Culture

Researchers from University of Sydney, University of Florida, and Rutgers University published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines the role of serendipity in customer satisfaction and how marketers can provide it.

The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "Serendipity: Chance Encounters in the Marketplace Enhance Consumer Satisfaction" and is authored by Aekyoung Kim, Felipe Affonso, Juliano Laran, and Kristina Durante.

Netflix knows you are tired of choice. The streaming service recently introduced what might be the perfect hack: a shuffle button that eliminates choice and plays a randomly selected program for the consumer. Under COVID-19 restrictions, the newly homebound were happy to have so many programming options, but this faded over time.

Recall a time when you heard a beloved song come across the radio or stumbled upon a favorite movie while channel surfing. These accidents become "happy" because they lead to feelings of serendipity, which our new research shows heighten enjoyment. When a product, service, or experience is positive, unexpected, and involving chance, our research team reasoned that this would generate congruent feelings. Consumers would feel that the encounter was a good surprise, make attributions to chance, and feel lucky that it happened--which we collectively call "feelings of serendipity." Using a series of experiments, we set out to test our contention that marketers can create serendipity in the marketplace.

Across multiple consumer domains (online subscription services, museums, movies, food consumption, and music), creating serendipity through positive, unexpected, chance encounters increased satisfaction, enjoyment, perceptions of meaningfulness, willingness to pay, willingness to recommend a service, and interest. For example, members of subscription box services (e.g., Birchbox, Stitchfix) enjoyed their assortment more when they received a random selection of products compared to members who made selections themselves. A similar phenomenon occurred during the researchers' curated experiments. For instance, they measured consumer satisfaction using two platforms; one delivering movie recommendations and another delivering music recommendations. As Kim explains, "Compared to a condition where consumers chose for themselves, enjoyment increased when consumers received a movie or song delivered at random from a set of alternatives we had previously selected. Increased enjoyment occurred because the seemingly randomly delivered product was thought to be a good surprise, attributed to chance and luck. In other words, serendipity was born."

This good news suggests that marketers can capitalize on the power of serendipity to increase consumer satisfaction. To do this, marketers must go beyond surprising consumers, because serendipity is not just a pleasant surprise. To test the depths of serendipity, the research team carefully removed one or more of the "ingredients" to see if the serendipity effect would go away. First, they found that when an encounter was negative, consumers no longer felt increased enjoyment. In fact, there was a boomerang effect. A negative encounter that was unexpected and attributed to chance was perceived to be even more negative.

Second, when they increased and decreased the degree of randomness, it exacerbated and attenuated serendipity. Consumers who viewed a movie trailer that was described as randomly selected from 100 possible options enjoyed it more than when it came from a menu of 10 options, which made it seem less random. Moreover, making consumers aware that a marketer was selecting the options also decreased serendipity and enjoyment, because now it was clear that someone was behind the curtain and the selection was not random.

Finally, they reasoned that educating consumers about a product or service would eliminate the serendipity effect. Affonso says that "Coming to learn more about a product not only eliminates unexpectedness (a key ingredient for serendipity), but can create a sense of expertise that leads consumers to think they have the knowledge to make better choices." In one experiment, they used a platform that recommends functional music that can enhance focus. Approximately half of the participants were provided with information on which attributes increase a song's ability to increase people's concentration. When consumers were educated this way, encountering music from the platform in a serendipitous way later on (via random chance) no longer enhanced enjoyment. This suggests that aficionados may not appreciate marketplace serendipity as much as the rest of us.

"In today's marketplace, which affords an abundance of choice, our research provides marketers with insights on how to build some magic into marketplace encounters," says Laran. When attempting to enhance serendipity, companies may sometimes want to increase perceptions that an encounter is the result of chance or randomness. For example, consumers may enjoy some unexpected events more as part of vacation packages or enjoy product samples that arrive randomly without a lot of information. Companies should also eliminate marketing communications that highlight the targeting process, avoiding telling consumers that a product was especially selected for them based on what the company knows about their preferences. In such instances, an attribution to chance is replaced by attribution to being watched and targeted by the company.

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. - A team of evolutionary biologists including faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York have shown that some Anolis lizards, or anoles, have adapted to rebreathe exhaled air underwater using a bubble clinging to their snouts.

Semi-aquatic anoles live along neotropical streams and frequently dive for refuge, remaining underwater for up to 16 minutes. Lindsey Swierk, assistant research professor of biological sciences at Binghamton University, documented this behavior in a Costa Rican anole species in 2019. She had been shocked to see an anole submerge itself for such long periods and used a GoPro underwater to document the behavior.

"It's easy to imagine the advantage that these small, slow anoles gain by hiding from their predators underwater - they're really hard to spot!" says Swierk. "But the real question is how they're managing to stay underwater for so long."

The researchers conducted experiments documenting routine air-based underwater respiration in several distantly related semi-aquatic anole species. They found that semi-aquatic anoles can respire underwater by ''rebreathing'' exhaled air that is trapped between their skin and surrounding water.

"We found that semi-aquatic anoles exhale air into a bubble that clings to their skin," said lead author Chris Boccia, a recent master of science graduate from the University of Toronto. "The lizards then re-inhale the air, a maneuver we've termed 'rebreathing' after the scuba-diving technology."

