the New York Genome Center; and David A. Davis and Deborah C. Mash of the University of Miami.</p><p>The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (5R21HG009274, 5R21MH112161, 5U19MH11483, R01MH125252, U01HG012079, 5T32MH020002, R01HG010634 and U01MH114812), the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and UC San Diego School of Medicine.</p>','2022-03-09 20:53:28.309077','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Salk Institute','Researchers have developed a new genomic technology to simultaneously analyze the DNA, RNA and chromatin -- a combination of DNA and protein -- from a single cell. The method, which took five years to develop, is an important step forward for large collaborations where multiple teams are working simultaneously to classify thousands of new cell types. The new technology will help streamline analyses.\n',1,27,'<li>Chongyuan Luo, Hanqing Liu, Fangming Xie, Ethan J. Armand, Kimberly Siletti, Trygve E. Bakken, Rongxin Fang, Wayne I. Doyle, Tim Stuart, Rebecca D. Hodge, Lijuan Hu, Bang-An Wang, Zhuzhu Zhang, Sebastian Preissl, Dong-Sung Lee, Jingtian Zhou, Sheng-Yong Niu, Rosa Castanon, Anna Bartlett, Angeline Rivkin, Xinxin Wang, Jacinta Lucero, Joseph R. Nery, David A. Davis, Deborah C. Mash, Rahul Satija, Jesse R. Dixon, Sten Linnarsson, Ed Lein, M. Margarita Behrens, Bing Ren, Eran A. Mukamel, Joseph R. Ecker. <strong>Single nucleus multi-omics identifies human cortical cell regulatory genome diversity</strong>. <em>Cell Genomics</em>, 2022; 2 (3): 100107 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.xgen.2022.100107\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1016/j.xgen.2022.100107</a>\n</li>'),(613,'Reducing subsequent injuries after a concussion','reducing-subsequent-injuries-after-a-concussion','2022-03-09 20:53:50.964166',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">As assistant professor of orthopedics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, David Howell, PhD, understands the relationship between concussions and subsequent injury in athletes -- namely, that after suffering a concussion, athletes at all levels are more likely to sustain another injury within the next year.</p><p>\"Any athlete may experience an injury such as an ankle sprain or an ACL rupture -- that\'s just a part of sports,\" says Howell, lead researcher for sports medicine at Children\'s Hospital Colorado. \"However, people with recent concussions tend to be particularly vulnerable to these. Even after symptoms have subsided and an athlete is cleared to go back to sports, we still see neuromuscular motor control deficits, particularly when they are paired with a cognitive task. Those lingering deficits might predispose them to further injury.\"</p><p><strong>Enter the intervention</strong></p><p>Looking for techniques to keep young athletes safer post-concussion, Howell and the investigative team devised a study in which teenage athletes who suffered concussions were randomized either to standard of care -- typically returning to play after clearing a set of standardized protocols that assess symptoms, cognition, and balance -- or completing the same protocol and then working with an athletic trainer on a specific neuromuscular training intervention that includes guided strength exercises and a focus on posture and landing stability.</p><p>\"It\'s similar to injury risk reduction programs that are used more in population-level studies,\" Howell says. \"You take an entire high school soccer team and run them through these neuromuscular training programs over a season, then compare them to a team that didn\'t do the program. Those studies showed that if you have a team go through this, it can reduce the risk of ACL tears, for example, pretty significantly.\"</p><p>Howell enrolled 27 post-concussion youth athletes in the study, most of whom were patients in the Sports Medicine Center at Children\'s Hospital Colorado. The athletes who were randomized to the intervention worked with an athletic trainer two times a week for eight weeks; researchers followed them for a full year following their concussion.</p><p>\"We asked them every month over the following year, \'Did you play sports? How many games did you have? How many practices do you have? How many hours did you participate\' -- plus, \'Did you get injured or not?\'\" Howell says. \"What we found is that the people who went through the intervention had about a three-and-a-half times reduced injury risk compared to the ones that did not go through the intervention over that next year.\"</p><p><strong>Changing the rules on return-to-play</strong></p><p>Howell hopes the results from his study will eventually change the way athletes are returned to play, shifting focus from computerized tests and self-reported symptoms to a standardized intervention that can help stave off additional injuries.</p><p>He and his research team are even working on an app that will support athletes through a self-guided training program in situations where they don\'t have access to a trained clinician, such as an athletic trainer or physical therapist.</p><p>\"When you think about sports, it\'s not just looking at a computer screen, doing a reaction time test or a single balance test,\" he says. \"It\'s an integration of many different systems. You think about a soccer pass, for example -- you\'re standing here, there\'s a teammate across the way to try to pass it to. But what\'s your angle of your foot doing? Where are the opponents? All those things require a lot of cognitive and fine motor skills that happened in rapid succession.</p><p>\"If this can help with at least some of those elements that can contribute to safety, we think that can have an effect,\" he says. \"The results of this preliminary study were really encouraging, and I\'m excited about where we\'re going from here.\"</p>','2022-03-09 20:53:50.964166','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus','Looking for techniques to keep young athletes safer post-concussion, researchers devised a study in which teenage athletes who suffered concussions were randomized either to standard of care -- typically returning to play after clearing a set of standardized protocols that assess symptoms, cognition, and balance -- or completing the same protocol and then working with an athletic trainer on a specific neuromuscular training intervention that includes guided strength exercises and a focus on posture and landing stability.\n',1,27,'<li>David R. Howell, Corrine N. Seehusen, Patrick M. Carry, Gregory A. Walker, Sarah E. Reinking, Julie C. Wilson. <strong>An 8-Week Neuromuscular Training Program After Concussion Reduces 1-Year Subsequent Injury Risk: A Randomized Clinical Trial</strong>. <em>The American Journal of Sports Medicine</em>, 2022; 036354652110693 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/03635465211069372\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1177/03635465211069372</a>\n</li>'),(614,'Stalagmites trace climate history and impact from volcanic eruptions','stalagmites-trace-climate-history-and-impact-from-volcanic-eruptions','2022-03-09 20:53:53.946559',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">The soils and vegetation of Patagonia\'s fjord regions form a unique and highly sensitive ecosystem that is closely linked to marine ecosystems, sediment deposition and carbon storage in the ocean. A research team, including the University of Göttingen, has been working on reconstructing the climate history of this region in this extremely wet, rainy and inaccessible fjord and island zone of the Patagonian Andes in southern Chile. Due to its location, the area is a key region for understanding the history of the southern westerly wind belt within the global climate system. The results were published in the journal <em>Nature Communications Earth &amp; Environment</em>.</p><p>The research, in collaboration with the University of Trier, is based on extensive soil analyses and, above all, the detailed geochemical analyses of a stalagmite that is around 4,500 years old, which was recovered from an almost inaccessible cave. \"This stalagmite is the southernmost limestone deposit of its kind ever found,\" says Professor Gerhard Wörner of the Geoscience Center at Göttingen University. \"Its fine and detailed stratification enables us to document the chemical composition of the stalagmite at high temporal resolution.\" Since the stalagmite formed over a long time from surface waters that seeped into the cave, this geological \"archive\" makes it possible to reconstruct the climate-driven chemical processes in the peaty soils at the Earth\'s surface above the cave.</p><p>It turns out that the transport of chemical compounds from the peatlands to the fjords in southern Patagonian fjords are particularly closely coupled with natural processes in the delicate soil ecosystems, which react highly sensitively to climate fluctuations and the input of volcanic ash from nearby active volcanoes. \"It was a surprise to discover actual remnants of volcanic dust from eruptions of nearby volcanoes in the soil. In fact, tiny volcanic particles were detected embedded in the stalagmite from the cave,\" Wörner explains. The effect of volcanic depositions can also be documented from geochemical anomalies in the stalagmite -- such as the high presence of sulphur -- and can even be attributed to individual volcanic eruptions by dating the stalagmite layers. These volcanic deposits are of fundamental importance for the chemical processes in the peatlands of Patagonia and have a particularly strong effect under the influence of the extreme precipitation in the region. \"These effects range from substantial destruction of vegetation after large eruptions to a possible fertilizing effect on the ocean as a result of nutrients released after smaller eruptions,\" Wörner adds.</p><p><strong>Story Source:</strong></p>','2022-03-09 20:53:53.946559','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Göttingen','The soils and vegetation of Patagonia\'s fjord regions form a unique and highly sensitive ecosystem that is closely linked to marine ecosystems, sediment deposition and carbon storage in the ocean. A research team has been working on reconstructing the climate history of this region in this extremely wet, rainy and inaccessible fjord and island zone of the Patagonian Andes in southern Chile. Due to its location, the area is a key region for understanding the history of the southern westerly wind belt within the global climate system.\n',1,27,'<li>Björn Klaes, Gerhard Wörner, Katrina Kremer, Klaus Simon, Andreas Kronz, Denis Scholz, Carsten W. Mueller, Carmen Höschen, Julian Struck, Helge Wolfgang Arz, Sören Thiele-Bruhn, Daniel Schimpf, Rolf Kilian. <strong>High-resolution stalagmite stratigraphy supports the Late Holocene tephrochronology of southernmost Patagonia</strong>. <em>Communications Earth &amp; Environment</em>, 2022; 3 (1) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s43247-022-00358-0\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s43247-022-00358-0</a>\n</li>');
INSERT INTO `news_news` VALUES (615,'New twist on an 80-year-old biochemical pathway','new-twist-on-an-80-year-old-biochemical-pathway','2022-03-09 20:53:58.930118',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Every year, thousands of biochemistry majors and medical students around the world learn to memorize the major biochemical pathways that allow cells to function. How these 10 or so pathways are described in textbooks hasn\'t changed much since the early 20th century, when they were first discovered.</p><p>But with the resurgence of interest in cancer metabolism in the past decade, researchers are coming to realize that there is more to a cell\'s biochemistry than once thought.</p><p>The latest plot twist comes from a team of scientists at the Sloan Kettering Institute who report that they have discovered a previously unappreciated metabolic pathway -- an alternate version of the famous Krebs cycle, also known as the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle.</p><p>The TCA or Krebs cycle -- named after Hans Krebs, the German-born biochemist who discovered it in 1937 -- is a central hub of cellular metabolism. It is a core part of the process by which cells \"burn\" sugars to make ATP, the cell\'s energy-carrying molecule. In its standard form, the cycle occurs entirely in a cell\'s mitochondria.</p><p>\"We and other scientists have recognized for a while that there is variation in the degree to which cells use parts of the TCA cycle, suggesting that cells may have multiple ways to meet their fundamental metabolic needs,\" says Lydia Finley, a cell biologist in SKI who led the team. \"Now, with this latest research, we can say there is a complete alternative to the canonical TCA cycle, and we explain how it works.\"</p><p><strong>Implications for Understanding Cancer Cell Metabolism</strong></p><p>Through several converging lines of evidence, Dr. Finley\'s team showed that an alternate version of the TCA cycle takes place partly in the mitochondria and partly in the cytosol. Rather than burning sugar for energy, this alternate version of the TCA cycle allows cells to use the carbons in sugar to build important molecules such as lipids for cell membranes.</p><p>Not only that, but a cell\'s use of one or the other version of the TCA cycle is associated with changes in its identity, the team showed.</p><p>These findings, which were reported on March 9, 2022, in <em>Nature</em>, have broad implications for understanding how cells adapt their metabolism to meet changing needs. They also may suggest additional avenues for cancer therapies geared at targeting a tumor\'s metabolism.</p><p><strong>Putting Together the Puzzle Pieces</strong></p><p>The new results came out of a productive collaboration in the Finley lab between Gerstner Sloan Kettering graduate student Paige Arnold and Tri-Institutional MD-PhD student Benjamin Jackson.</p><p>Arnold had been using carbon-tracing techniques to study the flow of carbons through the TCA cycle in different cell types. She had noticed, for example, that there seemed to be variation in the extent to which cells put their carbons into the TCA cycle versus skipping one part of it.</p><p>Around the same time, Jackson was using computational methods to analyze publicly available data from experiments in which the genome-editing tool CRISPR had been used to systematically knock out genes for various enzymes, one at a time, to see what effect this had on cells.</p><p>\"You would hypothesize that if the TCA cycle were one functional module, then any one of those enzymes should have a relatively similar effect when you remove it,\" Dr. Finley points out. \"What Ben noticed is that\'s not actually the case.\"</p><p>\"The metabolic enzymes seemed to form two separate modules,\" Jackson says. \"This backed up the anecdotal evidence that we were accumulating that there were different parts of the TCA cycle that cells could use or not use.\"</p><p>The CRISPR studies Jackson analyzed were performed in cancer cell lines -- in other words, cells that aren\'t \"normal.\" Arnold wanted to know if normal also engage in this alternative or noncanonical cycle. The Finley lab often works with embryonic stem cells, so Arnold had easy access to these normal cells. Arnold traced the flow of carbons through them and found that they also engaged in the noncanonical TCA cycle.</p><p><strong>Lessons From 80 Years Ago</strong></p><p>These two sets of experiments seemed to confirm that there really was an alternate way to perform the TCA cycle, one that is not in textbooks. But why had Krebs missed it?</p><p>To try to answer that question, Arnold decided to review Krebs\' original papers from the 1930s and 40s. She found, to her surprise, that Krebs had made his pivotal discoveries in one particular type of tissue: pigeon breast muscle.</p><p>\"Nobody really talks about that,\" Arnold says. \"But it made us wonder if maybe different cell types have distinct preferences for whether they use the traditional TCA cycle or this alternate version.\"</p><p>She decided to reconstruct Krebs\' original experiments, only in a dish rather than in pigeon muscle. She used mouse stem-like muscle cells to grow a muscle fiber precursor called a myotube and then traced the carbons. When she did this, she saw something interesting: \"When the cells were still in a more stem-like stage, they seemed to be doing a lot of this noncanonical TCA cycle, similar to embryonic stem cells and cancer cells,\" Arnold says. \"But as soon as the cells had differentiated into myotubes, they immediately switched to the more traditional TCA cycle. This is in keeping with what Krebs saw in pigeon muscle tissue.\"</p><p>To the team, this result suggested a clear link between changes in cell identity and usage of particular biochemical pathways. To test whether the changes in cell fate <em>required</em> use of the different pathways, the team performed additional experiments in which they chemically or genetically blocked certain enzymes in the cycles and asked whether the cells could still change their fate. They could not. This finding implied that changes in cell fate required different biochemical pathways.</p><p><strong>To Burn or To Build</strong></p><p>Why would a cell opt for a different form of the TCA cycle at all? According to Dr. Finley, the Krebs cycle is really good at maximizing ATP production. It helps cells combust all their nutrients down to carbon dioxide.</p><p>\"That\'s great if what you really care about is making ATP,\" Dr. Finley says. \"But if you want to grow, ATP is actually not the limiting reagent. You actually need to retain those carbons to make new biomass. That\'s what the noncanonical TCA cycle does: It allows you to take carbons from glucose and export them to the cytosol, where they can be used to build other molecules. So, instead of burning the carbon, you get to keep it.\"</p><p>This growth-oriented cycle may have particular relevance to cancer, whose signature characteristic is unlimited growth.</p><p>Dr. Finley cautions that their laboratory experiments were all done in a dish rather than in animals. The team is keenly interested in understanding whether and when it occurs in vivo, both in normal animals and in tumors.</p><p>\"That will help us know whether it might be a good cancer drug target,\" Dr. Finley says.</p><p><strong>An Unexpected Opportunity due to the COVID Pandemic</strong></p><p>Dr. Finley thinks that the more researchers begin to look for alternative biochemical pathways, the more they might find. In some ways, their discovery of a noncanonical TCA cycle was facilitated by unplanned downtime in the lab, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic.</p><p>As Jackson explains: \"I was at home, and we could not come into the lab because of the pandemic. So it became a very fortuitous time to work on this project, to work out all the bugs of the code.\"</p><p>For Arnold, too, the pandemic-related downtime provided a chance to really delve into the historical literature and mull over other labs\' data in which she thought she could see evidence of this other cycle operating.</p><p>\"In the end, the computational work that I did and the model Paige was building came together, and it became a really satisfying collaboration,\" Jackson says.</p><p>There is a fitting endnote to this story. When Krebs submitted his original paper on the TCA cycle to <em>Nature,</em> it was rejected. At the time, the editors didn\'t have space. This time, thankfully, they do.</p>','2022-03-09 20:53:58.930118','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center','With the resurgence of interest in cancer metabolism, researchers are coming to realize that there is more to a cell\'s biochemistry than once thought.\n',1,27,'<li>Paige K. Arnold, Benjamin T. Jackson, Katrina I. Paras, Julia S. Brunner, Madeleine L. Hart, Oliver J. Newsom, Sydney P. Alibeckoff, Jennifer Endress, Esther Drill, Lucas B. Sullivan, Lydia W. S. Finley. <strong>A non-canonical tricarboxylic acid cycle underlies cellular identity</strong>. <em>Nature</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04475-w\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41586-022-04475-w</a>\n</li>'),(616,'New responsible data sharing technique will enable better understanding of disease-causing genetic variants','new-responsible-data-sharing-technique-will-enable-better-understanding-of-disease-causing-genetic-variants','2022-03-09 20:54:02.178831',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Scientists may better understand and test for the genetic variations that cause cancer and other heritable diseases through the application of a novel strategy for securely sharing and analyzing genomic data developed at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute.</p><p>Understanding the clinical significance of rare genetic variants requires analyzing large amounts of genomic and clinical data. Privacy policies, however, restrict the sharing of this information between institutions, and no single institution is likely to have all the resources needed for a robust analysis.</p><p>In a paper published March 9 in the journal <em>Cell Genomics</em>, UCSC researchers showed that an approach called federated analysis can overcome this problem by \"bringing the code to the data.\" This is the first application of federated analysis to enable classification of previously unclassified genetic variants.</p><p>\"We have to find ways to get to the data that respect privacy, but still let researchers do their research, so the federated model is definitely the way of the future,\" said James Casaletto, a PhD candidate at UCSC\'s Baskin School of Engineering and the paper\'s lead author.</p><p>The study focused on genetic variants of the breast cancer genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. People who inherit harmful variants of one of these genes have increased risks of breast, ovarian and other cancers. Many people, however, have variants of unknown significance (VUS) in these genes, meaning scientists don\'t know if these variants are harmful or not.</p><p>The new study provides a more nuanced understanding of BRCA1 and BRCA2 variants. It also serves as a \"proof of concept\" of a novel data sharing and analysis technique for assessing the clinical implications of genetic variants.</p><p>Specific VUS are individually rare but collectively it is common for VUS in general to occur in the human population. To better understand exactly which VUS are disease-causing, researchers need to perform delicate analysis on a wide set of data, which can then be interpreted by experts to make clinical conclusions.</p><p>\"This has to do with the everyday person who maybe wonders if there\'s a history of cancer in her family, and if she\'s inherited that family cancer risk,\" said Melissa Cline, a research scientist at the UCSC Genomics Institute. \"All of this work is going to the aim of making genetic testing better.\"</p><p>However, most of the world\'s human health data is \'siloed\', or stored inaccessibly due to privacy laws, and institutions may be prohibited from exporting genomic data they collect, making it inaccessible to researchers who study genetic variants.</p><p>Additionally, engineering the software needed to execute these analyses is complex and usually cannot be undertaken by the average geneticist. UCSC researchers are addressing these two problems with their novel approach of federated analysis.</p><p>In the federated analysis approach, researchers bring the code to the data, avoiding the need to export sensitive data at all. UCSC Genomics Institute software is sent in a \"container\" to any collaborating institution around the world that is home to a valuable but protected set of genomic data. The collaborating institution then uses the software to analyze their data within their institution\'s secure environment, generating summary data that does not reveal personal information about individual patients.</p><p>This approach ensures that patient-level data meets the strict privacy rules of an institution that do not allow them to export data, but allows researchers to collect a much wider pool of genomic data which can lead to better clinical conclusions. Moreover, federated analysis can get around the issues of uploading, downloading and moving around huge data sets that can be prohibitively large.</p><p>\"[The paper is] a proof of concept that we have this container technology, we\'ve leveraged it for BRCA1 and BRCA2, we\'ve also demonstrated in the research that it can be used for other genes -- genotypes and phenotypes,\" Casaletto said.</p><p>For this project, UCSC researchers collaborated with the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences in Japan to analyze their biobank of BRCA1 and BRCA2 genomic data. These genes are inherited from a person\'s parents and when mutated can lead to an increased risk of breast, ovarian, and other cancers.</p><p>They used this to make discoveries about which specific variants in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes led to cancer and which left patients unaffected, moving the needle on a number of previously uncertain variants.</p><p>In undertaking this analysis, the researchers were able to help address the lack of diversity in genetic databases.</p><p>\"The genetics of white people are highly over-represented, the genetics of non-white people are much more of a mystery, due to a lot of historical biases in data collection,\" Cline said. \"We were also able to add together a little more knowledge on Japanese genetics than was previously available.\"</p><p>Further collaboration using federated analysis with institutes worldwide could similarly do much to address the lack of representation of non-white people and empower insitutions that may be resource-poor to contribute to the global genomic data pool.</p><p>\"What\'s been done in the past is basically a lot less data sharing, so the name of the game is really global data sharing,\" Cline said.</p><p>The researchers also work with the The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH), which helps set policy and create technical standards for responsible, ethical data sharing. They gave guidance on what data sharing can be done legally and responsibly, and helped establish methods to make the Genomics Institute software portable across different operating systems and environments to allow for collaboration like that in this project.</p><p>Other coauthors of the paper include Charles Markello of UCSC, Michael Parsons and Amanda Spurdle of Australia\'s Berghofer Medical Research Institute, and Yusuke Iwasaki and Yukihide Momozawa of Japan\'s RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences.</p>','2022-03-09 20:54:02.178831','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of California - Santa Cruz','Scientists may better understand and test for the genetic variations that cause cancer and other heritable diseases through the application of federated analysis, a novel strategy for securely sharing and analyzing genomic data developed at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute.\n',1,27,'<li>James Casaletto, Michael Parsons, Charles Markello, Yusuke Iwasaki, Yukihide Momozawa, Amanda B. Spurdle, Melissa Cline. <strong>Federated analysis of BRCA1 and BRCA2 variation in a Japanese cohort</strong>. <em>Cell Genomics</em>, 2022; 2 (3): 100109 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.xgen.2022.100109\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1016/j.xgen.2022.100109</a>\n</li>'),(617,'Scientists capture the fleeting dance of moiré excitons','scientists-capture-the-fleeting-dance-of-moiré-excitons','2022-03-09 20:54:08.020036',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Published in leading journal<em> Nature</em>, scientists from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC), and Stanford University have, in a world-first, imaged and measured the two parts of a unique particle, called amoiré exciton. Excitons are hailed as having the potential to revolutionize technological and quantum devices, but they are usually fleeting in nature, often lasting no longer than a few thousandths of a billionth of a second, which makes them incredibly difficult to study. Moiré excitons tend to be longer-lived and are thus an attractive way to study the particle and its potential applications. Yet information about their size, shape, and behavior remains unclear.</p><p>Excitons are created when light is shone on a semiconducting material. The particles of light, called photons, interact with the material\'s electrons. This causes the electrons to jump to a higher energy level. Each one leaves behind a hole at the lower energy level. The two are oppositely charged so they mutually attract and revolve around each other, forming the short-lived exciton.</p><p>\"We\'ve previously visualized the electron part of the exciton before it disappeared,\" stated Mr. Vivek Pareek, one of the six first authors in this paper and PhD candidate in OIST\'s Femtosecond Spectroscopy Unit. \"In this new study, we measured both parts of the exciton. This was the first time we\'ve seen the \'hole\', or lack of an electron.\"</p><p>\"This is really exciting research and could have vast implications,\" added Dr. Michael Man, a staff scientist in the same unit and also one of the first authors. \"Excitons adopt the properties of the material they\'re in. By controlling the materials and the environment of the excitons, we can control the exciton itself.\"</p><p>In the previous research, the scientists visualized excitons in a two-dimensional, single layer semiconductor. Now, the researchers have stacked two semiconducting layers on top of each other. When the exciton forms, the electron jumps from one layer to the other. This forces the electron and hole to remain apart for longer, extending the lifespan of the exciton.</p><p>The two-dimensional, two-layered samples were created in the state-of-the-art laboratories at SLAC and Stanford University. The two layers had to be aligned in a very specific way to create a pattern, called a moiré pattern.</p><p>\"Imagine that the atomic structure of the two different materials are like two nets. The structures resemble each other but they are not exactly the same,\" explained Dr. Ouri Karni, also a first author and a postdoctoral researcher working in the group of Prof. Tony Heinz at SLAC and Stanford University. \"When the nets are placed on top of each other, there are certain places where the gaps in the nets overlap, and others where they do not. This results in a moiré pattern. We aligned these atomic \'nets\' at very specific angles so they would clearly exhibit the moiré pattern, which in turn expresses what is called moiré potential -- a periodic \'landscape\' of electronic energy levels across the material.\"</p><p>The samples were then sent to OIST where scientists utilized a powerful and unique technique. They shone a beam of light within the extreme ultraviolet range at the material. The energy was so high that the excitons were broken apart and their electrons were sent flying out of the material. By measuring the speed and angles of the electrons as they left the material, the scientists were able to backtrack this information and construct an image of the exciton.</p><p>Perhaps the most important and exciting part of this research, both conceptually and experimentally, was that the scientists were also able to see the hole. Since the hole is actually the absence of an electron, it doesn\'t emit any of its own signals and its presence can only be detected by what is around it, similar to how black holes are detected.</p><p>\"This is an incredibly powerful tool, which allowed us to obtain a full picture of the exciton-how far apart the electron and hole were from each other, and how much the two moved together in the material,\" said Mr. Jonathan Georgaras, another first author and PhD candidate in Prof. Felipe Jornada\'s theory group at Stanford University.</p><p>Furthermore, they were also able to estimate how many excitons were present, something they were unable to do with just the electron signals.</p><p>The researchers found that, due to the moiré potential, the excitons were very localized and formed in places where the energy was minimal. This meant that the excitons were effectively pinned in tiny pockets of around 1.8 nanometers, despite their relatively large diameter, at around 5.2 nanometers.</p><p>\"After nearly a century of knowing about the existence of excitons, we are now able to get a near-holistic view of this important particle by peering into it and imaging both its constituent particles,\" concluded Prof. Keshav Dani, who leads OIST\'s Femtosecond Spectroscopy Unit and is a senior author of the paper. \"This research opens the doors to studying more sophisticated phenomena with excitons for quantum technology. Our current demonstration of the pinning of the large moiré exciton in tiny pockets is just the beginning.\"</p>','2022-03-09 20:54:08.020036','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) Graduate University','Scientists have visualized the two parts of an elusive particle -- the moiré exciton -- to reveal its structure and unique properties.\n',1,27,'<li>Ouri Karni, Elyse Barré, Vivek Pareek, Johnathan D. Georgaras, Michael K. L. Man, Chakradhar Sahoo, David R. Bacon, Xing Zhu, Henrique B. Ribeiro, Aidan L. O’Beirne, Jenny Hu, Abdullah Al-Mahboob, Mohamed M. M. Abdelrasoul, Nicholas S. Chan, Arka Karmakar, Andrew J. Winchester, Bumho Kim, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi, Katayun Barmak, Julien Madéo, Felipe H. da Jornada, Tony F. Heinz, Keshav M. Dani. <strong>Structure of the moiré exciton captured by imaging its electron and hole</strong>. <em>Nature</em>, 2022; 603 (7900): 247 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04360-y\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41586-021-04360-y</a>\n</li>'),(618,'Black hole billiards in the centers of galaxies','black-hole-billiards-in-the-centers-of-galaxies','2022-03-09 20:54:10.043226',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Researchers provide the first plausible explanation to why one of the most massive black hole pairs observed to date by gravitational waves also seemed to merge on a non-circular orbit. Their suggested solution, now published in <em>Nature</em>, involves a chaotic triple drama inside a giant disk of gas around a super massive black hole in a galaxy far, far away.</p><p>Black holes are one of the most fascinating objects in the Universe, but our knowledge of them is still limited -- especially because they do not emit any light. Up until a few years ago, light was our main source of knowledge about our universe and its black holes, until the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2015 made its breakthrough observation of gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes.</p><p>\"But how and where in our Universe do such black holes form and merge? Does it happen when nearby stars collapse and both turn into black holes, is it through close chance encounters in star clusters, or is it something else? These are some of the key questions in the new era of Gravitational Wave Astrophysics,\" says Assist. Prof. Johan Samsing from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, lead author of the paper.</p><p>He and his collaborators may have now provided a new piece to the puzzle, which possibly solves the last part of a mystery that astrophysicists have struggled with for the past few years.</p><p><strong>Unexpected Discovery in 2019</strong></p><p>The mystery dates back to 2019, when an unexpected discovery of gravitational waves was made by the LIGO and Virgo observatories. The event named <em>GW190521 </em>is understood to be the merger of two black holes, which not only were heavier than previously thought physically possible, but had in addition produced a flash of light.</p><p>Possible explanations have since been provided for these two characteristics, but the gravitational waves also revealed a third astonishing feature of this event -- namely that the black holes did not orbit each other along a circle in the moments before merging.</p><p>\"The gravitational wave event <em>GW190521</em> is the most surprising discovery to date. The black holes\' masses and spins were already surprising, but even more surprising was that they appeared not to have a circular orbit leading up to the merger,\" says co-author Imre Bartos, Prof. at the University of Florida.</p><p>But why is a non-circular orbit so unusual and unexpected?</p><p>\"This is because of the fundamental nature of the gravitational waves emitted, which not only brings the pair of black holes closer for them to finally merge but also acts to circularize their orbit.\" explains co-author Zoltan Haiman, a Professor at Columbia University.</p><p>This observation made many people around the world, including Johan Samsing in Copenhagen, wonder,</p><p>\"It made me start thinking about how such non-circular (known as \"eccentric\") mergers can happen with the surprisingly high probability as the observation suggests,\" says Johan Samsing.</p><p><strong>It Takes Three to Tango</strong></p><p>A possible answer would be found in the harsh environment in the centers of galaxies harboring a giant black hole millions of times the mass of the Sun surrounded by a flat, rotating disk of gas.</p><p>\"In these environments the typical velocity and density of black holes is so high that smaller black holes bounce around as in a giant game of billiards and wide circular binaries cannot exist,\" points out co-author Prof. Bence Kocsis from the University of Oxford.</p><p>But as the group further argued, a giant black hole is not enough, \"New studies show that the gas disk plays an important role in capturing smaller black holes, which over time move closer to the center and also closer to one other. This not only implies they meet and form pairs, but also that such a pair might interact with another, third, black hole, often leading to a chaotic tango with three black holes flying around, \" explains astrophysicist Hiromichi Tagawa from Tohoku University, co-author of the study.</p><p>However, all previous studies up to observation of <em>GW190521</em> indicated that forming eccentric black hole mergers is relatively rare. This naturally brings up the question: Why did the already unusual gravitational wave source <em>GW190521</em> also merge on an eccentric orbit?</p><p><strong>Two Dimensional Black Hole Billiards</strong></p><p>Everything that has been calculated so far was based on the notion that the black hole interactions are taking place in three dimensions, as expected in the majority of stellar systems considered so far.</p><p>\"But then we started thinking about what would happen if the black hole interactions were instead to take place in a flat disk, which is closer to a two-dimensional environment. Surprisingly, we found in this limit that the probability of forming an eccentric merger increases by as much as a 100 times, which leads to about half of all black hole mergers in such disks possibly being eccentric,\" says Johan Samsing and continues:</p><p>\"And that discovery fits incredibly well with the observation in 2019, which all in all now points in the direction that the otherwise spectacular properties of this source are not so strange again, if it was created in a flat gas disk surrounding a super massive black hole in a galactic nucleus.\"</p><p>This possible solution also adds to a century-old problem in mechanics, \"The interaction between 3 objects is one of the oldest problems in physics, which both Newton, myself, and others have intensely studied. That this now seems to play a crucial role in how black holes merge in some of the most extreme places of our Universe is incredibly fascinating ,\" says co-author Nathan W. Leigh, Prof. at Universidad de Concepción, Chile.</p><p><strong>Black Holes in Gaseous Disks</strong></p><p>The theory of the gas disk also fits with other researchers\' explanations of the other two puzzling properties of <em>GW190521</em>. The large masses of the black hole have been reached by successive mergers inside the disk, while the emission of light could originate from the ambient gas.</p><p>\"We have now shown that there can be a huge difference in the signals emitted from black holes that merge in flat, two-dimensional disks, versus those we often consider in three-dimensional stellar systems, which tells us that we now have an extra tool that we can use to learn about how black holes are created and merge in our Universe, \" says Johan Samsing.</p><p>But this study is only the beginning, \"People have been working on understanding the structure of such gas disks for many years, but the problem is difficult. Our results are sensitive to how flat the disk is, and how the black holes move around in it. Time will tell whether we will learn more about these disks, once we have a larger population of black hole mergers, including more unusual cases similar to <em>GW190521</em>. To enable this, we must build on our now published discovery, and see where it leads us in this new and exciting field\" concludes co-author Zoltan Haiman.</p><p><strong>Story Source:</strong></p>','2022-03-09 20:54:10.043226','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Copenhagen - Faculty of Science','Researchers provide the first plausible explanation to why one of the most massive black hole pairs observed to date by gravitational waves also seemed to merge on a non-circular orbit. Their suggested solution involves a chaotic triple drama inside a giant disk of gas around a super massive black hole in a galaxy far, far away.\n',1,27,'<li>J. Samsing, I. Bartos, D. J. D’Orazio, Z. Haiman, B. Kocsis, N. W. C. Leigh, B. Liu, M. E. Pessah, H. Tagawa. <strong>AGN as potential factories for eccentric black hole mergers</strong>. <em>Nature</em>, 2022; 603 (7900): 237 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04333-1\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41586-021-04333-1</a>\n</li>'),(619,'An obesity treatment for women only?','an-obesity-treatment-for-women-only?','2022-03-09 21:13:05.214123',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">University of Virginia School of Medicine researchers have identified a potential way to battle the health effects of obesity and type 2 diabetes in women after discovering an important factor that could determine how their bodies use and store fat.</p><p>Based on their new discovery, the researchers, led by Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering Mete Civelek, PhD, were able to change whether female lab mice\'s bodies stored fat subcutaneously (under the skin) or viscerally (wrapped around the organs). While visceral fat goes unseen, hidden deep inside the body, it can be particularly harmful to good health.</p><p>The researchers say their results in mice suggest that a similar approach could help treat the effects of obesity and battle metabolic diseases, such as diabetes, in women.</p><p>\"There is a strong need for targeted therapies against metabolic abnormalities caused by obesity and diabetes,\" said the study\'s first author, Qianyi Yang, PhD, of UVA\'s Center for Public Health Genomics. \"We hope that increasing KLF14 abundance in fat cells of females with obesity and diabetes may provide a novel treatment option to alleviate these metabolic abnormalities.\"</p><p><strong>How We Store Fat</strong></p><p>Men and women naturally store fat differently. Men tend to be more apple-shaped, meaning they store fat around the waist, while women tend to be more pear-shaped. This is because women store more subcutaneous fat and less visceral fat in their lower body. Civelek\'s new findings help explain why.</p><p>Civelek and his team were investigating a particular gene, <em>KLF14</em>, that has been linked to many different metabolic problems, including type 2 diabetes and coronary artery disease. These health associations are more pronounced in women than men, but scientists haven\'t understood the reason.</p><p>Civelek and his collaborators found that the <em>KLF14</em> gene is a key regulator of how the female body uses lipids (fats). The gene makes a protein that plays a critical in how fat cells form, what type of fat they turn into and where they are stored. When Civelek\'s team blocked the production of this protein in lab mice, they noticed very different effects in males and females: Females gained fat, while males lost it. The females also stored fat differently than normal, gaining more visceral fat and less subcutaneous fat.</p><p>There were other sex-specific changes as well: The female mice suffered slower metabolic rates and faster breathing, suggesting they were relying more on carbohydrates for fuel. And their bodies became less efficient at managing triglycerides, a type of fat in the blood.</p><p>Interestingly, when the researchers amped up production of the KLF14 protein in in female mice, the mice lost weight. But male mice did not.</p><p>Based on what they\'ve found, the researchers believe that increasing production of the KLF14 protein in fat cells in women may offer a way to treat the harmful effects of obesity and type 2 diabetes. More research will be needed, but the researchers say it is promising that their mouse findings align closely with what we see in humans.</p><p>\"We are now working to create a drug delivery system that will target fat cells and deliver a small molecule to increase KLF14 abundance,\" Civelek said. \"We hope to translate our laboratory\'s findings to the clinic to help women fight the effects of obesity and diabetes.\"</p><p><strong>Obesity Findings Published</strong></p><p>The researchers have published their findings in the scientific journal <em>Diabetes</em>, a publication of the American Diabetes Association. The research team consisted of Yang, Jameson Hinkle, Jordan N. Reed, Redouane Aherrahrou, Zhiwen Xu, Thurl E. Harris, Erin J. Stephenson, Kiran Musunuru, Susanna R. Keller and Civelek. Musunuru is an adviser and holds equity in Verve Therapeutics and Variant Bio.</p><p>The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health\'s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, grant R01 DK118287, and the American Diabetes Association, grant 1-19-IBS-105.</p><p>UVA\'s Department of Biomedical Engineering is a collaboration of UVA\'s School of Medicine and School of Engineering.</p>','2022-03-09 21:13:05.214123','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Virginia Health System','Researchers have identified a potential way to battle the health effects of obesity and type 2 diabetes in women after discovering an important factor that could determine how their bodies use and store fat.\n',1,27,'<li>Qianyi Yang, Jameson Hinkle, Jordan N. Reed, Redouane Aherrahrou, Zhiwen Xu, Thurl E. Harris, Erin J. Stephenson, Kiran Musunuru, Susanna R. Keller, Mete Civelek. <strong>Adipocyte-Specific Modulation of KLF14 Expression in Mice Leads to Sex-Dependent Impacts on Adiposity and Lipid Metabolism</strong>. <em>Diabetes</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.2337/db21-0674\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.2337/db21-0674</a>\n</li>'),(620,'Anti-Mullerian hormone may contribute to infertility in polycystic ovary syndrome','anti-mullerian-hormone-may-contribute-to-infertility-in-polycystic-ovary-syndrome','2022-03-09 21:43:28.339070',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">High levels of anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH) have traditionally been thought of as merely a passive byproduct of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), but a new preclinical study by Weill Cornell Medicine researchers suggests that the hormone plays an active role in the disorder and may contribute to problems with ovulation and fertility.</p><p>In the study, published March 9 in <em>Science Advances</em>, the investigators discovered that AMH may cause follicles, the multicellular, fluid-filled sacs that contain developing eggs in the ovary, to mature too quickly.