Culture

What The Study Did: Oregon's Reproductive Health Equity Act ensured coverage for family planning (abortion and contraception) using state funds for all low-income state residents regardless of citizenship status. Researchers in this study describe the first two years of abortion services covered and the distances traveled by women to receive care.

Authors: Maria I. Rodriguez, M.D., M.P.H., of Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, is the corresponding author.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ 

(doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2021.0402)

Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

What The Study Did: Variation in SARS-CoV-2 infection risk and socioeconomic disadvantage among a Mayan-Latinx population in Fruitvale, California, was examined in this study.

Authors: Paul Wesson, Ph.D., of the University of California, San Francisco, is the corresponding author.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.10789)

Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

Papers in leading psychology, economic and science journals that fail to replicate and therefore are less likely to be true are often the most cited papers in academic research, according to a new study by the University of California San Diego's Rady School of Management.

Published in Science Advances, the paper explores the ongoing "replication crisis" in which researchers have discovered that many findings in the fields of social sciences and medicine don't hold up when other researchers try to repeat the experiments.

The paper reveals that findings from studies that cannot be verified when the experiments are repeated have a bigger influence over time. The unreliable research tends to be cited as if the results were true long after the publication failed to replicate.

"We also know that experts can predict well which papers will be replicated," write the authors Marta Serra-Garcia, assistant professor of economics and strategy at the Rady School and Uri Gneezy, professor of behavioral economics also at the Rady School. "Given this prediction, we ask 'why are non-replicable papers accepted for publication in the first place?'"

Their possible answer is that review teams of academic journals face a trade-off. When the results are more "interesting," they apply lower standards regarding their reproducibility.

The link between interesting findings and nonreplicable research also can explain why it is cited at a much higher rate--the authors found that papers that successfully replicate are cited 153 times less than those that failed.

"Interesting or appealing findings are also covered more by media or shared on platforms like Twitter, generating a lot of attention, but that does not make them true," Gneezy said.

Serra-Garcia and Gneezy analyzed data from three influential replication projects which tried to systematically replicate the findings in top psychology, economic and general science journals (Nature and Science). In psychology, only 39 percent of the 100 experiments successfully replicated. In economics, 61 percent of the 18 studies replicated as did 62 percent of the 21 studies published in Nature/Science.

With the findings from these three replication projects, the authors used Google Scholar to test whether papers that failed to replicate are cited significantly more often than those that were successfully replicated, both before and after the replication projects were published. The largest gap was in papers published in Nature/Science: non-replicable papers were cited 300 times more than replicable ones.

When the authors took into account several characteristics of the studies replicated--such as the number of authors, the rate of male authors, the details of the experiment (location, language and online implementation) and the field in which the paper was published--the relationship between replicability and citations was unchanged.

They also show the impact of such citations grows over time. Yearly citation counts reveal a pronounced gap between papers that replicated and those that did not. On average, papers that failed to replicate are cited 16 times more per year. This gap remains even after the replication project is published.

"Remarkably, only 12 percent of post-replication citations of non-replicable findings acknowledge the replication failure," the authors write.

The influence of an inaccurate paper published in a prestigious journal can have repercussions for decades. For example, the study Andrew Wakefield published in The Lancet in 1998 turned tens of thousands of parents around the world against the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine because of an implied link between vaccinations and autism. The incorrect findings were retracted by The Lancet 12 years later, but the claims that autism is linked to vaccines continue.

The authors added that journals may feel pressure to publish interesting findings, and so do academics. For example, in promotion decisions, most academic institutions use citations as an important metric in the decision of whether to promote a faculty member.

This may be the source of the "replication crisis," first discovered the early 2010s.

"We hope our research encourages readers to be cautious if they read something that is interesting and appealing," Serra-Garcia said. "Whenever researchers cite work that is more interesting or has been cited a lot, we hope they will check if replication data is available and what those findings suggest."

Gneezy added, "We care about the field and producing quality research and we want to it to be true."

What The Study Did: This observational study found no association between long-term dietary intake of gluten and cognitive function among a large group of middle-age women without celiac disease.

Authors: Andrew T. Chan, M.D., M.P.H., of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, is the corresponding author.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.13020)

Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

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About JAMA Network Open: JAMA Network Open is the new online-only open access general medical journal from the JAMA Network. On weekdays, the journal publishes peer-reviewed clinical research and commentary in more than 40 medical and health subject areas. Every article is free online from the day of publication.

Irvine, Calif. - A record of medicine utilization patterns assembled by an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of California, Irvine and the UC San Diego School of Medicine reveals the thought, care and scientific rigor clinicians at UC Health medical centers applied in their treatment of patients with COVID-19 in 2020.

For a study published today in Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open, the investigators examined data on the usage rates of 10 different medicines and medicine categories to map how drugs were used on people hospitalized with the viral infection.