The researchers believe that hydrophobic skin, which they observed in all sampled anoles, may have been exaptative, facilitating the repeated evolution of specialized rebreathing in species that regularly dive. Their analyses strongly suggest that specialized rebreathing is adaptive for semi-aquatic habitat specialists. Air-based rebreathing may enhance dive performance by incorporating dead space air from the buccal cavity or plastron into the lungs, facilitating clearance of carbon dioxide, or allowing uptake of oxygen from surrounding water (i.e., a ''physical gill'' mechanism.) The team used an oxygen sensor inside the rebreathed bubbles to determine whether anoles were consuming oxygen from the bubble. In true "scuba-tank" fashion, the researchers discovered that the oxygen concentration in an anole's air bubble decreases over the length of the dive, in support of this idea.

"The finding that different species of semi-aquatic anoles have evolutionarily converged to extract oxygen from their rebreathed air bubbles leads to other exciting questions," says Swierk. "For example, the rate of oxygen consumption from the bubble decreases the longer an anole dives, which could possibly be explained a reduction in an anole's metabolic rate with increased dive time." Binghamton graduate student co-author, Alexandra Martin, is currently exploring whether body cooling during dives may help explain this phenomenon.

"Rebreathing had never been considered as a potential natural mechanism for underwater respiration in vertebrates," says Luke Mahler, an assistant professor in EEB at the University of Toronto and Boccia's thesis supervisor. "But our work shows that this is possible and that anoles have deployed this strategy repeatedly in species that use aquatic habitats."

Swierk and Mahler are planning future projects to better understand the evolution of the physiology and behavior related to rebreathing. "Anoles are a remarkable group of lizards, and the number of ways that this taxon has diversified to take advantage of their environments is mind-boggling," said Swierk.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - A comprehensive analysis of 437 studies from around the world provides the best evidence to date that narcissism is an important risk factor for both aggression and violence, researchers said.

The link between narcissism and aggression was found for all dimensions of narcissism and for a variety of types of aggression. Results were similar regardless of gender, age, whether they were college students, or country of residence.

And, to have an impact, narcissism doesn't have to be at levels so high as to be pathological. Findings showed that even when narcissism was within what is considered a normal range, higher levels were linked to aggression.

"It is a pretty straightforward message: Narcissism is a significant risk factor for aggressive and violent behavior across the board," said Brad Bushman, co-author of the study and professor of communication at The Ohio State University.

The study was led by Sophie Kjaervik, a graduate student in communication at Ohio State. It was published yesterday (May 24, 2021) in the journal Psychological Bulletin.

"The link we found between narcissism and aggression was significant - it was not trivial in size," Kjaervik said. "The findings have important real-world implications."

The researchers combined and analyzed data from many studies to provide a comprehensive view of this research area. In this meta-analysis, they examined data from 437 independent studies with a total of 123,043 participants.

Narcissism is characterized by an overblown sense of self-importance, Bushman said. The key component of narcissism is entitlement. Narcissism also has two peripheral components: grandiose (those with high self-esteem) and vulnerable (those with low self-esteem). The study found all of these components were linked to aggression.

Narcissism was related to all forms of aggression measured in the studies the researchers analyzed, including physical, verbal, bullying, direct or indirect, and displaced onto innocent targets.

"Individuals who are high in narcissism are not particularly picky when it comes to how they attack others," Kjaervik said.

Findings showed that narcissism was linked to online cyberbullying, as well as bullying offline.

"That's a highly important finding now that we live in an online world," she said.

People higher in narcissism were not only more likely to lash out in anger, but were also more likely to be "cold, deliberate and proactive" in their aggression, Bushman said.

People high in narcissism were more likely than others to be aggressive whether they were provoked or not, the study found. But the risk for aggression was significantly higher when they felt provoked, such as being ignored or insulted.

The researchers were somewhat surprised to find that the link between narcissism and violence was nearly as strong as its link with less serious forms of aggression. Violence is more rare than and is generally more difficult to predict than lesser forms of aggression, Bushman said. In this study, violence was defined as aggression intended to cause physical harm such as injury or death.

But these results are consistent with research suggesting that narcissism might be a risk factor for extremely violent acts such as mass shootings, he said.

One argument could be that the narcissism-aggression link would be more likely to occur in individualistic countries, like the United States, where people emphasize their personal rights. But the analysis found that narcissism and aggression were related even in more collectivist countries.

And findings were similar whether the research participants were college students or a more general population.

It might be tempting to think these results apply only to people who are "narcissists," but that would be wrong, Bushman said.

For one, you can't separate people into those who are narcissists and those who are not. Nearly everyone has some degree of narcissism, even though only a minority have levels high enough to be called pathological.

Findings in this study suggest that higher levels of narcissism are related to more aggression even before it reaches pathological levels.

"All of us are prone to being more aggressive when we are more narcissistic," Bushman said.

One thing that clearly stood out in the analysis, he said, was how people high in narcissism respond when they feel threatened.

"Our results suggest provocation is a key moderator of the link between narcissism and aggression," Bushman said.

"Those who are high in narcissism have thin skins, and they will lash out if they feel ignored or disrespected."

A study by Monash University and Alfred Health found a 70 per cent reduction in one type of human papillomavirus (HPV) in gay and bisexual men after the implementation of the school-based HPV vaccination program.

The HYPER2 study, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, and led by Associate Professor Eric Chow, found there was a significant reduction in all four vaccine-preventable genotypes in gay/bisexual men aged 16-20 years following the introduction of the vaccine for boys in 2013.

Australia is one of the first and few countries that have both boys and girls vaccination programs for HPV. The vaccine covers four genotypes: 6/11/16/18. Genotypes 6/11 cause about 90 per cent of the genital wart cases and genotypes 16/18 cause about 70 per cent of cervical and anal cancers.

This is the first study to show that the implementation of the gender-neutral program can reduce high-risk anal HPV and potentially reduce the incidence of anal cancer in gay and bisexual men.