</p><p>\"AMH is routinely measured in the clinic to give an indication of how many follicles a woman has growing in her ovaries, and this value is often high in women with PCOS. But no one has ever determined whether a high level of AMH, by itself, can have a negative influence,\" said senior author Dr. Daylon James, assistant professor of stem cell biology in obstetrics and gynecology and in reproductive medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. \"A better understanding of the root causes of PCOS is critical to mitigating the condition\'s many health consequences.\"</p><p>Developing eggs, called oocytes, are produced in the ovaries within follicles, which support their growth. As the follicle grows, the egg that resides within it gradually matures, and in a normal reproductive cycle, that follicle ultimately undergoes ovulation to release an egg capable of being fertilized. However, in patients with PCOS, a hormonal disorder that impacts up to 10 percent of women, the ovaries contain numerous smaller follicles that produce AMH, but fail to progress to later stages and ovulate.</p><p>While fertility treatments can help with conception, women with PCOS contend with a variety of other symptoms, said Dr. James. For example, PCOS is often accompanied by hyperandrogenism, or high levels of hormones such as testosterone that are collectively called androgens. An overabundance of these hormones can cause an array of secondary complications, including unwanted growth of body and facial hair. Women with PCOS can also be prone to diabetes and metabolic disease and are more susceptible to endometrial cancer.</p><p>Dr. James and his research team hypothesized that AMH is directly contributing to at least some of the constellation of symptoms associated with the disorder. To isolate the effects of AMH, the researchers utilized a xenograft system in which ovarian tissue from human organ donors is engrafted onto the flank of immunocompromised mice. One group of mice was transplanted along with cells that continuously supplied AMH directly to the grafted tissue, and the other group of mice was transplanted with control cells without AMH.</p><p>\"What we have here is a unique opportunity to take tissue from the same human donors and allocate it to both experimental groups -- the group with AMH and the group without AMH,\" said first author Dr. Limor Man, assistant professor of research in obstetrics and gynecology and in reproductive medicine, and the Hung-Ching Liu Research Scholar in obstetrics and gynecology. \"This is actually the best control you can hope for in these types of experiments.\"</p><p>By contrast, when researchers compare patients with PCOS to those without the disorder in clinical studies, a variety of influencing factors, such as genetic predispositions and varying levels of different reproductive hormones, must be considered, she said.</p><p>The researchers discovered that the ovarian tissue exposed to high AMH contained follicles that showed characteristics evident at a much later stage of development. Specifically, the follicles were undergoing luteinization, a process that occurs immediately leading up to ovulation, before any of the oocytes were ready.</p><p>\"AMH is causing the usually coordinated growth process between a follicle and its resident oocyte to fall out of synch,\" said Dr. James, who is also the Queenie Victorina Neri Research Scholar in obstetrics and gynecology and assistant professor of genetic medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. \"It is like baking with the oven too hot,\" he said. \"The outside, or the cellular component of the follicle, is overcooked, while the inside, or oocyte, is not done.\"</p><p>\"Based on ultrasounds showing persistent presence of multiple small follicles in the ovary, infertility in women with PCOS has been attributed to stalled growth and resultant failure in egg maturation,\" Dr. Man said. \"But recent data indicates that \"stalled\" follicles in these patients are actually a steady stream of newly growing, but abortive follicles.\"</p><p>This new study puts forth the revised interpretation that the persistent array of small follicles in PCOS ovaries represent a continuous succession of follicles undergoing rushed maturation and failure to ovulate.</p><p>Considering the broad prevalence of PCOS, the factors that contribute to its emergence remain poorly understood. Although treatments exist for individual facets of disease, the condition rarely recedes until women reach the end of their reproductive lifespan. The identification of a novel AMH-driven mechanism for failed follicle development suggests that it can contribute to this, and perhaps other, facets of PCOS disease symptoms.</p><p>\"With further research, we hope to develop drug treatments that target the effects of AMH, which could help restore the menstrual cycle in women with PCOS and manage other symptoms of the condition,\" Dr. James said.</p>','2022-03-09 21:43:28.339070','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Weill Cornell Medicine','High levels of anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH) have traditionally been thought of as merely a passive byproduct of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), but a new preclinical study suggests that the hormone plays an active role in the disorder and may contribute to problems with ovulation and fertility.\n',1,27,'<li>Limor Man, Nicole Lustgarten Guahmich, Eleni Kallinos, Barbara Caiazza, Monica Khan, Zong-Ying Liu, Ritaben Patel, Carmen Torres, David Pepin, He S. Yang, Richard Bodine, Nikica Zaninovic, Glenn Schattman, Zev Rosenwaks, Daylon James. <strong>Chronic superphysiologic AMH promotes premature luteinization of antral follicles in human ovarian xenografts</strong>. <em>Science Advances</em>, 2022; 8 (10) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abi7315\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1126/sciadv.abi7315</a>\n</li>'),(621,'Discovery of new immune process that regulates inflammation in human fat may help manage obesity','discovery-of-new-immune-process-that-regulates-inflammation-in-human-fat-may-help-manage-obesity','2022-03-09 21:43:31.208607',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Irish and German scientists have just identified how specific immune cells can work together in fat to cause inflammation that leads to weight gain and obesity. Their work pinpoints new avenues to exploit the regulation of that inflammation in fat tissue, thereby suggesting new ways to manage obesity [Wednesday 9<sup>th</sup> March 2022].</p><p>There is a global epidemic in obesity in adults and children, with obese people predisposed to develop diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. New therapies are needed to help tackle this issue.</p><p>In their research, the scientists identified how \"checkpoint proteins\" and immune cells alter inflammatory cells within the fat tissue to cause obesity. In people with obesity (Body Mass Index BMI&gt; 30 kg/m²) these changes in checkpoint expression in the visceral fat was predictive of the person\'s weight.</p><p>The scientists then showed that modifications in the so-called immune checkpoint proteins of mice on a Western \"high fat\" diet were linked to dramatic reductions in the development of obesity and diabetes.</p><p>The study, just published in the leading international biomedical journal <em>Science Translational Medicine,</em> was led by Professor Padraic Fallon from Trinity College Dublin\'s School of Medicine, and Dr Christian Schwartz, a former EMBO Fellow in Trinity and now a Principal Investigator at the University Hospital Erlangen.</p><p>Prof. Fallon commented: \"This new process of checkpoint regulation of cells in visceral fat of obese individuals advances our understanding of how the immune system controls diet-induced weight gain that can lead to conditions such as obesity and type 2 diabetes.</p><p>\"Our discovery has broader impacts on addressing how obesity influences co-morbidity with other diseases, as shown in the COVID-19 pandemic, where obese individuals that are infected with SARS-CoV-2 are more likely to develop severe disease that requires intensive care and also have an increased risk of mortality.\"</p><p>Dr Schwartz commented: \"In our study, we analysed the function of immune checkpoints on specific cells and it is fascinating to see that a small change on one of many cell populations in the fat has such an impact on the outcome of the disease. Only through our basic research efforts using pre-clinical models, were we able to gain access to patients\' samples and link our findings to human disease. It will be interesting to investigate now how we can manipulate this checkpoint on specific cell populations of interest to help people with obesity.\"</p><p>The study investigated inflammatory changes in patients with obesity, with or without type 2 diabetes, in collaboration with Dr Andy Hogan (Maynooth University), Profs. Donal O\'Shea and Helen Heneghan (St Vincent\'s Hospital and University College Dublin) and Dr Christian Krautz (University Hospital Erlangen).</p><p>The work was funded by Science Foundation Ireland, the National Children\'s Research Centre, Interdisciplinary Center for Clinical Research, University Hospital of the University of Erlangen?Nuremberg and the Else Kröner?Fresenius?Stiftung. Dr Schwartz was an EMBO Long-Term visiting Fellow. Dr Heike Hawerkamp is an Irish Research Council Fellow.</p>','2022-03-09 21:43:31.208607','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Trinity College Dublin','Scientists have just identified how specific immune cells can work together in fat to cause inflammation that leads to weight gain and obesity. Their work pinpoints new avenues to exploit the regulation of that inflammation in fat tissue, thereby suggesting new ways to manage obesity.\n',1,27,'<li>Christian Schwartz, Viviane Schmidt, Andrea Deinzer, Heike C. Hawerkamp, Emily Hams, Jasmin Bayerlein, Ole Röger, Moritz Bailer, Christian Krautz, Amr El Gendy, Moustafa Elshafei, Helen M. Heneghan, Andrew E. Hogan, Donal O’Shea, Padraic G. Fallon. <strong>Innate PD-L1 limits T cell–mediated adipose tissue inflammation and ameliorates diet-induced obesity</strong>. <em>Science Translational Medicine</em>, 2022; 14 (635) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.abj6879\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1126/scitranslmed.abj6879</a>\n</li>'),(623,'Study hints at how early life experiences may affect brain wiring','study-hints-at-how-early-life-experiences-may-affect-brain-wiring','2022-03-09 21:43:36.070616',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">A new study of brain development in mice shortly after birth may provide insights into how early life events can affect wiring patterns in the brain that manifest as disease later in life -- specifically such disorders as schizophrenia, epilepsy and autism.</p><p>Researchers focused on two types of brain cells that have been linked to adult neurological disorders: neurons in a modulating system nestled deep in the brain and other neurons in the cortex, the brain\'s outermost layer, that counteract excitation in other cells using inhibitory effects. The modulating cells send long-range cables to the cortex to remotely influence cortical cell activity.</p><p>The study is the first to show that these two types of cells communicate very early in brain development. A chemical released from the modulating cells initiates the branching, or arborization, of axons, the long, slender extensions of nerve cell bodies that transmit messages, on the cortical cells -- and that arborization dictates how effective the cells in the cortex are at doing their job.</p><p>Though there is still a lot to learn about the impact of this cellular interaction in the postnatal brain, the researchers said the study opens the door to a better understanding of how neurological diseases in adults may relate to early-life events.</p><p>\"It\'s known that abnormal early-life experiences can impact kids\' future sensation and behavior. This finding may help explain that kind of mechanism,\" said Hiroki Taniguchi, associate professor of pathology in The Ohio State University College of Medicine and senior author of the study.</p><p>\"This study provides new insight into brain development and brain pathology. It\'s possible that during development, depending on animals\' experiences, this modulating system activity can be changed and, accordingly, the cortical circuit wiring can be changed.\"</p><p>Taniguchi completed the work with co-authors André Steinecke and McLean Bolton while he was an investigator at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience.</p><p>The research is published today (March 9, 2022) in the journal <em>Science Advances</em>.</p><p>The study involved chandelier cells, a type of inhibitory neurons in the cortical section of the brain, and neurons of the cholinergic system -- one of the systems that monitor the environment and the internal state, and send signals to the rest of the brain to trigger memory and appropriate behaviors.</p><p>\"Both of these types of cells have been separately studied in the context of adult functions or modulations so far. The developmental role of cholinergic neurons in the brain wiring remains poorly understood,\" Taniguchi said.</p><p>Chandelier cells are named for the spray of signal-transmitting synapses (called synaptic cartridges) at the branch terminals that resemble candles of a traditional chandelier, a pattern that gives them inhibitory control over hundreds of cells at a time.</p><p>\"These cells have output control,\" said Steinecke, first author of the study who is now working at Neuway Pharma in Germany. \"Chandelier cells can put a brake on excitatory cells and tell them they\'re not ready to fire. As inhibitory cells, chandelier cells are thought to regulate waves of firing -- which is important, because the waves contain information that is transmitted over large distances of the brain.\"</p><p>Previous post-mortem studies have shown that the synaptic terminals located at the end of chandelier cell axons appear to be reduced in the brains of patients with schizophrenia.</p><p>\"This axonal \'arbor\' being reduced suggests they don\'t make as many connections to downstream targets, and the connections themselves are also altered and don\'t work that well,\" Steinecke said.</p><p>The team used two techniques to observe chandelier cells during early-life brain development in mice: genetically targeting and using a dye to label and detect cells that differentiate into chandelier cells, and transplanting genetically manipulated cells back into animals shortly after birth.</p><p>\"This enabled us to watch brain development as it happens and manipulate conditions to test what the mechanisms are,\" Taniguchi said.</p><p>The researchers first observed how chandelier cell axons develop their branching structures, noting that small protrusions emerging from axons were the first signs that branches would sprout. And they identified the chemical needed to start that sprouting process -- the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which is released by cholinergic system cells.</p><p>The interaction between the distant cell types was confirmed through a series of experiments: Knocking out receptors that bind to acetylcholine and decreasing activity of cholinergic neurons lessened branch development, and making cholinergic neurons more likely to fire led to more widespread branching.</p><p>\"The key is that we didn\'t previously know how neuromodulatory systems regulate the cortical circuits -- and both of them have been implicated in brain diseases,\" Taniguchi said. \"Now that we\'ve found that cholinergic neurons could remotely impact cortical circuit development, especially cortical inhibitory signals, the question is what kind of environment or emotional state of change can impact cortical inhibitors\' development? We may want to see if we can find a link as a next step.\"</p><p>This work was supported by funding from the Max Planck Society and the Brain Behavior and Research Foundation.</p>','2022-03-09 21:43:36.070616','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Ohio State University','A new study of brain development in mice shortly after birth may provide insights into how early life events can affect wiring patterns in the brain that manifest as disease later in life.\n',1,27,'<li>André Steinecke, McLean M. Bolton, Hiroki Taniguchi. <strong>Neuromodulatory control of inhibitory network arborization in the developing postnatal neocortex</strong>. <em>Science Advances</em>, 2022; 8 (10) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abe7192\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1126/sciadv.abe7192</a>\n</li>'),(625,'Giant impact crater in Greenland occurred a few million years after dinosaurs went extinct','giant-impact-crater-in-greenland-occurred-a-few-million-years-after-dinosaurs-went-extinct','2022-03-09 21:43:39.222464',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Danish and Swedish researchers have dated the enormous Hiawatha impact crater, a 31 km-wide meteorite crater buried under a kilometer of Greenlandic ice. The dating ends speculation that the meteorite impacted after the appearance of humans and opens up a new understanding of Earth\'s evolution in the post-dinosaur era.</p><p>Ever since 2015, when researchers at the University of Copenhagen\'s GLOBE Institute discovered the Hiawatha impact crater in northwestern Greenland, uncertainty about the crater\'s age has been the subject of considerable speculation. Could the asteroid have slammed into Earth as recently as 13,000 years ago, when humans had long populated the planet? Could its impact have catalyzed a nearly 1,000-year period of global cooling known as the Younger Dryas?</p><p>New analyses performed on grains of sand and rocks from the Hiawatha impact crater by the Natural History Museum of Denmark and the GLOBE Institute at the University of Copenhagen, as well as the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, demonstrate that the answer is no. The Hiawatha impact crater is far older. In fact, a new study published in the journal <em>Science Advances</em> today reports its age to be 58 million years old.</p><p>\"Dating the crater has been a particularly tough nut to crack, so it\'s very satisfying that two laboratories in Denmark and Sweden, using different dating methods arrived at the same conclusion. As such, I\'m convinced that we\'ve determined the crater\'s actual age, which is much older than many people once thought,\" says Michael Storey of the Natural History Museum of Denmark.</p><p>\"Determining the new age of the crater surprised us all. In the future, it will help us investigate the impact\'s possible effect on climate during an important epoch of Earth\'s history\" says Dr. Gavin Kenny of the Swedish Museum of Natural History.</p><p>As one of those who helped discover the Hiawatha impact crater in 2015, Professor Nicolaj Krog Larsen of the GLOBE Institute at the University of Copenhagen is pleased that the crater\'s exact age is now confirmed.</p><p>\"It is fantastic to now know its age. We\'ve been working hard to find a way to date the crater since we discovered it seven years ago. Since then, we have been on several field trips to the area to collect samples associated with the Hiawatha impact,\" says Professor Larsen</p><p><strong>Age revealed by laser beams and grains of sand</strong></p><p>No kilometer-thick ice sheet draped Northwest Greenland when the Hiawatha asteroid rammed into Earth surface releasing several million times more energy than an atomic bomb. At the time, the Arctic was covered with a temperate rainforest and wildlife abounded -- and temperatures of 20 degrees Celsius were the norm. Eight million years earlier, an even larger asteroid struck present-day Mexico, causing the extinction of Earth\'s dinosaurs.</p><p>The asteroid smashed into Earth, leaving a thirty-one-kilometer-wide, one-kilometer-deep crater. The crater is big enough to contain the entire city of Washington D.C. Today, the crater lies beneath the Hiawatha Glacier in Northwest Greenland. Rivers flowing from the glacier supplied the researchers with sand and rocks that were superheated by the impact 58 million years ago.</p><p>The sand was analyzed at the Natural History Museum of Denmark by heating the grains with a laser until they released argon gas, whereas the rock samples were analyzed at the Swedish Museum of Natural History using uranium-lead dating of the mineral zircon.</p><p>Clear evidence that the Hiawatha impact disrupted global climate is still lacking. However, the crater\'s dating allows the international research team working on the crater to begin testing various hypotheses to better understand what its impact was on both the local and global climate.</p><p>Facts:</p><p><strong>Story Source:</strong></p>','2022-03-09 21:43:39.222464','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Copenhagen - Faculty of Science','Danish and Swedish researchers have dated the enormous Hiawatha impact crater, a 31 km-wide meteorite crater buried under a kilometer of Greenlandic ice. The dating ends speculation that the meteorite impacted after the appearance of humans and opens up a new understanding of Earth\'s evolution in the post-dinosaur era.\n',1,27,'<li>Gavin G. Kenny, William R. Hyde, Michael Storey, Adam A. Garde, Martin J. Whitehouse, Pierre Beck, Leif Johansson, Anne Sofie Søndergaard, Anders A. Bjørk, Joseph A. MacGregor, Shfaqat A. Khan, Jérémie Mouginot, Brandon C. Johnson, Elizabeth A. Silber, Daniel K. P. Wielandt, Kurt H. Kjær, Nicolaj K. Larsen. <strong>A Late Paleocene age for Greenland’s Hiawatha impact structure</strong>. <em>Science Advances</em>, 2022; 8 (10) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abm2434\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1126/sciadv.abm2434</a>\n</li>'),(626,'Office buildings with infrequent water use may have poor water quality','office-buildings-with-infrequent-water-use-may-have-poor-water-quality','2022-03-09 21:43:42.095047',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Low-consumption office buildings with infrequent water use could have chemical and microbiological safety issues, according to a study published in <em>PLOS Water</em> by Andrew Whelton at Purdue University, Indiana, United States, and colleagues. The research could have implications for office buildings used less frequently during pandemic lockdowns, and suggests that regular water testing in commercial buildings may be needed.</p><p>Many office buildings have decreased occupancy during weekends and holidays -- and recently, during pandemic lockdowns -- increasing water stagnation in plumbing. Green buildings are designed to reduce water consumption using efficient fixtures and alternative water supplies. However, due to the combination of lower building water use and low occupancy periods, the safety of water from green buildings is unknown. To better understand chemical and microbiological quality in a green commercial office building plumbing after weekend stagnation, researchers sampled water from a ten-year-old, three story, LEED-certified office building in Indiana between January and February 2020. Samples from all water sources in the building were tested for pH, metals, ions, as well as bacterial strains of Legionella.</p><p>Researchers found that copper and lead levels increased over the weekend, and that Legionella counts were highest at a fixture which had no use recorded during sampling. Additionally, the concentration of the disinfectant chlorine decreased over the weekend. The study had several limitations as it relied on self-reported data for measurements of fixture use and may have misreported usage frequency at some locations. Future studies are needed to further analyze how water-saving appliances may impact water quality.</p><p>According to the authors, \"To prepare plumbing to code, water chemical and microbiological testing is not required or recommended. The green office building studied had many features that are increasingly common in new buildings, including low-flow faucets, automatic faucets, and alternative piping systems for major water uses like toilet flushing and irrigation. These design elements can change water temperature profiles and significantly reduce the amount of water used compared to traditional office buildings, raising concerns for water quality degradation.\"</p><p>The authors add: \"The first people in the office on a Monday morning may, in fact, be using contaminated drinking water. To better understand if the water we are using is safe, much more water testing at the faucet must be conducted. Plumbing design standards and codes must also be revised.\"</p>','2022-03-09 21:43:42.095047','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'PLOS','Low-consumption office buildings with infrequent water use could have chemical and microbiological safety issues, according to a new study. The research could have implications for office buildings used less frequently during pandemic lockdowns, and suggests that regular water testing in commercial buildings may be needed.\n',1,27,'<li>Elizabeth Montagnino, Caitlin R. Proctor, Kyungyeon Ra, Christian Ley, Yoorae Noh, Katie Vigil, Tiong Gim Aw, Sruthi Dasika, Andrew J. Whelton. <strong>Over the weekend: Water stagnation and contaminant exceedances in a green office building</strong>. <em>PLOS Water</em>, 2022; 1 (3): e0000006 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000006\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1371/journal.pwat.0000006</a>\n</li>'),(627,'Gender gaps in daily time usage at different ages vary between countries','gender-gaps-in-daily-time-usage-at-different-ages-vary-between-countries','2022-03-09 21:44:17.152713',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">A new, 10-country analysis identifies between-nation differences in the amount of time men and women spend on various daily activities at different stages of life. Joan García Román of Centre d\'Estudis Demogra?fics in Bellaterra, Spain, and Pablo Gracia of Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, present these findings in the open-access journal <em>PLOS ONE</em> on March 9, 2022.</p><p>Despite progress, gender inequalities remain in time use, with women more active in domestic chores and men more active in paid work. Prior research has illuminated, in particular, how parenthood magnifies these disparities. However, it has been unclear how different cultural contexts might affect gender disparities in time use from childhood through late adulthood.</p><p>To provide new insights, García Román and Gracia analyzed data from the Multinational Time Use study, in which participants tracked their daily time usage in diaries. The time-diary data included entries recorded from 2005 to 2015 by more than 200,000 participants from 10 countries in Asia, Europe, and North America.</p><p>Statistical analysis found that, for all 10 countries, the biggest disparities in time use between men and women were in the areas of housework, care work, and employment activities. Disparities were greatest in South Korea, Hungary, Italy, and Spain, while moderate in other Western European countries and lowest in Finland and Anglo-Saxon countries, such as the U.K., the U.S., and Canada.</p><p>For all ten countries, gender gaps in time spent on housework and care work widened from adolescence to adulthood, with the largest gaps persisting from age 30 to 44, but narrowing after 65. This pattern was strongest for Italy and South Korea, and less pronounced in Canada and Finland. Disparities in time spent on employment activities were greatest from the ages to 30 through 64; this pattern was most pronounced in the Netherlands and less prominent in the U.S.</p><p>These findings suggest that national context affects the precise ways in which gender gaps in time use may arise and wane over the entire life course. These findings, and future research in this area, could help inform country-specific efforts to close gender gaps in important activities for individuals\' health and well-being outcomes.</p><p>The authors add: \"Our study shows that age and gender intersect strongly in affecting time-use patterns, but also that the national context plays an important role in shaping gender-age interactions in time use allocation.\"</p>','2022-03-09 21:44:17.152713','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'PLOS','A new, 10-country analysis identifies between-nation differences in the amount of time men and women spend on various daily activities at different stages of life.\n',1,27,'<li>Joan García Román, Pablo Gracia. <strong>Gender differences in time use across age groups: A study of ten industrialized countries, 2005–2015</strong>. <em>PLOS ONE</em>, 2022; 17 (3): e0264411 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264411\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1371/journal.pone.0264411</a>\n</li>'),(628,'Music combined with auditory beat stimulation may reduce anxiety for some','music-combined-with-auditory-beat-stimulation-may-reduce-anxiety-for-some','2022-03-09 21:44:21.875212',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Treatments integrating music and auditory beat stimulation are effective in reducing state anxiety in some patients, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal <em>PLOS ONE</em> by Adiel Mallik and Frank Russo of the Ryerson University, Canada.</p><p>Anxiety has been steadily increasing, particularly in the adolescent and young adult populations, over recent decades. Studies have previously shown that listening to music can reduce anxiety, perhaps even more effectively than some anti-anxiety medications. However, quantitative data on the effects of personalized music on anxiety has been lacking.</p><p>In the new study, the researchers randomized 163 patients taking anti-anxiety medications to participate in an at-home treatment session involving music, auditory beat stimulation, both, or pink noise -- background sounds similar to white noise. The music was selected for each patient using LUCID\'s artificial intelligence which curates music based on the patient\'s emotional state and music preferences. Auditory beat stimulation involves combinations of tones, played in one or both ears, designed to trigger changes to brain activity. In all groups, patients were asked to download a customized application on their smart phone for the treatment, close their eyes, and listen to a 24-minute session.</p><p>Among people with moderate anxiety before the treatment session, greater reductions in somatic anxiety -- the physical symptoms of anxiety -- were seen in people who listened to both music and ABS (p=0.04, effect size=0.83), or those who listened to music alone (p=0.05, effect size=0.52), compared to those who listened to pink noise. The greatest reductions in cognitive state anxiety -- the aspect of anxiety related to thoughts and feelings -- were also seen in moderate trait anxiety participants who listened to both music and ABS. Among people with high trait anxiety before the session, the music-alone group had significantly higher reductions in anxiety compared to the ABS-alone group (p=0.04, effect size=0.72).</p><p>The authors conclude that sound-based treatments can be effective in reducing state anxiety and potentially offer a simple and easily distributable method of treating anxiety in a segment of the population.</p><p>Drs. Russo and Malik add: \"With the pandemic and remote work, there has been a remarkable uptick in the use of digital health tools to support mental health. The results of this clinical trial indicate great promise for the use of digital health tools, such as LUCID\'s digital music therapy, in the management of anxiety and other mental health conditions.\"</p><p>\"The findings from this research are exciting as they indicate that personalized music shows great promise in effectively reducing anxiety in specific segments of the population that suffer from anxiety. Hopefully, with additional research, we can help build a solid evidence base which further supports the use of personalized music as an additional tool in the clinician\'s toolbox that can be used to help reduce anxiety in the patient population.\"</p>','2022-03-09 21:44:21.875212','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'PLOS','Treatments integrating music and auditory beat stimulation are effective in reducing state anxiety in some patients, according to a new study.\n',1,27,'<li>Adiel Mallik, Frank A. Russo. <strong>The effects of music &amp; auditory beat stimulation on anxiety: A randomized clinical trial</strong>. <em>PLOS ONE</em>, 2022; 17 (3): e0259312 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259312\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1371/journal.pone.0259312</a>\n</li>'),(629,'Hugging a \'breathing\' cushion to ease anxiety','hugging-a-\'breathing\'-cushion-to-ease-anxiety','2022-03-09 21:44:29.695676',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Researchers have developed a huggable, cushion-like device that mechanically simulates breathing, and preliminary evidence suggests it could help reduce students\' pre-test anxiety. Alice Haynes of the University of Bristol, U.K., and colleagues present the device and findings in the open-access journal <em>PLOS ONE</em> on March 9, 2022.</p><p>Treatments for anxiety disorders primarily include therapy and medications. However, these can be costly, and medications may have unwanted side effects. At-home anxiety aids could complement treatments for anxiety disorders and also benefit people experiencing temporary anxiety. Within this category, a small but growing body of research highlights the anxiety-reducing potential of touch-based devices, such as TouchPoints wearables and Paro the seal, an interactive therapeutic robot.</p><p>Now, Haynes and colleagues have developed a new, touch-based device that could ease anxiety. They initially built several prototype devices that simulated different sensations, such as breathing, purring, and a heartbeat. Each prototype took the form of a soft, huggable cushion that was meant to be intuitive and inviting. Focus group testing identified the \"breathing\" cushion as being the most pleasant and calming, so the researchers further developed it into a larger, mechanical cushion.</p><p>To test the new device, the research team recruited 129 volunteers for an experiment involving a group mathematics test. Using pre- and post-test questionnaires, the researchers found that students who used the device were less anxious pre-test than those who did not. The experiment also compared the breathing cushion to a guided meditation, and found that both were equally effective at easing anxiety.</p><p>These findings suggest that the breathing cushion could be used to reduce anxiety, for example for students who are anticipating exams. The researchers now hope to further refine the cushion for testing in people\'s homes. They also plan to investigate people\'s physiological response to the device -- for instance, changes in heart rate or breathing patterns -- in order to elucidate the particular mechanisms by which the device might ease anxiety.</p><p>The authors add: \"We were excited to find that holding the breathing cushion, without any guidance, produced a similar effect on anxiety in students as a meditation practice. This ability of the device to be used intuitively opens it up to providing wider audiences with accessible anxiety relief.\"</p>','2022-03-09 21:44:29.695676','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'PLOS','Researchers have developed a huggable, cushion-like device that mechanically simulates breathing, and preliminary evidence suggests it could help reduce students\' pre-test anxiety.\n',1,27,'<li>Alice C. Haynes, Annie Lywood, Emily M. Crowe, Jessica L. Fielding, Jonathan M. Rossiter, Christopher Kent. <strong>A calming hug: Design and validation of a tactile aid to ease anxiety</strong>. <em>PLOS ONE</em>, 2022; 17 (3): e0259838 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259838\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1371/journal.pone.0259838</a>\n</li>'),(630,'Caribbean coral reefs have been warming for at least 100 years','caribbean-coral-reefs-have-been-warming-for-at-least-100-years','2022-03-09 21:44:34.019363',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">A new analysis outlines 150 years of sea-surface temperature history throughout the Greater Caribbean region, highlighting significant warming trends that have disrupted coral reef ecosystems. Colleen Bove of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal <em>PLOS Climate</em> on March 9.</p><p>In addition to heating the atmosphere, climate change caused by human activity heats the world\'s oceans, disrupting marine ecosystems. Previous research has documented dramatic warming-induced changes to coral reef ecosystems worldwide -- and in the Caribbean in particular -- identifying such effects as mass coral mortality through coral bleaching and loss of reef-dependent fish.</p><p>Building on prior research, Bove and colleagues have now conducted an updated analysis of sea-surface temperature trends for Caribbean coral reefs. They first built a database of 5,326 Caribbean coral reefs, each located in one of eight sub-regions. Then, they used three open-access datasets of satellite and on-location sea-surface temperature observations to assess the history of warming from 1871 through 2020.</p><p>The analysis showed that, regionwide, Caribbean coral reefs have been warming since 1915. However, in four of the eight sub-regions, warming began earlier, during the second half of the nineteenth century.</p><p>The researchers found that Caribbean reefs have warmed by a total of 0.5 to 1°C in the past century, with different sub-regions experiencing different rates of warming from each other and over time. The data suggest that, if warming continues in a similar manner, these ecosystems will warm further by an average of about 1.5°C by the year 2100.</p><p>The analysis also assessed the occurrence of marine heatwaves -- brief periods of unusually high ocean temperatures. They found that the frequency and length of these events are rising throughout the Caribbean, with reefs now experiencing an average of five per year, up from one per year in the 1980s.</p><p>On the basis of their findings and other studies, the researchers call for urgent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as efforts to address local and regional stressors of coral reef ecosystems, such as fishing and pollution, in the Caribbean and beyond.</p><p>The authors add: \"Our study indicates that coral reefs have been warming for at least a century and many reefs across the Caribbean have already warmed by a degree Celsius. This explains why we have seen such devastating declines in the health of this invaluable ecosystem.\"</p>','2022-03-09 21:44:34.019363','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'PLOS','A new analysis outlines 150 years of sea-surface temperature history throughout the Greater Caribbean region, highlighting significant warming trends that have disrupted coral reef ecosystems.\n',1,27,'<li>Colleen B. Bove, Laura Mudge, John F. Bruno. <strong>A century of warming on Caribbean reefs</strong>. <em>PLOS Climate</em>, 2022; 1 (3): e0000002 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000002\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1371/journal.pclm.0000002</a>\n</li>'),(631,'Childhood trauma and genetics linked to increased obesity risk','childhood-trauma-and-genetics-linked-to-increased-obesity-risk','2022-03-09 21:44:39.015812',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">New research from the Healthy Nevada Project® found associations between genetics, obesity, and childhood trauma, linking social health determinants, genetics, and disease. The study, which was published this week in <em>Frontiers in Genetics</em>, found that participants with specific genetic traits and who experience childhood traumas are more likely to suffer from adult obesity.</p><p>In 2016, DRI and Renown Health launched the Healthy Nevada Project®, the nation\'s first community-based, population health study, which now has more than 60,000 participants. The project is a collaboration with personal genomics company, Helix, and combines genetic, environmental, social, and clinical data to address individual and community health needs with the goal of improving health across the state and the nation.</p><p>The new study focuses on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), which are traumatic and unsafe events that children endure by the age of 18. Over 16,000 participants in the Healthy Nevada Project® answered a mental health survey, and more than 65 percent of these individuals self-reported at least one ACE occurrence. These 16,000 participants were cross-referenced with their genetic makeup, and clinical Body Mass Index (BMI) measures.</p><p>According to the research team\'s findings, study participants who had experienced one or more types of ACE were 1.5 times more likely to become obese adults. Participants who experienced four or more ACEs were more than twice as likely to become severely obese.</p><p>\"Understanding that Adverse Childhood Experiences, like abuse, poverty, food insecurity, and poor relationships with primary caregivers increase a person\'s risk for obesity but also interact with your genetics -- are key to understanding how we might provide earlier interventions, help reduce health disparities, and create a Healthier Nevada for all,\" said Tony Slonim, MD, DrPH, President &amp; CEO of Renown Health. Slonim, CEO of Reno, NV-based Renown Health, is the first quadruple-board-certified doctor in the United States with certifications in adult critical care, internal medicine, pediatric critical care, and pediatrics and holds a Doctorate in Public Health.</p><p>\"Our analysis showed a steady increase in BMI for each ACE a person experienced, which indicates a very strong and significant association between the number of adverse childhood experiences and adult obesity,\" said lead author Karen Schlauch, Ph.D., of DRI. \"More importantly, participants\' BMI reacted even more strongly to the occurrence of ACEs when paired with certain mutations in several genes, one of which is strongly associated with schizophrenia.\"</p><p>\"We know that genetics affect disease in the Healthy Nevada Project® [<a href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31888951/\">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31888951/</a>], and now we are recognizing that ACEs also affect disease,\" said Healthy Nevada Project® Principal Investigator Joseph Grzymski, Ph.D., of DRI and Renown Health. \"Our new study shows that the combination of genes and environmental factors like ACEs, as well as many social determinants of health, can lead to more serious health outcomes than either variable alone. More broadly, this new work emphasizes how important it is for population genetic studies to consider the impact of social determinants on health outcomes.\"</p><p>The study team believes that it is important for clinical caregivers to understand the strong impact that negative childhood experiences such as ACEs can have on both child and adult health. The researchers hope the information from this study will encourage doctors and nurses to conduct simple screenings for ACEs and consider a patient\'s social environment and history in combination with genetics when developing treatment plans for better patient health.</p><p>According to the 2019 Youth Behavior Risk Survey (YRBS), 25.6 percent of Washoe County teenagers are overweight or obese. Obesity is a serious health concern for children and adolescents. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obese children and adolescents are more likely to become obese as adults.</p><p>\"Obese and overweight children and adolescents are at risk for multiple health problems during their youth, which are likely to be more severe as adults,\" said Max J. Coppes, MD, PhD, MBA, FAAP, Nell J Redfield Chair of Pediatrics at the University of Nevada Reno School of Medicine, Physician in Chief of Renown Children\'s Hospital. \"Obese and overweight youth are more likely to have risk factors associated with cardiovascular diseases, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and type 2 diabetes. Losing weight, in addition to a healthy diet, helps to prevent and control multiple chronic diseases and improves quality of life for a lifetime.\"</p><p>\"We\'d like to thank all of the Healthy Nevada Project® participants who provided information to make our work possible,\" said Robert Read, M.S., of DRI. \"Our research illustrates that it\'s not just genetics that cause disease, but that our environment and life experiences interact with our genes to impact our health in ways that we are only beginning to understand.\"</p><p>Many thanks to Renown Health, the Stacie Mathewson Behavioral Health and Addiction Institute, and the Center for Genomic Medicine at DRI for supporting this significant work. Renown is currently enrolling participants in the world\'s largest community-based genetic population health study, the Healthy Nevada Project®. For more information, visit <a href=\"http://renown.org\">renown.org</a>.</p><p><strong>More information:</strong></p><p>The full text of the study, <em>The Impact of ACEs on BMI: An Investigation of the Genotype-Environment Effects of BMI</em>, is available from <em>Frontiers in Genetics</em>: <a href=\"https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2022.816660/full\">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2022.816660/full</a></p><p>This project was funded by the Stacie Mathewson Behavioral Health and Addiction Institute, Renown Health, and the Renown Health Foundation. Study authors included Karen Schlauch (DRI), Robert Read (DRI), Iva Neveux (DRI), Bruce Lipp (DRI), Anthony Slonim (Renown Health), and Joseph Grzymski (DRI/Renown Health).</p><p>For more information on the Healthy Nevada Project®, please visit: <a href=\"https://healthynv.org/\">https://healthynv.org/</a></p>','2022-03-09 21:44:39.015812','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Desert Research Institute','New research has found associations between genetics, obesity, and childhood trauma, linking social health determinants, genetics, and disease. The study found that participants with specific genetic traits and who experience childhood traumas are more likely to suffer from adult obesity.\n',1,27,'<li>Karen A. Schlauch, Robert W. Read, Iva Neveux, Bruce Lipp, Anthony Slonim, Joseph J. Grzymski. <strong>The Impact of ACEs on BMI: An Investigation of the Genotype-Environment Effects of BMI</strong>. <em>Frontiers in Genetics</em>, 2022; 13 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2022.816660\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.3389/fgene.2022.816660</a>\n</li>'),(632,'Fundamental growth limitations in Antarctic fish','fundamental-growth-limitations-in-antarctic-fish','2022-03-09 21:57:29.515396',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Antarctic fish have adapted over millennia to survive in the freezing temperatures of the Southern Ocean.</p><p>However, in doing so, they have lost their ability to grow at rates seen in their warmer water cousins, even when they are now held at the same water temperature, a new study suggests.</p><p>The research, conducted by scientists at the University of Plymouth and the British Antarctic Survey, focused on two species -- the Antarctic spiny plunderfish (<em>Harpagifer antarcticus</em>) and the shanny (<em>Lipophyrs pholis</em>), also known as the common blenny.