The authors got their data from the University of California COVID Research Data Set and tracked 22,896 patients admitted to UC Health medical centers in Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco between March 10 and Dec. 31, 2020.

"The home run of this paper is really in the figures built from the UC CORDS database," said lead author Jonathan Watanabe, UCI professor of clinical pharmacy. "You can clearly see how usage of certain medicines grew or declined over the course of the pandemic and how those movements were tied to evidence-based decisions being made by UC healthcare providers in real time. You can monitor the evolution in how we treat our sickest patients."

A stark example can be seen in the shift in acceptance of the antimicrobial medication hydroxychloroquine, which was the subject of public discussion in White House briefings and substantial media attention. In the early stages of the pandemic, the drug was given to more than 40 percent of patients, but by June, usage was below 5 percent. Usage of another drug in that class, azithromycin, fell from 40 to 30 percent in that same timeframe.

"There were some studies conducted in the early part of the pandemic that were not particularly well-designed and were limited in size that appeared to show hydroxychloroquine to be useful," said Watanabe, who's also UCI's founding associate dean of pharmacy assessment and quality in UCI's School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences. "We saw high uptake of the drug early on, but then it just cratered, because as time progressed and more high-quality trials came in, it was shown to be not effective."

The opposite can be seen with dexamethasone, which increased from being administered to 1.4 percent of patients per day on March 31 to 67.5 percent by the end of December. The inexpensive, generic corticosteroid was found to be effective in large trials in hospitalized patients in the U.K., according to Watanabe.

"At first glance, a lot of people might say you wouldn't want to use a corticosteroid that, theoretically, could reduce the immune response in a COVID patient," he said. "But the trials really demonstrated that the knee-jerk mechanism of action-response was not correct in this case: The anti-inflammatory effect of the drug to tame cytokine storms was evidently more important than any blunting of the immune response."

Remdesivir use grew 12-fold, from 4.9 percent on June 1 to 62.5 percent on Dec. 31. Watanabe said one possible explanation for this is that the medication was only available in conjunction with trials in the UC system in the early part of the pandemic and was more widely distributed as time went on.

Enoxaparin, used to both treat and prevent thrombosis, also proved effective against COVID-19, of which blood clots are a common symptom. The drug remained above 50 percent in usage throughout 2020.

"We tend to put hospitalized patients in general on an anticoagulant to reduce the risk of clots, which can happen because they may be lying in place immobile for long stretches," Watanabe said. "But then we started to notice thrombophilia in COVID patients, so enoxaparin and heparin both became very important not just as prophylaxis but as treatments."

He noted that the utilization numbers in the paper show how physicians and other healthcare professionals responded to evidence and their own observations effectively in real time and that such information is important for clinicians to know for future planning purposes in terms of both treatment decision-making and ensuring a robust supply of proven drugs.

"This JAMA study is a thoughtful chronicle of the steps doctors, nurses and staff at UC Health medical centers took to help patients with a potentially life-threatening disease," said Jan Hirsch, founding dean of UCI's School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences. "In the beginning, not a lot was known about the right course of treatment for COVID-19, but our people learned fast and responded to evidence about what was effective on a daily and sometimes even more frequent basis."

Micropollutants such as steroid hormones contaminate drinking water worldwide and pose a significant threat to human health and the environment even in smallest quantities. Until now, easily scalable water treatment technologies that remove them efficiently and sustainably have been lacking. Scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) developed a new chemical process for removing hormones. It takes advantage of the mechanisms of photocatalysis and transforms the pollutants into potentially safe oxidation products. The team reports on this in the scientific journal Applied Catalysis B: Environmental.

Organic pollutants such as pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and hormones - even at nanoscale concentrations - contaminate drinking water in a way that poses significant risks to humans, animals, and the environment. In particular, the steroid hormones estrone, estradiol, progesterone, and testosterone can cause biological damage in humans and wildlife. The European Union has therefore set strict minimum quality standards for safe and clean drinking water, which must also be taken into account in the development of new technologies for water treatment. "The challenge for science is to develop more sensitive methods to target the hormone molecules," says Professor Andrea Iris Schäfer, Head of the Institute for Advanced Membrane Technology (IAMT) at KIT. The main problem is that steroid hormones are very hard to detect in water. "There is one hormone molecule for every quintillion water molecules. This is an extremely low concentration," explains the expert.

Detecting - and Removing - Micropollutants

With conventional water treatment technologies, wastewater treatment plants can neither find nor remove micropollutants. Researchers at the IAMT and the KIT Institute of Microstructure Technology (IMT) are therefore working on new methods to not only detect and measure micropollutants, but also remove them. A new, photocatalytic process proves to be promising. The scientists coated a commercially available large-pore polymer membrane with Pd(II)-porphyrin, a palladium-containing, light-sensitive molecule that can absorb visible radiation. Exposure to radiation with simulated sunlight initiates a chemical process that produces so-called singlet oxygen, a highly reactive oxygen species. The singlet oxygen specifically "attacks" the hormone molecules and converts them into potentially safe oxidation products. "It is crucial that we coat the surface of each pore with the photosensitizer molecule, increasing the surface area of attack," explains Roman Lyubimenko, a scientist at IAMT and IMT.