This repeated cross-sectional study recruited 400 gay and bisexual men with a median age of 19 years from sexual health clinics and the community in Melbourne.

The results are compared with the HYPER1 group of 200 gay/bisexual men pre-vaccination in 2010-2012 and the HYPER2 group of 200 gay/bisexual men post-vaccination in 2017-2018.

It showed a reduction in anal quadrivalent genotypes from 28 per cent down to 7.3 per cent and penile quadrivalent genotypes also lower in the post-vaccination group 6.1 per cent compared to 11.9 per cent.

Anal cancer incidence has increased globally among men over the last three decades. It is overrepresented among gay and bisexual men, particularly those living with HIV.

A meta-analysis estimated the incidence of anal cancer to be 45.9 per 100,000 among HIV-positive MSM. Results from the HYPER2 study suggest that male vaccination may lead to a potential reduction in anal cancer among gay and bisexual men in Australia, which is similar to the reduction in cervical cancer among Australian women after the HPV vaccination program launched in 2007.

"Australia has a very successful HPV vaccination program for both boys and girls with high vaccine coverage," Associate Professor Chow said.

"The vaccine is effective in reducing HPV-related diseases and showing some promising evidence that this may lead to a reduction in HPV-related cancer in the future."

In the last year, one thing has become clear: we cannot live life without risk. In fact, every part of our daily routines became subject to analysis: How risky is the action and is its value worth the potential cost?

Risk analysis, though seemingly more ever-present in our thoughts today, has always been a part of how we operate and how the systems around us work. As new pressures, such as climate change, deepen, the accuracy and reliability of risk analysis models regarding issues as basic as the cleanliness of our drinking water have become more important than ever.

USC researchers, including Felipe de Barros, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, have developed a variety of models that can help assess how emerging contaminants disperse, dissolve and ultimately impact water quality and the resilience of aquifers.

"The subsurface environment is very complex and challenging to track, because we cannot see it," de Barros said. "We don't have detailed information on how deep the contaminants are, how far out they are spread, where they are coming from, what other contaminants they have mixed with or how the geological properties vary in space."

These questions are exactly what de Barros and his team work on. Recently, de Barros and collaborators developed an analytical model that can help predict contaminant spreading in fractured porous media under different water flow scenarios. This work was featured in Physics Review Fluids. The advantage of the analytical model developed by de Barros and collaborators is that it allows to look at the relationships between varying geological and physical parameters to see how they impact dissolution of a contaminant as water flows from one point to another.

"It's like studying alternative realities--like in a comic book universe," de Barros said. "If you can understand what happens with each different scenario, you can better predict outcomes in real time and better allocate resources to mitigate the problem."

"With tools like this one, you can do probabilistic risk analysis and compute and assess the risks associated with a waste disposal facility, for example, or with an accidental leak," he said. "We can also understand how fast these chemicals are going to travel in these environments."

For example, say there was a chemical spill near an aquifer. With accurate risk modeling that accounts for key heterogeneous variables in the environment, health professionals and regulatory bodies could better understand how much of a contaminant they can expect to be in the end water source, de Barros said.

"This modeling can help with questions like, 'Should I invest more money in public health or in characterizing the geological site? Should I shut down the well--which is very costly--or bring in tap water from another location or buy bottled water, or is there reasonable knowledge that the water can still be used, once treated?" he said.

A Complex System Simplified

Felipe de Barros and his team looked at the complex physics of water flow through different flow systems, namely where restricted flow, like through a porous membrane, meets free flow, like the space between two porous surfaces. How these areas interact are important in determining how a chemical dissolves or mixes in a water source, he said.

Instead of solving the physical equations numerically to model different outcomes, the team looked tackled the problem by developing analytical solutions that are computationally cheap. Identifying relationships between elements of the model allowed them to "upscale" it, simplifying the math involved by distilling these trends into fewer terms then embedded into their equation.

To create a model that encapsulated these key parameters and behaviors, the researchers looked at the geometric features of the subsurface structures. Porosity and permeability of the subsurface environment or aspect ratio characterizing the fractures were key elements that were considered, de Barros said.

Decision Making with Data

It is difficult to make decisions in a vacuum. This is why de Barros says the tools developed within his research group could change how water treatment facilities, regulators and others decide what to do in various scenarios. As surface water becomes increasingly scarce, subsurface sources and treatment options will need to be tapped into increasingly. At the same time, however, with pollution and chemical contaminants leaking into water sources, the challenge is identifying how to gauge safety of a certain flow without fully understanding the invisible unknowns impacting it.

One thing our research aims to go, de Barros said, is to develop application-oriented models that improve our fundamental understanding on the interaction between the geological media and solute transport behavior. This would allow to see how contaminant dispersion is influenced by shifting conditions. For example, how does a contaminant leak through to the other side of a cracked rock versus one that has no fissures? Because so many potential contaminants can be found in the water, this helps create a general understanding of the subsurface system without relying on knowing the exact contaminants in question.

This knowledge can also allow for reverse engineering, for example building a system to have certain hydrogeological conditions that could be help achieve a desired chemical concentration or water quality output.

"Understanding how the concentration of a chemical changes in a given system through space and time can have implications for public health, water treatment operations and also regulatory policies, for instance as issued by the U.S. EPA," de Barros said.

A study published today in Scientific Reports suggests that new health challenges may be emerging as a result of conservationists' success in pulling mountain gorillas back from the brink of extinction.