</p><p>The Antarctic fish consumed around 20% less food than the species from temperate waters and grew at about half the rate, even when the two ecologically similar species were held at the same water temperature.</p><p>These new findings show that fish living at Antarctic water temperatures have greatly increased the amount of cellular machinery they have to make proteins -- but still can\'t make proteins at the same rate as warmer water species -- while the rates at which polar and temperate fish break down protein is very similar</p><p>In turn, this means in Antarctic fish the ability to translate new proteins into physical growth has been drastically reduced.</p><p>As a result, the researchers say, it seems likely that an evolutionary trade-off for being able to survive at polar water temperatures has been a greatly reduced ability to grow as efficiently, or rapidly, as warmer water fish.</p><p>In turn, this has important implications for exposure to predation and how many years it might take to reach sexual maturity.</p><p>Published in <em>Royal Society Open Science</em>, the study is the first of its kind to assess how Antarctic fish make and store protein as growth compared to those from temperate waters.</p><p>It also provides one of the largest comparative studies of protein metabolism, growth and food consumption in fish across a wide range of biologically relevant habitat temperatures.</p><p>Dr Keiron Fraser, Lecturer in Marine Conservation at the University of Plymouth and the study\'s lead author, said: \"Antarctic fish are highly thermally constrained and cannot live long-term at temperatures much above those that they currently inhabit. In contrast, many temperate species are more tolerant of a wide range of temperatures as they often inhabit extensive latitudinal ranges. Our data shows that the rates of growth and protein metabolism in an Antarctic species are significantly lower than in the temperate species, even when held at the same water temperature. As ocean temperatures increase with global warming, it is a timely reminder of the differences in species that have evolved to live at widely different temperatures. If Antarctic fish are increasingly exposed to higher temperatures, it will have implications for their survival, as well as effects on many critical physiological processes, including growth.\"</p><p>Professor Lloyd Peck, lead physiologist on animal adaptations in extreme environments from the British Antarctic Survey, added: \"There is unexpectedly high biodiversity on the seabed in Antarctica, with estimates of around 20,000 species living there. So far all of the species studied have great problems making proteins and it seems this is a ubiquitous constraint on life at low temperature. There are many other unique adaptations in Antarctic marine species, such as 16 species of fish that are the only animals with backbones that do not have red blood cells or haemoglobin to carry oxygen around their bodies, or giant sea spiders thousands of times heavier than the largest in temperate zones. As well as the issues with making proteins, many of these other adaptations might make life easier in an environment with constant low temperatures, but they also appear to reduce abilities to survive in changing environments, which makes the future prospects for many Antarctic marine species bleak.\"</p>','2022-03-09 21:57:29.515396','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Plymouth','Antarctic fish have adapted over millennia to survive in the freezing temperatures of the Southern Ocean. However, in doing so, they have lost their ability to grow at rates seen in their warmer water cousins, even when they are now held at the same water temperature, a new study suggests.\n',1,27,'<li>Keiron P. P. Fraser, Lloyd S. Peck, Melody S. Clark, Andrew Clarke, Simeon L. Hill. <strong>Life in the freezer: protein metabolism in Antarctic fish</strong>. <em>Royal Society Open Science</em>, 2022; 9 (3) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.211272\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1098/rsos.211272</a>\n</li>'),(634,'Treating tough tumors by exploiting their iron \'addiction\'','treating-tough-tumors-by-exploiting-their-iron-\'addiction\'','2022-03-09 22:06:57.349248',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have successfully leveraged an FDA-approved drug to halt growth of tumors driven by mutations in the RAS gene, which are famously difficult to treat and account for about one in four cancer deaths.</p><p>Taking advantage of what they discovered to be the cancer cells\' appetite for a reactive form of iron, the researchers tweaked an anticancer drug to operate only in these iron-rich cells, leaving other cells to function normally. The achievement, described in the March 9, 2022 issue of the <em>Journal of Experimental Medicine</em> could open doors to more tolerable chemotherapy for many cancers in which current treatments can be as challenging as the disease.</p><p>\"RAS mutations, by themselves, cause more misery than all other cancers combined, and take so many lives worldwide,\" said Eric Collisson, MD, a senior author of the study and member of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. \"This study brings us much closer to addressing the unmet need for better treatment of these cancers.\"</p><p><strong>A Cancer Drug with an Iron Sensor</strong></p><p>To do so, Collisson and lead author Honglin Jiang, MD, both oncologists at UCSF, teamed up with Adam Renslo, PhD, a pharmaceutical chemist also at UCSF and co-senior author, to focus on RAS-mutated pancreatic and gastrointestinal cancers. The RAS gene plays a role in tamping down pathways in the cell that drive it to grow and divide. Mutations in the gene usually mean that these growth forces are going unchecked, leading to cancer.</p><p>Current treatments, such as a drug called cobimetinib, do a good job of blocking this excessive growth activity set in motion by the mutation, but they do so in many other, non-cancerous tissues as well, leading to serious side effects that many patients find intolerable.</p><p>\"Cobimetinib is a classic example of an anticancer drug that we know works well on its target, but it hasn\'t achieved its clinical potential because the same target is important in the skin and other normal tissues,\" said Renslo.</p><p>The researchers found that many tumors driven by the KRAS form of RAS mutations have elevated concentrations of ferrous iron -- a form of the element that is highly reactive -- and that this is correlated with shorter survival times.</p><p>To take advantage of this unique characteristic of the cancer cells, Renslo and then-graduate student Ryan Muir synthesized a new version of cobimetinib bearing a small, molecular sensor of ferrous iron. The sensor effectively turns cobimetinib off until it encounters ferrous iron in the cancer cells.</p><p>After confirming that the new drug, dubbed TRX-cobimetinib, prevented adverse effects on normal tissues like skin that limit dosing in human patients, the researchers tested the compound in mouse models of several KRAS-driven cancers and found that it was just as effective as cobimetinib in shrinking tumors.</p><p><strong>Enabling New Drug Combinations </strong></p><p>The reduced toxicity allowed the researchers to combine TRX-cobimetinib with other synergistic anticancer drugs to provide combination treatments that proved even better at inhibiting tumor growth and were better tolerated than comparable combinations using cobimetinib.</p><p>\"By removing toxicity from the equation, you\'re talking not just about one new drug, but 10 new combinations that you can now think about exploring in the clinic,\" said Renslo. \"That would be the home run for this approach.\"</p><p>Renslo is already at work studying whether a similar approach can be applied to antibiotics, some of which have untoward side effects, to target treatment and reduce toxicity.</p><p>Collisson, who works every day with patients wrestling with these cancers, said the collaboration with Renslo has given him hope that he\'ll be able to give those patients better options in the not-too-distant future. And, he added, the experience has opened his eyes to things he\'d been missing by being so focused on his day-to-day oncology world.</p><p>\"I love taking care of patients, and a fundamental part of that is, ultimately, getting a molecule to the place where it\'s needed and keeping it out of places where it\'s not needed,\" he said. \"To be able to deliver a therapy that\'s five times more potent than what we currently have and not run the patient ragged, that\'s pretty exciting.\"</p><p><strong> Funding: </strong> This work was supported by NIH, NCI Grants CA178015, CA222862, CA227807, CA239604, CA230263, CA210974, CA224081, P30CA082103, AI105106, W81XWH1810763, and W81XWH1810754.  <br/></p>','2022-03-09 22:06:57.349248','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of California - San Francisco','Researchers have successfully leveraged an FDA-approved drug to halt growth of tumors driven by mutations in the RAS gene, which are famously difficult to treat and account for about one in four cancer deaths.\n',1,27,'<li>Honglin Jiang, Ryan K. Muir, Ryan L. Gonciarz, Adam B. Olshen, Iwei Yeh, Byron C. Hann, Ning Zhao, Yung-hua Wang, Spencer C. Behr, James E. Korkola, Michael J. Evans, Eric A. Collisson, Adam R. Renslo. <strong>Ferrous iron–activatable drug conjugate achieves potent MAPK blockade in KRAS-driven tumors</strong>. <em>Journal of Experimental Medicine</em>, 2022; 219 (4) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1084/jem.20210739\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1084/jem.20210739</a>\n</li>'),(635,'Innovative solution for thermal energy storage','innovative-solution-for-thermal-energy-storage','2022-03-09 22:07:03.073068',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Have you ever gotten relief from summertime heat by draping a wet towel over your head? If so, you\'ve benefited from a <em>phase-change material</em> (PCM): a substance that releases or absorbs energy when it transitions between two of the fundamental states of matter, such as the solid, liquid, or gas states. Your damp towel cools you because water is a PCM that absorbs heat when it\'s evaporating -- in other words, when it\'s transitioning from the liquid state to the gas state.</p><p>Experimental apparatus showing the piston used to apply pressure to the PCM within the container; the heat source (heating pads) is at the bottom.</p><p>A PCM\'s ability to absorb and release energy has recently attracted more attention because of society\'s shift from fossil fuels towards renewable energy sources that are only intermittently available. Because sunlight is unavailable at night and wind varies, we can\'t capture their energy right when we need it; rather, we need ways to store it for future use. PCMs offer promise as a storage solution, but to date, their use has been limited by seemingly intractable technical challenges.</p><p>Now, as detailed in a paper just published in <em>Nature Energy</em>, one major challenge has been overcome through a remarkably simple idea, opening the door to expanded use of PCMs for energy-efficient heating and cooling.</p><p>Nenad Miljkovic, who is one of the authors and also the Ph.D. advisor of lead author Wuchen Fu, explains that any thermal energy storage (TES) system has two important metrics: \"One is <em>energy density</em>, which is the amount of energy you can store per unit volume, or per unit mass; then there\'s... <em>power density</em>, which is the rate at which you can extract that energy from that system per unit volume, or per unit mass.\" High levels of both are desirable, but most systems either have high energy density but low power density (e.g., a block of ice), or high power density but low energy density (e.g., a block of metal).</p><p>\"Classically, the way people have been handling this -- for well over thirty, forty years -- is they mix the two. What they do is create composites where some fraction of the volume is metal, or a metal matrix, to help conduct heat and achieve good power density,\" he says. \"But the trade-off is they are losing storage material, and so they sacrifice energy density in the process.\"</p><p>\"What our method does,\" Miljkovic explains, \"is it completely decouples the two,\" i.e., the energy density and power density.</p><p>Their insight was that application of slight pressure to a melting PCM can solve the problem simply by keeping the PCM right next to the heat source that is melting it.</p><p>Previously, to achieve the transition from solid to liquid, a stationary heat source was used to melt an adjoining stationary block of PCM. As the heat melted the near side of the PCM, that \"melt front\" of the PCM receded away from the heat source -- and the growing distance between the heat source and the shrinking PCM translated into dwindling power density, and an increasingly ineffective system.</p><p>Experiments discussed in the paper have demonstrated the efficacy of the new approach.</p><p>Miljkovic says the new solution was inspired by the low-tech observation that you can help a stick of butter melt in a hot pan if you press on it, instead of just dropping it in and waiting. \"Our main contribution here is not a fancy material or some expensive system! It\'s actually the simplicity,\" he says.</p><p>\"Thermal storage has long been of interest to researchers, but it has not yet been used for many applications,\" observes co-author William King. \"We really need high power to make it really compelling and useful for demanding applications like electric vehicles, power generation, and data centers. Our work makes it possible to achieve thermal storage at a high power not previously possible.\"</p>','2022-03-09 22:07:03.073068','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Illinois Grainger College of Engineering','A new research article features one major challenge overcome through a remarkably simple idea, opening the door to expanded use of PCMs for energy-efficient heating and cooling.\n',1,27,'<li>Wuchen Fu, Xiao Yan, Yashraj Gurumukhi, Vivek S. Garimella, William P. King, Nenad Miljkovic. <strong>High power and energy density dynamic phase change materials using pressure-enhanced close contact melting</strong>. <em>Nature Energy</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41560-022-00986-y\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41560-022-00986-y</a>\n</li>'),(637,'In pilot study, asynchronous telehealth visits effectively treat overactive bladder','in-pilot-study,-asynchronous-telehealth-visits-effectively-treat-overactive-bladder','2022-03-09 22:07:06.554418',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Women who received treatment for overactive bladder (OAB) using asynchronous telehealth visits had significant improvement in their symptoms and high satisfaction with their care, concludes an exploratory pilot study published in <em>Menopause</em>.</p><p>Overactive bladder is a common disorder that affects one in five women. This condition dramatically affects the quality of life of women affected by it, but treatment adherence is notoriously low. \"Successful treatment of overactive bladder often requires both medication and altering behavior, such as reducing the amount of liquids consumed and cutting back on beverages containing caffeine, a bladder irritant,\" says first author Marcus Ortega, MD, a female pelvic medicine and reconstructive surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). \"Patients often discontinue medications because of side effects, and the behavioral changes aren\'t easy to make without positive reinforcement and objective proof that they are effective. We wanted to test whether we could enhance treatment by keeping patients engaged in care and expediting therapy options.\"</p><p>The 23 women enrolled in the pilot study had been newly diagnosed with OAB during an in-person outpatient visit at MGH. Instead of scheduling a traditional clinic follow-up visit for OAB at three months, however, the women received their first asynchronous visit approximately one month from their initial in-office visit. The telehealth visit consisted of an electronic questionnaire from a clinician asking patients about their symptoms and treatment progress. Based on the patient\'s answers, the clinician responded with specific recommendations. \"For example, the clinician might recommend switching to a different medication because of side effects or lack of efficacy, or reinforce certain behaviors to improve symptoms,\" Ortega explains. \"The patient\'s answers on the validated medical questionnaires also allow us to objectively compare over time whether symptoms are improving, since it can be difficult for patients to keep track of subjective symptoms month after month.\"</p><p>The study participants completed a total of 50 e-visits over a mean 135 days, with most women completing two telehealth visits. All study participants had a statistically significant improvement in urinary symptoms and a decrease in the number of incontinence episodes between their first asynchronous visit and the last one. The women reduced their fluid intake, including caffeinated and carbonated beverages, and more than 30% switched medications or had the dosage adjusted. Participants were very satisfied with the experience, rating the asynchronous visits an 8.8 on a 10-point satisfaction scale.</p><p>Despite the recent advances in overactive bladder therapies, nearly 50% of patients are frustrated with treatment results. The investigators attribute the participants\' improvement in urinary symptoms in this study to more frequent engagement with their clinicians, which ultimately led to the patients\' better compliance in behavioral changes and medication use. Asynchronous visits may also accelerate the time for patients to receive advanced therapies, such as Botox injections, tibial nerve stimulation, or sacral neuromodulation. Often, insurance companies require at least two medication trials before approving advanced treatment options, and asynchronous visits allow clinicians to more quickly optimize treatment and try different medications, as opposed to waiting 90 days for the patient to return for a follow-up office visit.</p><p>The investigators plan to conduct a randomized clinical trial to test whether asynchronous visits improve outcomes in OAB compared with regular office-based care. \"If we can confirm the efficacy of this delivery model in a randomized trial, we hope this platform will become more widely available for other medical conditions,\" says Ortega. In addition to keeping patients engaged in follow-up care, asynchronous visits offer many other advantages, such as not requiring a camera, reduction in unnecessary medical visits, and the convenience of receiving care at a distance, especially in rural areas where few specialists practice.</p><p>Ortega is an instructor at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and a Massachusetts General Physicians Organization Management Fellow. Other key authors are Marcela del Carmen, MD, MPH, president of the Massachusetts General Physicians Organization and professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Biology at HMS; May Wakamatsu, MD, director of Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery and vice chair of Gynecology at MGH; and Jason Wasfy, MD, MPhil, medical director of the Massachusetts General Physicians Organization, director of Quality and Analytics at the MGH Heart Center, and associate professor of Medicine at HMS.</p>','2022-03-09 22:07:06.554418','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Massachusetts General Hospital','Women with overactive bladder are frequently frustrated with treatment, which leads to discontinuation of therapy. Asynchronous telehealth visits keep women engaged in follow-up care, accelerates trials of different medications and reinforces behavioral changes. The women in this pilot study reported improvement in symptoms and high satisfaction with asynchronous visits.\n',1,27,'<li>Marcus V. Ortega, Marcela G. del Carmen, May Wakamatsu, Susan A. Goldstein, Eirian Siegal-Botti, Jason H. Wasfy. <strong>Asynchronous telehealth visits for the treatment of overactive bladder</strong>. <em>Menopause</em>, 2022; Publish Ahead of Print DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/GME.0000000000001957\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1097/GME.0000000000001957</a>\n</li>'),(638,'New research sheds light on nature of friction in multi-layered graphene','new-research-sheds-light-on-nature-of-friction-in-multi-layered-graphene','2022-03-09 22:07:11.232653',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Multi-layered graphene is a promising carbon-based nanomaterial for a variety of next-generation technologies, but the relationships between its surface structures and properties are not entirely clear. Now, in a recent study, Pusan National University scientists analyze how surface structures like wrinkles and folded networks affect nanoscale friction in multi-layered graphene. Their findings could pave the way for graphene-based solid lubricants and micro/nano-scale mechanical devices.</p><p>Graphene, which consists of a single layer of carbon atoms, is the poster child of carbon-based 2D nanomaterials. It has many attractive properties that could be exploited in next-generation electronics, optics, catalysis, biomedicine, and many other fields. Recently, many scientists have focused on chemical vapor deposition (CVD) as a cost-efficient technique for producing larger graphene surfaces in lieu of the well-established method of mechanical exfoliation, which can only produce small graphene islands.</p><p>However, CVD graphene contains a fair number of surface structures and defects, including wrinkles, crystal grain boundaries, and surface contamination. Because graphene is so thin, even minor surface irregularities can greatly affect its properties, making its surface-property relationships an important area of research. While studies on this topic have been conducted extensively for single-layer CVD graphene, few have focused on how surface structures affect the nanoscale friction characteristics of multi-layered CVD graphene.</p><p>Recently, a team of researchers from Pusan National University, Korea, led by Assistant Professor Songkil Kim tackled this knowledge gap. \"Correlating surface characteristics with a material\'s properties is really important,\" explains Dr. Kim, \"Imagine you are stacking papers, and there is a huge compressive strain over these papers. This could cause massive structural deformations within the stacked layers and the surface. Similarly, the structural changes that occur in multi-layered graphene can affect its surface properties, such as its friction, which is what we focused on.\" Their paper was made available online on January 24, 2022, and published in Volume 584 of Applied Surface Scienceon May 15, 2022.</p><p>The team first used the atom-sized tip of an atomic force microscope (AFM) to scratch the surface of CVD multi-layer graphene, cleaning off any polymeric residues. Then, they used AFM imaging, friction force microscopy, and Raman spectroscopy to identify and study various surface structures and how they affect nanoscale friction. Interestingly, they found that only the top-most layer of graphene was twisted with respect to the rest, which influenced the layer-dependent nanoscale friction in a way that varied according to the applied load.</p><p>Overall, this study\'s findings could pave the way for interesting mechanical applications for CVD graphene. \"Graphene and similar materials can be used as solid lubricants,\" comments Dr. Kim, \"Whereas liquid lubricants like motor oils are not suitable for harsh environment such as outer space or the polar regions, the excellent robustness and frictional properties of graphene make it an attractive non-toxic alternative.\"</p><p>Interestingly, developing high-performance lubricants has environmental benefits since reducing friction is essential to prevent energy losses in mechanical systems. Another potential application for multi-layered CVD graphene is in micro/nano-devices, where a precise control of friction is necessary.</p>','2022-03-09 22:07:11.232653','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Pusan National University','Multi-layered graphene is a promising carbon-based nanomaterial for a variety of next-generation technologies, but the relationships between its surface structures and properties are not entirely clear. Now, in a recent study, scientists analyze how surface structures like wrinkles and folded networks affect nanoscale friction in multi-layered graphene. Their findings could pave the way for graphene-based solid lubricants and micro/nano-scale mechanical devices.\n',1,27,'<li>Min Gi Choi, Seonha Park, Habeom Lee, Songkil Kim. <strong>Correlating surface structures and nanoscale friction of CVD Multi-Layered graphene</strong>. <em>Applied Surface Science</em>, 2022; 584: 152572 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apsusc.2022.152572\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1016/j.apsusc.2022.152572</a>\n</li>'),(641,'Physics and biology explore together the mechanisms of life','physics-and-biology-explore-together-the-mechanisms-of-life','2022-03-09 22:07:16.572170',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Each of our cells contains about 40 million proteins that together perform all the tasks the cell needs to survive. For a smooth action, the right proteins must be concentrated in specific amounts, at a specific time and at a specific location. However, establishing such a delicate distribution requires an extremely precise process, happening at tiny spatial resolutions that standard cell biology tools are often unable to detect. To understand how this mechanism works, researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) developed a new approach combining genetics and cell biology experiments with physical modelling. Using specific algorithms, they simulated the formation of protein gradients in 3D and throughout time and were able to explain these complex mechanisms. Moreover, their innovative model can be adapted to other biology systems to investigate protein dynamics. These results can be read in the <em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</em>.</p><p>Like a drop of ink in a glass of water, proteins can diffuse and evenly distribute throughout the cell. However, for quite a few tasks, proteins need to form gradients. \"Protein gradients, which arise from the uneven distribution of proteins in specific cellular areas, are central to many cellular and organismal functions,\" explains Monica Gotta, a professor in the Department of Cell Physiology and Metabolism and in the Translational Research Centre in Onco-hematology (CRTOH) at UNIGE Faculty of Medicine, who directed this work. \"For example, protein gradients are important for cell differentiation, the process by which the different cell types that constitute a complex organism emerge from a unique cell, the fertilised egg.\"</p><p><strong>A use of randomness</strong></p><p>The PLK-1 protein, a key regulator of cell division, is known to be more concentrated at the anterior side of the embryo. But how can this mechanism be put in place, and what would be the consequence if the tiniest detail went awry? As the usual tools of biology were not sufficient to answer this question, Monica Gotta was happy to welcome in her team a physicist, Sofia Barbieri, post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Cell Physiology and Metabolism at UNIGE Faculty of Medicine. \"Compiling all the known about this biological process and new hypotheses on the mechanisms, I developed a statistical model of protein gradient formation based on probabilistic mathematics,\" explains Sofia Barbieri. \"I resorted to specific computational algorithms, called Monte-Carlo simulations, named after the famous gambling city.\" These algorithms are used to model phenomena with a high level of complexity, such as finance, trading, or particle physics.</p><p>The team was able to simulate protein gradients, not only in 3D, but also through time. Such a model required however several iterations between parameter optimisation and comparison with biological data. The researchers built a first version of the model incorporating all known physical and biological elements of the system, then introduced specific parameters necessary to test several hypotheses concerning the unknown variables. They simulated possible physical and biological outcomes that computationally reproduced the protein dynamics and gradient establishment in the cell, and tested them in real life with in vivo experiments using the embryos of a small worm, the <em>C. elegans</em> nematode.</p><p><strong>Intricate protein interactions at play</strong></p><p>Thanks to the continuous interplay between modelling and cell biology, the UNIGE researchers were able to determine how the PLK-1 gradient was established and maintained over time. Indeed, PLK-1 must dynamically bind to and unbind from MEX-5, another protein crucial for development in the <em>C. elegans</em> embryo, to counteract its natural tendency to diffuse homogenously in the cell. MEX-5 has indeed the ability to change its diffusivity depending on its position within the cell and to interact with other proteins, which is essential to enrich PLK-1 where needed. \"But quite surprisingly, MEX-5 is not that efficient at its task, as a large amount of PLK-1 is not bound to MEX-5!\" points out Sofia Barbieri.</p><p>This study provides a unique quantitative model for understanding dynamic interactions between proteins and can be adapted to other cells or proteins for which the complex mechanisms cannot be tested with usual cell biology experiments. \"Our work shows that interdisciplinary collaborations are more and more important to advance in research!\" concludes Monica Gotta.</p>','2022-03-09 22:07:16.572170','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Université de Genève','Each of our cells contains about 40 million proteins that together perform all the tasks the cell needs to survive. For a smooth action, the right proteins must be concentrated in specific amounts, at a specific time and at a specific location. However, establishing such a delicate distribution requires an extremely precise process, happening at tiny spatial resolutions that standard cell biology tools are often unable to detect. To understand how this mechanism works, researchers have developed a new approach combining genetics and cell biology experiments with physical modelling. Using specific algorithms, they simulated the formation of protein gradients in 3D and throughout time and were able to explain these complex mechanisms. Moreover, their innovative model can be adapted to other biology systems to investigate protein dynamics.\n',1,27,'<li>Sofia Barbieri, Aparna Nurni Ravi, Erik E. Griffin, Monica Gotta. <strong>Modeling protein dynamics in            Caenorhabditis elegans            embryos reveals that the PLK-1 gradient relies on weakly coupled reaction–diffusion mechanisms</strong>. <em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</em>, 2022; 119 (11) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2114205119\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1073/pnas.2114205119</a>\n</li>'),(643,'Scientists discover the origins of metastasis','scientists-discover-the-origins-of-metastasis','2022-03-09 22:07:41.561754',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Metastatic cells form in a primary tumour and then break away from it, migrate to other organs, attach to them and form new tumours. This spread reduces patients\' chances of recovery. Scientists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have discovered some of the mechanisms by which these cells arise. This is due to cells that have narrowly escaped cell death (apoptosis) following a chemotherapeutic treatment. Those cells reprogram themselves to acquire metastatic skills. Thanks to this study, these cells -- called PAME by the researchers -- now appear as new therapeutic targets. These results can be read in the journal <em>Cell Report</em>s.</p><p>Metastatic cells occur in many forms of cancer. They originate in primary tumours and then break away and migrate. They travel through the tissues surrounding them, through blood vessels or lymphatic channels. Along the way, they may attach to one or more organs -- such as the lungs, brain, bones or liver -- and form new tumours also called metastases. This spread of the disease can negatively affect a patient\'s chances of recovery.</p><p> Previous studies have identified metastatic cells during migration. It is also known that certain treatments can induce them. However, the precise mechanisms of their development remain a mystery. \"We don\'t know why, at a given moment, certain cells separate from the primary tumour,\" explains Ariel Ruiz i Altaba, a Full Professor in the Department of Genetic Medecine and Development at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine. \"The phenomenon is difficult to analyze because, before they migrate, there is nothing to distinguish future metastatic cells, or pro-metastatic cells, from other cells within the tumour.\"</p><p><strong>Cells that should have died</strong></p><p>Professor Ruiz i Altaba\'s team composed of two postdocs for this study, Arwen Conod (first author) and Marianna Silvano, has now provided some answers. Thanks to a recent research, these UNIGE scientists have discovered that the experience of imminent death within the primary tumour pushes certain cells to acquire pro-metastatic states. This near-death experience occurs in particular in the context of certain treatments aimed at depriving cancer cells of energy or oxygen. The team observed that these cells, which should have died, reprogram themselves and then present a high metastatic risk. These cells are called PAME for \"post-apoptotic pro-metastatic cells.\"</p><p><strong>A storm of cytokines</strong></p><p>To reach these conclusions, the UNIGE team used tumour samples taken from two colon cancer patients. Tumour cells from these samples were then transplanted into mice, where they grew and formed new tumours. These cells were subjected to an imminent death experience causing endoplasmic reticulum stress similar to that caused by certain chemotherapeutic drugs. This allowed the development of PAME cells.</p><p>The scientists also discovered that PAMEs trigger a storm of cytokines -- proteins and other factors that ensure cell-to-cell communication -- inducing adjacent cells to become PIMs, for PAME-induced migratory cells. These PIMs then associate with PAMEs and help them migrate to form metastases.</p><p>The present results open up promising new prospects for therapeutic management, including the prevention of the development of pro-metastatic fields generated by certain treatments. \"Currently, one of the main criteria when defining a treatment is tumor shrinkage. Thanks to our study, PAME cells now appear as potential therapeutic and metastasis prevention targets to be taken into account,\" concludes Professor Ruiz i Altaba.</p>','2022-03-09 22:07:41.561754','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Université de Genève','Metastatic cells form in a primary tumor and then break away from it, migrate to other organs, attach to them and form new tumors. This spread reduces patients\' chances of recovery. Scientists have discovered some of the mechanisms by which these cells arise. This is due to cells that have narrowly escaped cell death (apoptosis) following a chemotherapeutic treatment. Those cells reprogram themselves to acquire metastatic skills. Thanks to this study, these cells - called PAME by the researchers - now appear as new therapeutic targets.\n',1,27,'<li>Arwen Conod, Marianna Silvano, Ariel Ruiz i Altaba. <strong>On the origin of metastases: Induction of pro-metastatic states after impending cell death via ER stress, reprogramming, and a cytokine storm</strong>. <em>Cell Reports</em>, 2022; 38 (10): 110490 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2022.110490\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1016/j.celrep.2022.110490</a>\n</li>'),(647,'Patients with persistent postural-perceptual dizziness show warning signs early on','patients-with-persistent-postural-perceptual-dizziness-show-warning-signs-early-on','2022-03-09 22:08:01.528242',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">People who suffer from persistent postural-perceptual dizziness (PPPD) experience unsteadiness, non-spinning vertigo and dizziness. These symptoms are exacerbated by movement, upright posture, and visual stimuli. In a new study, scientists have tried to find out if these exacerbating factors are present in the period before PPPD is diagnosed. They found that patients developing PPPD are likely to have them early on after the onset of balance disorder symptoms.</p><p>The vestibular system, which is the link between the inner ear and the brain, helps the body maintain its balance. When people experience vestibular symptoms, i.e., symptoms of balance disorder, it can develop into persistent postural-perceptual dizziness (PPPD), a chronic disorder where patients experience dizziness and non-spinning vertigo, particularly during moving, maintaining an upright posture, and when exposed to complex visual stimuli. However, not all individuals suffering from vestibular symptoms go on to develop PPPD, and it is not clear if people showing exacerbating factors for PPPD tend to develop PPPD or not.</p><p>Recently, a research team comprising Assistant Professor Kayoko Kabaya, Dr. Masaki Kondo, Dr. Shinichi Iwasaki, and other researchers from Nagoya City University, Japan, analyzed medical records of patients who were tested for vestibular symptoms for the first time to identify predictive factors for developing PPPD later on, and explore the possibility that patients showing exacerbating factors early on are more likely to develop chronic PPPD following the onset of vestibular symptoms. \"PPPD is often severe and resistant to treatment. We believe that it is important to provide preventive interventions before PPPD develops, and wanted to identify the characteristics of patients who are prone to PPPD,\" explains Dr. Kabaya, the lead author of the study. This paper was published in the journal <em>Laryngoscope Investigative Otolaryngology.</em></p><p>In their study, the severity of the symptoms experienced by the patients was evaluated using the Niigata PPPD Questionnaire (NPQ), which involved questions on the exacerbating factors (upright posture, movement, and visual stimulation). Additionally, the perception of handicap due to dizziness was evaluated using a self-assessment scale called \"The Dizziness Handicap Inventory.\" The patients were then followed up for more than 3 months, and the NPQ scores of patients developing PPPD during the follow-up were compared with that of patients who did not develop PPPD.</p><p>More than half of the patients reported experiencing exacerbating factors shortly after the vestibular symptoms, worsening their symptoms. About 10% of these patients developed PPPD during the follow-up period, and the exacerbating factors were found to have a more severe effect on the vestibular symptoms in these patients. Notably, the NPQ scores of those who developed PPPD were significantly higher than that of those who did not.</p><p>\"Our results suggest that patients who develop PPPD are likely to have its exacerbating factors at the early stages of the disease following the onset of vestibular symptoms,\" says Dr. Kabaya.</p><p>With these findings, the researchers are optimistic that their study could help establish preventive measures against the disease. \"PPPD is a disease that causes long-term social loss and occurs following acute vestibular symptoms. Based on our finding that patients with exacerbating factors during acute vestibular symptom are more likely to develop PPPD, our study could encourage the development of intervention protocols for such patients before they develop PPPD,\" says Dr. Kabaya.</p>','2022-03-09 22:08:01.528242','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Nagoya City University','People who suffer from persistent postural-perceptual dizziness (PPPD) experience unsteadiness, non-spinning vertigo and dizziness. These symptoms are exacerbated by movement, upright posture, and visual stimuli. In a new study, scientists have tried to find out if these exacerbating factors are present in the period before PPPD is diagnosed. They found that patients developing PPPD are likely to have them early on after the onset of balance disorder symptoms.\n',1,27,'<li>Kayoko Kabaya, Hitomi Tamai, Akina Okajima, Toshiya Minakata, Masaki Kondo, Meiho Nakayama, Shinichi Iwasaki. <strong>Presence of exacerbating factors of persistent perceptual‐postural dizziness in patients with vestibular symptoms at initial presentation</strong>. <em>Laryngoscope Investigative Otolaryngology</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/lio2.735\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1002/lio2.735</a>\n</li>'),(648,'A \'zigzag\' blueprint for topological electronics','a-\'zigzag\'-blueprint-for-topological-electronics','2022-03-09 22:08:11.453795',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">A collaborative study led by the University of Wollongong confirms switching mechanism for a new, proposed generation of ultra-low energy \'topological electronics\'.</p><p>Based on novel quantum topological materials, such devices would \'switch\' a topological insulator from non-conducting (conventional electrical insulator) to a conducting (topological insulator) state, whereby electrical current could flow along its edge states without wasted dissipation of energy.</p><p>Such topological electronics could radically reduce the energy consumed in computing and electronics, which is estimated to consume 8% of global electricity, and doubling every decade.</p><p>Led by Dr Muhammad Nadeem at the University of Wollongong (UOW), the study also brought in expertise from FLEET Centre collaborators at UNSW and Monash University.</p><p><strong>Resolving the Switching Challenge, and Introducing the Tqfet</strong></p><p>Two-dimensional topological insulators are promising materials for topological quantum electronic devices where edge state transport can be controlled by a gate-induced electric field.</p><p>However, a major challenge with such electric-field-induced topological switching has been the requirement for an unrealistically large electric field to close the topological bandgap.</p><p>The cross-node and interdisciplinary FLEET research team studied the width-dependence of electronic properties to confirm that a class of material known as zigzag-Xene nanoribbons would fulfil the necessary conditions for operation, namely:</p><p><strong>Zigzag Xenes Could Be Key</strong></p><p>Graphene was the first confirmed atomically-thin material, a 2D sheet of carbon atoms (group IV) arranged in a honeycomb lattice. Now, topological and electronic properties are being investigated for similar honeycomb sheets of group-IV and group-V materials, collectively called 2D-Xenes.</p><p>2D-Xenes are topological insulators -- ie, electrically insulating in their interior but conductive along their edges, where electrons are transmitted without dissipating any energy (similar to a superconductor). When a 2D-Xene sheet is cut into a narrow ribbon terminated on \'zigzag\' edges, known as zigzag-Xene-nanoribbons, it retains the conducting edge modes characteristic of a topological insulator, which are thought to retain their ability to carry current without dissipation.</p><p>It has recently been shown that zigzag-Xene-nanoribbons have potential to make a topological transistor which can reduce switching energy by a factor of four.</p><p>The new research led by UOW found the following:</p><p><strong>Maintaining edge states</strong> Measurements indicated that spin-filtered chiral edge states in zigzag-Xene nanoribbons remain gapless and protected against the backward scattering that causes resistance, even with finite inter-edge overlapping in ultra-narrow ribbons (Meaning that a 2D quantum spin Hall material undergoes a phase transition to a 1D topological metal.) This is driven by the edge states intertwining with intrinsic band topology-driven energy-zero modes.</p><p>\"Quantum confined zigzag-Xene-nanoribbons are a special class of topological insulating materials where the energy gap of the bulk sample increases with a decrease in width, while the edge state conduction remains robust against dissipation even if the width is reduced to a quasi-one-dimension,\" says FLEET researcher and collaborator on the new study A/Prof Dmitrie Culcer (UNSW). \"This feature of confined zigzag-Xene-nanoribbons is in stark contrast to other 2D topological insulating materials in which confinement effects also induce an energy gap in the edge states.\"</p><p><strong>Low threshold voltage </strong></p><p>Due to width- and momentum-dependent tunability of gate-induced inter-edge coupling, the threshold-voltage required for switching between gapless and gapped edge states reduces as the width of the material decreases, without any fundamental lower limit.</p><p>\"An ultra-narrow zigzag-Xene-nanoribbon can \'toggle\' between a quasi-one-dimensional topological metal with conducting gapless edge states and an ordinary insulator with gapped edge states with a little tweaking of a voltage knob, says lead author Dr Muhammad Nadeem (UOW). \"The desired tweaking of a voltage knob decreases with decrease in width of zigzag-Xene-nanoribbons, and lower operating voltage means the device can use less energy. The reduction in voltage knob tweaking comes about due to a relativistic quantum effect called spin-orbit coupling and is highly contrasting from pristine zigzag-Xene-nanoribbons which are ordinary insulators and in which desired voltage knob tweaking increases with decrease in width.\"</p><p><strong>Topological switching without bulk bandgap closing</strong></p><p>When the width of zigzag-Xene nanoribbons is smaller than a critical limit, topological switching between edge states can be attained without bulk bandgap closing and reopening. This is primarily due to the quantum confinement effect on the bulk band spectrum, which increases the nontrivial bulk bandgap with decrease in width.</p><p>\"This behaviour is new and distinct from 2D topological insulators, where bandgap closing and re-opening is always required to change the topological state\" says Prof Michael Fuhrer (Monash). \"Wide zigzag-Xene-nanoribbons act more like the 2D case, where gate electric field switches edge state conductance while simultaneously closing and reopening bulk bandgap.\"</p><p>\"In the presence of spin-orbit coupling, topological switching mechanism in large-gap confined zigzag-Xene-nanoribbons overturns the general wisdom of utilizing narrow gap and wide channel materials for reducing threshold-voltage in a standard field effect transistor analysis,\" says Prof Xiaolin Wang (UOW).</p><p>\"In addition, topological quantum field effect transistor utilizing zigzag-Xene-nanoribbons as a channel material has several advantages of engineering intricacies involved in design and fabrication,\" says Prof Alex Hamilton (UNSW).</p><p>Unlike MOSFET technology, in which size dependence of threshold-voltage is tangled with isolation techniques, the reduction of threshold-voltage in a topological quantum field effect transistor is an intrinsic property of zigzag-Xene-nanoribbons associated with topological and quantum mechanical functionalities.</p><p>Along with vastly different conduction and switching mechanisms, the technological aspects required for fabricating a topological quantum field effect transistor with zigzag-Xene-nanoribbons also radically differ from those of MOSFETs: There is no fundamental requirement of specialized technological/isolation techniques for a low-voltage TQFET with an energy-efficient switching mechanism.