Significant Reduction of the Estradiol Concentration

The chemical decomposition of steroid hormones and the filtration of other micropollutants can be realized in a single module. With this process, filtering of 60 to 600 liters of water per square meter of membrane is possible in one hour. The scientists were able to reduce the concentration of estradiol, the most biologically active steroid hormone, by 98 percent from 100 to 2 nanograms per liter. "This means that we are already very close to the EU target value of one nanogram per liter," emphasizes Schäfer. The next goal of the research team is to further optimize the photocatalytic process and transfer it to a larger scale. Open issues are to find out how much light intensity and how much porphyrin will be needed and whether the costly palladium from the platinum group of metals can be replaced by other metals. (sur)

The findings of a clinical trial by Trinity College Dublin researchers of treatment for atopic dermatitis have been published today in The Lancet journal (Friday, 21st May, 2021). Results of the clinical trial at the School of Medicine, Trinity College and St James's Hospital, Dublin have shown the drug upadacitinib to be the most effective treatment to date for this chronic, relapsing inflammatory condition. The research is vital as there is an unmet need which exists for therapies that provide remission of symptoms in moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis.

The publication reports efficacy and safety results of upadacitinib compared with placebo for the treatment of moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis in adults and adolescents. This pivotal Global Phase 3 study involved 1,600 patients and took place over the last two years at The Wellcome Trust/Health Research Board Clinical Research Facility at St James's Hospital.

Atopic dermatitis is a chronic, relapsing inflammatory condition characterised by a cycle of intense itching and scratching leading to cracked, scaly, oozing skin. It affects up to an estimated 10 percent of adults and 25 percent of children. Between 20 and 46 percent of adults with atopic dermatitis have moderate to severe disease. The range of symptoms pose significant physical, psychological and economic burden on individuals impacted by the disease.

Results show upadacitinib to so far be the most effective treatment for atopic dermatitis in clinical trials. The magnitude and breadth of the treatment effect versus placebo across multifaceted aspects of atopic dermatitis provides evidence that a targeted therapy blocking multiple inflammatory pathways could help to address the substantial unmet needs in the treatment of moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis.

These pivotal findings could potentially transform the treatment goals and standards of care for patients with moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis.

Professor Alan Irvine, School of Medicine, Trinity College and Principal Investigator said:

"Atopic dermatitis is a common inflammatory skin disease which, when severe, has a very significant impact on quality of life. These results are hugely encouraging and will hopefully offer an additional treatment option for patients very soon. The success of this clinical trial also shows the value of investment in our Trinity research facility at St James's Hospital, meaning Irish patients have access to advanced therapies and Irish medical and nursing trainees gain valuable research skills. "

An international study led by the ICTA-UAB states that recognizing indigenous peoples' and local communities' rights and agency is critical to addressing the current biodiversity crisis

Policies established by the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) could be ineffective if the rights and agency of indigenous peoples and local communities are not recognized and fully incorporated into biodiversity management. This is supported by an international study led by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and recently published in the journal Ambio.

The Convention on Biological Diversity is now working to formulate the goals that will frame global biodiversity policy in the years to come. This will be done through an ambitious international plan commonly known as the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. The objective of this framework is to promote a profound transformation at the social level that allows halting biodiversity loss at global level. Unfortunately, the framework, as currently written, still has a long way to go towards fully recognizing Indigenous Peoples' rights and agency, scientists argue.

"Indigenous Peoples' and local communities' understandings of nature align perfectly well with the Convention on Biological Diversity's vision of Living in Harmony with Nature", says ICREA Research Professor at the ICTA-UAB Victoria Reyes-García, leader of the study. "It seems paradoxical that global discussions on the collective future of the planet do not heed the voices of Indigenous Peoples' and local communities, one of the groups of actors that has contributed the most to safeguarding the planet's biodiversity".

The study, signed by 21 scientists from all over the world, presents a set of arguments why foregrounding Indigenous Peoples' and local communities' rights and agency is essential to the success of future biodiversity policy. Based on an in-depth review of literature, the study highlights that Indigenous Peoples and local communities hold critical knowledge for setting realistic, legitimate and effective biodiversity targets.

"The Global Biodiversity Framework should recognize and address the views and perspectives of Indigenous Peoples and local communities", states Dr. Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, co-author of the study and researcher at the University of Helsinki. "There is crystal-clear evidence that their knowledge systems, practices and values have so much to offer in addressing the current biodiversity crisis".