The study, the first species-wide survey of parasite infections across the entire range of the mountain gorilla, was conducted by an international science team led by the Institute of Vertebrate Biology, Czech Academy of Sciences; University of Veterinary Sciences Brno, Czech Republic; Gorilla Doctors; and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. The work was conducted in collaboration with the protected area authorities of Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (the Rwanda Development Board, the Uganda Wildlife Authority and l'Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature, respectively).

All mountain gorillas live in fully protected national parks in Rwanda, Uganda and DR Congo, where the potential for spatial expansion is extremely limited due to dense human communities living nearby. Consequently, as gorilla population densities within the protected areas increase, their susceptibility to infectious diseases may also.

The Virunga mountain gorilla population has not increased uniformly across its habitat, possibly due to varying ecological conditions that are linked to different vegetation types. Additionally, in areas of the Virunga Massif where some of the highest growth rates occurred, the mountain gorillas experienced major changes in their social structure, leading to a threefold increase in group densities.

Clinical gastrointestinal diseases linked to helminths, a type of parasitic worm, have been recorded in mountain gorilla populations in both the Virunga Massif and the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, and may pose a threat to these endangered animals.

"Gastrointestinal disease from helminths is typically asymptomatic in wild non-human primates," said first author Dr. Klara Petrzelkova, senior researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences. "But host and extrinsic factors can alter helminth transmission and host susceptibility. This study has put a spotlight on these factors."

The study elucidates the drivers and patterns of helminth infections and provides a comprehensive foundation for future assessments of the impact of these parasites on gorilla population dynamics. Strongylid and tapeworm infections were quantified in fecal samples collected from night nests and from individually identified gorillas living in five social groups using fecal egg counts.

"Detecting significant differences in parasite burdens among gorilla family groups is critical information for guiding our decisions in providing life-saving veterinary care for this endangered species," said Julius Nziza, head veterinarian in Rwanda for Gorilla Doctors, which is a collaboration of the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project and the University of California, Davis' Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center.

Striking geographic differences in strongylid infections were detected, with higher egg counts measured mostly in gorillas living in areas where there has been a higher occurrence of gastrointestinal disease in gorillas. Differences in population growth rates across the Virunga Massif subpopulations and the Bwindi population, differences in the social structure of groups, especially in the Virungas, and differences in habitat characteristics (for example, vegetation types at altitudinal gradients) across the distribution range of mountain gorillas may explain observed differences in strongylid infections.

"The knowledge we acquired from this study will help develop future plans for protecting these endangered primates and their critical habitat" said Felix Ndagijimana of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

This highly collaborative study points to new challenges emerging as possible "side effects" of the remarkable conservation success of the past few decades. Unraveling the patterns of parasite infections in both gorilla populations, evaluating host exposure to infective parasite stages, and studying susceptibility to infection and its consequences on host health will be an important next step for the continued success and survival of this and other endangered animal species with small, isolated populations.

An investigation carried out by the astrophysicists of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) ?ofia Chrobáková, a doctoral student at the IAC and the University of La Laguna (ULL), and Martín López Corredoira, questions one of the most interesting findings about the dynamics of the Milky Way in recent years: the precession, or the wobble in the axis of rotation of the disc warp is incorrect. The results have just been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, which means that it is composed, among other components, of a disc of stars, gas and dust, in which the spiral arms are contained. At first, it was thought that the disc was completely flat, but for some decades now it is known that the outermost part of the disc is distorted into what is called a "warp": in one direction it is twisted upwards, and in the opposite direction downwards. The stars, the gas, and the dust are all warped, and so are not in the same plane as the extended inner part of the disc, and an axis perpendicular to the planes of the warp defines their rotation.

In 2020, an investigation announced the detection of the precession of the warp of the Milky Way disc, which means that the deformation in this outer region is not static, but that just like a spinning top the orientation of its axis is itself rotating with time. Furthermore, these researchers found that it was quicker than the theories predicted, a cycle every 600-700 million years, some three times the time it takes the Sun to travel once round the centre of the Galaxy.

Precession is not a phenomenon which occurs only in galaxies, it also happens to our planet. As well as its annual revolution around the Sun, and its rotation period of 24 hours, the axis of the Earth precesses, which implies that the celestial pole is not always close to the present pole star, but that (as an example) 14,000 years ago it was close to the star Vega.

Now, a new study by ?ofia Chrobáková and Martín López Corredoira has taken into account the variation of the amplitude of the warp with the ages of the stars. The study concludes that, using the warp of the old stars whose velocities have been measured, it is possible that the precession can disappear, or at least become slower than what is presently believed. To arrive at this result the researchers have used data from the Gaia Mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), analysing the positions and velocities of hundreds of millions of stars in the outer disc.

"In previous studies it had not been noticed", explains ?ofia Chrobáková, a predoctoral researcher at the IAC and the first author of the article, "that the stars which are a few tens of millions of years old, such as the Cepheids, have a much larger warp than that of the stars visible with the Gaia mission, which are thousands of millions of years old".

"This does not necessarily mean that the warp does not precess at all, it could do so, but much more slowly, and we are probably unable to measure this motion until we obtain better data", concludes Martín López Corredoira, and IAC researcher and co-author of the article.

The bacterium Staphylococcus epidermidisis primarily a harmless microbe found on the skin and in the noses of humans. Yet some strains of this species can cause infections - in catheters, artificial joints, heart valves, and in the bloodstream - which are difficult to treat. These bacteria are often resistant to a particularly effective antibiotic, methicillin, and are among the most feared germs in hospitals. How these usually harmless skin microbes become deadly pathogens has been unclear up to now.