</p><p>With preserved ON-state topological robustness and minimal threshold voltage, channel width can be reduced to a quasi-one-dimension. This allows optimized geometry for a topological quantum field effect transistor with enhanced signal-to-noise ratio via multiple edge state channels.</p>','2022-03-09 22:08:11.453795','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'ARC Centre of Excellence in Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies','A collaborative study confirms a potential new switching mechanism for a proposed generation of ultra-low energy topological electronics. Based on novel, quantum nanoribbons terminating on \'zigzag\' edges, such devices would switch from non-conducting to conducting state, whereby electrical current could flow along topological edge states without wasted dissipation of energy.\n',1,27,'<li>Muhammad Nadeem, Chao Zhang, Dimitrie Culcer, Alex R. Hamilton, Michael S. Fuhrer, Xiaolin Wang. <strong>Optimizing topological switching in confined 2D-Xene nanoribbons via finite-size effects</strong>. <em>Applied Physics Reviews</em>, 2022; 9 (1): 011411 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/5.0076625\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1063/5.0076625</a>\n</li>'),(653,'Oversized and understudied: Researchers begin to uncover the mysterious lives of jumbo bacteriophages','oversized-and-understudied:-researchers-begin-to-uncover-the-mysterious-lives-of-jumbo-bacteriophages','2022-03-09 22:08:23.351412',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Viruses are tiny but mighty intruders that can be found in the environment including in human bodies, and they can play a variety of roles in ecosystems. Viruses also come in a range of sizes. Some are even larger than bacteria, which scientists thought were rare cases until recently.</p><p>Among these large viruses are bacterial viruses called jumbo bacteriophages. Jumbo phages were discovered decades ago, but they have, rather paradoxically, mostly escaped further investigation because scientists were looking on too small of a scale.</p><p>Alaina Weinheimer, a Ph.D. candidate, and Frank Aylward, an assistant professor of biological sciences in Virginia Tech\'s College of Science and an affiliate faculty member in the Center for Emerging, Zoonotic, Arthropod-borne Pathogens within the Fralin Life Sciences Institute, are seeking to answer a few big questions about these jumbo viruses. In a recent study, Weinheimer constructed and analyzed the genomes of marine jumbo phages, which led to a number of findings about their evolution and ecology.</p><p>\"We are only beginning to appreciate the diversity and scope of jumbo phages in the environment\" said Weinheimer, and the first author on the paper. \"We don\'t quite understand the impacts of jumbo phages yet, and we\'re just beginning to see that they are quite widespread. This study shows that they are found all throughout the ocean, and they don\'t necessarily all infect the same type of bacteria.\"</p><p>Their findings were published in <em>The ISME Journal: Multidisciplinary Journal of Microbial Ecology</em>.</p><p>Bacteria are the driving force behind the ocean\'s nutrient cycles. Despite their position at the bottom of the food chain, bacteria perform vital functions such as photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation, which contribute greatly to the health of marine ecosystems.</p><p>When jumbo bacteriophages infect and kill bacteria, they first seize control of the bacteria\'s metabolism, transforming the bacteria\'s principal functions -- such as photosynthesis and transcription -- into the replication of more viruses. To release new viruses, the bacteria cell bursts, which also releases the cell\'s nutrients and organic material into the sea. These infections shape nutrient cycles in the ocean.</p><p>For that reason, researchers are determined to understand how phages change the composition of marine microbial communities and nutrient cycles that bacteria affect. But to study viruses such as these, researchers need to work beyond a basic microscopic level.</p><p>Viruses can be incredibly difficult to grow in a lab, so to analyze them, researchers often go out and collect DNA samples from the environment called metagenomes. Each metagenomic sample is composed of DNA from many organisms or entities, which means researchers have to isolate and piece together the genomes of viruses themselves.</p><p>From there, the process is like constructing an incomplete puzzle.</p><p>\"When we sequence DNA in the environment, we first have to break the DNA up into itty bitty pieces,\" said Weinheimer. \"After they are sequenced, we put the pieces back together into longer stretches of DNA that we think belong to the same genome.\"</p><p>Because of their particularly complex evolution and genomes, researchers must come up with intricate ways to detect jumbo phages and reconstruct their genomes as accurately and completely as possible.</p><p>After some trial and error, Weinheimer and Aylward developed a method that will help other researchers better identify and group jumbo bacteriophages in metagenomes.</p><p>With this approach, Weinheimer and Aylward were able to successfully recover 85 high-quality jumbo phage genomes present in the ocean. They then grouped these jumbo phages based on gene content with other known jumbo phages and were able to conclude that certain groups of jumbo phages are more prevalent in surface waters than deeper waters and vice versa.</p><p>\"Traditional methods typically only look at a fragment of jumbo phage genomes,\" said Weinheimer. \"But with our approach, we are getting closer to full genomes, and so we\'re able to better our understanding of the diversity and biology of these phages.\"</p><p>In their study, Weinheimer and Aylward also suggest that bacteriophages have different routes of evolving such big genomes. While some phages acquire photosynthetic genes to aid in infection efficiency, others will pick up genes that are more vital for combating their host\'s defenses.</p><p>This finding backs up the hypothesis that a defense system arms race is part of the reason behind the impressive size and variety of bacteriophage genomes.</p><p>But there is more to be done to understand how complexity emerges or evolves in the virus world and how they evolve with their hosts. Now that Weinheimer and Aylward know where these jumbo phages are more prevalent, they can collect samples to potentially even begin to grow them in the lab.</p><p>\"By targeting and isolating jumbo phages or growing them in the lab, we may better understand their biology,\" said Weinheimer. \"A lot of jumbo phages have genes with unknown functions, and we are excited to see what we will find.\"</p><p>Additionally, their methods can be applied to metagenome samples from other environments such as soils and lakes to begin to see what roles jumbo phages may have in these ecosystems.</p>','2022-03-09 22:08:23.351412','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Virginia Tech','Viruses are tiny but mighty intruders that can be found in the environment including in human bodies, and they can play a variety of roles in ecosystems. Viruses also come in a range of sizes. Some are even larger than bacteria, which scientists thought were rare cases until recently.\n',1,27,'<li>Alaina R. Weinheimer, Frank O. Aylward. <strong>Infection strategy and biogeography distinguish cosmopolitan groups of marine jumbo bacteriophages</strong>. <em>The ISME Journal</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41396-022-01214-x\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41396-022-01214-x</a>\n</li>'),(658,'When ribosomes collide: How bacteria clean up after molecular crashes','when-ribosomes-collide:-how-bacteria-clean-up-after-molecular-crashes','2022-03-09 22:33:42.490255',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">The knobby, 3D structure on the screen in front of Rachel Green showed an intracellular car wreck never before seen by scientists. It also confirmed a hypothesis a team in her lab had been working on for months.</p><p>But at first, Green wasn\'t so impressed. \"That\'s it?\" she remembers thinking wryly.</p><p>It was early 2021, and she was on sabbatical, working at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich with her friend and collaborator, Roland Beckmann. Green, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at Johns Hopkins University, had told him about a project in her lab exploring a long-standing biological mystery. They were trying to fill in a key gap in scientists\' knowledge about how bacterial cells respond to protein synthesis problems. Because cells need proteins for nearly everything they do, this response is critical for normal function.</p><p>Green\'s team had a good idea of what was going on, but they didn\'t have the snapshots to prove it. Beckmann, a structural biologist, was intrigued. Using a technique called cryo-electron microscopy, his team revealed what happens at the scene -- that is, if you knew what to look for.</p><p>\"When they first show you a structure, you can\'t really tell what anything is because everything\'s gray,\" Green says. \"Roland pointed to some little blob, and said, \'Look, there it is!\'\"</p><p>Her team suspected that the \"little blob\" acted as a molecular first responder that shows up at the accident. Beckmann\'s images confirmed the molecule\'s identity and presented new intel about how this rescue operation, a method of quality control for bacteria, works. Beckmann, Green, and a group of scientists in her lab led by Allen Buskirk first described the research in a preprint on bioRxiv.org and later in the journal <em>Nature </em>onMarch 9, 2022. The work could offer clues about how other, more complex organisms -- perhaps even humans -- keep protein production on track.</p><p>Molecular machines known as ribosomes quite literally follow instructions encoded in a linear strand of genetic material. As they travel along the strand, they build a protein. Sometimes, though, this machinery malfunctions.</p><p>Earlier research in yeast, whose cells resemble those of animals, had shown that ribosomes stall when they get into trouble. Like a car that stops too suddenly, a stalled ribosome can be rear-ended by the one behind it. Green\'s lab had previously identified a yeast molecule that responds to these collisions. Like a tiny Jaws of Life, the molecule cuts the stalled ribosome free. It\'s the first step in a rescue effort that ultimately lets the cell salvage and reuse these valuable, protein-making machines.</p><p>Bacterial cells\' ribosomes can get jammed up too, but scientists doubted that bacteria respond to collisions the same way yeast do. That\'s because researchers already knew that bacteria have their own distinct method for rescuing wrecked ribosomes, says Jamie Cate, a biochemist and structural biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the project.</p><p>No one knew exactly what kicked off the bacterial rescue effort, but they expected that it would be something entirely different from yeast, Cate says. Instead, the new research suggests that both bacteria and yeast initiate this process the same way -- by summoning blade-like first responders.</p><p>\"The cool thing is that both molecules recognize ribosomes that have collided into each other,\" Cate says.</p><p>In Green\'s lab in Baltimore, Buskirk and first author Kazuki Saito identified the first responder in bacteria as a molecule called SmrB and explored how it carried out its job. Beckmann\'s structure \"was the final piece of the puzzle,\" Buskirk says.</p><p>Beckmann\'s group captured the first-ever images of a collision between two bacterial ribosomes, then color-coded them so their components weren\'t lost in a sea of gray. After adding SmrB to the sample containing the ribosomes, the team saw the molecule appear at the center of the crash.</p><p>Biochemical experiments revealed that SmrB, like its yeast counterpart, cuts the wrecked ribosomes apart. And not only do the two molecules share a job description, bacterial SmrB and its yeast counterpart are also close relatives, the team found. Researchers haven\'t yet been able to visualize how the yeast version interacts with ribosomes during a collision. So, the similar but simpler SmrB may give scientists a foothold for understanding how the process works in other organisms.</p><p>\"Everything else about these rescue pathways is very different,\" Green says. \"We didn\'t anticipate we would find an aspect that appears to be universal.\"</p>','2022-03-09 22:33:42.490255','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Howard Hughes Medical Institute','Tiny cellular machines called ribosomes build proteins. When this building process goes awry in bacteria, ribosomes collide, triggering the arrival of a first responder molecule that begins a rescue operation.\n',1,27,'<li>Kazuki Saito, Hanna Kratzat, Annabelle Campbell, Robert Buschauer, A. Maxwell Burroughs, Otto Berninghausen, L. Aravind, Rachel Green, Roland Beckmann, Allen R. Buskirk. <strong>Ribosome collisions induce mRNA cleavage and ribosome rescue in bacteria</strong>. <em>Nature</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04416-7\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41586-022-04416-7</a>\n</li>'),(664,'The untapped nitrogen reservoir','the-untapped-nitrogen-reservoir','2022-03-09 22:34:23.358505',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Guanidine is one of the most nitrogen-rich compounds. It could be a valuable source of organic nitrogen, but only very few organisms can access it. However, certain bacteria manage to obtain nitrogen from guanidine. A Konstanz-based research team led by chemist Professor Jörg Hartig and biologist Professor Olga Mayans has now discovered how this works. A newly discovered enzyme plays a key role -- and, surprisingly, so does nickel. The research results were published on 9 March 2022 in the scientific journal <em>Nature.</em></p><p><strong>No growth without nitrogen</strong></p><p>Nitrogen is an important component of all living organisms, and no growth is possible without nitrogen uptake. Although almost 80 percent of the atmosphere are nitrogen, the vast majority of life forms cannot access this reserve. They are thus dependent on chemically bound nitrogen, which is therefore also a pivotal component of fertilisers. However, where there is not enough nitrogen available, plants as well as many microorganisms quickly reach their limits.</p><p>There are nitrogen reserves in nature that are barely utilized: Guanidine is a widespread nitrogen-rich compound that excels by particularly high chemical stability. Due to this stability, it is hardly possible for organisms to obtain the vital nitrogen from guanidine: They cannot \"crack the nut,\" so to speak. Hence, many organisms are within reach of an abundant source of nitrogen -- and yet cannot tap it.</p><p>A Konstanz-based research network led by chemist Professor Jörg Hartig and biologist Professor Olga Mayans has now identified a biochemical mechanism that enables certain microorganisms to extract nitrogen from guanidine. In nitrate-poor environments, this is a decisive advantage over competing organisms.</p><p><strong>How the nitrogen mining works</strong></p><p>Cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, use an enzyme from the arginase family to initiate degradation of guanidine in the form of hydrolysis. Hydrolysis initially means merely the splitting of a chemical compound by water. In the case of guanidine, however, contact with water alone is not enough: \"When guanidine is immersed in water, for hundreds of millennia virtually nothing will happen -- because there is not enough energy to attack this compound,\" says Dr Dietmar Funck, a biologist from Konstanz.</p><p>The water therefore first needs to be \"primed\" in order to become chemically more active and be able to break down the guanidine. This is done by binding to nickel ions. The fact that, of all things, nickel is used as the catalyst came as a surprise to the research team. \"Nickel is special. Nickel is complicated. Very quickly you have either too little or too much of it,\" describes Jörg Hartig: \"We humans no longer have nickel-dependent enzymes in our bodies, because it is too complicated for the organism to provide the right amount.\"</p><p>Nevertheless, the bacteria specifically resort to the tricky nickel to initiate the hydrolysis. \"Dealing with nickel is no trivial matter for the bacteria either,\" explains biochemist Dr Malte Sinn, \"they need two auxiliary enzymes to incorporate nickel into the enzyme.\" The water \"primed\" by nickel ions in the active centre of the enzyme attacks the guanidine and converts it into ammonia and urea. The urea can in turn be converted into ammonia by further enzymes. Both compounds can thus subsequently be exploited as nitrogen sources, making the nitrogen available for building new biomolecules.</p><p><strong>Structural images</strong></p><p>Olga Mayans\'s research team carried out structural analyses to investigate the process at the molecular level. The high specificity of the process was another surprise. The structural images show how precisely the enzyme encloses its substrate guanidine. \"It has a very beautiful structure, strikingly symmetrical. The active site is very small and perfect for holding the small guanidine molecule in the correct position for hydrolysis,\" explains biologist Dr Jennifer Fleming from Olga Mayans\'s research team.</p><p>For the research team, the current results are a first step towards understanding naturally occurring guanidine in more detail: how it is formed, what functions it has in nature, and which other organisms can utilize it. Despite its wide distribution, guanidine is still a blank spot on the biochemical map.</p>','2022-03-09 22:34:23.358505','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Konstanz','A research team elucidates how bacteria use the compound guanidine as a source of nitrogen.\n',1,27,'<li>D. Funck, M. Sinn, J. R. Fleming, M. Stanoppi, J. Dietrich, R. López-Igual, O. Mayans, J. S. Hartig. <strong>Discovery of a Ni2 -dependent guanidine hydrolase in bacteria</strong>. <em>Nature</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04490-x\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41586-022-04490-x</a>\n</li>'),(666,'Introducing organs-on-chips to the lymph system','introducing-organs-on-chips-to-the-lymph-system','2022-03-09 22:52:23.229991',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Currently, there is little research focused on understanding mechanisms and drug discovery of lymphatic vascular diseases. However, conditions such as lymphedema, a buildup of fluid in the body when the lymph system is damaged, impact more than 200,000 people every year in the United States alone.</p><p>Dr. Abhishek Jain, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&amp;M University, has taken his expertise in organ-on-chip models and applied them to a field they\'ve never been used in before, creating the first lymphangion-chip.</p><p>To engineer this new device, Jain\'s team first developed a new technique to create microfluidic cylindrical blood or lymphatic vessels consisting of endothelial cells, which line blood vessels. It could then use this technique to create a co-cultured multicellular lymphangion, the functional unit of a lymph vessel, and successfully recreate a typical section of a lymphatic transport vessel in vitro, or outside the body.</p><p>\"We can now better understand how mechanical forces regulate lymphatic physiology and pathophysiology,\" Jain said. \"We can also understand what are the mechanisms that result in lymphedema, and then we can find new targets for drug discovery with this platform.\"</p><p>The project is in collaboration with Dr. David Zawieja from the Texas A&amp;M College of Medicine. Their research was published in the Jan. 7 issue of the journal <em>Lab on a Chip</em><em>.</em></p><p>\"Collaborations with Dr. Zawieja and others in the department played a crucial role,\" Jain said. \"They introduced me to this topic and provide their longstanding expertise that has made it possible for us to create this new organ-on-chip platform and now advance it in these exciting directions using contemporary experimental models.\"</p><p>Jain said the impact of this work is far-reaching because there is a new hope for patients with lymphatic diseases. They can now learn about the biology of these diseases and reach a point where they can be treated.</p><p>\"The most exciting part of this research is that it is allowing us to now push the organ-on-chip in directions where finding cures for rare and orphan (understudied) diseases is possible with less effort and money,\" Jain said. \"We can help the pharma industry to invest in this platform and find a cure for lymphedema that impacts millions of people.\"</p>','2022-03-09 22:52:23.229991','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Texas A&M University','Currently, there is little research focused on understanding mechanisms and drug discovery of lymphatic vascular diseases. However, conditions such as lymphedema, a buildup of fluid in the body when the lymph system is damaged, impact more than 200,000 people every year in the United States alone.\n',1,27,'<li>Amirali Selahi, Teshan Fernando, Sanjukta Chakraborty, Mariappan Muthuchamy, David C. Zawieja, Abhishek Jain. <strong>Lymphangion-chip: a microphysiological system which supports co-culture and bidirectional signaling of lymphatic endothelial and muscle cells</strong>. <em>Lab on a Chip</em>, 2022; 22 (1): 121 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/D1LC00720C\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1039/D1LC00720C</a>\n</li>'),(668,'New insight into machine-learning error estimation','new-insight-into-machine-learning-error-estimation','2022-03-09 23:23:31.480078',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Omar Maddouri, a doctoral student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&amp;M University, is working with Dr. Byung-Jun Yoon, professor, and Dr. Edward Dougherty, Robert M. Kennedy \'26 Chair Professor, to evaluate machine-learning models using transfer learning principles. Dr. Francis \"Frank\" Alexander with Brookhaven National Labs and Dr. Xiaoning Qian from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&amp;M University are also involved with the project.</p><p>In data-driven machine learning, models are built to make predictions and estimations for what\'s to come in any given data set. One important field within machine learning is classification, which allows a data set to be assessed by an algorithm and then classified or broken down into classes or categories. When the data sets provided are very small, it can be very challenging to not only build a classification model based on this data but also to evaluate the performance of this model, ensuring its accuracy. This is where transfer learning comes into play.</p><p>\"In transfer learning, we try to transfer knowledge or bring data from another domain to see whether we can enhance the task that we are doing in the domain of interest, or target domain,\" Maddouri explained.</p><p>The target domain is where the models are built, and their performance is evaluated. The source domain is a separate domain that is still relevant to the target domain from which knowledge is transferred to make the analysis within the target domain easier.</p><p>Maddouri\'s project utilizes a joint prior density to model the relatedness between the source and target domains and offers a Bayesian approach to apply the transfer learning principles to provide an overall error estimator of the models. An error estimator will deliver an estimate of how accurate these machine-learning models are at classifying the data sets at hand.</p><p>What this means is that before any data is observed, the team creates a model using their initial inferences about the model parameters in the target and source domains and then updates this model with enhanced accuracy as more evidence or information about the data sets becomes available.</p><p>This technique of transfer learning has been used to build models in previous works; however, no one has ever before used this transfer learning technique to propose novel error estimators to evaluate the performance of these models. For an efficient utilization, the devised estimator has been implemented using advanced statistical methods that enabled a fast screening of source data sets which enhances the computational complexity of the transfer learning process by 10 to 20 times.</p><p>This technique can help serve as a benchmark for future research within academia to build upon. In addition, it can help with identifying or classifying different medical issues that would otherwise be very difficult. For example, Maddouri utilized this technique to classify patients with schizophrenia using transcriptomic data from brain tissue samples originally acquired by invasive brain biopsies. Because of the nature and the location of the brain region that can be analyzed for this disorder, the data collected is very limited. However, using a stringent feature selection procedure that comprises differential gene expression analysis and statistical testing for assumptions validity, the research team identified transcriptomic profiles of three genes from an additional brain region found to be highly relevant to the desired brain tissue as reported by independent research studies from other literature.</p><p>This knowledge allowed them to utilize the transfer learning technique to leverage samples collected from the second brain region (source domain) to help with the analysis and significantly boost the accuracy of diagnosis within the original brain region (target domain). The data gathered from the source domain can be exploratory in the absence of information from the target domain, allowing the research team to enhance the quality of their conclusion.</p><p>This research has been funded by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.</p>','2022-03-09 23:23:31.480078','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Texas A&M University','Scientists are evaluating machine-learning models using transfer learning principles.\n',1,27,'<li>Omar Maddouri, Xiaoning Qian, Francis J. Alexander, Edward R. Dougherty, Byung-Jun Yoon. <strong>Robust importance sampling for error estimation in the context of optimal Bayesian transfer learning</strong>. <em>Patterns</em>, 2022; 100428 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2021.100428\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1016/j.patter.2021.100428</a>\n</li>'),(669,'Exploring the bounds of room-temperature superconductivity','exploring-the-bounds-of-room-temperature-superconductivity','2022-03-09 23:23:35.179961',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">In the simplest terms, superconductivity between two or more objects means zero wasted electricity. It means electricity is being transferred between these objects with no loss of energy.</p><p>Many naturally occurring elements and minerals like lead and mercury have superconducting properties. And there are modern applications that currently use materials with superconducting properties, including MRI machines, maglev trains, electric motors and generators. Usually, superconductivity in materials happens at low-temperature environments or at high temperatures at very high pressures. The holy grail of superconductivity today is to find or create materials that can transfer energy between each other in a non-pressurized room-temperature environment.</p><p>If the efficiency of superconductors at room temperature could be applied at scale to create highly efficient electric power transmission systems for industry, commerce, and transportation, it would be revolutionary. The deployment of the technology of room temperature superconductors at atmospheric pressure would accelerate the electrification of our world for its sustainable development. The technology allows us to do more work and use less natural resources with lower waste to preserve the environment.</p><p>There are a few superconducting material systems for electric transmission in various stages of development. In the meantime, researchers at the University of Houston are conducting experiments to look for superconductivity in a room-temperature and atmospheric pressure environment.</p><p>Paul Chu, founding director and chief scientist at the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH and Liangzi Deng, research assistant professor, chose FeSe (Iron (II) Selenide) for their experiments because it has a simple structure and also great Tc (superconducting critical temperature) enhancement under pressure.</p><p>Chu and Deng have developed a pressure-quench process (PQP), in which they first apply pressure to their samples at room-temperature to enhance superconductivity, cool them to a chosen lower temperature, and then completely release the applied pressure, while still retaining the enhanced superconducting properties.</p><p>The concept of the PQP is not new, but Chu and Deng\'s PQP is the first time it\'s been used to retain the high-pressure-enhanced superconductivity in a high-temperature superconductor (HTS) at atmospheric pressure. The findings are published in the <em>Journal of Superconductivity and Novel Magnetism</em>.</p><p>\"We waste about 10% of our electricity during transmission, that\'s a huge number. If we had superconductors to transmit electricity with zero energy wasted, we would basically change the world, transportation and electricity transmission would be revolutionized, \"Chu said. \"If this process can be used, we can create materials that could transmit electricity from the place where you produce it all the way to places thousands of miles away without the loss of energy.\"</p><p>Their process was inspired by the late Pol Duwez, a prominent material scientist, engineer and metallurgist at the California Institute of Technology who pointed out that most of the alloys used in industrial applications are metastable or chemically unstable at atmospheric pressure and room temperature, and these metastable phases possess desired and/or enhanced properties that their stable counterparts lack, Chu and Deng noted in their study.</p><p>Examples of these materials include diamonds, high-temperature 3D-printing materials, black phosphorus and even beryllium copper, which is notably used to make tools for use in high explosive environments like oil rigs and grain elevators.</p><p>\"The ultimate goal of this experiment was to raise the temperature to above room temperature while keeping the material\'s superconducting properties,\" Chu said. \"If that can be achieved, cryogenics will no longer be needed to operate machines that used superconducting material like an MRI machine and that\'s why we\'re excited about this.\"</p>','2022-03-09 23:23:35.179961','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Houston','There are a few superconducting material systems for electric transmission in various stages of development. In the meantime, researchers are conducting experiments to look for superconductivity in a room-temperature and atmospheric pressure environment.\n',1,27,'<li>C. W. Chu, L. Z. Deng, Z. Wu. <strong>The Retention and Study of High-Pressure-Induced Phases in High- and Room-Temperature Superconductors</strong>. <em>Journal of Superconductivity and Novel Magnetism</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10948-021-06117-0\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1007/s10948-021-06117-0</a>\n</li>'),(670,'Non-social jays surprise scientists by learning as skillfully as birds living in groups','non-social-jays-surprise-scientists-by-learning-as-skillfully-as-birds-living-in-groups','2022-03-10 00:30:38.506498',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">The California scrub-jay, a generally non-social bird, can learn just as well as another species of jay that lives in groups, a finding that surprised animal intelligence researchers who devised a novel food puzzle to study cognition in the wild.</p><p>The research illustrates the complexity of the link between social behavior and the evolution of intelligence, say the scientists, who had expected the group-oriented Mexican jay to outperform the scrub-jay.</p><p>The international collaboration that included Oregon State University\'s Jonathon Valente was led by the University of California Santa Barbara\'s Kelsey McCune when she was at the University of Washington. Findings were published in Nature <em>Scientific Reports</em>.</p><p>\"Further studies with wild animals are clearly necessary to develop a better understanding of when, where and why intelligence evolved,\" said Valente, a postdoctoral scholar in the OSU College of Forestry.</p><p>Scientists have long wondered why some wildlife species evolved with higher levels of intelligence than others, and a leading theory posits that animals living in groups tend to be smarter because they need cognitive abilities more complex than those required of less-social species, according to McCune.</p><p>\"The group-oriented animals rely on intelligence to cooperate with and learn from -- and also deceive -- their group mates,\" she said. \"However, due to the difficulty of testing cognition outside the laboratory, no studies to date have tested this theory in wild animals.\"</p><p>McCune, Valente and colleagues at Seoul National University and Daegu-Gyeongbuk Institute of Science, also in South Korea, put bird food behind four different types of doors on two identical puzzle apparatuses, each fashioned from a log. Three of the four doors had a simple lock; the other was unlocked but contained a less-desirable type of food -- sunflower seeds rather than peanuts.</p><p>The researchers trained \"demonstrator\" birds of each species how to open a locked door and then set about looking at the learning abilities of wild, banded jays: 49 Mexican jays, which were studied near Portal, Arizona, and 26 California scrub-jays, observed in Oregon\'s Willamette Valley.</p><p>\"Having an unlocked door helped prevent \'naïve\' jays from abandoning the foraging area due to a failure to get food, thus increasing their probability of observing group mates interacting with the puzzle,\" Valente said.</p><p>Mexican jays and California scrub-jays are closely related, McCune notes -- both feed on tree nuts like acorns, are opportunistic, generalist foragers that like dry, open habitats of pine and scrub oak, and cache food at a similar rate.</p><p>But they have very different social systems: Mexican jays assemble in groups of five to 30, while the relatively non-social scrub-jays mainly live with a single mate.</p><p>\"We compared intelligence between these species by testing their abilities to either innovate a solution to the puzzle or to learn to solve the puzzle by observing other birds solving it,\" McCune said. \"Contrary to what we thought we\'d find out, the two species showed similar abilities to learn.\"</p><p>The scrub-jays and Mexican jays differed in the ways they preferred to learn, the researchers noted. Mexican jays tended to learn through watching other jays interact with the puzzle, whereas scrub-jays relied more on individual problem-solving to get at the food.</p><p>\"Also, surprisingly, members of both species tended to avoid interacting with parts of the puzzle where they observed other birds obtain food,\" Valente said. \"That suggests they were socially learning where to avoid competition rather than how to open the puzzle. Regardless, the findings suggest the relationship between social behavior and the evolution of intelligence is a highly complex one.\"</p><p>The National Science Foundation partially supported this study via a graduate research fellowship to McCune, a doctoral student at the University of Washington at the time of the research and now a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California Santa Barbara.</p>','2022-03-10 00:30:38.506498','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Oregon State University','The California scrub-jay, a generally non-social bird, can learn just as well as another species of jay that lives in groups, a finding that surprised animal intelligence researchers who devised a novel food puzzle to study cognition in the wild.\n',1,27,'<li>Kelsey B. McCune, Jonathon J. Valente, Piotr G. Jablonski, Sang-im Lee, Renee R. Ha. <strong>Social behavior mediates the use of social and personal information in wild jays</strong>. <em>Scientific Reports</em>, 2022; 12 (1) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-06496-x\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41598-022-06496-x</a>\n</li>'),(671,'How a virus packages its genetic material','how-a-virus-packages-its-genetic-material','2022-03-10 00:30:41.822137',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Each simple RNA virus has a genome, its \"native RNA.\" This genome dictates how the virus replicates in cells to eventually cause disease. The genome also has the code for making a capsid, the protein shell of a virus that encapsulates the genome and protects it like a nanocontainer.</p><p>A team led by Roya Zandi, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Riverside, has developed a theory and performed a series of simulations that may help explain how a virus finds its native genome and how capsids form around it and not around other RNAs in the cell.</p><p>\"A better understanding of how capsids form is of vital importance to material scientists and a crucial step in the design of engineered nano-shells that could serve as vehicles for delivering drugs to specific targets in the body,\" Zandi said.</p><p>The researchers\' work, published in <em>ACS Nano</em>, shows that the interplay of the mechanical properties of proteins, the size of the genome, and the strength of the interaction between the genome and capsid proteins can significantly modify the symmetry, structure, and stability of the capsid.</p><p>When a virus enters a cell, the capsid breaks open to release the genome, which then uses the cell\'s reproductive machinery to replicate. The newly formed genomes begin to acquire their capsids, a process mainly driven by the attractive electrostatic interaction between the positive charges on capsid proteins and the negative charges on the genomes. But how the virus selects and packages its native RNA inside the crowded environment of a host cell cytoplasm in the presence of many nonviral RNA and other polymers has remained a mystery.</p><p>The simulations run by Zandi\'s team show that capsid proteins could, in theory, pick any nonviral genome to encapsulate. But the viral genome, she said, is best suited for capsid proteins to form a shell around due to an interplay of energies at the molecular level.</p><p>\"The stress distribution of the capsid proteins is lower when the capsids encapsulate their own genome, the one for which they were coded,\" Zandi said. \"The energy of the whole system is lower. While smaller nonviral RNAs are available in the cell in plenty, the capsid proteins are inclined toward forming a shell around a viral RNA because the resulting soccer ball-like shell has a lower stress distribution.\"</p><p>Zandi said the work lays out a systematic comparison of theory and experiments, which will allow a better understanding of the role of RNA in the capsid assembly pathway, stability, and structure.</p><p>\"A deeper understanding of the role of the genome in virus assembly mechanisms could lead to design principles for alternative antivirals,\" she said.</p><p>The new work is an early step in understanding viral assembly. The process is not well understood because viruses measure in nanometers and the assembly occurs in milliseconds.</p><p>\"Theoretical work and simulations are necessary to understand how a virus grows,\" Zandi said.</p><p>Zandi was joined in the research by graduate student Sanaz Panahandeh at UCR; Siyu Li at Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory in China; and Bogdan Dragnea at Indiana University, Bloomington. Li is a former graduate student at UCR.</p><p>The research was funded by the National Science Foundation. </p>','2022-03-10 00:30:41.822137','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of California - Riverside','Physics and astronomy professors have developed a theory and performed a series of simulations that may help explain how a virus finds its native genome and how capsids form around it and not around other RNAs in the cell.\n',1,27,'<li>Sanaz Panahandeh, Siyu Li, Bogdan Dragnea, Roya Zandi. <strong>Virus Assembly Pathways Inside a Host Cell</strong>. <em>ACS Nano</em>, 2022; 16 (1): 317 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.1c06335\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1021/acsnano.1c06335</a>\n</li>'),(672,'Video game-based therapy helps stroke patients','video-game-based-therapy-helps-stroke-patients','2022-03-10 00:30:44.394942',' <p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">After a stroke, patients may lose feeling in an arm or experience weakness and reduced movement that limits their ability to complete basic daily activities. Traditional rehabilitation therapy is very intensive, time-consuming and can be both expensive and inconvenient, especially for rural patients travelling long distances to in-person therapy appointments.</p><p>That\'s why a team of researchers, including one at the University of Missouri, utilized a motion-sensor video game, Recovery Rapids, to allow patients recovering from a stroke to improve their motor skills and affected arm movements at home while checking in periodically with a therapist via telehealth.</p><p>The researchers found the game-based therapy led to improved outcomes similar to a highly regarded form of in-person therapy, known as constraint-induced therapy, while only requiring one-fifth of the therapist hours. This approach saves time and money while increasing convenience and safety as telehealth has boomed in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic.</p><p>\"As an occupational therapist, I have seen patients from rural areas drive more than an hour to come to an in-person clinic three to four days a week, where the rehab is very intensive, taking three to four hours per session, and the therapist must be there the whole time,\" said Rachel Proffitt, assistant professor in the MU School of Health Professions. \"With this new at-home gaming approach, we are cutting costs for the patient and reducing time for the therapist while still improving convenience and overall health outcomes, so it\'s a win-win. By saving time for the therapists, we can also now serve more patients and make a broader impact on our communities.\"</p><p>Traditional rehab home exercises tend to be very repetitive and monotonous, and patients rarely adhere to them. The Recovery Rapids game helps patients look forward to rehabilitation by completing various challenges in a fun, interactive environment, and the researchers found that the patients adhered well to their prescribed exercises.</p><p>\"The patient is virtually placed in a kayak, and as they go down the river, they perform arm motions simulating paddling, rowing, scooping up trash, swaying from side to side to steer, and reaching overhead to clear out spider webs and bats, so it\'s making the exercises fun,\" said Rachel Proffitt, assistant professor in the MU School of Health Professions. \"As they progress, the challenges get harder, and we conduct check-ins with the participants via telehealth to adjust goals, provide feedback and discuss the daily activities they want to resume as they improve.\"</p><p>Nearly 800,000 Americans have a stroke each year according to the CDC, and two-thirds of stroke survivors report they cannot use their affected limbs to do normal daily activities, including making a cup of coffee, cooking a meal or playing with one\'s grandchildren.</p><p>\"I am passionate about helping patients get back to all the activities they love to do in their daily life,\" Proffitt said. \"Anything we can do as therapists to help in a creative way while saving time and money is the ultimate goal.\"</p>','2022-03-10 00:30:44.394942','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Missouri-Columbia','After a stroke, patients may lose feeling in an arm or experience weakness and reduced movement that limits their ability to complete basic daily activities. Traditional rehabilitation therapy is very intensive, time-consuming and can be both expensive and inconvenient, especially for rural patients travelling long distances to in-person therapy appointments. That\'s why a team of researchers utilized a motion-sensor video game, Recovery Rapids, to allow patients recovering from a stroke to improve their motor skills and affected arm movements at home while checking in periodically with a therapist via telehealth.\n',1,27,'<li>Lynne V. Gauthier, Deborah S. Nichols-Larsen, Gitendra Uswatte, Nancy Strahl, Marie Simeo, Rachel Proffitt, Kristina Kelly, Roger Crawfis, Edward Taub, David Morris, Linda Pax Lowes, Victor Mark, Alexandra Borstad. <strong>Video game rehabilitation for outpatient stroke (VIGoROUS): A multi-site randomized controlled trial of in-home, self-managed, upper-extremity therapy</strong>. <em>eClinicalMedicine</em>, 2022; 43: 101239 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2021.101239\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1016/j.eclinm.2021.101239</a>\n</li>'),(673,'Florida\'s 76,000 stormwater ponds emit more carbon than they store','floridas-76000-stormwater-ponds-emit-more-carbon-than-they-store','2022-03-12 13:13:34.247993','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">When you look at ponds, you might see birds and fish, but you probably don\'t think about carbon. In fact, Florida\'s 76,000 ponds store plenty of carbon, and a lot of it escapes into the atmosphere.</p><p>In fact, ponds lose more carbon via gas than they store in the muck, a new University of Florida study found.</p><p>\"That finding means some ponds are doing us an ecosystem \'disservice,\'\" said Mary Lusk, a UF/IFAS assistant professor of soil and water sciences. \"Globally, we expect that as urbanization continues, there will be more and more of these small human-made ponds in urban landscapes.\"</p><p>This research will inform scientists\' attempts to estimate how much carbon is entering the atmosphere from these ponds on a regional basis, said Lusk, a faculty member at the UF/IFAS Gulf Coast Research and Education Center.</p><p>\"Then, once people start to understand that better, we hope they will take stormwater ponds into account for policies related to carbon control,\" she said. \"Stormwater ponds are everywhere in Florida. But they are understudied in terms of how they are impacting local ecosystems. Because they are human-made parts of the landscape, they sort of get overlooked, and people might assume they\'re not very important ecologically.\"</p><p>The sheer number of ponds compelled Lusk to study if they could have larger environmental effects than people think. She originally wanted to focus on nitrogen and phosphorus in ponds, but one of her graduate students, Audrey Goeckner, wanted to study carbon.</p><p>\"When I learned that I had the chance to work in stormwater ponds, similar to what I had grown up in around in my neighborhood, I immediately asked myself, well what about these little urban ponds? How do they compare to other aquatic ecosystems?\" asked Goeckner, now a Ph.D. student in soil and water sciences on the main UF/IFAS campus in Gainesville. \"Turns out that despite their small size,</p><p>they can rapidly store and process carbon, which adds up when you consider how many of them exist in developed landscapes and how many continue to be built.