The authors argue that Indigenous Peoples' and local communities' participation in biodiversity policy contribute to recognizing and upholding human rights, and call on the Convention on Biological Diversity to fully recognize Indigenous Peoples' and local communities not only as stakeholders, but also as rights, agency and knowledge-holders.

Scientists at the Ural Federal University (UrFU, Russia) have created clay bricks that are able to attenuate ionizing radiation to a level that is safe for the human body. To the composition of bricks scientists add waste from the industry, which protects against radiation. The article describing the technology was published in the journal Applied Radiation and Isotopes.

"Bricks are a relatively cheap and convenient material with which we can quickly erect protective rooms, structures, walls around objects with radiation," says scientific head of the project, associate professor of the Department of Nuclear Power Plants and Renewable Energy Sources at UrFU Oleg Tashlykov. "The bricks are alloyed with heavy metals - wastes from the metallurgical enterprises. These substances have pronounced radiation-protective properties. Thus, we solve two problems at once. First, by adding crushed absorbers of ionizing radiation to the matrix, in this case from clay, we obtain building materials with the desired protective properties. Secondly, in this way we find a way to utilize industrial waste."

The ultimate goal of scientists is to develop a wide range of materials based not only on clay, but also cement mortars or concrete, artificial polymers with different chemical composition and concentration of absorbing substances. In other words, with specified protective properties that meet specific conditions (isotopic composition of radioactive contamination, types of radiation, etc.) at nuclear power plants, in radioactive waste storage facilities, as well as in medical institutions where diagnostics and treatment are carried out using X-ray equipment and irradiating devices.

"Tungsten is widely known to be the most reliable protection against gamma or X-ray radiation, but it is very expensive," says research coauthor, research engineer of the Department of Nuclear Power Plants and Renewable Energy Sources at UrFU Karem Makhmud. "Lead is cheaper but toxic. And, besides, it is plastic and in an upright position can slide under its own weight, forming holes in the radiation protection system and reducing its stability. Our materials are optimal in terms of radiation protection efficiency and ease of manufacture, strength, durability, cost. The latter factor is important, since today the contribution of biological protection to the cost of nuclear power facilities reaches 20-30%."

Scientists use high-precision computational codes to create bricks. Also they use for their experimental research the reactor plant of the Institute of Reactor Materials of the State Corporation "Rosatom" (Russia), as well as the production technologies of the Sealing Materials Plant (Russia). The products of joint activities are of great interest to domestic and foreign enterprises of the nuclear industry. There are plans to further study the mechanical and radiation-protective parameters of various natural substances, including those common in the partner countries of Rosatom (Turkey, Egypt, Bangladesh), where nuclear power plants are being built with the participation of Russian specialists.

Chronic skin itching drives more people to the dermatologist than any other condition. In fact, the latest science literature finds that 7% of U.S. adults, and between 10 and 20% of people in developed countries, suffer from dermatitis, a common skin inflammatory condition that causes itching.

"Itch is a significant clinical problem, often caused by underlying medical conditions in the skin, liver, or kidney. Due to our limited understanding of itch mechanisms, we don't have effective treatment for the majority of patients," said Liang Han, an assistant professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Biological Sciences who is also a researcher in the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.

Until recently, neuroscientists considered the mechanisms of skin itch the same. But Han and her research team recently uncovered differences in itch in non-hairy versus hairy areas of the skin, opening new areas for research.

Their research, published April 13 in the journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America), could open new, more effective treatments for patients suffering from persistent skin itching.

Itch Origins More Than Skin Deep

According to researchers, there are two different types of stimuli from the nervous system that trigger the itch sensation through sensory nerves in the skin ? chemical and mechanical. In their study, Han and her team identified a specific neuron population that controls itching in 'glabrous' skin ?the smoother, tougher skin that's found on the palms of hands and feet soles.

Itching in those areas poses greater difficulty for sufferers and is surprisingly common. In the U.S., there are an estimated 200,000 cases a year of dyshidrosis, a skin condition causing itchy blisters to develop only on the palm and soles. Another chronic skin condition, palmoplantar pustulosis (a type of psoriasis that causes inflamed, scaly skin and intense itch on the palms and soles), affects as many as 1.6 million people in the U.S. each year.

"That's actually one of the most debilitating places (to get an itch)," said first author Haley R. Steele, a graduate student in the School of Biological Sciences. "If your hands are itchy, it's hard to grasp things, and if it's your feet, it can be hard to walk. If there's an itch on your arm, you can still type. You'll be distracted, but you'll be OK. But if it's your hands and feet, it's harder to do everyday things."

Ability to Block, Activate Itch-causing Neurons in Lab Mice

Since many biological mechanisms underlying itch -- such as receptors and nerve pathways -- are similar in mice and people, most itch studies rely on mice testing. Using mice in their lab, Georgia Tech researchers were able to activate or block these neurons.