An international research team has now discovered what distinguishes peaceful S. epidermidis microorganisms from the many dangerous invaders. The scientists have identified a new gene cluster that enables the more aggressive bacteria to produce additional structures in their cell walls. This morphological alteration allows the staphylococci to attach more easily to human cells forming the blood vessels, a process via which they can persist in the bloodstream to become pathogens. These new cell wall structures may also allow the spread of methicillin resistance, by transferring it, for example, from Staphylococcus epidermidis to its more dangerous relative Staphylococcus aureus.

The study was carried out under the direction of researchers of the Cluster of Excellence "Controlling Microbes to Fight Infections" (CMFI) of the University of Tübingen and the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) in cooperation with universities in Copenhagen, Hamburg, Shanghai and Hanover as well as the German Center for Lung Research (DZL) in Borstel. The results are being published in the journal Nature Microbiology.

Set apart by structure

A considerable portion of the cell walls of Staphylococci - like other gram-positive bacteria - is made up of teichoic acids. Chain-like, these polymers cover the bacterial surface. Their chemical structures vary according to species. "During our examination we determined that many pathogenic strains of S. epidermidis have an additional gene cluster that contains information for the synthesis of wall teichoic acids that are actually typical of S. aureus," says researcher Dr. Xin Du of the Cluster of Excellence of the CMFI and DZIF. She adds that experiments have shown S. epidermidis bacteria with only species-specific teichoic acids in their walls are not very invasive, colonizing the surfaces of the skin and mucous membranes. If the wall teichoic acids for S. aureus are also present, Xin Du explains, they are unable to attach effectively to those surfaces. Instead, they are more successful in penetrating the tissues of their human host. "At some point, a few S. epidermidis clones took on the corresponding genes from S. aureus and became threatening pathogens as a result," says Professor Andreas Peschel of the Cluster of Excellence CMFI and of the DZIF.

It's long been known that bacteria can share genetic material through gene transfer. Bacteriophages - viruses that infect bacteria - carry out the transfer. Mostly, this takes place within one species and requires similar surface structures to which the bacteriophages bind. "Differing cell wall structures normally prevent gene transfer between S. epidermidis and S. aureus. But in S. epidermidis strains that can also produce the wall teichoic acids of S. aureus, that type of gene transfer suddenly becomes possible between different species," explains Peschel. That would explain, he continues, how S. epidermidis could transfer methicillin resistance to even more threatening - and then methicillin-resistant - S. aureus, adding that more investigation is still needed. The new findings are an important step, says Peschel, towards developing better treatments or vaccinations against dangerous pathogens such as S. epidermidis ST 23, which has been known for fifteen years and belongs to the group of HA-MRSE (healthcare-associated methicillin-resistant S. epidermidis).

On 17 May 2021, the UK moved to step three of the Government's Roadmap out of Lockdown - which allowed for the lifting of a ban on foreign travel. Yet, travelling to amber and red list countries still carries strict regulations. UK residents can use proof of vaccination or Covid status (via the NHS app) to comply with travel restrictions in different countries - a scheme known as vaccine passports. However, issues remain to be resolved on how they will be implemented and used, and public opinion appear polarised.

Researchers from the University of Surrey's School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, Professor Iis Tussyadiah, Dr Athina Ioannou, and Professor Graham Miller, conducted two studies to explore public opinion about vaccine passports. First, they mined opinions from Twitter from December 2020, the start of vaccination rollout, to April 2021 and, using topic modelling, extracted major themes from relevant tweets. 14 major themes were identified. Those supporting vaccine passports argued that they will allow people access to services and to go on holiday, ease international travel, help the economy to recover and society to return to normality. Those rejecting the scheme cited issues of civil liberties, discrimination, privacy and surveillance.

The social media analysis was supplemented by an online survey, distributed to 1,000 UK residents between 14 and 20 May 2021, further exploring the prevalence of different shades of opinion on this matter. When considering vaccine passports, people surveyed generally agreed on their benefits. Only about a third agreed that vaccine passports will restrict individual freedom, increase discrimination, and threaten privacy. Half of those surveyed stated they intend to use vaccine passports in general, for travel, and to go to pubs, restaurants, and shops in the near future. Only 20% reported being unwilling to use them, with 30% undecided.

To gauge the extent that people plan to travel according to the planned Roadmap, respondents were asked if they intend to travel immediately after step three of the Roadmap and in summer 2021, after step four of the Roadmap. About a third reported intention to travel domestically after step three and more than half after step four. Although the numbers are smaller for international travel, nevertheless, 15% plan to embark on international travel after step three and 25% after step four. There is a weak but significant correlation between those intending to travel and positive sentiment towards vaccine passports.

Professor lis Tussyadiah, Professor of Intelligent Systems in Service and Acting Head of School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at the University of Surrey, said;

"The global tourism sector has been particularly hard hit by the Covid-19 pandemic - the largest challenge the sector has ever faced. I am delighted that half of the UK residents surveyed would be willing to adopt vaccine passport in order to travel. These findings will help inform the government and the travel and tourism industry in finding ways to move forward with confidence post pandemic."

Researchers will ensure this study is used to capitalise on existing consumer awareness of vaccine passports, while addressing ongoing concerns identified by the work. Uptake is likely to be increased if perceived drawbacks are addressed. For institutions providing and requesting proof of vaccination or Covid status for travel, it is clear that issues pertaining to privacy and exclusion will need to be addressed, including by providing alternative mechanisms for those who have not been vaccinated to access services safely.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Biomedical engineers at Duke University have developed an automatic process that uses streamlined artificial intelligence (AI) to identify active neurons in videos faster and more accurately than current techniques.

The technology should allow researchers to watch an animal's brain activity in real time, as they are behaving.