\"</p><p>For the study, done as part of her master\'s thesis at GCREC, Goeckner designed a way to measure the amount of carbon leaving ponds. Although Goeckner studied ponds in Manatee County, her findings hold implications for pond carbon emissions globally.</p><p>Goeckner took two canoes (attached to each other) into the ponds. She and a lab technician each sat in one canoe to balance the weight. Goeckner then collected muck from the bottom of the ponds and measured the depth of muck above a sandy layer of sediment, indicating when the pond was constructed and the amount of organic carbon stored in it.</p><p>That\'s how Goeckner found the amount of carbon buried in the ponds.</p><p>Secondly, she modified a chamber that is normally used to measure greenhouse gases -- carbon dioxide and methane -- from soil. Instead, Goeckner used the chamber to measure these gases from the surface of the ponds.</p><p>She found the quantity of these gases that escapes from the ponds each year, and then compared carbon stored in the pond muck vs. carbon lost via gaseous loss. As a result, scientists now know that ponds give off more carbon than they store and that the amount lost changes over the lifetime of a pond.</p><p>As Florida continues to grow, it\'s going to become more urbanized. With new development often comes new stormwater ponds, which are not as good at storing carbon as older ones, Lusk said.</p><p>As ponds age, their sediment and biogeochemical properties may promote the amount of carbon stored, rather than emitted as a gas, Goeckner said. That translates to better storage efficiency of organic carbon that enters the water.</p><p>\"Our results suggest that when they\'re new, they emit large proportions of carbon from the landscape and potentially increase storage over time,\" Lusk said. \"This means the older ponds are doing less of an ecosystem disservice to us than the younger ponds. But if you think about the rate of new housing development in Florida, and how fast new stormwater ponds are being built in all that new development, it means we will always have a fresh new batch of young ponds that are just pumping carbon out to the atmosphere.\"</p>','2022-03-10 00:30:47.751268','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Florida','As Florida and other states become more urbanized, an increasing number of stormwater ponds are built. Florida already has 76,000 such ponds. The newer ones emit more carbon than they store, a new study finds. Researchers hope this finding will inform policy makers and others about when, where and how to install stormwater ponds.',1,163,'<li>Audrey H. Goeckner, Mary G. Lusk, Alexander J. Reisinger, Jacob D. Hosen, Joseph M. Smoak. <strong>Florida’s urban stormwater ponds are net sources of carbon to the atmosphere despite increased carbon burial over time</strong>. <em>Communications Earth &amp; Environment</em>, 2022; 3 (1) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s43247-022-00384-y\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s43247-022-00384-y</a>\r\n</li>'),(711,'People with serious mental illness may have increased heart disease risk at younger ages','people-with-serious-mental-illness-may-have-increased-heart-disease-risk-at-younger-ages','2022-03-10 19:32:49.596751','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">An analysis of nearly 600,000 adults in the U.S. found that those diagnosed with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder may have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease at younger ages compared to adults not diagnosed with one of those serious mental illnesses, according to new research published today in the <em>Journal of the American Heart Association</em>, an open access, peer-reviewed <em>Journal of the American Heart Association</em>.</p><p>\"Previous research has indicated that people diagnosed with a serious mental illness die 10-20 years earlier than the general population, and their leading cause of death is heart disease,\" said study lead author Rebecca C. Rossom, M.D., M.S., a senior research investigator in behavioral health at the Center for Chronic Care Innovation at HealthPartners Institute in Minneapolis, Minnesota. \"Our study focused on the contribution of cardiovascular risk factors, such as blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, body mass index and smoking status, to compare overall heart disease risk for people with and without serious mental illness.\"</p><p>The researchers believe this is the first study to examine estimated 30-year (lifetime) cardiovascular risk in a large sample of adult outpatients diagnosed with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder -- three serious mental illnesses specific to this study. Many previous studies of cardiovascular risk for people with serious mental illness have included only people who were hospitalized, and they tend to have more severe mental illness and frailer health than outpatients, according to Rossom. In contrast, this study, included a large sample of non-hospitalized U.S. adults.</p><p>According to the National Institute of Mental Health, bipolar disorder (formerly called manic-depressive illness or manic depression) is a mental illness that causes unusual shifts in mood, energy, activity levels, concentration and the ability to carry out day-to-day tasks. Schizophrenia can cause hallucinations, delusions or disorganized speech. People with schizophrenia may seem like they have lost touch with reality, which can cause significant distress for the individual, their family and friends. The symptoms of schizophrenia can be persistent and disabling. Schizoaffective disorder is defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as an uninterrupted duration of illness during which there is a major mood episode (manic or depressive) in addition to meeting criteria for schizophrenia.</p><p>This analysis evaluated health data for nearly 600,000 people, ages 18-75 years, who visited a primary care clinic in Minnesota and Wisconsin between January 2016 and September 2018. Nearly 2%, or approximately 11,000 adults, had a diagnosis of serious mental illness. Of these, 70% were diagnosed with bipolar disorder, 18% with schizoaffective disorder and 12% with schizophrenia. On average, people with serious mental illness were more likely to be younger; female; self-identify as Black race, Native American, Alaskan race or of multiple races; and be insured by Medicaid or Medicare, compared to their counterparts not diagnosed with one of those three serious mental illnesses.</p><p>Prediction models providing a standardized metric were used to assess cardiovascular risk factors and predict the likelihood of a heart attack, stroke or cardiovascular death. To assess 10-year risk, the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association\'s atherosclerotic cardiovascular risk scoring tool was used for adults ages 40-75 years old. The Framingham Risk Score was used to estimate 30-year cardiovascular risk among adults ages 18-59 years old.</p><p>Researchers found:</p><p>\"Even at younger ages, people with serious mental illness had a higher risk of heart disease than their peers, which highlights the importance of addressing cardiovascular risk factors for these individuals as early as possible,\" Rossom said. \"Interventions to address heart disease risk for these individuals are maximally beneficial when initiated at younger ages.</p><p>\"We encourage health care systems and clinicians to use the 30-year cardiovascular risk estimates for young adults with serious mental illness, as these may be used starting at age 18,\" she said. \"Right now, estimates of 10-year heart disease risk are used most frequently, and they cannot be applied until people are at least 40 years old, which is too late to start addressing heart disease risk in people with serious mental illness.\"</p><p>Co-authors include Stephanie A. Hooker, Ph.D., M.P.H.; Patrick J. O\'Connor, M.D., M.A., M.P.H.; A. Lauren Crain, Ph.D.; and JoAnn M. Sperl-Hillen, M.D. This work was funded by a Cooperative Agreement with the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a division of the National Institutes of Health.</p>','2022-03-10 10:42:10.194440','uploads/news/mental_health_thumb_1646905525669_1646905536525.webp',1,'American Heart Association','An analysis of nearly 600,000 adults in the U.S. found people with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder had up to double the estimated cardiovascular risk levels than those without such illnesses, even at younger ages. The study focused on adults diagnosed with one of those three serious mental illnesses, who were not hospitalized or living in a mental health treatment center and estimated their 10-year and 30-year cardiovascular risk. Earlier identification and management of major cardiovascular risk factors -- including obesity, smoking, diabetes and high blood pressure -- in young adults with a serious mental illness may reduce risk of heart disease and improve outcomes, researchers said.',1,39,'<li>Rebecca C. Rossom, Stephanie A. Hooker, Patrick J. O’Connor, A. Lauren Crain, JoAnn M. Sperl‐Hillen. <strong>Cardiovascular Risk for Patients With and Without Schizophrenia, Schizoaffective Disorder, or Bipolar Disorder</strong>. <em>Journal of the American Heart Association</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1161/JAHA.121.021444\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1161/JAHA.121.021444</a>\r\n</li>'),(726,'Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy benefits people with depression through promoting self-kindness','mindfulness-based-cognitive-therapy-benefits-people-with-depression-through-promoting-self-kindness','2022-03-10 19:30:56.336937','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">New research shows that Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) can help promote self-kindness in people with a history of depression, thereby putting their bodies in a state of safety and relaxation.</p><p>The research, led by the University of Exeter with collaboration from the universities of Oxford and Magdeburg, indicates that MBCT may help break the cycle of highly critical thoughts and feelings of worthlessness, which often lead people with depression to relapse.</p><p>Participants treated with MBCT showed a pattern of being kind to themselves, along with body responses of reduced threat response, a state of safety and relaxation that is important for regeneration and healing.</p><p>The authors believe the study helps to better understand how MBCT prevents relapse.</p><p>MBCT is an effective group-based psychological treatment that helps people change the way they think and feel about their experiences and learn skills that reduce the likelihood of further episodes of depression.</p><p>Previous research has shown that individuals with recurrent depression benefit particularly from MBCT when they learn to become more compassionate towards themselves.</p><p>This increased self-compassion has been defined as the ability to be kind to ourselves in stressful times.</p><p>The researchers studied 50 people who were in remission from depression and at risk for depressive relapse.</p><p>25 of this group were tested before and after an eight-week MBCT treatment and compared with an untreated control sample of 25 people with recurrent depression.</p><p>Dr Hans Kirschner, of the University of Magdeburg, the first author of the study, said: \"It\'s encouraging to see that an evidence-based treatment like MBCT can help individuals with recurrent depression to move to a kinder self view and a related body state of safety. We hope that this can strengthen individuals\' resilience and prevent depressive relapse. Though, this idea must be tested formally in future research.\"</p><p>In contrast, the untreated control group showed body responses indicative of a more adverse response to the self-compassion meditation when they engaged in it a second time.</p><p>The study builds on the team\'s previous research that found that a brief self-compassion exercise can temporarily activate a pattern of self-kindness and feeling safe in healthy individuals.</p><p>The researchers wanted to explore this effect in people with depression, and found that the self-compassion exercise alone was not sufficient to bring about the feeling of safety, but that MCBT did so effectively.</p><p>Professor Anke Karl, from the University of Exeter, lead author of the study, said: \"This study extends our previous research that found that a brief self-compassion exercise can temporarily activate a pattern of self-kindness and feeling safe in healthy individuals but in individuals with recurrent depression this is unlikely to happen without going through an effective psychological therapy that we know addresses vulnerability to relapse.\"</p>','2022-03-10 12:19:29.910591','uploads/news/download_39.jpg',1,'University of Exeter','New research shows that Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) can help promote self-kindness in people with a history of depression, thereby putting their bodies in a state of safety and relaxation.',1,39,'<li>Hans Kirschner, Willem Kuyken, Anke Karl. <strong>A Biobehavioural Approach to Understand How Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy Reduces Dispositional Negative Self-Bias in Recurrent Depression</strong>. <em>Mindfulness</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12671-022-01845-3\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1007/s12671-022-01845-3</a>\r\n</li>'),(729,'Half century of protection pays off for sea turtles','half-century-of-protection-pays-off-for-sea-turtles','2022-03-10 19:36:21.216185','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Green turtle numbers continue to rise on a group of islands where the species has now been protected for more than 50 years, new research shows.</p><p>Turtles were hunted at Aldabra Atoll in the Seychelles until a ban in 1968.</p><p>The population has been tracked by estimating how many clutches of eggs are laid -- and that figure has risen from 2,000-3,000 per year in the late 1960s to more than 15,000 per year in the latest data (2014-19).</p><p>The study was carried outby a team of researchers from the Seychelles Islands Foundation with analytical support from the University of Exeter.</p><p>\"Green turtles have suffered massive historical population declines due to intensive harvesting of nesting females,\" said lead author Adam Pritchard, from the Centre for Ecology and Conservation on Exeter\'s Penryn Campus in Cornwall.</p><p>\"Aldabra Atoll was the first green turtle nesting site to be protected in the Western Indian Ocean, with a ban on turtle capture in 1968, followed by continued long-term monitoring by Seychelles Islands Foundation researchers.\"</p><p>Professor Brendan Godley, who helped supervise the research, added: \"It\'s been an honour to support the analysis of the decades of work by the Seychelles team.</p><p>\"The ongoing population increase of Aldabra\'s green turtles is testament to long-term protection, and offers some clear evidence of the fact that we can be optimistic about marine conservation, well enacted.\"</p><p>The study\'s results reveal that green turtle clutches have increased at Aldabra by 2.6% per year overall, with the greatest increase at Settlement Beach on Picard, where exploitation of nesting females was historically the most intense.</p><p>Co-author Cheryl Sanchez, who is currently doing a PhD on Aldabra\'s turtles, said: \"This study demonstrates the importance of long-term monitoring, which is often seen as less glamorous and valuable than targeted research.</p><p>\"It has taken decades of tireless commitment to collect the data to confirm this increase, and the foresight to protect the nesting population before it was too late.</p><p>\"Aldabra\'s green turtles should continue to be an incredible conservation success story that we can follow for decades to come.\"</p><p>The study\'s figures confirm Aldabra as the second-largest monitored green turtle rookery in the region.</p><p>The research also shows the considerable contribution of Aldabra to regional green turtle numbers and clearly demonstrates the benefits of long-term protection and monitoring.</p><p>Furthermore, with Aldabra\'s turtle population still being well below estimated pre-exploitation population numbers, the increase is likely to continue.</p>','2022-03-10 12:19:50.074300','uploads/news/download_41.jpg',1,'University of Exeter','Green turtle numbers continue to rise on a group of islands where the species has now been protected for more than 50 years, new research shows.',1,67,'<li>AM Pritchard, CL Sanchez, N Bunbury, AJ Burt, JC Currie, N Doak, F Fleischer-Dogley, K Metcalfe, JA Mortimer, H Richards, J van de Crommenacker, BJ Godley. <strong>Green turtle population recovery at Aldabra Atoll continues after 50 yr of protection</strong>. <em>Endangered Species Research</em>, 2022; 47: 205 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.3354/esr01174\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.3354/esr01174</a>\r\n</li>'),(730,'Research sheds light on mysterious messenger RNA modifications','research-sheds-light-on-mysterious-messenger-rna-modifications','2022-03-10 19:29:09.656709','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">A team led by scientists at the University of Birmingham has come a step closer to uncovering the purpose of a distinctive set of modifications found at the beginning of messenger RNA which have long remained a fundamental mystery in molecular biology.</p><p>Messenger RNAs (mRNAs) are vital for protein production. Their specific structure at the beginning of the chain, called a cap, has two main functions. It protects the mRNA from breaking down, but also it plays a key role in the way the messenger RNA produces proteins.</p><p>In addition to the cap structure, the first few nucleotides of an mRNA can carry small decorations called methylation. These occur in animals as well as in some of their parasites like SARS viruses and trypanosomes, but their purpose has remained enigmatic.</p><p>Although scientists have known about these mRNA modification for more than 45 years, its effect on the function of mRNA has not been well understood. This is because scientists have not been able to show what happens when this methylation in mRNA is \'knocked out\', or removed from animal model organisms.</p><p>In a new study, published in <em>Nature Communications,</em> researchers from the Universities of Birmingham, Oxford, Nottingham and Warwick succeeded in creating a knockout model using fruit flies (<em>Drosophila) </em>by removing two key genes<em>. </em>That means they were able to show what happens when the flies don\'t have the two enzymes used in the methylation process.</p><p>They found that, although the modified flies did still live, the two enzymes played an important role in the animals\' reward learning process. These flies showed a defect in their ability to learn the association of a specific odour with a sugar reward.</p><p>Lead author Dr Matthias Soller from the School of Biosciences at the University of Birmingham says: \"The study shows us that mRNA modifications have important functions in the brain. Even though these flies are alive, they are not very capable of learning essential survival skills.\"</p><p>The research builds on work previously done by one of the paper\'s co-authors, Professor Rupert Fray at the University of Nottingham, who found that cap modifications are highly dynamic in mice.</p><p>The team discovered that these modifications played a role in transporting the mRNAs to synapses -- the site of communication between neurons.</p><p>Professor Scott Waddell from the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at Oxford University said: \"This learning phenotype opens many new questions. Although we do not yet know the detailed nature of the underlying neuronal dysfunction, it is reminiscent of the genetic disease associated with Fragile X Mental Retardation Protein FMRP, which also involves RNA biology and is known to produce defects in synapse development and plasticity.\"</p><p>Dr Irmgard Haussmann from Birmingham City University adds: \"Analysing the cap modifications is very challenging and further technical hurdles need to be taken to look at modifications in specific mRNAs.\"</p><p>\"This is highly relevant as SARS and other viruses that have their own cap methylation enzyme, but it is not really understood what role this plays in virus-host interactions,\" adds Dr Nathan Archer from the University of Nottingham School of Veterinary Medicine and Sciences.</p><p>The next step for the team will be to investigate in more detail the mechanism by which the modified mRNA is able to influence protein expression relevant to reward learning and virus propagation.</p>','2022-03-10 12:19:52.158455','uploads/news/83507c0cb7dc3831527714cb9516c416.png',1,'University of Birmingham','A team led by scientists has come a step closer to uncovering the purpose of a distinctive set of modifications found at the beginning of messenger RNA which have long remained a fundamental mystery in molecular biology.',1,176,'<li>Irmgard U. Haussmann, Yanying Wu, Mohanakarthik P. Nallasivan, Nathan Archer, Zsuzsanna Bodi, Daniel Hebenstreit, Scott Waddell, Rupert Fray, Matthias Soller. <strong>CMTr cap-adjacent 2′-O-ribose mRNA methyltransferases are required for reward learning and mRNA localization to synapses</strong>. <em>Nature Communications</em>, 2022; 13 (1) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28549-5\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41467-022-28549-5</a>\r\n</li>'),(760,'Frequent external childcare can affect children\'s behavior, survey suggests','frequent-external-childcare-can-affect-childrens-behavior-survey-suggests','2022-03-10 19:27:15.948138','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">How does childcare outside of the family affect the development of children and adolescents? To answer this question, researchers at the University of Zurich surveyed around 1,300 Zurich school children, their parents and teachers. The survey suggests that the more time children spend in external daycare, the more likely they are to exhibit problematic behavior; however, this behavior generally disappears at the end of primary school.</p><p>The Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development at the University of Zurich has conducted a study to examine how external childcare influences the development of children into young adulthood. The analyzed data were collected as part of the Zurich Project on the Social Development from Childhood into Adulthood (z-proso) and consisted of around 1,300 school children aged between seven and 20 in the city of Zurich.</p><p><strong>Effects at primary school age</strong></p><p>Around 67 percent of the children in the survey received external childcare before entering kindergarten. 32 percent of these children attended a daycare center, and 22 percent a playgroup. Another 22 percent received care from an external family member, 3 percent from acquaintances or neighbors, and 12 percent from daycare mothers. The researchers asked the children as well as their parents and teachers about externalizing or internalizing behavior problems, delinquency and substance use. The survey showed that the observed behaviors in primary school-aged children differed depending on the respondents and the type of external daycare.</p><p>According to the parents, primary school pupils were more likely to show aggression, display symptoms of ADHD, and experience anxiety and depression the more time they had spent in a daycare center before entering school. This finding was also supported by some of the children\'s own assessments. According to the teachers, hyperactivity, lack of impulse control, inattention or aggression were more likely to occur in school children who had spent more than two days a week with a daycare mother or at least three days a week in a playgroup.</p><p><strong>Problem behavior usually disappears</strong></p><p>How can these findings be explained? \"It\'s possible that external childcare may lessen the strength of child-parent attachment and interaction,\" says first author Margit Averdijk. But it is also possible that children in center-based care or playgroups learn problem behavior from their peers and sometimes use it to get attention from caregivers.</p><p>\"Although we can\'t directly check which of these mechanisms is the most likely explanation for our results, both of them support our findings,\" explains the researcher. The good news is that the problematic behavior observed in primary school-aged children decreases as the children get older and mostly disappears from the age of 13. Symptoms of ADHD were the only ones to persist into adolescence.</p><p><strong>No general link to substance use in adolescents</strong></p><p>Moreover, the researchers found no evidence that generally links external childcare settings to delinquency and substance use in adolescents. An exception was the link between daycare attendance and substance use, which persisted into young adulthood for those from vulnerable backgrounds. \"Our study indicates that these children are also more likely to experience anxiety or depression as they grow older, which may become more acute as a result of the parents\' absence,\" Averdijk explains.</p><p><strong>Interpret with caution</strong></p><p>\"Our study sheds light on some possible unfavorable links between external childcare and children\'s later development,\" says last author Manuel Eisner. However, the professor of sociology urges not to jump to conclusions. He adds that while the study meets the highest scientific standards, it is based on observational data and surveys that do not always allow clear conclusions to be drawn about causation. Furthermore, the study was not able to take into account the quality of childcare received outside of the family.</p>','2022-03-10 15:44:03.278600','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Zurich','A survey of around 1,300 Zurich school children, their parents and teachers suggests that the more time children spend in external daycare, the more likely they are to exhibit problematic behavior. However, this behavior generally disappears at the end of primary school.',1,171,'<li>Margit Averdijk, Denis Ribeaud, Manuel Eisner. <strong>External childcare and socio-behavioral development in Switzerland: Long-term relations from childhood into young adulthood</strong>. <em>PLOS ONE</em>, 2022; 17 (3): e0263571 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263571\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1371/journal.pone.0263571</a>\r\n</li>'),(761,'196 lasers help scientists recreate the conditions inside gigantic galaxy clusters','196-lasers-help-scientists-recreate-the-conditions-inside-gigantic-galaxy-clusters','2022-03-10 19:25:34.757885','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Galaxies rarely live alone. Instead, dozens to thousands are drawn together by gravity, forming vast clusters that are the largest objects in the universe.</p><p>\"Galaxy clusters are one of the most awe-inspiring things in the universe,\" said Prof. Emeritus Don Lamb, a University of Chicago astrophysicist and co-author on a new paper published March 9 -- one that may point the way towards solving a decades-long mystery.</p><p>Scientists have long known that the hydrogen gas in galaxy clusters is searingly hot -- about 10 million degrees Kelvin, or roughly the same temperature as the center of the sun -- which is so hot that hydrogen atoms cannot exist. Instead the gas is a plasma consisting of protons and electrons.</p><p>But a puzzle persists: There is no straightforward explanation for why or how the gas stays so hot. According to the normal rules of physics, it should have cooled within the age of the universe. But it hasn\'t.</p><p>The challenge for anyone trying to solve this puzzle is that you can\'t exactly create these kinds of powerfully hot and magnetic conditions in your backyard.</p><p>However, there is now one place on Earth where you can: the most energetic laser facility in the world. The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is able to create such extreme conditions -- though only for a tiny fraction of a second in a volume the size of a dime.</p><p>Scientists from UChicago, the University of Oxford, and the University of Rochester worked together to use the National Ignition Facility -- located in Livermore, California -- to create conditions similar to the hot gas in gigantic galaxy clusters. \"The experiments conducted at the NIF are literally out of this world,\" said Jena Meinecke, who was the first author on the paper.</p><p>The scientists focused 196 lasers onto a single tiny target, creating a white-hot plasma with intense magnetic fields that exists for a few billionths of a second.</p><p>This was long enough for them to determine that instead of a uniform temperature, there were hot and cold spots in the plasma.</p><p>This dovetails with one of the theories that has been proposed for how heat is trapped inside galaxy clusters. Normally, heat would be easily distributed as electrons collide with each other. But the tangled magnetic fields inside the plasma can affect these electrons, causing them to spiral along the direction of magnetic fields -- which can prevent them from evenly distributing and dispersing their energy.</p><p>In fact, in the experiment they saw that the conduction of energy was suppressed by more than a factor of 100.</p><p>\"This is an incredibly exciting result because we\'ve been able to show that what astrophysicists have proposed is on the right track,\" said Lamb, the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Astronomy and Astrophysics.</p><p>\"This is indeed an astonishing result,\" added study co-author University of Rochester Prof. Petros Tzeferacos, who oversaw computer simulations of the complicated experiment. \"The simulations were key to untangling the physics at play in the turbulent, magnetized plasma, but the level of thermal transport suppression was beyond what we expected.\"</p><p>The simulations were done with a computer code called the FLASH codes, which was developed at the University of Chicago and is now hosted at the University of Rochester\'s Flash Center for Computational Science, which is led by Tzeferacos. The code allows scientists to simulate their laser experiments in exquisite detail before they do them, so that they can achieve the results they seek.</p><p>This is critical because the scientists only get a precious few shots at the facility -- if something goes wrong, there\'s no redo. And because the experiment conditions only last nanoseconds, the scientists have to make sure they make the measurements they need at exactly the right time. This means everything has to be precisely plotted out far ahead of time.</p><p>\"It\'s a challenge when you\'re at the very extremes of what can be done, but that\'s where the frontier is,\" said Lamb.</p><p>More questions remain about the physics of galaxy clusters, however. Though the hot and cold spots are solid evidence for the impact of magnetic fields on the cooling of the hot gas in galaxy clusters, further experiments are needed to understand exactly what is happening. The group is planning its next round of experiments at NIF later this year.</p><p>For the moment, though, they\'re happy to have shed light on why the gas in galaxy clusters is still hot even after billions of years.</p><p>Galaxies rarely live alone. Instead, dozens to thousands are drawn together by gravity, forming vast clusters that are the largest objects in the universe.</p><p>\"Galaxy clusters are one of the most awe-inspiring things in the universe,\" said Prof. Emeritus Don Lamb, a University of Chicago astrophysicist and co-author on a new paper published March 9 -- one that may point the way towards solving a decades-long mystery.</p><p>Scientists have long known that the hydrogen gas in galaxy clusters is searingly hot -- about 10 million degrees Kelvin, or roughly the same temperature as the center of the sun -- which is so hot that hydrogen atoms cannot exist. Instead the gas is a plasma consisting of protons and electrons.</p><p>But a puzzle persists: There is no straightforward explanation for why or how the gas stays so hot. According to the normal rules of physics, it should have cooled within the age of the universe. But it hasn\'t.</p><p>The challenge for anyone trying to solve this puzzle is that you can\'t exactly create these kinds of powerfully hot and magnetic conditions in your backyard.</p><p>However, there is now one place on Earth where you can: the most energetic laser facility in the world. The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is able to create such extreme conditions -- though only for a tiny fraction of a second in a volume the size of a dime.</p><p>Scientists from UChicago, the University of Oxford, and the University of Rochester worked together to use the National Ignition Facility -- located in Livermore, California -- to create conditions similar to the hot gas in gigantic galaxy clusters. \"The experiments conducted at the NIF are literally out of this world,\" said Jena Meinecke, who was the first author on the paper.</p><p>The scientists focused 196 lasers onto a single tiny target, creating a white-hot plasma with intense magnetic fields that exists for a few billionths of a second.</p><p>This was long enough for them to determine that instead of a uniform temperature, there were hot and cold spots in the plasma.</p><p>This dovetails with one of the theories that has been proposed for how heat is trapped inside galaxy clusters. Normally, heat would be easily distributed as electrons collide with each other. But the tangled magnetic fields inside the plasma can affect these electrons, causing them to spiral along the direction of magnetic fields -- which can prevent them from evenly distributing and dispersing their energy.</p><p>In fact, in the experiment they saw that the conduction of energy was suppressed by more than a factor of 100.</p><p>\"This is an incredibly exciting result because we\'ve been able to show that what astrophysicists have proposed is on the right track,\" said Lamb, the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Astronomy and Astrophysics.</p><p>\"This is indeed an astonishing result,\" added study co-author University of Rochester Prof. Petros Tzeferacos, who oversaw computer simulations of the complicated experiment. \"The simulations were key to untangling the physics at play in the turbulent, magnetized plasma, but the level of thermal transport suppression was beyond what we expected.\"</p><p>The simulations were done with a computer code called the FLASH codes, which was developed at the University of Chicago and is now hosted at the University of Rochester\'s Flash Center for Computational Science, which is led by Tzeferacos. The code allows scientists to simulate their laser experiments in exquisite detail before they do them, so that they can achieve the results they seek.</p><p>This is critical because the scientists only get a precious few shots at the facility -- if something goes wrong, there\'s no redo. And because the experiment conditions only last nanoseconds, the scientists have to make sure they make the measurements they need at exactly the right time. This means everything has to be precisely plotted out far ahead of time.</p><p>\"It\'s a challenge when you\'re at the very extremes of what can be done, but that\'s where the frontier is,\" said Lamb.</p><p>More questions remain about the physics of galaxy clusters, however. Though the hot and cold spots are solid evidence for the impact of magnetic fields on the cooling of the hot gas in galaxy clusters, further experiments are needed to understand exactly what is happening. The group is planning its next round of experiments at NIF later this year.</p><p>For the moment, though, they\'re happy to have shed light on why the gas in galaxy clusters is still hot even after billions of years.</p><p>\"It\'s a reminder that the universe is full of amazing things,\" said Lamb.</p><p>The principle investigator on the experiment was Prof. Gianluca Gregori of Oxford University. Team members also included Oxford\'s Prof. Alexander Schekochihin, Princeton\'s Archie Bott, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory\'s James Steven Ross.</p><p><strong>Story Source:</strong></p>','2022-03-10 15:44:06.058244','uploads/news/download_38.jpg',1,'University of Chicago','Scientists have long known that the hydrogen gas in galaxy clusters is searingly hot -- about 10 million degrees Kelvin, or roughly the same temperature as the center of the sun -- which is so hot that hydrogen atoms cannot exist. Instead the gas is a plasma consisting of protons and electrons. But a puzzle persists: There is no straightforward explanation for why or how the gas stays so hot. According to the normal rules of physics, it should have cooled within the age of the universe. But it hasn\'t. Scientists have created conditions similar to the hot gas in gigantic galaxy clusters.',1,2,'<li>Jena Meinecke, Petros Tzeferacos, James S. Ross, Archie F. A. Bott, Scott Feister, Hye-Sook Park, Anthony R. Bell, Roger Blandford, Richard L. Berger, Robert Bingham, Alexis Casner, Laura E. Chen, John Foster, Dustin H. Froula, Clement Goyon, Daniel Kalantar, Michel Koenig, Brandon Lahmann, Chikang Li, Yingchao Lu, Charlotte A. J. Palmer, Richard D. Petrasso, Hannah Poole, Bruce Remington, Brian Reville, Adam Reyes, Alexandra Rigby, Dongsu Ryu, George Swadling, Alex Zylstra, Francesco Miniati, Subir Sarkar, Alexander A. Schekochihin, Donald Q. Lamb, Gianluca Gregori. <strong>Strong suppression of heat conduction in a laboratory replica of galaxy-cluster turbulent plasmas</strong>. <em>Science Advances</em>, 2022; 8 (10) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abj6799\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1126/sciadv.abj6799</a>\r\n</li>'),(770,'Inclusive new tool makes genomic research better reflect world\'s diversity','inclusive-new-tool-makes-genomic-research-better-reflect-worlds-diversity','2022-03-10 19:23:23.620113','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Scientists have developed a powerful, inclusive new tool for genomic research that boosts efforts to develop more precise treatments for many diseases by leveraging a better representation of the genetic diversity of people around the world.</p><p>The new tool will allow researchers to compare natural variations in our genes against genome sequences collected from a diverse group of people. Until now, scientists have compared these variations with a \"reference genome\" primarily sequenced from a few volunteers (~70% from one person) living near laboratories involved in the Human Genome Project almost 20 years ago. This represented genomes from a small number of people in a small number of countries.</p><p>The new software tool, called \"Giraffe,\" enables the use of a reference point that is far more diverse and inclusive. Instead of relying on a single reference genome, Giraffe uses a \"pangenome\" that incorporates information about genome sequences from people around the world. This will give scientists a much more global perspective and help them understand why diseases often strike certain groups disproportionately.</p><p>\"A major advantage of Giraffe is that it enables fast and sensitive comparison of short-read human genome sequences to a pangenome, which is essential for the widespread use of reference graphs that reduce bias in the human genome reference,\" said researcher Stephen S. Rich, PhD, of the University of Virginia School of Medicine\'s Center for Public Health Genomics. \"Since the current effort in genomics is to move from a European-Caucasian base to a global representation, Giraffe can better define genetic variation in non-white populations and, as a result, have a major impact on precision medicine and application to understanding the genetic risk of disease.\"</p><p><strong>A Giraffe\'s-eye View</strong></p><p>Rich and UVA\'s Aakrosh Ratan, PhD, were part of a team of scientists who developed the new tool through the Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) program backed by the National Institutes of Health\'s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.</p><p>Giraffe will make it easier for scientists to understand genetic variation in different populations. Instead of the default point of comparison being a single reference genome, it becomes more than 5,000 people from many different backgrounds. That will help scientists better detect important patterns in a global population approaching 8 billion. It will also reduce unintentional biases in genomic data widely used by doctors and scientists.</p><p>Giraffe will prove especially helpful when scientists are examining larger, more complex stretches of our genetic code. It will make it much easier for scientists to compare these large \"structural variants,\" as the swathes are known. That will help scientists understand what the structural variants do and their role in diseases. That will, ultimately, help guide the development of new treatments.</p><p>\"Giraffe has made a great impact on the discovery of structural variants, large and complicated regions in the human genome that could not be resolved by standard, short-read sequencing,\" said Ratan, who, like Rich, is part of the Center for Public Health Genomics and UVA\'s Department of Public Health Sciences. \"This is critical as structural variation has been shown to be important for the risk of autism and other neuropsychiatric disorders, as well as many cancers. Giraffe is especially useful for detecting structural variation across diverse ethnic groups.\"</p><p>There are many other benefits as well, Rich added. \"Giraffe has been shown to reduce bias, increase the speed of analysis, and improve discovery of large blocks of variation in the human genome across diverse ancestries. This single software tool increases inclusiveness and, hopefully, reduces health disparities in genomic studies by enabling the use of a more global pangenome reference.\"</p>','2022-03-10 17:34:42.767881','uploads/news/genome.jpg',1,'niversity of Virginia Health System','Scientists have developed a powerful, inclusive new tool for genomic research that boosts efforts to develop more precise treatments for many diseases by leveraging a better representation of the genetic diversity of people around the world.',1,65,'<li>Jouni Sirén, Jean Monlong, Xian Chang, Adam M. Novak, Jordan M. Eizenga, Charles Markello, Jonas A. Sibbesen, Glenn Hickey, Pi-Chuan Chang, Andrew Carroll, Namrata Gupta, Stacey Gabriel, Thomas W. Blackwell, Aakrosh Ratan, Kent D. Taylor, Stephen S. Rich, Jerome I. Rotter, David Haussler, Erik Garrison, Benedict Paten. <strong>Pangenomics enables genotyping of known structural variants in 5202 diverse genomes</strong>. <em>Science</em>, 2021; 374 (6574) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.abg8871\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1126/science.abg8871</a>\r\n</li>'),(771,'How new bird species arise','how-new-bird-species-arise','2022-03-10 19:20:21.904760','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Much of a centuries-old debate over where and how new bird species form has now been resolved. Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have provided evidence that birds in mountainous areas -- where the vast majority of the planet\'s species live -- have left lowland habitats for higher and higher mountain elevations throughout their evolution. Millions of years of climatic fluctuations have contributed to pushing bird species upslope -- as is probably happening now.</p><p>One of the fundamental questions in biology, and a centuries-old academic debate, is: How do new species form? And, how do species end up on mountaintops several kilometers high? Indeed, 85% of the world\'s vertebrates -- birds included -- live in mountainous areas where lowland habitats isolate animal species and populations from one another.</p><p>\"The discussion about how mountain bird species arise has been ongoing among scientific researchers for many years. Some say -- \"Obviously, birds can just fly from one mountain to another,\" while others say -- \"Well, actually they don\'t.\" Scientists have been arguing about this since Darwin and Wallace. But until now, no one had the scientific evidence,\" explains associate professor Knud Andreas Jønsson of the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen.</p><p>He and a number of fellow researchers from the University of Copenhagen are now in possession of evidence that can settle the age-old feud -- or at least the part of it concerning the enormous island region around Indonesia and Australia. The evidence comes as the result of collecting entire genomes from various bird populations on the world\'s largest tropical island -- mountainous New Guinea.</p><p>Genomic analyses have established that bird species emerge in the lowlands and then move higher and higher into mountainous areas over millions of years -- probably both due to competition and climate change -- before eventually going extinct. For this reason, mountain peaks, like islands, are often referred to as evolutionary dead ends. The results have been published in <em>Nature Communications</em>.</p><p><strong>The closer to the top, the greater the genetic variation</strong></p><p>By sequencing DNA from birds of the same species, but living on two separate mountains, researchers were able to investigate how genetically different these populations are from each other.</p><p>\"We can see that the higher up in the mountains birds live, the greater the differences between populations of the same species. Some of the populations are so different, that one could make the case that they are distinct species.Conversely, there are greater similarities among lowland populations. This tells us that the spread of new species must have taken place from lowland habitats upwards,\" explains Knud Andreas Jønsson, the study\'s lead author.</p><p>Because the researchers are also familiar with the generation time of these birds, they have been able to measure that the movement of species from lowlands to mountaintops has occurred gradually, over a couple million years.</p><p>Knud Andreas Jønsson points out that the study does not necessarily suggest an upslope pattern of colonization globally. Therefore, it is important to investigate the processes behind species formation within specific zoogeographical regions.</p><p><strong>Climate fluctuations pushed birds higher up the mountain</strong></p><p>The study also shows that climate fluctuations, especially over the past two million years -- known as Pleistocene climate oscillations -- caused dramatic fluctuations in the size of the populations. At times, climate fluctuations probably contributed to the upslope evolution.</p><p>\"As it gets warmer, montane forests and birds are pushed further upslope, to where there is less and less habitat and to where they are more likely to become extinct. As a result, one sees large fluctuations in population sizes. As it got warmer, populations shrank, and the poorer a population\'s chances became for further colonization,\" explains Knud Andreas Jønsson.</p><p>On average, bird species survive a few million years before dying out. The smaller the population, the more vulnerable a species is and the greater its risk of extinction. As the researcher points out:</p><p>\"Our analyses demonstrate that the species living on mountain peaks are 5-10 million years old. So, the oldest and most specialized species live at elevations of 3-4 kilometers, and in small numbers. Climate fluctuations can accelerate the process, so that ancient species will go extinct faster. This will probably be a consequence of modern-day global warming as well.