The research shows, for the first time, "the actual neurons that send itch are different populations. Neurons that are in hairy skin that do not sense itch in glabrous skins are one population, and another senses itch in glabrous skins."

Why has an explanation so far eluded science? "I think one reason is because most of the people in the field kind of assumed it was the same mechanism that's controlling the sensation. It's technically challenging. It's more difficult than working on hairy skin," Han said.

To overcome this technical hurdle, the team used a new investigative procedure, or assay, modeled after human allergic contact dermatitis, Steele said.

The previous method would have involved injecting itch-causing chemicals into mice skin, but most of a mouse's skin is covered with hair. The team had to focus on the smooth glabrous skin on tiny mice hands and feet. Using genetically modified mice also helped identify the right sensory neurons responsible for glabrous skin itches.

"We activated a particular set of neurons that causes itch, and we saw that biting behavior again modeled," said Steele, referring to how mice usually deal with itchy skin.

One set of study mice was given a chemical to specifically kill an entire line of neurons. Focusing on three previously known neuron mechanisms related to itch sensation found in hairy skin, they found that two of the neurons, MrgprA3+ and MrgprD+, did not play important roles in non-hairy skin itch, but the third neuron, MrgprC11+, did. Removing it reduced both acute and chronic itching in the soles and palms of test mice.

Potential to Drive New Treatments for Chronic Itch

Han's team hopes that the research leads to treatments that will turn off those itch-inducing neurons, perhaps by blocking them in human skin.

"To date, most treatments for skin itch do not discriminate between hairy and glabrous skin except for potential medication potency due to the increased skin thickness in glabrous skin," observed Ron Feldman, assistant professor in the Department of Dermatology in the Emory University School of Medicine. Georgia Tech's findings "provide a rationale for developing therapies targeting chronic itching of the hands and feet that, if left untreated, can greatly affect patient quality of life," he concluded.

What's next for Han and her team? "We would like to investigate how these neurons transmit information to the spinal cord and brain," said Han, who also wants to investigate the mechanisms of chronic itch conditions that mainly affect glabrous skin such as cholestatic itch, or itch due to reduced or blocked bile flow often seen in liver and biliary system diseases.

"I joined this lab because I love working with Liang Han," added Steele, who selected glabrous skin itch research for her Ph.D. "because it was the most technically challenging and had the greatest potential for being really interesting and significant to the field."

When Charles Darwin published Descent of Man 150 years ago, he launched scientific investigations on human origins and evolution. This week, three leading scientists in different, but related disciplines published "Modern theories of human evolution foreshadowed by Darwin's Descent of Man," in Science, in which they identify three insights from Darwin's opus on human evolution that modern science has reinforced.

"Working together was a challenge because of disciplinary boundaries and different perspectives, but we succeeded," said Sergey Gavrilets, lead author and professor in the Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Mathematics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Their goal with this review summary was to apply the framework of modern speciation theory to human origins and summarize recent research to highlight the fact that Darwin's Descent of Man foreshadowed many recent scientific developments in the field.

They focused on the following three insights:

1. We share many characteristics with our closest relatives, the anthropoid apes, which include genetic, developmental, physiological, morphological, cognitive, and psychological characteristics.

2. Humans have a talent for high-level cooperation reinforced by morality and social norms.

3. We have greatly expanded the social learning capacity that we see already in other primates.

"The paper's insights have important implication for understanding behavior of modern humans and for developing policies to solve some of the most pressing problems our society faces," Gavrilets said.

Gavrilets is director of the Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity (DySoC) at UT, which promotes transdisciplinary research into the origins, evolution, and futures of human social complexity. This paper is one of the outcomes of activities from the Center. Other related outcomes include free online learning modules on cultural evolution and a series of online webinars about cultural evolution and human origins, which thousands of students and researchers worldwide have watched.

Depressive disorders are among the most frequent illnesses worldwide. The causes are complex and to date only partially understood. The trace element lithium appears to play a role. Using neutrons of the research neutron source at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), a research team has now proved that the distribution of lithium in the brains of depressive people is different from the distribution found in healthy humans.

Lithium is familiar to many of us from rechargeable batteries. Most people ingest lithium on a daily basis in drinking water. International studies have shown that a higher natural lithium content in drinking water coincides with a lower suicide rate among the population.

In much higher concentrations lithium salts have been used for decades to treat mania and depressive disturbances. However, the exact role lithium plays in the brain is still unknown.

Physicists and neuropathologists at the Technical University of Munich joined forensic medical experts at Ludwig-Maximilian-University of Munich (LMU) and an expert team from the Research Neutron Source Heinz Maier-Leibnitz (FRM II) to develop a method which can be used to precisely determine the distribution of lithium in the human brain. The team hopes to be able to draw conclusions for therapy as well as to gain a better understanding of the physiological processes involved in depression.