The work appears May 20 in Nature Machine Intelligence.

One of the ways researchers study the activity of neurons in living animals is through a process known as two-photon calcium imaging, which makes active neurons appear as flashes of light. Analyzing these videos, however, typically requires a human circling every burst of intensity they see in a process called segmentation. While this may seem straightforward, these bursts often overlap in spaces where thousands of neurons are imaged simultaneously. Analyzing just a five-minute video this way could take weeks or even months.

"People try to figure out how the brain works by recording the activity of neurons as an animal does a behavior to study the relationship between the two," said Yiyang Gong, the primary author on the paper. "But manual segmentation creates a big bottleneck and doesn't allow researchers to see the activation of the neurons in real-time."

Gong, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, and Sina Farsiu, a professor of biomedical engineering, previously addressed this bottleneck in a 2019 paper, where they shared the development of a deep-learning platform that maps active neurons as accurately as humans in a fraction of the time. But because videos can be tens of gigabytes, researchers still have to wait hours or days for them to process.

Now, the team is making their platform work in real-time.

"Our goal was to improve our approach to be more intelligent so it can target and learn from the important data in the videos rather than parse through all of the extra noise," said Gong.

To make their approach more intelligent, the team developed signal processing algorithms that pre-process the data before being analyzed by the neural network. These algorithms help improve the signal-to-noise ratio and remove the background fluctuations in the video, highlighting active neurons while obscuring inactive neurons and other unneeded data.

The team also adapted their neural network to scan fewer layers, because it doesn't need as much data to learn how to accurately identify and segment the activated neurons.

The result is a system that features an unusual upgrade. Not only is it an order of magnitude faster than their previous work, it's also slightly more accurate.

Because their platform can highlight active neurons so quickly, researchers can use the tool to detect neurons in real-time and examine how certain activation patterns match animal behavior. Due to the tool's usefulness in neuroscience experiments, the team has made a version of the network available online.

"Rather than wait until the end of an experiment, the speed of our network allows us to learn things during the experiment," said Gong. "We now have a new potential to explore how different kinds of stimulation can affect neuronal activation and animal behavior."

The team is already exploring new ways to continue to improve their tool for wider use.

"The algorithm can always use further optimization," said Gong. "We've shown that this works really well for the two-photon calcium imaging, but there are a lot of different optical microscopes in neuroscience, and ultimately we'd like to make a neural network that works for all of these imaging modalities."

Schizophrenia is a heterogeneous psychiatric disorder characterized by positive symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions, negative symptoms such as apathy and lack of emotion, and cognitive impairment. We have reported that VB6 (pyridoxal) levels in peripheral blood of a subpopulation of patients with schizophrenia is significantly lower than that of healthy controls. More than 35% of patients with schizophrenia have low levels of VB6 (clinically defined as male:

VB6 is not synthesized de novo in humans, but is primarily obtained from foods. In the present study, to clarify the relationship between VB6 deficiency and schizophrenia, we generated VB6-deficient (VB6(-)) mice through feeding with a VB6-lacking diet as a mouse model for the subpopulation of schizophrenia patients with VB6 deficiency. After feeding for 4 weeks, plasma VB6 level in VB6(-) mice decreased to 3% of that in control mice. The VB6(-) mice showed social deficits and cognitive impairment. Furthermore, the VB6(-) mice showed a marked increase in 3-methoxy-4-hydroxyphenylglycol (MHPG) in the brain, suggesting enhanced NA metabolism in VB6(-) mice. We confirmed the increased NA release in the prefrontal cortex and the striatum of VB6(-) mice through in vivo microdialysis. These findings suggest that the activities of NAergic neuronal systems are enhanced in VB6(-) mice.

Furthermore, VB6 supplementation directly into the brain using an osmotic pump ameliorated the hyperactivation of the NAergic system and behavioral abnormalities. indicating that the enhanced NA turnover and the behavioral deficits shown in the VB6(-) mice are attributed to VB6 deficiency in the central nervous system. In addition, the ?2A adrenergic receptor agonist guanfacine also improved the hyperactivated NAergic system in the frontal cortex and behavioral disorders. These results show that the behavioral deficits in VB6(-) mice may be caused by an enhancement of NAergic signaling.

Schizophrenic patients with VB6 deficiency, who account for more than 35% of all patients, present with relatively severe clinical symptoms and treatment resistance. Our findings suggest that a new therapeutic strategy targeting the NAergic system might be effective for these patients. They will also provide evidence based on pathophysiology for a new therapeutic strategy called "VB6 treatment for schizophrenia," which we are currently conducting clinical research on.

Tsukuba, Japan - Carbonic anhydrases are essential enzymes that are present in virtually all living things; all eight classes of carbonic anhydrases that have been identified to date need a metal ion to function. But now, researchers from Japan have discovered that metal is not crucial for all carbonic anhydrases.

In a study published this month in BMC Biology, researchers from the Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Tsukuba have described two members of the COG4337 protein family that are the first known examples of carbonic anhydrase enzymes that do not require a metal ion to function.

Carbonic anhydrases catalyze the conversion of carbon dioxide (CO2) into bicarbonate (HCO3-), and vice versa. They are central to a wide range of physiological processes, including regulation of acid-base balance, respiration, and photosynthesis, and are crucial for all carbon-based life, from bacteria to humans. All previously identified classes of carbonic anhydrase contain a metal cofactor -- zinc, cadmium, cobalt, or manganese -- that is essential for the activity of these enzymes, so when the researchers at the University of Tsukuba identified that the COG4337 proteins were similar to known carbonic anhydrases, they expected metal ions to be important for these new proteins too.