\"</p><p><strong>Mountain birds are at greatest risk</strong></p><p>Great swaths of lowland forest have disappeared in the New Guinea-Indonesia region. Consequently, there has been a considerable focus on the loss of the many lowland species living there. But according to the researcher, the new results could serve to help prioritize the conservation of highland birds.</p><p>\"There is no doubt that highland bird species are the ones most vulnerable to global warming. Given that it has taken millions of years for their populations to build and their great genetic variation on individual mountain peaks, perhaps something more should be done to preserve them. It isn\'t just a global goal to preserve species, but to preserve genetic diversity,\" concludes Knud Andreas Jønsson.</p><p><strong>Occasionally, the improbable occurs</strong></p><p>Although species colonization generally occurs from lowland towards highland habitats, there is also a regular, but limited amount of genetic exchange between mountaintops. This happens when a few individuals per generation manage to travel from one mountain range to another and propagate. While some might think that this shouldn\'t be too surprising for a winged creature, Knud Andreas Jønsson finds it astonishing:</p><p>\"One of the species that occasionally makes the more than 100-kilometer long trip across mountains is the blue-capped ifrit (<em>Ifrita kowaldi</em>), a stationary forest songbird. Without the new data, I\'d say, \'I just don\'t believe it!\' In the past, we have used satellite transmitters to track similar forest birds in New Guinea and seen that they tend not to disperse at all. But occasionally, the improbable occurs, if there is enough time and enough individuals within a population,\" concludes Knud Andreas Jønsson.</p><p><strong>About the study</strong></p><p><strong>Story Source:</strong></p>','2022-03-10 17:34:45.435964','uploads/news/download_37.jpg',1,'University of Copenhagen - Faculty of Science','Much of a centuries-old debate over where and how new bird species form has now been resolved. Researchers have provided evidence that birds in mountainous areas -- where the vast majority of the planet\'s species live -- have left lowland habitats for higher and higher mountain elevations throughout their evolution. Millions of years of climatic fluctuations have contributed to pushing bird species upslope -- as is probably happening now.',1,132,'<li>José Martín Pujolar, Mozes P. K. Blom, Andrew Hart Reeve, Jonathan D. Kennedy, Petter Zahl Marki, Thorfinn S. Korneliussen, Benjamin G. Freeman, Katerina Sam, Ethan Linck, Tri Haryoko, Bulisa Iova, Bonny Koane, Gibson Maiah, Luda Paul, Martin Irestedt, Knud Andreas Jønsson. <strong>The formation of avian montane diversity across barriers and along elevational gradients</strong>. <em>Nature Communications</em>, 2022; 13 (1) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-27858-5\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41467-021-27858-5</a>\r\n</li>'),(772,'Relocating farmland could turn back clock twenty years on carbon emissions, say scientists','relocating-farmland-could-turn-back-clock-twenty-years-on-carbon-emissions-say-scientists','2022-03-10 19:18:58.952143','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Scientists have produced a map showing where the world\'s major food crops should be grown to maximise yield and minimise environmental impact. This would capture large amounts of carbon, increase biodiversity, and cut agricultural use of freshwater to zero.</p><p>The reimagined world map of agriculture includes large new farming areas for many major crops around the cornbelt in the mid-western US, and below the Sahara desert. Huge areas of farmland in Europe and India would be restored to natural habitat.</p><p>The redesign -- assuming high-input, mechanised farming -- would cut the carbon impact of global croplands by 71%, by allowing land to revert to its natural, forested state. This is the equivalent of capturing twenty years\' worth of our current net CO<sub>2</sub> emissions. Trees capture carbon as they grow, and also enable more carbon to be captured by the soil than when crops are grown in it.</p><p>In this optimised scenario, the impact of crop production on the world\'s biodiversity would be reduced by 87%. This would drastically reduce the extinction risk for many species, for which agriculture is a major threat. The researchers say that croplands would quickly revert back to their natural state, often recovering their original carbon stocks and biodiversity within a few decades.</p><p>The redesign would eliminate the need for irrigation altogether, by growing crops in places where rainfall provides all the water they need to grow. Agriculture is currently responsible for around 70% of global freshwater use, and this causes drinking water shortages in many drier parts of the world.</p><p>The researchers used global maps of the current growing areas of 25 major crops, including wheat, barley and soybean, which together account for over three quarters of croplands worldwide. They developed a mathematical model to look at all possible ways to distribute this cropland across the globe, while maintaining overall production levels for each crop. This allowed them to identify the option with the lowest environmental impact.</p><p>The study is published today in the journal <em>Nature Communications Earth &amp; Environment</em>.</p><p>\"In many places, cropland has replaced natural habitat that contained a lot of carbon and biodiversity - and crops don\'t even grow very well there. If we let these places regenerate, and moved production to better suited areas, we would see environmental benefits very quickly,\" said Dr Robert Beyer, formerly a researcher in the University of Cambridge\'s Department of Zoology, and first author of the study. Beyer is now based at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany.</p><p>Previous studies have identified priority areas for ecological restoration, but this is the first to plot the relocation of agricultural land to maximise long-term environmental benefits without compromising food security.</p><p>While a complete global relocation of cropland is clearly not a scenario that could currently be put into practice, the scientists say their models highlight places were croplands are currently very unproductive, but have potential to be hotspots for biodiversity and carbon storage.</p><p>Taking a pared-back approach and only redistributing croplands within national borders, rather than globally, would still result in significant benefits: global carbon impact would be reduced by 59% and biodiversity impact would be 77% lower than at present.</p><p>A third, even more realistic option of only relocating the worst-offending 25% of croplands nationally would result in half of the benefits of optimally moving all croplands.</p><p>\"It\'s currently not realistic to implement this whole redesign. But even if we only relocated a fraction of the world\'s cropland, focusing on the places that are least efficient for growing crops, the environmental benefits would be tremendous,\" said Beyer.</p><p>The study finds that the optimal distribution of croplands will change very little until the end of the century, irrespective of the specific ways in which the climate may change.</p><p>\"Optimal cropping locations are no moving target. Areas where environmental footprints would be low, and crop yields high, for the current climate will largely remain optimal in the future,\" said Professor Andrea Manica at the University of Cambridge, senior author of the paper.</p><p>The researchers acknowledge that relocating cropland must be done in a way that is acceptable to the people it affects, both economically and socially. They cite examples of set-aside schemes that give farmers financial incentives to retire part of their land for environmental benefit. Financial incentives can also encourage people to farm in better suited locations.</p><p>The model generated alternative global distribution maps depending on the way the land is farmed - ranging from advanced, fully mechanised production with high-yielding crop varieties and optimum fertiliser and pesticide application, through to traditional subsistence-based organic farming. Even redistribution of less intensive farming practices to optimal locations would substantially reduce their carbon and biodiversity impacts.</p><p>While other studies show that if we moved towards more plant-based diets we could significantly reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture, the researchers say that in reality diets aren\'t changing quickly. Their model assumed that diets will not change, and focused on producing the same food as today but in an optimal way.</p><p>Many of the world\'s croplands are located in areas where they have a huge environmental footprint, having replaced carbon-rich and biodiversity-rich ecosystems, and are a significant drain on local water resources. These locations were chosen for historical reasons, such as their proximity to human settlements, but the researchers say it is now time to grow food in a more optimal way.</p>','2022-03-10 17:34:52.053237','uploads/news/relocating-farmland-co-2.webp',1,'University of Cambridge','Scientists have produced a map showing where the world\'s major food crops should be grown to maximize yield and minimize environmental impact. This would capture large amounts of carbon, increase biodiversity, and cut agricultural use of freshwater to zero.',1,70,'<li>Robert M. Beyer, Fangyuan Hua, Philip A. Martin, Andrea Manica, Tim Rademacher. <strong>Relocating croplands could drastically reduce the environmental impacts of global food production</strong>. <em>Communications Earth &amp; Environment</em>, 2022; 3 (1) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s43247-022-00360-6\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s43247-022-00360-6</a>\r\n</li>'),(774,'Eating protein from a greater variety of sources may lower risk of high blood pressure','eating-protein-from-a-greater-variety-of-sources-may-lower-risk-of-high-blood-pressure','2022-03-10 19:16:07.655235','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Eating a balanced diet including protein from a greater variety of sources may help adults lower the risk of developing high blood pressure, according to new research published today in <em>Hypertension</em>, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Heart Association.</p><p>Nearly half of the U.S. population has hypertension, or high blood pressure -- one of the leading contributors to cardiovascular disease. When left untreated, high blood pressure damages the circulatory system and is a significant contributing factor to heart attack, stroke and other health conditions.</p><p>\"Nutrition may be an easily accessible and effective measure to fight against hypertension. Along with fat and carbohydrates, protein is one of the three basic macronutrients,\" said study author Xianhui Qin, M.D., of the National Clinical Research Center for Kidney Disease at Nanfang Hospital, Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China.</p><p>There is a strong association between poor diet quality and increased risk of cardiovascular disease and death from cardiovascular disease. In its 2021 dietary guidance to improve cardiovascular health, the American Heart Association advises people eat healthy sources of protein, mostly from plants and may include seafood and low-fat or fat-free dairy products, and, if desired, lean cuts and unprocessed forms of meat or poultry. The American Heart Association recommends eating one to two servings, or 5.5 ounces, of protein daily.</p><p>The study authors analyzed health information for nearly 12,200 adults living in China who were part of at least 2 out of 7 rounds of the China Health and Nutrition Survey from 1997 to 2015 (surveys taken every 2-4 years). Participants\' initial survey was used as a baseline, while data from their last round was used as a follow-up for comparison. Participants were an average age of 41 years, and 47% were men. The survey measured dietary intake in three consecutive 24-hour dietary recalls and a household food inventory. A trained interviewer collected 24-hour dietary information over 3 days in the same week during each round of the survey.</p><p>Participants were given a protein \"variety score\" based on the number of different sources of protein eaten out of 8 reported: whole grains, refined grains, processed red meat, unprocessed red meat, poultry, fish, egg and legumes. One point was given for each source of protein, with a maximum variety score of 8. The researchers then evaluated the association for new onset hypertension in relation to the protein variety score.</p><p>New-onset hypertension was defined as systolic (top number) blood pressure greater than or equal to 140 mm Hg and/or diastolic (bottom number) blood pressure greater than or equal to 90 mm Hg, taking blood pressure-lowering medicine, or self-reporting that a physician diagnosed high blood pressure since their last survey visit. Average time to follow-up was 6 years.</p><p>The analysis found:</p><p>\"The heart health message is that consuming a balanced diet with proteins from various different sources, rather than focusing on a single source of dietary protein, may help to prevent the development of high blood pressure,\" Qin said.</p><p>A limitation of the study is its observational design. Because researchers used prior health information, they could not definitively prove protein intake of any kind or quantity caused or prevented new-onset hypertension.</p><p>The study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Outstanding Youths Development Scheme of Nanfang Hospital, Clinical Research Program of Nanfang Hospital and Southern Medical University.</p>','2022-03-10 17:34:58.287847','uploads/news/download_36.jpg',1,'American Heart Association\r\n.','In a study of nearly 12,200 adults in China, eating protein from a greater variety of sources was associated with a lower risk of developing high blood pressure. This suggests that consuming a balanced diet with a moderate amount of protein from diverse food sources may help prevent new-onset hypertension.',1,127,'<li>Chun Zhou, Qimeng Wu, Ziliang Ye, Mengyi Liu, Zhuxian Zhang, Yuanyuan Zhang, Huan Li, Panpan He, Qinqin Li, Chengzhang Liu, Xianhui Qin. <strong>Inverse Association Between Variety of Proteins With Appropriate Quantity From Different Food Sources and New-Onset Hypertension</strong>. <em>Hypertension</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA.121.18222\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA.121.18222</a>\r\n</li>'),(776,'Stealth nanomedicines combat cancer and cut toxic effects of chemo','stealth-nanomedicines-combat-cancer-and-cut-toxic-effects-of-chemo','2022-03-10 19:14:21.088639','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Nanomedicines -- typically drugs hidden within nanoscopic fatty membranes (\'liposomes\') -- have potential to transform chemotherapy treatments, improving drug delivery and reducing toxic side effects for thousands of cancer patients every year.</p><p>Now, world first research conducted by the University of South Australia has identified that the frequently used chemotherapy drug (5-FU or Fluorouracil) is 100 per cent more effective at targeting tumours (rather than surrounding tissues) when administered using an optimised liposomal formulation.</p><p>Using a minimally invasive sampling technique known as micro-dialysis this is the first time that the biodistribution of 5-FU liposome formulations has been quantified in this way -- something that could not be achieved as effectively using current imaging approaches.</p><p>In Australia, about 150,000 new cases of cancer are diagnosed each year. It is a leading cause of death worldwide accounting for nearly 10 million deaths a year (nearly one in six deaths).</p><p>Chemotherapy is regularly used to treat many cancers, with 5-FU being an important drug used in treatment. Side effects of this drug can include nausea and vomiting, fatigue, hair loss, diarrhea or constipation, weight fluctuations, frequent infections, and mouth sores.</p><p>Lead researcher and co-Director at UniSA\'s Centre for Pharmaceutical Innovation, Professor Clive Prestidge, says the discovery could change the way chemotherapy is administered, providing a better quality of life for thousands of cancer patients.</p><p>\"Chemotherapy is regularly administered to treat many different types of cancers, including breast and colon cancers, but one of the major setbacks of 5-FU is that it does not distribute well to tumour issues and can cause high levels of off-target damage,\" Prof Prestidge says.</p><p>\"As a result, many patients suffer adverse effects and can get very sick during treatment.</p><p>\"Liposomal formulations present great opportunities for safer and more effective cancer medications because they prolong the retention of encapsulated drugs and can better target tumours. But optimising them for chemotherapy drugs has always proved challenging.</p><p>\"Our micro-dialysis approach is the first to quantify how liposomal-specific delivery of 5-FU can reduce tumour growth with fewer toxic side effects, so it has the potential to dramatically transform many cancer treatments and deliver better outcomes for people with cancer.\"</p>','2022-03-10 17:35:08.098244','uploads/news/Stealth-nanomedicines-combat-cancer-and-cut-toxic-effects-of-chemo.webp',1,'University of South Australia','New research has identified that the frequently used chemotherapy drug (5-FU or Fluorouracil) is 100 per cent more effective at targeting tumors (rather than surrounding tissues) when administered using an optimized liposomal formulation.',1,19,'<li>Wen Wang, Paul Joyce, Kristen Bremmell, Robert Milne, Clive A. Prestidge. <strong>Liposomal 5-Fluorouracil Polymer Complexes Facilitate Tumor-Specific Delivery: Pharmaco-Distribution Kinetics Using Microdialysis</strong>. <em>Pharmaceutics</em>, 2022; 14 (2): 221 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/pharmaceutics14020221\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.3390/pharmaceutics14020221</a>\r\n</li>'),(778,'Robot that seems to convey emotion while reading','robot-that-seems-to-convey-emotion-while-reading','2022-03-10 19:11:28.527169','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Scientists from the Faculty of Engineering, Information and Systems at the University of Tsukuba devised a text message mediation robot that can help users control their anger when receiving upsetting news. This device may help improve social interactions as we move towards a world with increasingly digital communications.</p><p>While a quick text message apology is a fast and easy way for friends to let us know they are going to be late for a planned meet up, it is often missing the human element that would accompany an explanation face-to-face, or even over the phone. It is likely to be more upsetting when we are not able to perceive the emotional weight behind our friends\' regret at making us wait.</p><p>Now, researchers at the University of Tsukuba have built a handheld robot they called OMOY, which was equipped with a movable weight actuated by mechanical components inside its body. By shifting the internal weight, the robot could express simulated emotions. The robot was deployed as a mediator for reading text messages. A text with unwelcome or frustrating news could be followed by an exhortation by OMOY to not get upset, or even sympathy for the user. \"With the medium of written digital communication, the lack of social feedback redirect focus from the sender and onto the content of the message itself,\" author Professor Fumihide Tanaka says. The mediator robot was designed so that it can suppress the user\'s anger and other negative interpersonal motivations, such as thoughts of revenge, and instead fostered forgiveness.</p><p>The researchers tested 94 people with a message like \"I\'m sorry, I am late. The appointment slipped my mind. Can you wait another hour?\" The team found that OMOY was able to reduce negative emotions. \"The mediator robot can relay a frustrating message followed by giving its own opinion. When this speech is accompanied by the appropriate weight shifts, we saw that that the user would perceive the \'intention\' of the robot to help them calm down,\" Professor Tanaka says.</p><p>The robot\'s body expression produced by weight shifts did not require any specific external components, such as arms or legs, which implied that the internal weight movements could reduce a user\'s anger or other negative emotions without the use of rich body gestures or facial expressions.</p>','2022-03-10 17:35:11.048389','uploads/news/ImageForNews_12801_16469162570301694.webp',1,'University of Tsukuba','Researchers have created a robot with an internal weight that can give the impression of conveying emotions while reading text messages. It can also remind users to not get upset, which may help them cope with unpleasant information.',1,175,'<li>Yohei Noguchi, Hiroko Kamide, Fumihide Tanaka. <strong>Weight Shift Movements of a Social Mediator Robot Make It Being Recognized as Serious and Suppress Anger, Revenge and Avoidance Motivation of the User</strong>. <em>Frontiers in Robotics and AI</em>, 2022; 9 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2022.790209\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.3389/frobt.2022.790209</a>\r\n</li>'),(783,'Cutting HFCs to cool the Earth','cutting-hfcs-to-cool-the-earth','2022-03-12 13:11:48.989900','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">To have a better chance of holding global warming to 1.5°C, we need to accelerate the phase-down of HFC refrigerants under the Montreal Protocol. This could also reduce pollution and improve energy access.</p><p>An air conditioner may freshen the atmosphere in your home, but in doing so, it is probably degrading the atmosphere of Earth. Along with other cooling technologies such as refrigerators and heat pumps, today\'s aircon commonly relies on chemicals called HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons), which are very powerful greenhouse gases. HFCs have been used to replace ozone-depleting substances, and their emissions have increased rapidly in the past two decades.</p><p>To meet the Paris climate goals, the world now needs to wean itself off HFCs quickly, according to a new study led by IIASA researchers published in the journal <em>Nature Climate Change</em>. As a bonus, this process could reduce global power consumption substantially, bringing many benefits such as lower pollution.</p><p>HFCs can be replaced with various gases that have a far lower climate impact per kilogram, including ammonia, CO<sub>2</sub>, and hydrocarbons such as propane. Indeed, a phase-down of HFCs is already required by international law. In 2016, these chemicals were brought into the Montreal Protocol, a treaty originally set up to curb ozone-depleting substances. The protocol\'s 2016 Kigali Amendment lays out HFC cuts for four groups of countries up to 2047, requiring consumption to fall by 80 to 85% relative to their respective baselines. The problem is that HFC emissions lag years behind consumption. They can leak out of cooling devices during manufacture and use, and when equipment is scrapped.</p><p>The new study considers this lag and examines how various HFC consumption scenarios would affect future emissions, using the IIASA Greenhouse Gas and Air Pollution Interactions and Synergies (GAINS) model. The study projects that, if left uncontrolled, HFC emissions from 2019 to 2050 would have amounted to more than 92 billion tons CO<sub>2</sub> equivalent. (Note that cumulative emissions until 2050 determines the effectiveness of HFC reduction for climate mitigation). Controlled by the Kigali Amendment, the total should be about 32 billion tons. That is however still far above the roughly 16 billion tons in SSP1?1.9 consistent climate scenarios, in which global warming is limited to around 1.5°C above pre?industrial temperatures.</p><p>\"Current ambitions for HFC emissions reductions are not sufficient to meet the Paris Agreement\'s 1.5°C goal. A more ambitious target under the Kigali Amendment could still help achieve the Paris goal if countries act early,\" says Pallav Purohit, lead author on the study and a senior researcher in the Pollution Management Research Group of the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program.</p><p>The Montreal protocol has a history of ratcheting up ambition, so the authors looked at various options for stronger HFC cuts. For example, in the existing Kigali Amendment, one group of developing nations is allowed to delay cuts by a few years because they have especially high ambient temperatures -- so what if they were required to keep the same pace as other developing nations?</p><p>This turns out to make little difference to total emissions. Or, what if all nations had to reach 95% emissions cuts by 2050, instead of 80 to 85% in 2047? Again, this barely reduces cumulative emissions to 2050, but it leaves emissions at a lower level for the rest of the century, which is more in line with 1.5°C scenarios.</p><p>The most effective option involves all countries not only hitting 95% by 2050, but making accelerated deep cuts before that (for example, developed countries reaching 55% cuts in 2025, instead of the 35 to 40% required in the Kigali Amendment, and developing countries reaching 35% cuts in 2030, compared with 0 to 10% in the Amendment). This leads to 2050 cumulative emissions of less than 24 billion tons CO<sub>2</sub> equivalent -- much closer to the 1.5°C climate scenario.</p><p>Better still, this early move would be an opportunity to replace old cooling equipment with more efficient hardware. This could save up to 20% of expected future global electricity consumption, which would double the climate benefits of the HFC phase-down, reduce air pollution, improve energy access and cut consumer energy bills.</p><p>\"Drawing on the Montreal Protocol\'s start-and-strengthen approach, accelerated HFC phase-down would increase the chances of staying below 1.5°C,\" Purohit concludes.</p>','2022-03-10 19:17:53.798343','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis\r\n\r\n\r\nSulfur hexafluoride,\r\nRefrigerant,\r\nClimate change mitigation,\r\nGlobal warming,\r\nAir pollution,\r\nCarbon dioxide sink,\r\nGlobal warming controversy,\r\nEutrophication,','To have a better chance of holding global warming to 1.5°C, we need to accelerate the phase-down of HFC refrigerants under the Montreal Protocol. This could also reduce pollution and improve energy access.',1,196,'<li>Purohit, P., Borgford-Parnell, N., Klimont, Z., and Höglund-Isaksson, L. <strong>Achieving Paris climate goals calls for increasing ambition of the Kigali Amendment</strong>. <em>Nature Climate Change</em>, 2022 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01310-y\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41558-022-01310-y</a>\r\n</li>'),(784,'More \'losers\' than \'winners\' among plants in the age of humans','more-losers-than-winners-among-plants-in-the-age-of-humans','2022-03-12 12:32:55.217055','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">A new analysis spanning more than 86,000 plant species from John Kress, botany curator emeritus at the Smithsonian\'s National Museum of Natural History, and Gary Krupnick, head of the museum\'s plant conservation unit, finds that on this human-dominated planet, many more species of plants are poised to \"lose\" rather than \"win.\" The study was published today, March 10, in the journal <em>Plants, People, Planet</em>.</p><p>From changing Earth\'s climate to destroying, degrading and altering ecosystems on a massive scale, human choices now largely dictate the environmental conditions across much of the globe and, as a result, which species of plants and animals can survive and persist and which will go extinct. Species lucky enough to be directly or indirectly aided by human activities are likely to survive and can be thought of as \"winners,\" while those that are pushed to ecological irrelevance or extinction by those same activities are the ultimate \"losers\" in evolutionary terms.</p><p>Kress encountered this concept of evolutionary winners and losers in the age of humans (known to some researchers as the Anthropocene), in the writings of John McNeill and wanted to see if it might be possible to tally the plant species that were winning and losing now and in the future.</p><p>\"I actually started this project from a place of optimism,\" Kress said. \"I had just planted all these trees around my house in Vermont and thought to myself that maybe there are actually more winners than losers, and we are just focused on everything that\'s disappearing.\"</p><p>In the summer of 2019, Kress brought Krupnick into the fold to help compile and analyze the mountains of data required to put every plant species for which there was enough information into the categories of winners and losers. The researchers split the winners and losers into species that are and are not useful to humans.</p><p>In addition to these four categories, Kress and Krupnick created four others: Species that appeared likely to win or lose in the future were deemed tentative winners or potential losers, and species that do not seem to be winning or losing at present were considered currently neutral. A fourth and final category included 571 species that have already gone extinct.</p><p>To place plants in these categories, Kress and Krupnick combed through databases that listed endangered plant species, economically important species such as crops, invasive and weedy plants, and endangered plants that are involved in legal and illegal global trade.</p><p>In total, the researchers were able to place 86,592 species of vascular plants -- a large group of plants that have vascular tissue which transport water, nutrients and other substances -- into the eight categories that describe their prospects for survival in the Anthropocene. That may sound like an inconceivably large number of species, but it is actually just under 30% of the nearly 300,000 known species of vascular plants. There simply was not enough data to categorize the remaining 70% of global plant diversity, which reflects how much is left to learn about Earth\'s botanical riches, Kress said.</p><p>The analysis revealed that losers currently outnumber winners, and that losers are likely to continue to outpace winners in the future if human impact on the planet maintains its current trajectory. Kress and Krupnick categorized 20,293 species of plants as losers, with the vast majority of those losing species being identified as not useful to humans. By contrast, the researchers found just 6,913 species of winners, with all but 164 of those species having some human use.</p><p>In the future, barring significant changes in how people conduct themselves on Earth, losers are projected to continue to outnumber winners, with 26,002 species in the potential losers category compared to 18,664 species in the tentative winners category.</p><p>To look for evolutionary patterns within the clear winners and losers identified by the study, the researchers also mapped the locations of these lucky and unlucky species on the tree of life.</p><p>\"The question was whether there were some lineages of plants that were more packed with winners or were full of losers we should be concerned about,\" Kress said.</p><p>As it turned out, winners and losers were for the most part evenly distributed across plant orders. The exceptions came primarily from small lineages, which were more prone than lineages with many species to leaning heavily in favor of winners or losers, Krupnick said. Three of the lineages most at risk of extinction include cycads, the cypress family (which includes redwoods and junipers) and an ancient family of conifers called the araucariales which are today mostly found in New Caledonia.</p><p>Branches of the plant evolutionary tree with few species and more losers than winners such as these have an elevated risk of being lost altogether, taking with them everything there is yet to learn about their biology and their lineage\'s genetic uniqueness.</p><p>\"Now and in the future, plants have to adapt to the environment humans have created or they will go extinct,\" Krupnick said. \"Our results suggest that this means the plant communities of the future will be more homogenized than those of today.\"</p><p>This increased homogeneity is likely to have serious consequences for ecosystems around the world as well as humanity. Losing plant diversity can drive a loss of animal diversity, Kress said, and make ecosystems less resilient in the face of hardship or change.</p><p>\"The list of winners shows that we\'ve selected certain species that are useful to us, but as that pool of plants we have to select from decreases in the future, humanity will have many fewer options when we want to reforest the planet, find new medicines or foods, or develop new products,\" Kress said.</p><p>Kress said he hopes that these lists will afford other researchers opportunities to look more in depth about why certain species of lineages are winning or losing in the age of humans and to identify the plants that are most in need of conservation.</p><p>\"It still looks green outside my window, and that can create the illusion that plants are doing well,\" Kress said. \"But this study suggests we\'re on course for a big loss of plant diversity, and we better wake up.\"</p><p>Funding and support for this research were provided by the Smithsonian.</p>','2022-03-10 19:25:40.086882','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Smithsonian','A new analysis spanning more than 86,000 plant species finds that on this human-dominated planet, many more species of plants are poised to \'lose\' rather than \'win.\' T',1,34,'<li>W. John Kress, Gary A. Krupnick. <strong>Lords of the biosphere: Plant winners and losers in the Anthropocene</strong>. <em>PLANTS, PEOPLE, PLANET</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.10252\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1002/ppp3.10252</a>\r\n</li>'),(785,'Exploring ancient tuberculosis transmission chains','exploring-ancient-tuberculosis-transmission-chains','2022-03-12 12:31:30.668022','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Nearly one quarter of the world\'s population is suspected to have been exposed to the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis, a disease that accounts for the highest global mortality from a bacterial infection. TB\'s global distribution was once viewed as support for its emergence deep in our past, where it was thought to have evolved in Africa tens of thousands of years ago and became distributed throughout the world following migrations with its host. Its ability to infect a number of mammalian species also make it a highly adaptable pathogen.</p><p>Analyses of ancient TB genomes have stirred up controversy about when this host-pathogen association began and precisely how TB became globally distributed. A 2014 study led by research teams at the University of Tübingen and Arizona State University reported on three ancient TB genomes from coastal Peru, which revealed aspects of its history that were incompatible with prevailing assumptions on TB\'s origins.</p><p>First, rather than identifying one of the well-characterized human-associated strains of the pathogen, the team identified a comparatively rare strain that today infects mostly marine mammals such as seals and sea lions (pinnipeds). In addition, their data suggested that TB was a much younger disease than previously thought, having emerged only sometime in the last 6000 years. \"At the time, we assumed that TB made its way from Africa to the Peruvian coast through travel with infected seal populations,\" comments Kirsten Bos of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who co-led the new study. \"We assumed the source of the infection in Peru had been a zoonosis from seals. It was not clear, though, if the specific TB infection we identified in the three people was a local phenomenon restricted to the area, or whether its distribution was broader.\"</p><p>TB is an infection well known to specialists in bone lesions and pathology. Paleopathologist Jane Buikstra of Arizona State University has extensively studied human skeletal remains across the Americas, and clear cases of TB infection are easily identified across the continents in the pre-contact period. \"We\'ve known for decades that a form of TB infection was present in the western coast of South America through the study of human remains. Now, with 21<sup>st</sup> century scientific advances, ancient DNA is the best tool available to investigate the relationships between the TB manifestations we observe osteologically in different parts of the Americas.\"</p><p>In a study published this week in <em>Nature Communications</em>, the team reports on three new cases of pre-contact era South American TB, this time from human remains that come from inland archaeological sites, two of which are situated in the highlands of the Colombian Andes. All three people were infected with the marine-associated strain of TB, thus making a simple zoonosis from seals unlikely.</p><p>TB\'s entry into South America through human exposure to infected seals is still the strongest hypothesis, but how TB was subsequently distributed on land remains an open question. Lead authors Åshild Vågene and Tanvi Honap are confident that these new cases present strong evidence that the TB variant currently found in seals was once able to travel long distances on land. \"The TB bacterium can infect numerous mammalian species, so there are many candidates for its terrestrial dispersal, including humans themselves,\" says Vågene. \"Vast trade networks may have played an important role in transporting the pathogen from the coast.\" Honap adds that \"recovering ancient TB DNA in animal remains from the pre-contact era Americas may one day allow us to explore the transmission chains responsible for bringing this marine variant so far inland.\"</p><p>Anne Stone of Arizona State University who specializes in the evolutionary history of TB and co-led the current study, sees the new results as an opportunity for deeper exploration into the ecology of the disease in the Americas before the colonial period. \"It\'s an exciting time in ancient DNA research, as we can now look at genome-level differences in these ancient pathogens and track their movements across continents and beyond. For TB, the open question is how widespread the seal-associated strain was in human populations of the Americas prior to its replacement by the more virulent strains that arrived with the Europeans.\"</p>','2022-03-10 19:25:54.509847','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology','Tuberculosis (TB) is the second most common cause of death worldwide by an infectious pathogen (after Covid-19), but many aspects of its long history with humans remain controversial. Researchers found that ancient TB discovered in archaeological human remains from South America is most closely related to a variant of TB associated today with seals, but surprisingly these cases were found in people who lived nowhere near the coast. This implies that these cases were not the result of direct transmission from seals, and instead one, or more, spillover events were likely to be the primary drivers of human infection.',1,88,'<li>Åshild J. Vågene, Tanvi P. Honap, Kelly M. Harkins, Michael S. Rosenberg, Karen Giffin, Felipe Cárdenas-Arroyo, Laura Paloma Leguizamón, Judith Arnett, Jane E. Buikstra, Alexander Herbig, Johannes Krause, Anne C. Stone, Kirsten I. Bos. <strong>Geographically dispersed zoonotic tuberculosis in pre-contact South American human populations</strong>. <em>Nature Communications</em>, 2022; 13 (1) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28562-8\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41467-022-28562-8</a>\r\n</li>'),(786,'Could leaky blood vessels in the brain be a culprit in Alzheimer’s disease?','could-leaky-blood-vessels-in-the-brain-be-a-culprit-in-alzheimers-disease','2022-03-12 12:30:15.469277','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Alzheimer\'s disease is an enormous problem that, with an aging population, will only get bigger. More than 6 million Americans are living with Alzheimer\'s disease, and 1 in 3 seniors will die of it, according to the Alzheimer\'s Association. By 2050, the cost of Alzheimer\'s disease, currently estimated at $355 billion, will rise to $1.1 trillion.</p><p>Could one of the causes of such a huge and costly problem be traced back to the cells that line the body\'s tiniest blood vessels?</p><p>A new study published by a Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) research team in <em>Molecular Therapy</em> suggests that the answer is yes. The team, led by Hongkuan Fan, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, found fewer of these cells, known as pericytes, in the brains of people who died of Alzheimer\'s disease. They also found higher levels of Fli-1, a protein most often found in blood cells and thought to govern their development.</p><p>When the team blocked, or inhibited, the action of Fli-1 in a mouse model of Alzheimer\'s disease, the memory of the mice improved. Blocking the protein also stopped immune cells from leaking into the brain and causing the inflammation that is a hallmark of Alzheimer\'s disease. Blocking Fli-1 could be a promising new approach to treating Alzheimer\'s disease and other dementias.</p><p>\"We are really excited by these data because they suggest that Fli-1 could be a new therapeutic target for Alzheimer\'s disease,\" said Fan.</p><p>Better therapies for Alzheimer\'s disease are urgently needed. Most existing Alzheimer\'s therapies just treat the symptoms and do little to address underlying causes.</p><p>It has long been known that people who have vascular issues, or problems with their hearts or blood vessels, are at increased risk of developing Alzheimer\'s disease and other dementias. These include people who have had a heart attack or who have diabetes or high blood pressure or cholesterol.</p><p>That\'s not surprising, since the brain is hungry for oxygen. When it doesn\'t get enough, because the flow of blood is inadequate, its cells don\'t function as well and can begin to die.</p><p>Lining the walls of tiny blood vessels known as capillaries, pericytes make sure the brain\'s energy and waste-elimination demands are met.</p><p>\"The capillary is where all the action is,\" said Perry Halushka, M.D., Ph.D., Distinguished University Professor of Cell and Molecular Pharmacology. \"It is the place where all these exchanges really take place.\"</p><p>Pericytes also help to make up the blood-brain barrier that prevents impurities and immune cells in the blood from reaching the brain. They also help to remove amyloid-beta, known to be a culprit in Alzheimer\'s disease, from the brain.</p><p>When pericytes are lost, immune cells and impurities begin to leak into the brain, causing it to become inflamed and eventually leading to cell death and declining mental function.</p><p>\"Pericytes may play a much more important role in dementia than people originally thought,\" said Halushka. \"This is especially true in the aging population, where vascular dementia is going to become a bigger problem.\"</p><p>With funding from the South Carolina Clinical &amp; Translational Research Institute, the MUSC team looked at the brains of people who had died of Alzheimer\'s disease, drawing on the resources of the brain bank at the Carroll A. Campbell, Jr. Neuropathology Laboratory.</p><p>\"The opportunity to study the human brain is an extraordinary asset for the institution and for the study of all types of brain diseases, not just Alzheimer\'s disease,\" said Halushka.</p><p>The MUSC team found that the brains of people who died of Alzheimer\'s disease had 34% fewer pericytes than healthy brains in their hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with learning and memory. The remaining pericytes had much higher levels of Fli-1.</p><p>The team then showed that an animal model of Alzheimer\'s also showed pericyte loss in the hippocampus, increased Fli-1 and impaired memory. Blocking Fli-1 improved the mice\'s performance on behavioral tests meant to assess memory.</p><p>\"The most exciting finding is that the Fli-1 inhibitor actually improved cognitive deficits in the animal model because, in the end, that\'s the only thing that matters,\" said Halushka.</p><p>The team also found that blocking Fli-1 in the mice helped to prevent pericyte loss and preserve the integrity of the blood-brain barrier as well as reduce the build-up of amyloid-beta.</p><p>\"We didn\'t expect such a profound effect in the mice, but to our surprise, the inhibitor really worked,\" said Fan.</p><p>The next step for the MUSC team is to develop an RNA that could silence Fli-1 and so reduce the brain inflammation that leads to cell death in Alzheimer\'s disease. The goal would not be to do away with Fli-1, as it serves important roles in the body, but to maintain it at healthy levels.</p><p>\"What\'s exciting is that this could be a new way to think about treating Alzheimer\'s disease, which has never been thought of before,\" said Halushka. \"This research opens up a whole new area for potential targets, not just Fli-1 but the pericyte itself.\"</p>','2022-03-10 19:25:57.188688','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Medical University of South Carolina','Researchers report that they found high levels of the protein Fli-1 in the brains of deceased Alzheimer\'s patients. Blocking Fli-1\'s action in a mouse model of Alzheimer\'s disease reversed mental loss and reduced the brain inflammation and amyloid-beta clumping that are hallmarks of Alzheimer\'s disease. Although clinical translation of this finding is likely years off, the study suggests Fli-1 is a promising therapeutic target for Alzheimer\'s disease.',1,179,'<li>Pengfei Li, Yan Wu, Eric D. Hamlett, Andrew J. Goodwin, Perry V. Halushka, Steven L. Carroll, Meng Liu, Hongkuan Fan. <strong>Suppression of Fli-1 protects against pericyte loss and cognitive deficits in Alzheimer\'s disease</strong>. <em>Molecular Therapy</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ymthe.2022.01.023\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1016/j.ymthe.2022.01.023</a>\r\n</li>'),(788,'Blood test as possible diagnostic tool for Alzheimer’s disease','blood-test-as-possible-diagnostic-tool-for-alzheimers-disease','2022-03-12 12:26:55.944663','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">A recent study published out of the lab of Donna Wilcock, Ph.D., the Robert P. and Mildred A. Moores Endowed Chair in Alzheimer\'s Disease, at University of Kentucky shows promising results for a blood test that could be used to identify Alzheimer\'s changes in the brain before the onset of any symptoms, which could result in preventative treatments being used before any memory loss.</p><p>In their paper, published in <em>Alzheimer\'s &amp; Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer\'s Association</em>, the researchers note that the detection of disease-causing pathology associated with Alzheimer\'s disease and Vascular Contributions to Cognitive Impairment and Dementia (VCID) is limited to cognitive evaluations and neuroimaging like MRI and PET scans. Due to recent technological developments, blood-based biomarkers of disease are now available and the team at Sanders-Brown believes they could be beneficial in the diagnosis of Alzheimer\'s and other dementias. A biomarker -- short for biological marker -- is a measurable indicator that captures what is happening in a cell or an organism at a given moment.</p><p>Zachary Winder, MD/PhD student at the UK College of Medicine, led the work within the Wilcock lab which used the extensive bank of samples found within UK\'s Alzheimer\'s Disease Research Center autopsy cohort, which consists of Kentucky residents who have agreed to donate their brains at time of death. For this study, researchers identified samples from participants who had blood taken and banked within two years of their death. They then tested blood samples from 90 participants for a variety of proteins with the goal of identifying biomarkers in the blood that could predict changes in the brain that might have contributed to dementia.