Neutrons detect the slightest traces of lithium

The scientists investigated the brain of a suicidal patient and compared it with two control persons. The investigation focused on the ratio of the lithium concentration in white brain matter to the concentration in the gray matter of the brain.

In order to determine where how much lithium is present in the brain, the researchers analyzed 150 samples from various brain regions - for example those regions which are presumably responsible for processing feelings. At the FRM II Prompt Gamma-Ray Activation Analysis (PGAA) instrument the researchers irradiated thin brain sections with neutrons.

"One lithium isotope is especially good at capturing neutrons; it then decays into a helium atom and a tritium atom," explains Dr. Roman Gernhäuser of the Central Technology Laboratory of the TUM Department of Physics. The two decay products are captured by detectors in front of and behind the sample and thus provide information on where exactly the lithium is located in the brain section.

Since the lithium concentration in the brain is usually very low, it is also very difficult to ascertain. "Until now it wasn't possible to detect such small traces of lithium in the brain in a spatially resolved manner," says Dr. Jutta Schöpfer of the LMU Munich Institute for Forensic Medicine. "One special aspect of the investigation using neutrons is that our samples are not destroyed. That means we can repeatedly examine them several times over a longer period of time," Gernhäuser points out.

Significant difference between depressive patients and healthy persons

"We saw that there was significantly more lithium present in the white matter of the healthy person than in the gray matter. By contrast, the suicidal patient had a balanced distribution, without a measurable systematic difference," summarizes Dr. Roman Gernhäuser.

"Our results are fairly groundbreaking, because we were able for the first time to ascertain the distribution of lithium under physiological conditions," Schöpfer is glad to report. "Since we were able to ascertain trace quantities of the element in the brain without first administering medication and because the distribution is so clearly different, we assume that lithium indeed has an important function in the body."

Just a beginning

"Of course the fact that we were only able to investigate brain sections from three persons marks only a beginning," Gernhäuser admits. "However, in each case we were able to investigate many different brain regions which confirmed the systematic behavior."

"We would be able to find out much more with more patients, whose life stories would also be better known," says Gernhäuser, adding that it might then also be possible to answer the question as to whether the deviating lithium distribution in depressive persons is a cause or a result of the illness.

Social scientists have had a longstanding fixation on moral character, demographic information, and socioeconomic status when it comes to analyzing crime and arrest rates. The measures have become traditional markers used to quantify and predict criminalization, but they leave out a crucial indicator: what's going on in the changing world around their subjects.

An unprecedented longitudinal study, published today in the American Journal of Sociology, looks to make that story more complete and show that when it comes to arrests it can come down to when someone is rather than who someone is, a theory the researchers refer to as the birth lottery of history.

Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson and Ph.D. candidate Roland Neil followed arrests in the lives of more than 1,000 Americans as they transitioned out of adolescence to being young adults over a 23-year span. This was a time period that saw some of the largest social change in recent memory, and the results indicate how these changes, which included the rise of mass incarceration, aggressive policing tactics, and the mid-1990s sudden drop in crime that became known as the "great American crime decline" -- helped shape how these adolescents and young adults came into contact with the criminal justice system.

"What we're attempting to do is to look at birth cohorts who were coming of age at different times during these social changes," said Sampson, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences. "The setting is roughly the last quarter-century or so. We focused on that because it's a time of great social change in the United States. Mass incarceration comes to the top of many people's minds, but we also saw a rise in violence before that and then a large decline in violence over most of the past 25 years. We saw tremendous changes in policing practices, and most recently, concerns about police brutality and police killings have risen."

What Sampson and Neil tried to do is link those changes with what it's like to grow up when it comes to criminalization, particularly arrest -- the trigger generating a criminal record in the first place. It sheds new light on the arrest patterns of people who came of age in different eras of the war on drugs, mass incarceration, and plummeting violence starting in the 1990s.

The researchers based their work on a multi-cohort longitudinal study of 1,057 children who were originally enrolled in a National Institute of Justice study called the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, a study of how families, schools, and neighborhoods affect child and adolescent development. The oldest individuals tracked were born between 1980 and the mid-1980s and were ages nine, 12, and 15 at the start of the study. The youngest in the study were born in 1995. All participants were tracked from 1995 to 2018.

All participants in the study, originally all Chicagoans, were followed over the course of nearly twenty-five years as they came of age. They were selected randomly based on a representative sample reflecting the diversity of contemporary urban America. Blacks and Latinos each comprised over a third of the sample while white participants made up 20 percent. More than a third of the individuals came from immigrant families. The researchers also collected information through interviews with caretakers and the participants over multiple rounds of data collection. It allowed Sampson and Neil to dig deep into the characteristics of the participants, their families, and early-life neighborhood conditions.