"Because the active site of most carbonic anhydrases contains a metal ion that facilitates interconversion between CO2 and HCO3-, we were surprised to find that the COG4337 proteins did not require any of the eight different metals we tested, and actually were less functional in the presence of zinc," lead author Professor Yoshihisa Hirakawa says.

When the researchers made a model of COG4337 protein structure, they found that there was an active site, or pocket, that may hold on to CO2 while the enzyme converts it to HCO3-. Interestingly, unlike other carbonic anhydrases, these novel enzymes don't seem to carry out the reverse reaction of converting HCO3- to CO2. In addition, the investigators saw that these COG4337 proteins tend to congregate in the plastids and mitochondria of the microalga Bigelowiella natans, which is where CO2 metabolism takes place.

"These proteins are expressed by many cyanobacteria and eukaryotic microalgae that live in environments with fairly diverse metal contents. It is possible that this enzyme evolved in an ancestral microbe to adapt to metal-poor environments, such as the open ocean," Professor Hirakawa explains.

Given the widespread expression of carbonic anhydrases in ecologically important species of microalgae, this novel type of metal-independent carbonic anhydrases may play an important role in the global carbon cycle. Understanding more about how these enzymes work could also be useful for artificial photosynthesis, an important source of renewable energy.

Tokyo, Japan - Most people don't think much about the food scraps they throw away; however, investigators from the Institute of Industrial Science at The University of Tokyo have developed a new method to reduce food waste by recycling discarded fruit and vegetable scraps into robust construction materials.

Worldwide industrial and household food waste amounts to hundreds of billions of pounds per year, a large proportion of which comprises edible scraps, like fruit and vegetable peels. This unsustainable practice is both costly and environmentally unfriendly, so researchers have been searching for new ways to recycle these organic materials into useful products.

"Our goal was to use seaweed and common food scraps to construct materials that were at least as strong as concrete," explains Yuya Sakai, the senior author of the study. "But since we were using edible food waste, we were also interested in determining whether the recycling process impacted the flavor of the original materials."

The researchers borrowed a "heat pressing" concept that is typically used to make construction materials from wood powder, except they used vacuum-dried, pulverized food scraps, such as seaweed, cabbage leaves, and orange, onion, pumpkin, and banana peels as the constituent powders. The processing technique involved mixing the food powder with water and seasonings, and then pressing the mixture into a mold at high temperature. The researchers tested the bending strength of the resulting materials and monitored their taste, smell, and appearance.

"With the exception of the specimen derived from pumpkin, all of the materials exceeded our bending strength target," says Kota Machida, a senior collaborator. "We also found that Chinese cabbage leaves, which produced a material over three times stronger than concrete, could be mixed with the weaker pumpkin-based material to provide effective reinforcement."

The new, robust materials retained their edible nature, and the addition of salt or sugar improved their taste without reducing their strength. Furthermore, the durable products resisted rot, fungi, and insects, and experienced no appreciable changes in appearance or taste after exposure to air for four months.

Given that food waste is a global financial burden and environmental concern, it is crucial to develop methods for recycling food scraps. Using these substances to prepare materials that are strong enough for construction projects, but also maintain their edible nature and taste, opens the door to a wide range of creative applications from the one technology.

Researchers have flipped traditional 3D printing to create some of the most intricate biomedical structures yet, advancing the development of new technologies for regrowing bones and tissue.

The emerging field of tissue engineering aims to harness the human body's natural ability to heal itself, to rebuild bone and muscle lost to tumours or injuries.

A key focus for biomedical engineers has been the design and development of 3D printed scaffolds that can be implanted in the body to support cell regrowth.

But making these structures small and complex enough for cells to thrive remains a significant challenge.

Enter a RMIT University-led research team, collaborating with clinicians at St Vincent's Hospital Melbourne, Australia, who have overturned the conventional 3D printing approach.

Watch and embed the timelapse video

Instead of making the bioscaffolds directly, the team 3D printed moulds with intricately-patterned cavities then filled them with biocompatible materials, before dissolving the moulds away.

Using the indirect approach, the team created fingernail-sized bioscaffolds full of elaborate structures that, until now, were considered impossible with standard 3D printers.

Lead researcher Dr Cathal O'Connell said the new biofabrication method was cost-effective and easily scalable because it relied on widely available technology.

"The shapes you can make with a standard 3D printer are constrained by the size of the printing nozzle - the opening needs to be big enough to let material through and ultimately that influences how small you can print," O'Connell, a Vice-Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at RMIT, said.

"But the gaps in between the printed material can be way smaller, and far more intricate.

"By flipping our thinking, we essentially draw the structure we want in the empty space inside our 3D printed mould. This allows us to create the tiny, complex microstructures where cells will flourish."

Versatile technique

O'Connell said other approaches were able to create impressive structures, but only with precisely-tailored materials, tuned with particular additives or modified with special chemistry.

"Importantly, our technique is versatile enough to use medical grade materials off-the-shelf," he said.

"It's extraordinary to create such complex shapes using a basic 'high school' grade 3D printer.

"That really lowers the bar for entry into the field, and brings us a significant step closer to making tissue engineering a medical reality."

The research, published in Advanced Materials Technologies, was conducted at BioFab3D@ACMD, a state-of-the-art bioengineering research, education and training hub located at St Vincent's Hospital Melbourne.

Co-author Associate Professor Claudia Di Bella, an orthopedic surgeon at St Vincent's Hospital Melbourne, said the study showcases the possibilities that open up when clinicians, engineers and biomedical scientists come together to address a clinical problem.