</p><p>They believe their results support the continued study of blood-based biomarkers as a clinical screening tool for Alzheimer\'s and VCID. \"This study provides evidence that a blood test could be used to estimate the presence of Alzheimer\'s disease changes and blood vessel damage in the brain. We identified proteins in blood that indicate protein changes and changes in the brain known to cause dementia. Higher pTau181 and lower beta-amyloid in the blood indicate amyloid plaques of Alzheimer\'s in the brain,\" said Wilcock, who is associate director at Sanders-Brown. \"Protein markers of inflammation in the blood were also associated with higher amyloid plaques in the brain. We also looked at proteins that might have a relationship with damage to the blood vessels of the brain. We found that inflammation proteins in blood were related to damage to blood vessels in the brain.\"</p><p>Wilcock, Winder and the rest of the research team agree that establishing biomarkers that allow doctors to diagnose and monitor patients is a crucial step towards identifying at-risk but not yet symptomatic patients, who could be more responsive to potential therapeutics.</p><p>\"Blood samples can be easily obtained, even at primary care visits. The development of a blood test would eliminate the need for expensive, specialized PET scans or invasive, uncomfortable spinal taps,\" said Wilcock.</p><p>Thanks to the community-based cohort at UK, researchers have found through autopsies that there are mixed causes of dementia and that proteins in the blood are associated with brain changes. They believe those discoveries provide additional evidence that blood biomarkers have a strong potential for diagnosis of Alzheimer\'s and other causes of dementia.</p><p>Up until recent years the only way to know if someone had Alzheimer\'s or a related dementia was after death through an autopsy. Advances in research regarding biomarkers, like this recent study from Sanders-Brown, are allowing researchers to see changes in the brain while people are alive, monitor the disease\'s progression, and test the effectiveness of potential treatments.</p>','2022-03-10 19:25:59.340882','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Kentucky','A recent study shows promising results for a blood test that could be used to identify Alzheimer\'s changes in the brain before the onset of any symptoms, which could result in preventative treatments being used before any memory loss.',1,179,'<li>Zachary Winder, Tiffany L. Sudduth, Sonya Anderson, Ela Patel, Janna Neltner, Barbara J. Martin, Katherine E. Snyder, Erin L. Abner, Gregory A. Jicha, Peter T. Nelson, Donna M. Wilcock. <strong>Examining the association between blood‐based biomarkers and human            post mortem            neuropathology in the University of Kentucky Alzheimer\'s Disease Research Center autopsy cohort</strong>. <em>Alzheimer\'s &amp; Dementia</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/alz.12639\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1002/alz.12639</a>\r\n</li>'),(790,'Hawaiian corals show surprising resilience to warming oceans','hawaiian-corals-show-surprising-resilience-to-warming-oceans','2022-03-10 19:34:49.541233','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">A long-term study of Hawaiian coral species provides a surprisingly optimistic view of how they might survive warmer and more acidic oceans resulting from climate change.</p><p>Researchers found that the three coral species studied did experience significant mortality under conditions simulated to approximate ocean temperatures and acidity expected in the future -- up to about half of some of the species died.</p><p>But the fact that none of them completely died off -- and some actually were thriving by the end of the study -- provides hope for the future of corals, said Rowan McLachlan, who led the study as a doctoral student in earth sciences at The Ohio State University.</p><p>\"We found surprisingly positive outcomes in our study. We don\'t get a lot of that in the coral research field when it comes to the effects of warming oceans,\" said McLachlan, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Oregon State University.</p><p>While the findings are optimistic, they are also more realistic than previous studies, said study senior author Andréa Grottoli, distinguished professor of earth sciences at Ohio State.</p><p>The study lasted 22 months, which is much longer than most similar research, which often spans days to up to five months, Grottoli said.</p><p>\"There are aspects of coral biology that take a long time to adjust. There can be a dip when they are faced with stressors, but after enough time corals can recalibrate and return to a normal state,\" Grottoli said.</p><p>\"A study that lasts five months is only seeing part of the arc of the response.\"</p><p>The research was published today (March 10, 2022) in the journal <em>Scientific Reports</em>.</p><p>Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have led to warmer oceans and about a quarter of the carbon dioxide in the air dissolves into the ocean, causing it to become more acidic. Both rising acidity and temperatures threaten coral, Grottoli said.</p><p>In this study, the researchers collected samples of the three most common coral species in Hawaii: <em>Montipora capitata</em>, <em>Porites compressa</em> and <em>Porites lobata</em>.</p><p>The samples were placed in tanks with four different conditions: a control tank with current ocean conditions; an ocean acidification condition (-0.2 pH units); an ocean warming condition (+2 degrees Celsius); and a condition that combined warming and acidification.</p><p>Results showed that warming oceans will hurt coral species: 61% of corals exposed to the warming conditions survived, compared to 92% exposed to current ocean temperatures.</p><p>The two <em>Porites</em> species were more resilient than <em>M. capitata</em> in the combined warming and acidification condition. Over the course of the study, survival rates were 71% for <em>P. compressa</em>, 56% for <em>P. lobata</em> and 46% for <em>M. capitata</em>.</p><p>\"Of the coral that survived, especially the <em>Porites</em> species, they were coping well, even thriving,\" McLachlan said. \"They were able to adapt to the above-average temperature and acidity.\" For example, the surviving <em>Porites</em> were able to maintain normal growth and metabolism.</p><p>Grottoli said <em>M. capitata</em> may fare better in the real world than they did in this study. The species relies heavily on zooplankton as a food source when under stress, and they may not have had as much available in the study conditions as they would in the ocean.</p><p>\"We may have underestimated their capacity for resilience in this study. It may be higher on the reefs,\" Grottoli said.</p><p>In most ways, though, this study did better than most at creating real-life conditions, the researchers said.</p><p>The corals were put in outside tanks designed to mimic ocean reefs by including sand, rocks, starfish, urchins, crabs and fish. These tanks also allowed natural variability in temperature and pH levels over the course of each day and over the seasons, as corals would have in the ocean.</p><p>\"When you\'re trying to make predictions of the long-term effects of climate change, it is important to mimic the real-world conditions, and our study does that,\" Grottoli said.</p><p>\"We feel strongly that this makes our findings very robust.\"</p><p>The findings regarding the two <em>Porites</em> species may offer particular hope for corals around the world. The <em>Porites</em> are part of a genus of coral that is common across the world and that has a key role in reef building, so their resilience in this study is a good sign, Grottoli said.</p><p>While this study does lead to reasons for optimism, it does not mean that corals face no threat under climate change.</p><p>\"We don\'t know how corals will fare if changes in temperature and acidity are more drastic than what we used in this study,\" McLachlan said. \"Our results do offer some hope but the approximately 50% mortality we saw in some species in this study is not a small thing.\"</p><p>The study also didn\'t include local stressors like pollution and overfishing that may have additional negative impacts on corals in some areas, according to Grottoli.</p><p>Other co-authors were James Price, Agustí Muñoz?Garcia and Noah Weisleder of Ohio State; Stephen Levas of the University of Wisconsin-Whitwater; and Christopher Jury and Robert Toonen of the University of Hawaii at M?noa.</p><p>About 30 Ohio State undergraduate students also worked on the study, some through Ohio State\'s Second-Year Transformational Experience Program.</p><p>Funding for the research was provided to Grottoli from the National Science Foundation and the HW Hoover Foundation and to Jury and Toonen from NSF.</p><p><strong>Story Source:</strong></p>','2022-03-10 19:26:50.442503','uploads/news/download_40.jpg',1,'Ohio State University','A long-term study of Hawaiian coral species provides a surprisingly optimistic view of how they might survive warmer and more acidic oceans resulting from climate change.',1,34,'<li>McLachlan, R.H., Price, J.T., Muñoz-Garcia, A. et al. <strong>Physiological acclimatization in Hawaiian corals following a 22-month shift in baseline seawater temperature and pH</strong>. <em>Scientific Reports</em>, 2022 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-06896-z\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41598-022-06896-z</a>\r\n</li>'),(791,'Treatment length reduced for children with tuberculosis','treatment-length-reduced-for-children-with-tuberculosis','2022-03-12 13:16:58.951362','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">A UCL-led international trial exploring the effectiveness of tuberculosis (TB) treatment in children has led to a change in the World Health Organisation\'s global guidelines for managing the disease.</p><p>The research, published in <em>The New England Journal of Medicine, </em>found that the treatment duration for the majority of children with drug sensitive tuberculosis can be shortened from six to four months, thereby reducing the burden on families and healthcare systems around the world.</p><p>Principal Investigator, Professor Diana Gibb (MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL) said: \"It is estimated that nearly one quarter of children with TB die, but the vast majority (90%) die because they are not diagnosed and started on treatment. A shorter treatment for children with non-severe TB allows savings of on average $17 (£12) per child, which can be used to improve the screening coverage and find the missing children with TB.\"</p><p>Researchers from the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL worked with partners in South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and India on the SHINE study, the first randomised control trial to assess whether children with \'minimal\' TB could be effectively treated with a shorter course of treatment.</p><p>Minimal tuberculosis is non-severe lung or lymph gland TB, where the TB bacteria cannot easily be found in the sputum through smear microscopy (smear negative). In 2020 an estimated 1.1 million children fell ill with TB globally, and unlike adult patients, most of them (approximately two thirds) had a non-severe form of the disease.</p><p>Yet despite children being more likely to have minimal TB, until now their treatment length has been based on the results of trials in adults, requiring six months of a combination of daily medicines. As children on TB treatment often stay home from school, this also increases the burden on caregivers.</p><p>The SHINE team found that treatment for four months using the same standard medicines was as beneficial as a six-month treatment course for children with minimal TB.</p><p>Spending less time on treatment will mean fewer clinic visits, as well as making it easier to complete the full course of medicine. Savings to TB programmes can instead be spent on improving access to screening and diagnostic tests for the disease, which can be poor at lower-level health facilities, as well as on training health care workers.</p><p>First author, Dr Anna Turkova (MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL) said: \"People think that a child with TB must be very sick -- that\'s not true. It is known that two-thirds of children who fall ill with TB every year have non-severe TB and therefore could be treated with shorter treatment.\"</p><p>The trial involved 1,204 children aged from two months up to 16 years with non-severe TB, who were divided randomly into two groups to take either four or six months of treatment with anti-TB medicines. Of the enrolled children, 11% were living with HIV. All children were followed for 18 months after enrolment to see whether their treatment had been successful.</p><p>The results clearly showed that children who received the shorter course did as well as those on the standard six-month treatment, regardless of the age group, country or HIV status, with few and similar side effects in both groups.</p><p>The evidence from SHINE was reviewed by the World Health Organisation Guidelines Development Group, who recommended in August 2021 that in children and adolescents with non-severe, presumed drug susceptible TB, a four-month regimen should be used rather than the standard six-month regimen. Important considerations about how to determine eligibility for the shorter treatment regimen will be described in WHO\'s full consolidated guidelines coming out in March 2022 and in the operational handbook.</p><p>Lead investigator at the Zambian trial site, Dr Chishala Chabala (University Teaching Hospital, Lusaka, Zambia), said: \"Children are often presenting with mild disease. If they are diagnosed on time, they can now be treated with a shorter course. The SHINE results are an opportunity to improve treatment of children with TB.\"</p><p>Trial paediatrician Dr Priyanka Anand Kulkarni (B.J. Medical College, Pune, India) added: \"For parents it\'s very challenging to manage the pill burden and to motivate kids to complete the full duration of treatment. The short treatment course can make it more manageable.\"</p><p>Children living with HIV who also have TB face problems of having to take treatment for both diseases, which complicates HIV treatment options. The shorter TB treatment will help to reduce these issues.</p><p>While undertaking the trial, training and community education helped to diagnose children with mild TB. The SHINE team is now working with its South African partners to improve ways of identifying children with the disease. They hope to explore use of artificial intelligence to read chest radiographs and help clinicians distinguish between severe and non-severe cases.</p><p>The SHINE trial was funded by the Joint Global Health Trials scheme, including the Department for Health and Social Care, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the Medical Research Council and Wellcome. This UK-funded award is part of the EDCTP2 Programme supported by the European Union.</p><p>Jill Jones, Head of Global Health Strategy at the Medical Research Council said: \"It\'s fantastic to see that the trial results from this study have already been taken up in WHO TB guidelines.</p><p>\"TB remains a major health burden for children and so reducing treatment time by two months will have a major impact on the health and wellbeing of children affected by TB.\"</p><p>Additional partners included Stellenbosch University, South Africa; University of Cape Town, South Africa; National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis, India; Radboud University Medical Center, the Netherlands; International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, France; University of Melbourne, Australia; University of York; Imperial College London and University Hospitals Birmingham.</p>','2022-03-10 20:00:38.986178','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University College London','An international trial exploring the effectiveness of tuberculosis (TB) treatment in children has led to a change in the World Health Organization\'s global guidelines for managing the disease.',1,105,'<li>Anna Turkova, Genevieve H. Wills, Eric Wobudeya, Chishala Chabala, Megan Palmer, Aarti Kinikar, Syed Hissar, Louise Choo, Philippa Musoke, Veronica Mulenga, Vidya Mave, Bency Joseph, Kristen LeBeau, Margaret J. Thomason, Robert B. Mboizi, Monica Kapasa, Marieke M. van der Zalm, Priyanka Raichur, Perumal K. Bhavani, Helen McIlleron, Anne-Marie Demers, Rob Aarnoutse, James Love-Koh, James A. Seddon, Steven B. Welch, Stephen M. Graham, Anneke C. Hesseling, Diana M. Gibb, Angela M. Crook. <strong>Shorter Treatment for Nonsevere Tuberculosis in African and Indian Children</strong>. <em>New England Journal of Medicine</em>, 2022; 386 (10): 911 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2104535\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1056/NEJMoa2104535</a>\r\n</li>'),(799,'Ice-ocean interactions are accelerating melting in West Antarctica','ice-ocean-interactions-are-accelerating-melting-in-west-antarctica','2022-03-12 13:15:55.430160','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">An analysis of Antarctica\'s Pope, Smith and Kohler glaciers by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, NASA\'s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the University of Houston and other institutions has revealed an aggressive pattern of retreat connected to high melt rates of floating ice in the Amundsen Sea Embayment sector of West Antarctica.</p><p>In a paper published recently in <em>Nature Geoscience</em>, the team reports that the grounding line -- where ice moves off the land and begins to float -- of Pope Glacier retreated 3.5 kilometers in 3.6 months for an average of nearly 12 kilometers per year in 2017. Between 2016 and 2018, the western portion of Smith Glacier retreated at 2 kilometers per year and Kohler Glacier at 1.3 kilometers per year.</p><p>Observations from 2018 to 2020 showed a slowing of these rates, but the movement is still faster than anticipated by the glaciology community\'s yearly numerical models, according to the researchers.</p><p>\"Alpine glaciers retreat by about 1 kilometer per century, so it\'s alarming to see these Antarctic glaciers receding at as much as 12 times that rate per year,\" said co-author Eric Rignot, UCI Donald Bren Professor and Chancellor\'s Professor of Earth system science and NASA JPL senior research scientist. \"This pace is at the upper limit of what our models can replicate.\"</p><p>The Pine Island, Thwaites, Haynes, Pope, Smith and Kohler glaciers flow into West Antarctica\'s Amundsen Sea Embayment, which covers an area roughly the size of Texas. The volume of non-floating ice in these glaciers is equivalent to a 1.2-meter (nearly 4-foot) increase in global sea level.</p><p>Rignot and his colleagues surveyed the glaciers multiple times per year via synthetic aperture radar interferometry observations from Italy\'s COSMO-SkyMed satellite system. Combining these data with digital elevation models of the ice surface generated through readings from the German Aerospace Center\'s TanDEM-X satellite, the glaciologists were able to gain valuable information about the movement of glacier grounding lines and ice sheet thickness since 2014.</p><p>Rignot said the main culprit in the rapid glacier retreat is the interaction of floating ice and seawater, particularly in newly formed cavities at the ice-ocean boundary.</p><p>\"Pressurized seawater intrudes into sub-glacial gaps and melts grounded ice,\" said lead author Pietro Milillo, an associate project scientist in UCI\'s Department of Earth System Science during this research project who\'s now an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Houston. \"This process has an added effect of reducing basal resistance, which speeds up glacier retreat.\"</p><p>Equivalent to about 6 centimeters of global sea level rise, the Pope, Smith and Kohler glaciers account for a relatively small contribution in the Amundsen Sea Embayment sector. But the physical dynamics of the retreat of these three smaller glaciers that were the focus of the UCI/NASA JPL study are also in effect for the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers, according to Rignot.</p><p>\"The destabilization of the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers, which are also subject to rapid retreat from the intrusion of ocean water beneath the ice, can raise global sea level by more than a meter and cause the destabilization of a huge swath of West Antarctica,\" he said. \"When that happens, which could be in as soon as a few years, we will have a major problem on our hands.\"</p><p>Joining Rignot and Milillo on this project -- which was funded by NASA\'s Cryospheric Sciences Program and the Natural Environment Research Council/National Science Foundation\'s International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration -- were Bernd Scheuchl, associate project scientist, and Jeremie Mouginot, associate researcher, of UCI\'s Department of Earth System Science; Paola Rizzoli, Jose Luis Bueso-Bello and Pau Prats-Iraola of the German Aerospace Center\'s Microwaves and Radar Institute; and Luigi Dini of the Italian Space Agency in Matera.</p>','2022-03-10 22:12:18.048585','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of California - Irvine','An analysis of Antarctica\'s Pope, Smith and Kohler glaciers has revealed an aggressive pattern of retreat connected to high melt rates of floating ice in the Amundsen Sea Embayment sector of West Antarctica.',1,163,'<li>P. Milillo, E. Rignot, P. Rizzoli, B. Scheuchl, J. Mouginot, J. L. Bueso-Bello, P. Prats-Iraola, L. Dini. <strong>Rapid glacier retreat rates observed in West Antarctica</strong>. <em>Nature Geoscience</em>, 2022; 15 (1): 48 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00877-z\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41561-021-00877-z</a>\r\n</li>'),(800,'ECMO may offer sickest COVID patients chance for \'exceptional survival\', study finds','ecmo-may-offer-sickest-covid-patients-chance-for-exceptional-survival-study-finds','2022-03-12 13:14:50.626231','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Some patients with severe COVID-19 who are treated with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) may experience significant lung recovery and return to normal lives with \"meaningful\" long-term outcomes, according to research published online today in <em>The Annals of Thoracic Surgery</em>.</p><p>\"Our work suggests that with appropriately selected patients and aggressive management strategies, the use of ECMO support for severe COVID-19 can result in exceptional early survival, and these patients who leave the hospital without the need for oxygen therapy are very likely to remain alive and well 1 year later,\" said Deane E. Smith, MD, from NYU Langone Health in New York City, New York.</p><p>Dr. Smith and colleagues identified 415 patients who were admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) of NYU Langone Health from March 10, 2020, through May 1, 2020, with confirmed COVID-19 infection. Of these patients, 30 (7.2%) received venovenous (VV) ECMO -- an advanced life support machine that takes over the function of damaged lungs.</p><p>Most of the ICU patients -- 323 (77.8%) -- were intubated for mechanical ventilatory support. However, according to Dr. Smith, the ventilator may damage the lungs further and \"create a vicious cycle\" for patients with severe lung disease or damage who are intubated. In some cases, VV-ECMO may result in decreased support from the ventilator, minimizing damage to the lungs and allowing them to begin healing. Thus, 80 patients (19.3%) were evaluated for VV-ECMO, with 30 (7.2%) eventually receiving it.</p><p>\"These patients received ECMO for severe COVID-19 during the height of the pandemic in New York City -- at a time when very little was known about the likelihood for success,\" said Dr. Smith.</p><p>The researchers reported that 28 patients (93.3%) survived VV-ECMO. These patients were hospitalized for a median of 45 days and supported on VV-ECMO for a median of 19 days. Importantly, 27 patients (90%) were discharged home or to acute rehabilitation. No patients left the hospital dependent on a ventilator, and only one patient required supplemental oxygen.</p><p>According to Dr. Smith, patient selection was a significant factor that impacted the success of VV ECMO. The selection philosophy was that this was not a \"bailout\" or salvage therapy to be employed in the absence of other options. Instead, VV-ECMO was offered to patients believed to have a reasonable chance for survival with this support.</p><p>\"We were struck by the number of young, otherwise healthy patients who were dying from the disease. Because of this, we felt patient selection was very important,\" he said.</p><p>Dr. Smith further explained that the decision to offer ECMO support also was impacted by the severity of lung disease and potential for survival. \"If there was one theme throughout our experience, it was how we would define success. We did not feel that using ECMO to have patients survive simply to go to long-term facilities debilitated and vent-dependent was successful, or not as successful as it could be. In other words, we began with the end in mind. If we were going to offer patients ECMO for severe COVID-19, it was because we believed that we could protect the lungs and allow patients to return to their normal lives at the end of it.\"</p><p>While patient selection was important, a standardized approach to patient management and protecting the lungs was equally valuable. This included: not deviating from lung protective ventilation strategies, early tracheostomy (an opening surgically created through the neck into the trachea) and frequent bronchoscopy (a procedure to look directly at the airways in the lungs using a thin, lighted tube), treatment of coinfection, and standardization of an anticoagulation regimen (to help prevent blood clots). In addition, to help improve oxygenation, the team frequently positioned patients who were not recovering as quickly as expected on their abdomens, also known as \"proning.\"</p><p>\"It\'s worth noting that most of these things such as bronchoscopy or tracheostomy were not considered safe in patients with COVID-19 at the start of the pandemic,\" said Dr. Smith. \"Our team was aggressive with these interventions much earlier than most hospitals.\"</p><p>Importantly, at a median follow-up of 10.8 months since the patients were treated with VV-ECMO, survival was 86.7%, including one patient who underwent lung transplantation. A 6-minute walk test was performed in 16 patients (59.3%) with a median value of 350 meters, which the researchers called \"encouraging.\"</p><p>\"We learned that lung recovery was actually possible. When the pandemic started, that was not clear,\" said Dr. Smith.</p>','2022-03-10 22:12:27.774726','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'The Society of Thoracic Surgeons','Some patients with severe COVID-19 who are treated with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) may experience significant lung recovery and return to normal lives with \'meaningful\' long-term outcomes, according to research.',1,197,'<li>Deane E. Smith, Stephanie H. Chang, Travis C. Geraci, Les James, Zachary N. Kon, Julius A. Carillo, Marjan Alimi, David Williams, Joshua A. Scheinerman, Robert J. Cerfolio, Eugene A. Grossi, Nader Moazami, Aubrey C. Galloway. <strong>One-Year Outcomes With Venovenous Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation Support for Severe COVID-19</strong>. <em>The Annals of Thoracic Surgery</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.athoracsur.2022.01.003\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1016/j.athoracsur.2022.01.003</a>\r\n</li>'),(801,'Cancer patients do benefit from COVID-19 vaccination, study finds','cancer-patients-do-benefit-from-covid-19-vaccination-study-finds','2022-03-12 13:10:33.026221','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Cancer patients who have compromised immune systems due to their disease or therapy remain at high risk for COVID-19 infection. It is why this population was one of the first to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. However, while clinical trials showed vaccination could prevent infection or lessen the risk of severe illness in healthy individuals, it was unclear if those considered immunocompromised would have a similar response. Moffitt Cancer Center researchers quickly put together one of the largest observational studies to date to answer that question. Their results were published today in <em>JAMA Oncology.</em></p><p>The study, led by Drs. Anna R. Giuliano, Shari Pilon-Thomas and Jeffrey E. Lancet, followed 515 patients with varying cancers. The goal was to evaluate if patients had an immune response to the Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccine and if that response differed by diagnosis and treatment.</p><p>Patients provided blood samples before their first and second doses of the vaccine and again one month later. Each sample was tested for COVID-19 antibodies. For comparison, antibody levels were measured for 18 healthy adults receiving the mRNA-1273 vaccine.</p><p>The results showed that most cancer patients had seroconverted, meaning they developed antibodies after receiving the vaccine. Overall, 71.3% of patients seroconverted after the first dose, 90.3% after the second. There were, however, differences among cancer types. Patients with blood cancers had lower seroconversion rates when compared to those with solid tumors, 84.7% versus 98.1%.</p><p>\"Although we did see higher seroconversion rates among solid tumor patients, it is important to point out the antibody titers were lower than seen in healthy adults. Unfortunately, we don\'t know how much antibody a person needs to provide full protection against the virus,\" said Giuliano, founding director of the Center for Immunization and Infection Research in Cancer at Moffitt.</p><p>Blood cancer patients with lymphoid disease, such as chronic lymphocytic leukemia and B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma, had the lowest seroconversion rates. And patients with those diseases who were on active treatment fared even worse.</p><p>\"This finding was to be expected. Lymphoid disease affects B cells, which your immune system needs to make antibodies. If a patient\'s B cells are suppressed, either through the disease process itself or treatment, chances are low they would be able to make antibodies,\" said Lancet, chair of the Malignant Hematology Department at Moffitt.</p><p>Lancet said certain treatments also had an impact on seroconversion. Patients who received anti-CD20 antibodies within six months of vaccination had no immune response. And those treated with BTK inhibitors, Venetoclax and CD19 targeted CAR T-cell therapy had the lowest seroconversion rates.</p><p>The researchers are continuing to follow study participants, taking blood samples at six, 12 and 24 months. The team has also launched a companion study evaluating immune response in cancer patients following a third dose of the mRNA-1273 vaccine.</p><p>Their work is supported by the National Cancer Institute (P30CA076292), the state of Florida (MOD17) and the Investigator-Initiated Studies Program of Merck Sharp &amp; Dohme Corp.</p>','2022-03-10 22:12:30.756435','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute','A recent study followed 515 patients with varying cancers. The goal was to evaluate if patients had an immune response to the Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccine and if that response differed by diagnosis and treatment.',1,152,'<li>Anna R. Giuliano, Jeffrey E. Lancet, Shari Pilon-Thomas, Ning Dong, Akriti G. Jain, Elaine Tan, Somedeb Ball, Shelley S. Tworoger, Erin M. Siegel, Junmin Whiting, Qianxing Mo, Christopher L. Cubitt, Christopher W. Dukes, Jonathan A. Hensel, Robert J. Keenan, Patrick Hwu. <strong>Evaluation of Antibody Response to SARS-CoV-2 mRNA-1273 Vaccination in Patients With Cancer in Florida</strong>. <em>JAMA Oncology</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jamaoncol.2022.0001\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1001/jamaoncol.2022.0001</a>\r\n</li>'),(802,'Cosmic particle accelerator at its limit','cosmic-particle-accelerator-at-its-limit','2022-03-12 13:09:36.428849','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">With the help of special telescopes, researchers have observed a cosmic particle accelerator as never before. Observations made with the gamma ray observatory H.E.S.S. in Namibia show for the first time the course of an acceleration process in a stellar process called a nova, which comprises powerful eruptions on the surface of a white dwarf. A nova creates a shock wave that tears through the surrounding medium, pulling particles with it and accelerating them to extreme energies. Surprisingly, the nova \"RS Ophiuchi\" seems to cause particles to accelerate at speeds reaching the theoretical limit, corresponding to ideal conditions. The research has been published in the journal <em>Science</em>.</p><p>White dwarves are burned-out old stars that have collapsed in on themselves and develop into extremely compact objects. Novae events occur, for example, when a white dwarf is in a binary system with a large star, and the white dwarf gathers material from its more massive companion due to its gravity. Once the gathered material goes over a critical level, it spurs a thermonuclear explosion on the surface of the white dwarf. Some novae are known to repeat. RS Ophiuchi is one of these recurrent novae; there is an explosion on its surface every 15 to 20 years. \"The stars forming the system are at approximately the same distance from each other as the Earth and the Sun,\" explains Alison Mitchell, researcher at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and principal investigator of the H.E.S.S Nova programme. \"When the nova exploded in August 2021, the H.E.S.S. telescopes allowed us to observe a galactic explosion in very-high-energy gamma rays for the first time,\" she continues.</p><p>The research group observed that the particles were accelerated to energies several hundreds of times higher than previously observed in novae. Additionally, the energy released as a result of the explosion was transformed extremely efficiently into accelerated protons and heavy nuclei, such that the particle acceleration reached the maximum speeds calculated in theoretical models. According to Ruslan Konno, one of the lead authors of the study and a doctoral candidate at DESY in Zeuthen, \"The observation that the theoretical limit for particle acceleration can actually be reached in genuine cosmic shock waves has enormous implications for astrophysics. It suggests that the acceleration process could be just as efficient in their much more extreme relatives, supernovae.\"</p><p>During the eruption of RS Ophiuchi, the researchers were able for the first time to follow the development of the nova in real time, allowing them to observe and study cosmic particle acceleration as if they were watching a film. The researchers were able to measure high-energy gamma rays up to one month after the explosion. \"This is the first time we have ever been able to carry out observations like this, and it will allow us to gain even more accurate future insights into how cosmic explosions work,\" explains Dmitry Khangulyan, a theoretical astrophysicist at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, Japan. \"We may, for example, discover that novae contribute to the ever-present sea of cosmic rays and therefore have a considerable effect on the dynamics of their immediate surroundings.\" Cosmic rays are immense showers of energetic subatomic particles that come from every direction in space at the same time, and which have an unclear exact origin.</p><p>Specific telescopes were required for these measurements. The H.E.S.S. facility (which stands for High Energy Stereoscopic System) in Namibia consists of five Cherenkov telescopes that are used to investigate gamma rays from space. A new, highly sensitive state-of-the-art camera -- known as FlashCam -- was recently installed in the largest telescope. The FlashCam design is currently being further developed for the next generation gamma-ray observatory, the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). \"The new camera has been in use since late 2019, and this measurement shows just how much potential the latest generation of cameras has,\" explains Simon Steinmaßl, a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, who was involved in analysing the camera data.</p><p>The telescopes were pointed towards the nova at very short notice after amateur astronomers first reported the nova to the astrophysics community. The success of the observation was due in no small part to the rapid reaction of the researchers and the wider astronomical community, paving the way for extensive subsequent observations. H.E.S.S. Director Stefan Wagner, a professor at the regional observatory in Heidelberg, explains, \"Over the next few years, research using the CTA telescopes will show whether this type of nova is special.\" In addition, researchers now have a clearer idea of what to look for. This gives rise to a number of new possibilities for gaining a better understanding and being better able to explain events linked to novae. \"This measurement is a further success in gamma-ray astronomy and an encouraging sign that we will be able to study many more cosmic explosions with H.E.S.S. and gamma-ray telescopes of the future.\"</p><p><strong>Story Source:</strong></p>','2022-03-10 22:12:55.373064','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY','With the help of special telescopes, researchers have observed a cosmic particle accelerator as never before. Observations made with the gamma ray observatory H.E.S.S. in Namibia show for the first time the course of an acceleration process in a stellar process called a nova, which comprises powerful eruptions on the surface of a white dwarf. A nova creates a shock wave that tears through the surrounding medium, pulling particles with it and accelerating them to extreme energies. Surprisingly, the nova \'RS Ophiuchi\' seems to cause particles to accelerate at speeds reaching the theoretical limit, corresponding to ideal conditions.',1,195,'<li>The H.E.S.S. collabroation. <strong>Time-resolved hadronic particle acceleration in the recurrent nova RS Ophiuchi</strong>. <em>Science</em>, 2022 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.abn0567\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1126/science.abn0567</a>\r\n</li>'),(809,'One step closer to artificial rhino eggs','one-step-closer-to-artificial-rhino-eggs','2022-03-12 13:08:27.923464','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">To prevent the extinction of the northern white rhino, the international consortium BioRescue is attempting to create artificial egg cells from stem cells. A team led by MDC\'s Sebastian Diecke and Micha Drukker of Leiden University has now revealed <em>in Scientific Reports</em> that they are one step closer to achieving this goal.</p><p>Fatu and Najin are the last two northern white rhinos in the world -- and they are both female. As a result, this subspecies can no longer reproduce naturally, and extinction seems inevitable. However, the BioRescue consortium is working against the clock to ensure that the northern white rhino does not disappear from our planet forever. The researchers are pursuing a two-pronged approach: First, they are developing advanced assisted reproduction techniques; second, they want to use skin cells taken from the northern white rhinoceros to create induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells in the lab, which can eventually develop into immature egg cells, or oocytes. The team from the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC), together with partners in Munich, the Netherlands and Japan, has now taken a major step towards this goal. In the journal <em>Scientific Reports</em>, they reveal that they have managed to obtain and conduct in-depth studies on pluripotent rhino stem cells. \"Our paper sheds new light on pluripotency -- the ability of stem cells to differentiate into all cells of the body,\" says lead author Dr. Vera Zywitza of the Pluripotent Stem Cells Platform at the MDC, which is led by Dr. Sebastian Diecke. \"It therefore represents an important milestone on the road to artificially generated rhino oocytes.\"</p><p>The BioRescue project has received €4 million in funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The international consortium, which includes the MDC, is led by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW) and cooperates with many more partners, including Helmholtz Zentrum München in Germany.</p><p><strong>The fine art of cell engineering</strong></p><p>iPS cells in a petri dish have the potential to develop into any cells of the body -- including the primordial germ cells that the BioRescue scientists want to cultivate. The researchers are working closely with the lab of Professor Katsuhiko Hayashi, a Japanese stem cell researcher at Kyushu University. In 2016, Hayashi succeeded in generating egg cells from the skin of mice, artificially fertilizing these cells, and implanting them in females. The mice conceived by this method were born healthy and fertile.</p><p>Stem cell researcher Professor Micha Drukker and his teams at Helmholtz Zentrum München and at Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Reserach at Leiden University used a process known as episomal reprogramming to successfully produce northern white rhino iPS cells. This involved the researchers introducing foreign DNA molecules called \"plasmids\" into skin cells they had obtained. These plasmids contained genes to reprogram the skin cells into iPS cells. The rhino stem cells generated in this way are remarkably similar to their human equivalent. \"Viewed under the microscope, they are barely distinguishable from human iPS cells,\" says Drukker, adding: \"They also respond very similarly to external influences.\"</p><p><strong>A promising start for germline cell cultivation</strong></p><p>iPS cells have different states: they can be naïve -- the \"ground state\" of pluripotency -- or primed. Cells in the latter state are thought to have reached a slightly more advanced stage of embryonic development. Experiments with stem cells generated from mice show that they are particularly good at producing germline cells when converting from the primed to the naïve-like state. However, when the scientists first attempted to convert the rhino cells to a naïve-like state, the cells died. The researchers therefore introduced a gene into the rhino cells that prevents cell death -- and with this, they successfully obtained naïve iPS cells. \"We have characterized the cells in detail by, among other things, analyzing transcriptome data,\" Zywitza explains. \"The successful conversion to a naïve-like state of pluripotency is a promising starting point for generating germline cells.\"</p><p>Nevertheless, Zywitza and her colleagues cannot yet move onto the next stage. \"The iPS cells we have cultivated contain persistent foreign genetic material -- namely, the reprogramming factors and the gene that prevents cell death,\" Zywitza explains. \"This means we can\'t use them to make germ cells, as there is a risk these would be pathologically altered.\" But these cells are still extremely useful for studying rhino stem cells in general and gaining a better understanding of their different states in specific. With their help, scientists can explore the molecular mechanisms that take place in stem cells. \"For example, we can study why the gestation period of a rhinoceros is 16 months whereas that of a mouse is only 21 days, or how organs develop in different species,\" the scientist explains. This teaches us a lot about evolution.\"</p><p><strong>Ovarian tissue is needed too</strong></p><p>In the meantime, Diecke\'s team has generated further iPS cells. They used RNA viruses instead of plasmids to introduce the reprogramming factors. These new iPS cells do not contain anything that does not belong there. Now the scientists are trying to produce primordial germ cells from them.</p><p>And that\'s not all: primordial germ cells only mature into egg cells when they are surrounded by ovarian tissue. It is nearly impossible to obtain such tissue from living or deceased rhinos. \"So we have to create not only primordial germ cells but also ovarian tissue,\" Zywitza explains. The Berlin-based scientists are working closely with Hayashi to achieve this. Last year he successfully cultivated ovarian tissue from mouse stem cells.</p><p><strong>14 embryos created so far using assisted reproduction</strong></p><p>Meanwhile, progress is also being made with assisted reproduction. In January of this year, scientists at IZW, in collaboration with the Kenya Wildlife Service, the Wildlife Research and Training Institute, the Dv?r Králové Safari Park, and Ol Pejeta Conservancy, collected immature egg cells called oocytes from Fatu. These were matured at Avantea\'s laboratories in Italy and inseminated with thawed sperm from a deceased bull. There are now a total of 14 northern white rhino embryos, which are stored in liquid nitrogen at minus 196 degrees Celsius. In the near future the embryos will be implanted into southern white rhino surrogates, with the aim of creating a healthy northern white rhino calf.</p><p>The production of 14 embryos represents a great success in reproductive biology, but this is not a large amount if the goal is to rebuild the northern white population to a self-sustaining level. \"Najin and Fatu are also closely related and their genetic makeup is largely identical,\" says Professor Thomas Hildebrandt of IZW, who leads the BioRescue research consortium. \"Due to age and reproductive tract issues, we were unable to collect any oocytes from Najin that could be developed into embryos, so all 14 embryos are from Fatu. We therefore urgently need a complementary strategy for creating gametes -- eggs and sperm -- from significantly more individuals.\"</p><p><strong>Protecting the world\'s species -- before it\'s too late</strong></p><p>\"Generating functional eggs of the northern white rhinoceros would be the crowning achievement of our research,\" Diecke says. This approach could serve as a model for other endangered species. If reproduction from stem cells works, the technique could be used to revive many more threatened or already extinct species. More than 10,000 living cell cultures from more than 1,000 endangered species are stored in the Frozen Zoo at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center for Conservation Research in San Diego and in IZW\'s biobank in Berlin. \"This invaluable resource could be used to bring back species from the brink of extinction,\" Diecke says. The northern white rhino would then be just the beginning -- although he adds that he \"would rather we never had to use our technique and did more to preserve species before it was too late.\"</p><p>But for Zywitza, one thing is certain: If a northern white rhino is born someday thanks to stem cell technologies, she would love to meet it.