They used data based on criminal history records that were collected through the end of 2018 for all participants, allowing them to study arrest over a 23-year span. The analysis showed large differences in patterns of arrest among the four age cohorts across substantial portions of their lives "We wanted to know not only if there were differences in arrest rates for the different cohorts, but why were there differences," Neil said. "Do these differences reflect fundamental differences in who these people were, or differences in what happened early on in their life? Or did they reflect differences in the larger context through which they were aging?"

The researchers found it was the latter. In many cases, for example, even people who shared the same kind of character traits, grew up in similar families, and came from similar economic backgrounds had much higher or lower chances of getting arrested depending on the years during which they were 17 to 23 years old, the peak ages for arrest.

For instance, younger cohorts (those born in the 1990s) came of age during a radically different and, in some ways, more peaceful world than the older cohorts, who were born in the 1980s. In fact, the chances of arrest for the older cohorts were nearly double -- 96 percent higher -- than the younger cohorts, according to the study.

"The explanation for this can't just be reduced to the usual suspects -- childhood experiences, family structure, demographics, social class, family upbringing -- or individual characteristics," Sampson said.

This is where the birth lottery of history comes in, meaning the fortune of when they were born factored into their chances of arrest. Analysis showed just how significant a few years of social changes can make when it comes to arrest rates by looking at what are often cited as the two leading explanations for crime: socioeconomic disadvantage and having low self-control.

Approximately 70 percent of children born in the 1980s to disadvantaged families were arrested by their mid-20s while only about a quarter of disadvantaged children born in the mid-1990s were arrested by that same age. For participants from more advantaged backgrounds changes were moderate. Looking at those same cohorts, the study found that those born in the 1980s with higher self-control had about the same arrest rates as those born in the 1990s with low self-control.

"We should really be looking at not what was virtuous or wrong with individuals of a particular cohort but rather looking at what's right or wrong with the larger social environment during the historical period in which they happen to come of age," Sampson said. "This study is showing that historical changes are built into those very criminal records."

Changing law enforcement patterns explained about half the cohort differences in criminalization, with disorderly conduct and drug arrests falling substantially in the period they studied. However, the researchers make clear that these differences were not driven by aggressive policing alone.

They believe behavioral changes caused by larger societal changes also led to lower arrests for younger cohorts. For example, from the mid-90s to 2018, parts of urban Chicago underwent revitalization, gentrification, repopulation, and saw an influx of immigrants. In more recent years the rise of technologies such as smartphones, video games, the internet, and social media have also transformed the lives of young people, potentially reducing time spent in risky situations for arrest.

"Put simply, our results show that when we are matters as much and perhaps more than who we are or even what we have done. To the extent that arrest is a result of substantial social changes in both criminal justice practices and societal norms that strongly differentiate the life experience of successive birth cohorts, independent of individual or family differences, the idea of an individual's propensity to crime needs reconsideration," Sampson said.

The study pointed out potential caveats such as the study being limited to people originally from Chicago and only looking at 20 years of a person's life.

The researchers hope to expand their theory and the data they collected on cohort inequalities in criminalization. They plan on doing new interviews and continuing to add to the records they've built to dig into the data further.

Paleontologists had to adjust to stay safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many had to postpone fossil excavations, temporarily close museums and teach the next generation of fossil hunters virtually instead of in person.

But at least parts of the show could go on during the pandemic -- with some significant changes.

"For paleontologists, going into the field to look for fossils is where data collection begins, but it does not end there," said Christian Sidor, a University of Washington professor of biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the UW's Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture. "After you collect fossils, you have to bring them to the laboratory, clean them off and see what you've found."

Among other adaptations during the pandemic, Sidor and his UW colleagues have spent more time cleaning, preparing and analyzing fossils excavated before the pandemic, as well as managing new pandemic-related struggles -- such as a misplaced shipment of irreplaceable specimens.

For Sidor's team, a recent triumph came from an analysis -- led by UW postdoctoral researcher Bryan Gee -- of fossils of Micropholis stowi, a salamander-sized amphibian that lived in the Early Triassic, shortly after Earth's largest mass extinction approximately 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian Period. Micropholis is a temnospondyl, a group of extinct amphibians known from fossil deposits around the globe. In a paper published May 21 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, Gee and Sidor report on the first occurrence of Micropholis in ancient Antarctica.

"Previously, Micropholis was only known from South African specimens," said Gee. "That isolation was considered fairly typical for amphibians in the Southern Hemisphere during the Early Triassic. Each region -- South Africa, Madagascar, Antarctica, Australia -- will have its own set of amphibian species. Now, we're seeing that Micropholis was more widespread than previously recognized."