"A common problem faced by clinicians is the inability to access technological experimental solutions for the problems they face daily," Di Bella said.

"While a clinician is the best professional to recognise a problem and think about potential solutions, biomedical engineers can turn that idea into reality.

"Learning how to speak a common language across engineering and medicine is often an initial barrier, but once this is overcome, the possibilities are endless."

Future treatment toolkit

Currently there are few treatment options for people who lose a significant amount of bone or tissue due to illness or injury, making amputation or metal implants to fill a gap common outcomes.

While a few clinical trials of tissue engineering have been conducted around the world, key bioengineering challenges still need to be addressed for 3D bioprinting technology to become a standard part of a surgeon's toolkit.

In orthopedics, a major sticking point is the development of a bioscaffold that works across both bone and cartilage.

"Our new method is so precise we're creating specialised bone and cartilage-growing microstructures in a single bioscaffold," O'Connell said.

"It's the surgical ideal - one integrated scaffold that can support both types of cells, to better replicate the way the body works."

Tests with human cells have shown bioscaffolds built using the new method are safe and non-toxic.

The next steps for the researchers will be testing designs to optimise cell regeneration and investigating the impact on cell regrowth of different combinations of biocompatible materials.

Step-by-step: How to reverse print a bioscaffold

The new method - which researchers have dubbed Negative Embodied Sacrificial Template 3D (NEST3D) printing - uses simple PVA glue as the basis for the 3D printed mould.

Once the biocompatible material injected into the mould has set, the entire structure is placed in water to dissolve the glue, leaving just the cell-nurturing bioscaffold.

Study first author, PhD researcher Stephanie Doyle, said the method enabled researchers to rapidly test combinations of materials to identify those most effective for cell growth.

"The advantage of our advanced injection moulding technique is its versatility," Doyle said.

"We can produce dozens of trial bioscaffolds in a range of materials - from biodegradable polymers to hydrogels, silicones and ceramics - without the need for rigorous optimisation or specialist equipment.

"We're able to produce 3D structures that can be just 200 microns across, the width of 4 human hairs, and with complexity that rivals that achievable by light-based fabrication techniques.

"It could be a massive accelerator for biofabrication and tissue engineering research."

Digital medicine is opening up entirely new possibilities. For example, it can detect tumors at an early stage. But the effectiveness of new AI algorithms depends on the quantity and quality of the data used to train them.

To maximize the data pool, it is customary to share patient data between clinics by sending copies of databases to the clinics where the algorithm is being trained. For data protection purposes, the material usually undergoes anonymization and pseudonymization processes - a procedure that has also come in for criticism. "These processes have often proven inadequate in terms of protecting patients' health data," says Daniel Rueckert, Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Medicine at TUM.

Smart algorithms support doctors

To address this problem, an interdisciplinary team at TUM has worked with researchers at Imperial College London and the non-profit OpenMined to develop a unique combination of AI-based diagnostic processes for radiological image data that safeguard data privacy. In a paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, the team has now presented a successful application: a deep learning algorithm that helps to classify pneumonia conditions in x-rays of children.

"We have tested our models against specialized radiologists. In some cases the models showed comparable or better accuracy in diagnosing various types of pneumonia in children," says Prof. Marcus R. Makowski, the Director of the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology at the Klinikum rechts der Isar of TUM.

Data remain onsite

"To keep patient data safe, it should never leave the clinic where it is collected," says project leader and first author Georgios Kaissis of the TUM Institute of Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology. "For our algorithm we used federated learning, in which the deep learning algorithm is shared - and not the data. Our models were trained in the various hospitals using the local data and then returned to us. Thus, the data owners did not have to share their data and retained complete control," says first author Alexander Ziller, a researcher at the Institute of Radiology.

Data cannot be traced back to individuals

To prevent identification of institutions where the algorithm was trained, the team applied another technique: secure aggregation. "We combined the algorithms in encrypted form and only decrypted them after they were trained with the data of all participating institutions," says Kaissis. And to ensure 'differential privacy' - i.e. to prevent individual patient data from being filtered out of the data records - the researchers used a third technique when training the algorithm. "Ultimately, statistical correlations can be extracted from the data records, but not the contributions of individual persons," says Kaissis.

First-ever combination of privacy-protecting methods

"Our methods have been applied in other studies," says Daniel Rueckert. "But we have not yet seen large-scale studies using real clinical data. Through the targeted development of technologies and the cooperation between specialists in informatics and radiology, we have succeeded in training models that deliver precise results while meeting high standards of data protection and privacy."

Rickmer Braren, the deputy director of the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology notes: "It is often claimed that data protection and the utilization of data must always be in conflict. But we are now proving that this does not have to be true." The scientists add that their method can be applied to other medical data, and not just x-rays. For example speech and text.

Data protection opens up enormous potential for digital medicine

The combination of the latest data protection processes will also facilitate cooperation between institutions, as the team showed in a paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence in 2020. Their privacy-preserving AI method can overcome ethical, legal and political obstacles - thus paving the way for widespread use of AI, says Braren. And this is enormously important for research into rare diseases.

The scientists are convinced that their technology, by safeguarding the private sphere of patients, can make an important contribution to the advancement of digital medicine. "To train good AI algorithms, we need good data," says Kaissis. "And we can only obtain these data by properly protecting patient privacy," adds Rueckert. "This shows that, with data protection, we can do much more for the advancement knowledge than many people think."

Further information:

With the appointment in 2020 of the Alexander von Humboldt Professor Daniel Rueckert and the new Director of the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology Prof. Marcus R. Makowski, TUM decisively strengthened its activities in AI research and its applications in radiology.