</p><p><strong>Story Source:</strong></p>','2022-03-10 23:14:02.198819','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association','To prevent the extinction of the northern white rhino, researchers are attempting to create artificial egg cells from stem cells. A team has now revealed that they are one step closer to achieving this goal.',1,53,'<li>Vera Zywitza, Ejona Rusha, Dmitry Shaposhnikov, Jorge Ruiz-Orera, Narasimha Telugu, Valentyna Rishko, Masafumi Hayashi, Geert Michel, Lars Wittler, Jan Stejskal, Susanne Holtze, Frank Göritz, Robert Hermes, Jichang Wang, Zsuzsanna Izsvák, Silvia Colleoni, Giovanna Lazzari, Cesare Galli, Thomas B. Hildebrandt, Katsuhiko Hayashi, Sebastian Diecke, Micha Drukker. <strong>Naïve-like pluripotency to pave the way for saving the northern white rhinoceros from extinction</strong>. <em>Scientific Reports</em>, 2022; 12 (1) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-07059-w\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1038/s41598-022-07059-w</a>\r\n</li>'),(811,'A first step towards quantum algorithms: Minimizing the guesswork of a quantum ensemble','a-first-step-towards-quantum-algorithms-minimizing-the-guesswork-of-a-quantum-ensemble','2022-03-12 13:06:19.114497','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Given the rapid pace at which technology is developing, it comes as no surprise that quantum technologies will become commonplace within decades. A big part of ushering in this new age of quantum computing requires a new understanding of both classical and quantum information and how the two can be related to each other.</p><p>Before one can send classical information across quantum channels, it needs to be encoded first. This encoding is done by means of quantum ensembles. A quantum ensemble refers to a set of quantum states, each with its own probability. To accurately receive the transmitted information, the receiver has to repeatedly \'guess\' the state of the information being sent. This constitutes a cost function that is called \'guesswork.\' Guesswork refers to the average number of guesses required to correctly guess the state.</p><p>The concept of guesswork has been studied at length in classical ensembles, but the subject is still new for quantum ensembles. Recently, a research team from Japan -- consisting of Prof. Takeshi Koshiba of Waseda University, Michele Dall\'Arno from Waseda University and Kyoto University, and Prof. Francesco Buscemi from Nagoya University -- has derived analytical solutions to the guesswork problem subject to a finite set of conditions. \"<em>The guesswork problem is fundamental in many scientific areas in which machine learning techniques or artificial intelligence are used. Our results trailblaze an algorithmic aspect of the guesswork problem</em>,\" says Koshiba. Their findings are published in <em>IEEE Transactions on Information Theory</em>.</p><p>To begin with, the researchers considered a common formalism of quantum circuits that relates the transmitted state of a quantum ensemble <em>? </em>to the quantum measurement ?. They next introduced the probability distributions for both the quantum ensemble and the numberings obtained from the quantum measurement. They then established the guesswork function. The guesswork function maps any pair of ? and ? into the expectation value of the t<sup>th </sup>guess (where t refers to the guess number), averaged over the probability distribution of the t<sup>th </sup>guess being correct. Finally, they minimized the guesswork function over the elements of ? and used this result to derive analytical solutions to the guesswork problem subject to a finite set of conditions.</p><p>These solutions included the explicit solution to a qubit ensemble with a uniform probability distribution. \"<em>Previously, results for analytical solutions have been known only for binary and symmetric ensembles. Our calculation for ensembles with a uniform probability distribution extends these</em>,\" explains Koshiba. The research team also calculated the solutions for a qubit regular polygonal ensemble, and a qubit regular polyhedral ensemble.</p><p><em>\"Guesswork is a very basic scientific problem, but there is very little research on quantum guesswork and even less on the algorithmic implications of quantum guesswork. Our paper goes a little way towards filling that gap</em>,\" concludes Koshiba.</p><p>While the consequences of these findings may not be immediately obvious, in the future they are sure to have a major influence on quantum science, such as quantum chemistry for drug development and quantum software for quantum computing.</p>','2022-03-10 23:14:09.538698','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Waseda University','A quantum ensemble -- a set of quantum states with their corresponding probabilities -- is essential to the encoding of classical information for transmission over quantum channels. But receivers must be able to \'guess\' the transmitted quantum state, incurring a cost called \'guesswork.\' Recently, researchers have derived analytical solutions of the guesswork problem for when the ensemble is subject to a finite set of conditions. The results constitute a first step towards future algorithms for quantum software.',1,193,'<li>Michele Dall\'Arno, Francesco Buscemi, Takeshi Koshiba. <strong>Guesswork of a quantum ensemble</strong>. <em>IEEE Transactions on Information Theory</em>, 2022; 1 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TIT.2022.3146463\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1109/TIT.2022.3146463</a>\r\n</li>'),(812,'\'Scents\' of alarm: Volatile chemical signals from damaged plants warn neighbors about herbivore attacks','scents-of-alarm-volatile-chemical-signals-from-damaged-plants-warn-neighbors-about-herbivore-attacks','2022-03-12 13:05:01.521862','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Animals often use highly specific signals to warn their herd about approaching predators. Surprisingly, similar behaviors are also observed among plants. Shedding more light on this phenomenon, Tokyo University of Science researchers have discovered one such mechanism. Using Arabidopsis thaliana as a model system, the researchers have shown that herbivore-damaged plants give off volatile chemical \"scents\" that trigger epigenetic modifications in the defense genes of neighboring plants. These genes subsequently trigger anti-herbivore defense systems.</p><p>In the wild, many species of animals, especially those with known predators, signal each other of imminent dangers using a variety of techniques, ranging from scent to sound. Now, thanks to multiple studies on the topic, we have reason to believe that plants, too, can sound an alarm under threat of an attack.</p><p>Prior studies have shown that when grown near mint plants, soybean and field mustard (<em>Brassica rapa</em>) plants display heightened defense properties against herbivore pests by activating defense genes in their leaves, as a result of \"eavesdropping\" on mint volatiles. Put simply, if mint leaves get damaged after a herbivore attack, the plants in their immediate vicinity respond by activating their anti-herbivore defense systems in response to the chemical signals released by the damaged mint plant. To understand this mechanism better, a team of researchers from multiple Japanese research institutes, including Tokyo University of Science, studied these responses in <em>Arabidopsis thaliana,</em> a model plant used widely in biological studies.</p><p>\"Surrounding undamaged plants exposed to odors emitted from plants eaten by pests can develop resistance to the pests. Although the induction of the expression of defense genes in odor-responsive plants is key to this resistance, the precise molecular mechanisms for turning the induced state on or off have not been understood. In this study, we hypothesized that histone acetylation, or the so-called epigenetic regulation, is involved in the phenomenon of resistance development,\" explains Dr. Gen-ichiro Arimura, Professor at the Tokyo University of Science and one of the authors of the study.</p><p>Their findings have recently been published in the journal <em>Plant Physiology</em>.</p><p>First, researchers exposed the plants to β-ocimene, a volatile organic compound often released by plants in response to attacks by herbivores like <em>Spodoptera litura</em>. Next, the researchers tried to determine the exact mechanism of action of volatile-chemical-activated plant defense.</p><p>The results were interesting―defense traits were induced in Arabidopsis leaves, presumably through \"epigenetic\" mechanisms, which refer to gene regulation that occurs because of external environmental influences. In this case, the volatile chemicals released by the damaged plants enhanced histone acetylation and the expression of defense gene regulators, including the ethylene response factor genes \"ERF8\" and \"ERF104.\" The team found a specific set of histone acetyltransferase enzymes (HAC1, HAC5, and HAM1) were responsible for the induction and maintenance of the anti-herbivore properties.</p><p>The researchers are excited about their discovery of the role that epigenetics has to play in plant defense. According to them, the communication between plants via volatile compounds (known as the \"talking plants\" phenomenon) can potentially be applied to organic cultivation systems. This may increase the pest resistance of plants and effectively reduce our massive dependence on pesticides.</p><p>\"The effective use of plants\' natural survival strategies in production systems will bring us closer to the realization of a sustainable society that simultaneously solves environmental and food problems,\" concludes Dr. Arimura.</p><p><br></p>','2022-03-10 23:14:24.908431','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Tokyo University of Science','Animals often use highly specific signals to warn their herd about approaching predators. Surprisingly, similar behaviors are also observed among plants. Shedding more light on this phenomenon, researchers have discovered one such mechanism. Using Arabidopsis thaliana as a model system, the researchers have shown that herbivore-damaged plants give off volatile chemical \'scents\' that trigger epigenetic modifications in the defense genes of neighboring plants. These genes subsequently trigger anti-herbivore defense systems.',1,54,'<li>Haruki Onosato, Genya Fujimoto, Tomota Higami, Takuya Sakamoto, Ayaka Yamada, Takamasa Suzuki, Rika Ozawa, Sachihiro Matsunaga, Motoaki Seki, Minoru Ueda, Kaori Sako, Ivan Galis, Gen-ichiro Arimura. <strong>Sustained defense response via volatile signaling and its epigenetic transcriptional regulation</strong>. <em>Plant Physiology</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/plphys/kiac077\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1093/plphys/kiac077</a>\r\n</li>'),(813,'The start of the birth of planets in a binary star system observed','the-start-of-the-birth-of-planets-in-a-binary-star-system-observed','2022-03-12 13:03:18.498462','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Astronomers have observed primordial material that may be giving birth to three planetary systems around a binary star in unprecedented detail.</p><p>Bringing together three decades of study, an international group of scientists have observed a pair of stars orbiting each other, to reveal that these stars are surrounded by disks of gas and dust. The material within the newly discovered disks could be the beginnings of new planet systems which in the future orbit the binary stars.</p><p>Using the Very Large Array (VLA) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), the scientific group has studied the binary star SVS 13, still in its embryonic phase. This work has provided the best description available so far on a binary system in formation.</p><p>Models of planet formation suggest that planets form by the slow aggregation of ice and dust particles in protoplanetary disks around forming stars. Usually these models consider only single stars, such as the Sun. However, most stars form binary systems, in which two stars rotate around a common centre. Very little is yet known about how planets are born around these important twin star systems, in which the gravitational interaction between the two stars plays an essential role.</p><p>\"Our results have revealed that each star has a disk of gas and dust around it and that, in addition, a larger disk is forming around both stars,\" says Ana Karla Díaz-Rodríguez, a researcher at the IAA-CSIC and the UK ALMA Regional Centre (UK-ARC) at The University of Manchester, who leads the work.</p><p>\"This outer disk shows a spiral structure that is feeding matter into the individual disks, and in all of them planetary systems could form in the future. This is clear evidence for the presence of disks around both stars and the existence of a common disk in a binary system.\"</p><p>The binary system SVS 13, consisting of two stellar embryos with a total mass similar to that of the Sun, is relatively close to us, about 980 light-years away in the Perseus molecular cloud allowing its detailed study. The two stars in the system are very close to each other, with a distance of only about ninety times that between the Earth and the Sun.</p><p>The work has made it possible to study the composition of gas, dust and ionized matter in the system. In addition, nearly thirty different molecules have been identified around both protostars, including thirteen complex organic molecules precursors of life (seven of them detected for the first time in this system). \"This means that when planets begin to form around these two suns, the building blocks of life will be there,\" says Ana Karla Díaz-Rodríguez (IAA-CSIC / UK-ARC).</p><p>The scientific team has used the observations of SVS 13 obtained by the VLA over thirty years, together with new data from ALMA, and has followed the motion of both stars over this period, which has allowed their orbit to be traced, as well as the geometry and orientation of the system, along with many fundamental parameters, such as the mass of the protostars, the mass of the disks, and their temperature. Gary Fuller of the University of Manchester, a collaborator on the project, says \"This work shows how careful, systematic studies of young stars can provide a remarkably detailed view of their structure and properties.\"</p><p>\"At the IAA we began studying this system twenty-five years ago. We were surprised when we discovered that SVS 13 was a radio binary, because only one star is seen in the optical. Normally, stellar embryos are detected in radio, but they only become visible at the end of the gestation process. It was very strange to discover a pair of twin stars where one of them seemed to have evolved much faster than the other. We designed several experiments to get more details and to find out if in such a case either of the stars could form planets. Now we have seen that both stars are very young, and that both can form planets,\" says Guillem Anglada, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC) who is coordinating the studies of SVS 13.</p><p>SVS 13 has generated much debate in the scientific literature, as some studies consider it to be extremely young and others consider it to be in a later stage. This new study, probably the most complete study of a binary star system in formation, not only sheds light on the nature of the two protostars and their environment, but also provides crucial parameters for testing numerical simulations of the early stages of binary and multiple system formation.</p>','2022-03-10 23:14:29.719458','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Manchester','Astronomers have observed primordial material that may be giving birth to three planetary systems around a binary star in unprecedented detail.',1,192,'<li>John J. Tobin, Stella S. R. Offner, Kaitlin M. Kratter, S. Thomas Megeath, Patrick D. Sheehan, Leslie W. Looney, Ana Karla Diaz-Rodriguez, Mayra Osorio, Guillem Anglada, Sarah I. Sadavoy, Elise Furlan, Dominique Segura-Cox, Nicole Karnath, Merel L. R. van ’t Hoff, Ewine F. van Dishoeck, Zhi-Yun Li, Rajeeb Sharma, Amelia M. Stutz, Łukasz Tychoniec. <strong>The VLA/ALMA Nascent Disk And Multiplicity (VANDAM) Survey of Orion Protostars. V. A Characterization of Protostellar Multiplicity</strong>. <em>The Astrophysical Journal</em>, 2022; 925 (1): 39 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ac36d2\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.3847/1538-4357/ac36d2</a>\r\n</li>'),(814,'A cautionary tale of machine learning uncertainty','a-cautionary-tale-of-machine-learning-uncertainty','2022-03-12 13:02:04.624749','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">A new analysis shows that researchers using machine learning methods could risk underestimating uncertainties in their final results.</p><p>The Standard Model of particle physics offers a robust theoretical picture of the fundamental particles, and most fundamental forces which compose the universe. All the same, there are several aspects of the universe: from the existence of dark matter, to the oscillating nature of neutrinos, which the model can\'t explain -- suggesting that the mathematical descriptions it provides are incomplete. While experiments so far have been unable to identify significant deviations from the Standard Model, physicists hope that these gaps could start to appear as experimental techniques become increasingly sensitive.</p><p>A key element of these improvements is the use of machine learning algorithms, which can automatically improve upon classical techniques by using higher-dimensional inputs, and extracting patterns from many training examples. Yet in new analysis published in <em>EPJ C</em>, Aishik Ghosh at the University of California, Irvine, and Benjamin Nachman at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA, show that researchers using machine learning methods could risk underestimating uncertainties in their final results.</p><p>In this context, machine learning algorithms can be trained to identify particles and forces within the data collected by experiments such as high-energy collisions within particle accelerators -- and to identify new particles, which don\'t match up with the theoretical predictions of the Standard Model. To train machine learning algorithms, physicists typically use simulations of experimental data, which are based on advanced theoretical calculations. Afterwards, the algorithms can then classify particles in real experimental data.</p><p>These training simulations may be incredibly accurate, but even so, they can only provide an approximation of what would really be observed in a real experiment. As a result, researchers need to estimate the possible differences between their simulations and true nature -- giving rise to theoretical uncertainties. In turn, these differences can weaken or even bias a classifier algorithm\'s ability to identify fundamental particles.</p><p>Recently, physicists have increasingly begun to consider how machine learning approaches could be developed which are insensitive to these <em>estimated</em> theoretical uncertainties. The idea here is to decorrelate the performance of these algorithms from imperfections in the simulations. If this could be done effectively, it would allow for algorithms whose uncertainties are far lower than traditional classifiers trained on the same simulations. But as Ghosh and Nachman argue, the estimation of theoretical uncertainties essentially involves well-motivated guesswork -- making it crucial for researchers to be cautious about this insensitivity.</p><p>In particular, the duo argues there is a real danger that these techniques will simply deceive the unsuspecting researcher by reducing only the estimate of the uncertainty, rather than the true uncertainty. A machine learning procedure that is insensitive to the estimated theory uncertainty may not be insensitive to the actual difference between nature, and the approximations used to simulate the training data. This in turn could lead physicists to artificially underestimate their theory uncertainties if they aren\'t careful. In high-energy particle collisions, for example, it may cause a classifier to incorrectly confirm the presence of certain fundamental particles.</p><p>In presenting this \'cautionary tale\', Ghosh and Nachman hope that future assessments of the Standard Model which use machine learning will not be caught out by incorrectly shrinking uncertainty estimates. This could enable physicists to better ensure reliability in their results, even as experimental techniques become ever more sensitive. In turn, it could pave the way for experiments which finally reveal long-awaited gaps in the Standard Model\'s predictions.</p>','2022-03-10 23:14:32.422934','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Springer','A new analysis shows that researchers using machine learning methods could risk underestimating uncertainties in their final results.',1,68,'<li>Aishik Ghosh, Benjamin Nachman. <strong>A cautionary tale of decorrelating theory uncertainties</strong>. <em>The European Physical Journal C</em>, 2022; 82 (1) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-022-10012-w\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1140/epjc/s10052-022-10012-w</a>\r\n</li>'),(815,'The cellular cleaning program autophagy helps in wound healing','the-cellular-cleaning-program-autophagy-helps-in-wound-healing','2022-03-12 13:01:19.283925','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">A team led by Maria Leptin has shown in the fruit fly Drosophila that autophagy, a mechanism of stress responses in cells, plays an important role in wound healing: When a wound heals, the process of autophagy is initiated and regulated by the protein complex TORC1. This is a newly discovered function of autophagy and the first evidence that autophagy controls the formation of syncytia (multinucleated cells). While syncytia are also formed during the development of muscles or the placenta, their role in wound healing and the involvement of autophagy are new discoveries. The article, \'Autophagy-mediated plasma membrane removal promotes the formation of epithelial syncytia\' has been published in The EMBO Journal.</p><p>Autophagy is a cellular recycling mechanism that has been conserved over the course of evolution from yeast to humans. Autophagic vesicles, small bubbles within the cell, recognize, engulf, and digest invaders such as bacteria and viruses or the cell\'s own material such as accumulated protein clumps. The material is recycled, thus providing the cell with raw materials under stressful conditions. During aging, infection, or disease, when proper cellular function declines and harmful products accumulate in organs, autophagy function is instrumental in restoring health. In turn, dysfunction of autophagy increases the risk of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer\'s and Parkinson\'s, as well as cancer and infections.</p><p>In the new study, scientists from the CECAD Cluster of Excellence for Aging Research, the Center for Molecular Medicine Cologne (CMMC), and the Institute of Genetics (all at the University of Cologne) investigated the function of autophagy in wound healing and in the healthy and uninjured epidermis (skin) of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. In the process studied here, autophagy hence did not digest viruses or bacteria, but the cell\'s own cell membrane, so that boundaries between cells broke down and a large cell with multiple nuclei was formed.</p><p>The team observed that autophagy is increased in the cells surrounding the wound. This leads to a selective breakdown of the membranes that connect the cells. Eventually, a large, multinucleated cell (syncytium) is formed. \'When we genetically triggered autophagy in healthy, uninjured skin, we again observed the same phenomenon: the membrane between adjacent cells is lost and large patches of multinucleated syncytia form throughout the epidermis,\' said Parisa Kakanj, first author of the study. \'It is surprising that the formation of syncytia, which we already know to occur in the formation of some organs such as muscles or placenta, also occurs in wound healing. The role of autophagy in this may also be important for our understanding of disease mechanisms, since multinuclear cells are also found in tumors and infected tissues.\'</p><p>In previous studies of muscle and placenta development, the formation of a syncytium was shown to provide mechanical stability and a strong barrier function to protect tissues from pathogens. Whether the process performs similar functions in wound healing is not yet clear. This will be the subject of future studies.</p><p>The investigators also observed an interaction of the autophagic vesicles with the lateral plasma membrane of the cell in the healthy, unwounded epidermis as well as in the cells surrounding the wound. In this context, proper function of the TORC1 protein complex, which has a central regulatory function in cell metabolism, and here also controls autophagy, is crucial to prevent destruction of the epidermis by autophagy. Based on these and other observations, the team hypothesizes that the lateral plasma membrane is a potential source of the autophagic vesicles. \'Autophagy is a double-edged sword, the precise extent and spatiotemporal activity of which determines whether it is useful or problematic,\' said Maria Leptin. To be able to use the beneficial side of autophagy for prevention and therapy, it is even more important to understand how autophagy is activated and how autophagic vesicles are formed.</p>','2022-03-10 23:14:34.337564','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Cologne','Scientists have shown that the recycling program of cells, autophagy, leads to the fusion of several single cells into multinucleated cell units during wound healing.',1,191,'<li>Parisa Kakanj, Sourabh Bhide, Bernard Moussian, Maria Leptin. <strong>Autophagy–mediated plasma membrane removal promotes the formation of epithelial syncytia</strong>. <em>The EMBO Journal</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.15252/embj.2021109992\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.15252/embj.2021109992</a>\r\n</li>'),(817,'Using cell phone GNSS Networks to monitor crustal deformation','using-cell-phone-gnss-networks-to-monitor-crustal-deformation','2022-03-12 13:00:13.438770','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">A paper published February 9 in <em>Earth Planets and Space</em> by Japanese Earth Science researchers analyzed the potential of a dense Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) network, which is installed at cell phone base stations, to monitor crustal deformation as an early warning indicator of seismic activity. The results showed that data from a cell phone network can rival the precision of data from a government-run GNSS network, while providing more complete geographic coverage.</p><p>Crustal deformation is monitored around plate boundaries, active faults, and volcanoes to assess the accumulation of strains that lead to significant seismic events. GNSS networks have been constructed worldwide in areas that are vulnerable to volcanoes and earthquakes, such as in Hawai\'i, California, and Japan. Data from these networks can be analyzed in real time to serve in tsunami forecasting and earthquake early warning systems.</p><p>Japan\'s GNSS network (GEONET) is operated by the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan. While GEONET has been fundamental in earth science research, its layout of 20-25 kilometers on average between sites limits monitoring of crustal deformation for some areas. For example, magnitude 6-7 earthquakes on active faults in inland Japan have fault lengths of 20-40 kilometers; the GEONET site spacing is slightly insufficient to measure their deformation with suitable precision for use in predictive models.</p><p>However, Japanese cell phone carriers have constructed GNSS networks to improve locational information for purposes like automated driving. The new study examines the potential of a GNSS network built by the carrier SoftBank Corporation to play a role in monitoring crustal deformation. With 3300 sites in Japan, this private company oversees 2.5 times the number of sites as the government GEONET system.</p><p>\"By utilizing these observation networks, we aim to understand crustal deformation phenomena in higher resolution and to search for unknown phenomena that have not been found so far,\" explained study author Yusaku Ohta, a geoscientist and assistant professor at the Graduate School of Science, Tohoku University.</p><p>The study used raw data provided by SoftBank GNSS from cell phone base stations to evaluate its quality in monitoring crustal deformation. Two datasets were analyzed, one from a seismically quiet nine-day period in September of 2020 in Japan\'s Miyagi Prefecture, the other from a nine-day period that included a 7.3 magnitude earthquake off the Fukushima coast on February 13, 2021, in Fukushima Prefecture.</p><p>The study authors found that SoftBank\'s dense GNSS network can monitor crustal deformation with reasonable precision. \"We have shown that crustal deformation can be monitored with an unprecedentedly high spatial resolution by the original, very dense GNSS observation networks of cell phone carriers that are being deployed for the advancement of location-based services,\" said earth scientist Mako Ohzono, associate professor at Hokkaido University.</p><p>Looking ahead, they project that combining the SoftBank sites with the government-run GEONET sites could yield better spatial resolution results for a more detailed fault model. In the study area of the Fukushima Prefecture, combining the networks would result in an average density of GNSS sites of one per 5.7 kilometers. \"It indicates that these private sector GNSS observation networks can play a complementary role to GNSS networks operated by public organizations,\" said Ohta.</p><p>The study paved the way for considering synergy between public and private GNSS networks as a resource for seismic monitoring in Japan and elsewhere. \"The results are important for understanding earthquake phenomena and volcanic activity, which can contribute to disaster prevention and mitigation,\" noted Ohzono.</p>','2022-03-10 23:14:40.945175','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Tohoku University','The Global Navigation Satellite System associated with a Japanese cell phone carrier can enhance monitoring of crustal deformation changes for earthquake early warning models.',1,122,'<li>Yusaku Ohta, Mako Ohzono. <strong>Potential for crustal deformation monitoring using a dense cell phone carrier Global Navigation Satellite System network</strong>. <em>Earth, Planets and Space</em>, 2022; 74 (1) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40623-022-01585-7\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1186/s40623-022-01585-7</a>\r\n</li>'),(818,'Predicting tropical fish patterns in Japan','predicting-tropical-fish-patterns-in-japan','2022-03-12 12:59:14.411181','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Scientists have developed a model that predicts six tropical fish species will expand into northern parts of Japan as sea temperatures rise.</p><p>A new study forecasts how global climate change will affect tropical fish species in Japan. The research, published in the journal <em>Frontiers in Built Environmen</em>t, predicts that six tropical fish species will expand northward into temperate regions of the Japanese coast as sea temperatures rise.</p><p>Climate change is causing temperate coastal waters to get warmer, affecting the abundance, distribution and types of marine species that live there. In Japan, water temperature in coastal regions has risen by 1.16°C degrees over the last 100 years, which is twice the global average of 0.56°C degrees.</p><p>Tropicalization -- the increase in species originating from tropical waters -- will affect humans in many ways. For example, rising numbers of toxic harmful species can be detrimental for fisheries and leisure, increasing the risk of food poisoning or injuries when swimming. Increases in herbivorous fish can lead to loss of seagrass and seaweed beds, reducing carbon uptake. On the other hand, rising numbers of tropical reef fish can attract tourism and provide opportunities for the aquarium fish trade and environmental education.</p><p>\"Our current knowledge of how marine ecosystems in Asia will respond to climate change is limited, especially for coastal fish species,\" explains Kenji Sudo, marine ecologist at Hokkaido University. \"We developed a model to investigate how tropical fish in Japan might respond to changing environmental conditions.\"</p><p>The Hokkaido researchers selected six tropical fish species from the 4,500 species of fish that inhabit Japanese waters. They chose species that represent a range of different effects on humans and have well-documented numbers. They studied two toxic harmful fish (<em>Aluterus scriptus</em> and <em>Scarus ovifrons</em>), two herbivorous fish (<em>Kyphosus bigibbus</em> and <em>Siganus fuscescens</em>), and two tropical reef fish (<em>Amphiprion frenatus</em> and <em>Chaetodon auriga</em>).</p><p>The researchers used publicly available distribution data and numerical models to estimate how the six species\' future habitats might change under different climate change scenarios. They examined how different environmental variables, such as minimum sea surface temperature, depth, slope, coral reef area, and seagrass/seabed areas, affect fish species patterns and used this information to predict future changes.</p><p>They found that the minimum sea surface temperature was the most important factor affecting distribution patterns for all species. Depth, slope and seagrass/seaweed beds were also important for some species.</p><p>The model showed that, under two different carbon emission scenarios, all six tropical species were predicted to expand into the middle to northern parts of Japan. By the 2090s, their habitat range was estimated to expand to around 1.5 times that of 2000-2018 with severe warming. The expansion was predicted to be highest along the Pacific coast, which is affected by the warm Kuroshio and Tsushima Currents along the coast of the Sea of Japan. However, the model indicated that habitat range changes could be minimised by stringent mitigation measures.</p><p>\"The results indicate that many human activities along the Japanese coasts, such as fisheries, leisure use and human health may be greatly affected by changes in tropical fish patterns without proper mitigation measures against climate change,\" says co-author Masahiko Fujii, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Environmental Earth Science, Hokkaido University.</p><p>The study suggests that ambitious commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions could prevent future tropicalization. The model could be used by local decision makers to plan suitable climate adaption programs.</p><p><br></p>','2022-03-10 23:14:42.788796','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Hokkaido University','Scientists have developed a model that predicts six tropical fish species will expand into northern parts of Japan as sea temperatures rise.',1,116,'<li>Kenji Sudo, Serina Maehara, Masahiro Nakaoka, Masahiko Fujii. <strong>Predicting Future Shifts in the Distribution of Tropicalization Indicator Fish that Affect Coastal Ecosystem Services of Japan</strong>. <em>Frontiers in Built Environment</em>, 2022; 7 DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fbuil.2021.788700\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.3389/fbuil.2021.788700</a>\r\n</li>'),(819,'Genetic mechanisms of coral metamorphosis identified','genetic-mechanisms-of-coral-metamorphosis-identified','2022-03-12 12:58:18.717653','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Researchers have identified the gene expression regulation mechanisms that drive the metamorphosis of coral from larvae that float freely in the ocean to sedentary adult reef builder adults.</p><p>A study describing the researchers\' findings appeared in the journal <em>Zoological Letters</em> on January 25, 2022.</p><p>The moment that corals metamorphose from free-swimming (planktonic) larvae to sedentary polyps is perhaps the momentous event in this animal\'s life, producing a radical and abrupt change in both body structure and behavior. When larvae encounter certain cues or stimuli from an underlying surface (substratum), they stop swimming and rest on the substratum on one end and take on a round shape. In the case of Acropora, these cues come from a buildup (biofilm) of algae. If the larvae receive sufficient stimuli from this substratum, they take the next step and undergo a radical and irreversible differentiation of cells, including a stable attachment to the substratum.</p><p>However, the molecular processes at the genetic and cellular level of this metamorphosis have long been something of a mystery.</p><p>Other researchers have in the past managed to identify a critical period of time when the cells of the coral genus of Acropora (whose more than 150 species include some of the main species responsible for the building of reefs) are committed to this transformation. From this point on, these corals are unable to revert back to their pre-metamorphosis state -- what coral scientists call a \"point of no return.\" But quite what happens during the point of no return at a deeper level has until now remained unknown.</p><p>To investigate further, the authors of the study analysed the changes in the transcriptome -- the complete set of messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules produced (expressed) by an organism or cell -- before and after the point of no return in an Acropora species. Messenger RNA molecules play the key role of copying (\"transcribing\") the genetic \"recipe\" encoded in DNA for making and taking it to the protein factories in the cell known as ribosomes. Analysis of the coral transcriptome at the moments before and after metamorphosis thus should tell scientists what the difference is in genetic recipes that are being activated (\"gene expression\") over this period.</p><p>The researchers collected samples from colonies of the species Acropora tenuis from Sesoko Island in Japan\'s Okinawa Prefecture. The corals were then kept in tank conditions designed to approximate their natural setting. Metamorphosis was induced using the application of a neuropeptide known to prompt this process and further samples intended for RNA extraction were taken at multiple different times before and after the point of no return.</p><p>The RNA was then sequenced, offering an analysis of gene expression changes at a fine time resolution that showed a series of molecular mechanisms that are likely involved in the irreversibility of metamorphosis.</p><p>The researchers found that alterations in signal perception occurs through a change in expression of a group of genes that regulate G-protein-couple receptors (GPCRs), in particular the GABA receptor proteins and \"Frizzled\" proteins, at the early stage of metamorphosis, as well as those driving the breakdown of certain proteins.</p><p>GPCRs are one of the largest groups of receptors on the surface of cells and act as a sort of mailbox, receiving messages from proteins, sugars, fats and other entities. These messages tell the cell something about their environment or pass on information from other cells, and activate other messenger molecules within the cell, directing some sort of response. Frizzled receptors play a key role in embryo development, while GABA receptors respond to the neurotransmitter GABA, a compound that works to inhibit particular activities and to prompt cells to differentiate (take different forms).</p><p>In this case, the receptor-mediated cellular response to stimuli involves cell differentiation and the breakdown of certain proteins that in combination result in drastic changes that make the metamorphosis process irreversible.</p><p>The researchers also suggest that the GABA receptors may play a role in the larvae\'s search for an appropriate substratum before metamorphosis, ensuring a proper environment for the adult form. This ability is lost as metamorphosis proceeds, as such searching is no longer needed.</p><p>\"An intriguing unexpected finding was gene expression of green fluorescence proteins after the point of no return,\" said Shinichiro Maruyama an evolutionary biologist at the Tohoku University Graduate School of Life Sciences and co-author of the study, \"implying there is some sort of key physiological and ecological role of fluorescence going on at early developmental stages that is completely understudied, for example, studying the attraction of symbiotic algae.\"</p><p>Having identified the candidates for genes involved in metamorphosis, the scientists want to see whether modification of these same genes can alter the point of no return. In addition, they stress that their findings are limited to corals in a controlled laboratory setting, and want to explore how things change in a real-world setting.</p><p><strong>Story Source:</strong></p>','2022-03-10 23:14:48.298337','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'Tohoku University','Researchers discovered the gene expression regulation mechanisms that drive coral transition from a floating larvae to one that sits sedentary in reefs.',1,184,'<li>Yuu Ishii, Masayuki Hatta, Ryusaku Deguchi, Masakado Kawata, Shinichiro Maruyama. <strong>Gene expression alterations from reversible to irreversible stages during coral metamorphosis</strong>. <em>Zoological Letters</em>, 2022; 8 (1) DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40851-022-00187-1\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1186/s40851-022-00187-1</a>\r\n</li>'),(822,'How toddler-mother attachment impacts adolescent brain and behavior','how-toddler-mother-attachment-impacts-adolescent-brain-and-behavior','2022-03-12 12:57:08.443911','<p class=\"lead\" id=\"first\">Interpersonal trust is a crucial component of healthy relationships. When we interact with strangers, we quickly gauge whether we can trust them. And those important social skills may be shaped by our earliest relationship with caregivers.</p><p>Adolescents who had an insecure attachment to their mothers as toddlers are more likely to overestimate the trustworthiness of strangers, according to a new study from the University of Illinois.</p><p>\"The idea is to understand whether early attachment relationships with mothers have a longitudinal, predictive association with how adolescents process cues related to trustworthiness, both at the behavioral level and the brain level,\" explains Xiaomei Li, doctoral student in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies (HDFS) at U of I and lead author on the paper.</p><p>The project builds on data from the Children\'s Social Development Project, a longitudinal study conducted under the lead of Nancy McElwain, HDFS professor and co-author on the paper.</p><p>In the first round of data collection, 128 toddlers and their mothers participated in a laboratory visit where researchers observed their interactions and evaluated their attachment style.</p><p>Ten years later, when the children were in their early adolescence, they were invited back for a second round of studies. This time, the researchers wanted to observe how the adolescents evaluated the trustworthiness of strangers.</p><p>Placed under an MRI scanner, the adolescents viewed pictures of faces and were asked to rate the trustworthiness of each face on a scale from 1 to 5. Simultaneously, the MRI scanner measured their brain activity. In rating trustworthiness, adolescents were told to consider how likely they would be to approach the person for help or directions if they were alone in an unfamiliar city.</p><p>The pictures were selected from an established database containing photos of actors posing with emotionally neutral faces. The faces show varying degrees of trustworthiness, determined and validated by prior studies among independent observers who rated how trustworthy each face appears to be according to their first impressions and gut feelings.</p><p>Securely and insecurely attached children agreed on rating the \"high-trustworthiness\" faces, but the children who were insecurely attached as toddlers were less likely to rate \"low-trustworthiness\" faces as such. Their brain scans also showed less activity in brain regions associated with emotional processing when viewing untrustworthy faces.</p><p>\"The adolescents who had a history of secure attachment showed greater sensitivity to untrustworthy cues compared with their insecure counterparts,\" Li states.</p><p>\"We were able to see how early relationship dynamics during toddlerhood, which is a key period for social-emotional development, predicted adolescent functioning, even at the level of the brain.\"</p><p>The core of attachment theory is whether the child trusts their primary caregiver to provide warmth and comfort when needed. Inconsistent or unreliable support from the caregiver can lead to a pattern of insecure attachment.</p><p>\"Because children with an insecure attachment have experienced inconsistent and unreliable care when they are young, they may now choose to avoid negative social cues as a defensive mechanism to protect themselves. The lack of brain activation supports this explanation, suggesting that insecure adolescents are not processing untrustworthy cues,\" Li says.</p><p>\"In comparison, adolescents with a secure history of attachment may be more open to thinking about and responding to negative social cues.\"</p><p>The findings also suggest the importance of parents being open to their child\'s negative emotions, McElwain states.</p><p>\"A secure attachment is likely to develop when the parent can accept their children\'s negative emotions and respond with comfort and support. When parents avoid dealing with their child\'s negative emotions, children may come to learn that these emotions are \'bad.\'</p><p>\"It\'s okay for children to be upset and these are important, teachable moments when parents can help children deal with their emotions in an age-appropriate way. By doing so, children will be better prepared to engage in whatever comes their way later on.\"</p><p>McElwain emphasizes the effects of early experience are not irreversible.</p><p>\"So much brain development happens during adolescence. Teens are much better able to consciously reflect on their experiences and emotions, which makes it a great time to intervene and change behavioral patterns that are not working well. Parents, as well as other adults such as teachers or coaches, can help children and adolescents learn how to engage with negative social cues or social situations through open discussion, role playing, and positive modeling.\"</p><p>The Department of Human Development and Family Studies is in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois.</p><p>Funding: National Science Foundation, the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the University of Illinois Research Board, and the Jacobs Foundation, Switzerland.</p>','2022-03-10 23:14:53.283171','uploads/news/logo.jpg',1,'University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences','Interpersonal trust is a crucial component of healthy relationships. When we interact with strangers, we quickly gauge whether we can trust them. And those important social skills may be shaped by our earliest relationship with caregivers. Adolescents who had an insecure attachment to their mothers as toddlers are more likely to overestimate the trustworthiness of strangers, according to a new study from the University of Illinois.',1,105,'<li>Xiaomei Li, Nathan A Jorgensen, Nancy L McElwain, Eva H Telzer. <strong>Toddler–mother attachment moderates adolescents’ behavioral and neural evaluation of trustworthiness</strong>. <em>Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience</em>, 2022; DOI: <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsac009\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">10.1093/scan/nsac009</a>\r\n</li>'),