Out of more than 30 Early Triassic amphibians in the Southern Hemisphere, Micropholis is now only the second found in more than one region, according to Gee. That is surprising given Earth's geography. In the Early Triassic, most of Earth's continents were connected as a part of a single, large landmass, Pangea. Places like South Africa and Antarctica were not as far apart as they are today, and may have had similar climates. Some scientists theorize that these closely placed regions could harbor different amphibian species as a consequence of the end-Permian mass extinction.

"It had been proposed that there were only small populations of survivors and low movement of species in the Early Triassic, which could have explained these regional differences," said Gee.

Finding Micropholis in two regions may indicate that this species was a "generalist" -- adaptable to many types of environments -- and could easily spread after the mass extinction.

Alternatively, it's possible that many other amphibians actually lived in multiple regions, like Micropholis, but paleontologists haven't found evidence yet. While some Southern Hemisphere regions like South Africa have been well sampled, others have not -- like Antarctica, which in the Early Triassic was relatively temperate, but is today largely covered by ice sheets.

Sidor's team collected skulls and other fragile body parts from four individuals of Micropholis during a 2017-2018 collection trip to the Transantarctic Mountains. In 2019, Gee agreed to come to the UW to lead the analysis of amphibian fossils from that trip after completing his doctoral degree at the University of Toronto. He completed his degree early in the pandemic and moved to Seattle during the second wave of COVID-19.

With social distancing measures in place on campus, Sidor delivered the fossils and a microscope to Gee's home, where he analyzed the specimens in his living room.

"Having access to the microscope was really the most essential piece of equipment, to be able to identify all the small-scale anatomical features that we need to definitively prove these were Micropholis fossils," said Gee.

On the same trip, Sidor's team collected another rare find: a well-preserved skull of a therocephalian, a group of extinct mammal relatives that lived in the Permian and Triassic periods. Therocephalians were a widespread group of both herbivores and carnivores.

"But the Antarctic record for these animals is very poor," said Sidor. "So this was a rare find."

It was a rare find that nearly went extinct again. Sidor shipped the therocephalian skull in October 2019 to Chicago's Field Museum, where it was cleaned and prepped by his longtime colleague Akiko Shinya.

"Not being able to travel to museums to do research, we've been shipping fossils to each other -- which we don't like to do, but sometimes we have to in order to keep the work going," said Sidor.

In early April, Shinya shipped the finished specimens overnight back to Sidor in Seattle, but the package did not show up at the projected time. As Sidor recounted on Twitter, the skull was apparently lost in a transfer facility in Indiana -- he feared for good. After several days, the package was found, and was promptly transported to Seattle and delivered safely to the UW.

"I was so relieved," said Sidor. "When I thought it was lost, I had been thinking about the insurance forms. How do you put a dollar value on a specimen that you needed an LC-130 Hercules to collect?"

The skull is undergoing analysis at the UW. As for the Antarctic Micropholis specimens, they'll soon receive a new home. Later this year, they'll go on display at the Burke Museum.

DALLAS - May 21, 2021 - One member of a large protein family that is known to stop the spread of bacterial infections by prompting infected human cells to self-destruct appears to kill the infectious bacteria instead, a new study led by UT Southwestern scientists shows. However, some bacteria have their own mechanism to thwart this attack, nullifying the deadly protein by tagging it for destruction.

The findings, published online today in Cell, could lead to new antibiotics to fight bacterial infections. And insight into this cellular conflict could shed light on a number of other conditions in which this protein is involved, including asthma, Type 1 diabetes, primary biliary cirrhosis, and Crohn's disease.

"This is a wonderful example of an arms race between infectious bacteria and human cells," says study leader Neal M. Alto, Ph.D., professor of microbiology at UTSW and a member of the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Previous research has shown that the protein, called gasdermin B (GSDMB), was different from other members of the mammalian gasdermin family. Related gasdermin proteins form pores in the membranes of infected cells, killing them while allowing inflammatory molecules to leak out and incite an immune response. However, GSDMB - found in humans but not in some other mammalian species, including rodents - doesn't form pores in the membranes of cultured mammalian cells, leaving its target a mystery.

Using a novel screening technology, Alto and colleagues discovered that a protein toxin called IpaH7.8 from shigella flexneri, a bacterium that causes diarrheal disease, directly inhibits GSDMB. Biochemical experiments show that IpaH7.8 places a chemical tag on GSDMB that marks it for cellular destruction.

To understand why shigella flexneri rids human cells of GSDMB, the researchers placed GSDMB within synthetic mammalian and bacterial cell membranes. While GSDMB left the synthetic mammalian membranes unharmed, it poked holes in the bacterial membranes. Further investigation showed that immune cells called natural killer cells stimulate this process.

Alto notes that inhibiting the ability of shigella IpaH7.8 to counteract GSDMB could lead to new types of antibiotics. And because genetic variants of GSDMB have been linked to a variety of inflammatory diseases and cancer, better understanding this protein could lead to new treatments for these conditions too.