Culture

Family history of early cardiac events in first degree relatives such as a parent or sibling is a major risk factor, especially for premature events. Currently, data on risks in close relatives of patients with a family history of premature heart attacks, chronic stable angina or peripheral vascular disease are sparse.

Researchers from Florida Atlantic University's Schmidt College of Medicine in collaboration with an international team of leading scientists in Italy, the United Kingdom and Poland, assembled a consecutive series of 230 patients with premature onset of heart attacks, strokes, angina or peripheral artery disease and a comparison group of apparently healthy men and women during a 24-month period. The comparison group had no family or personal history of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and had normal electrocardiograms (ECGs), cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressures and glucose. Researchers defined a premature event as occurring in men 60 years or younger and in women 65 years or younger.

"Our data indicate that early cardiac events pose major and different risks in close relatives," said Charles H. Hennekens, M.D., Dr.PH. senior author, the First Sir Richard Doll Professor and senior academic advisor in FAU's Schmidt College of Medicine. "Further, since families share more than genes, not surprisingly, these data are compatible with a role for both genetic and environmental factors."

The data, published in the International Journal of Cardiology, also suggest that first degree relatives of patients with premature heart attacks compared with those presenting with a first episode of chronic stable angina or peripheral vascular disease have a shorter survival time. Patients with heart attacks and chronic stable angina reported significantly higher frequencies of attacks in their first degree relatives than patients with peripheral vascular disease. In contrast, patients with chronic stable angina and peripheral vascular disease reported significantly higher frequencies of chronic stable angina and peripheral vascular disease, respectively, in their first degree relatives compared to patients with heart attacks.

"Family history of early onset events is a major and independent risk factor. Thus, patients with a positive parental or sibling history of premature cardiac events require even more aggressive therapeutic lifestyle changes as well as adjunctive drug therapies of proven benefit," said Hennekens. "In the United States, Europe and worldwide, most guidelines recommend risk scores for initial clinical assessments, which do not include family history of early events."

Hennekens formerly served as the first John Snow and the first Braunwald professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. His groundbreaking scientific findings have significantly improved the ability to treat as well as prevent CVD, and for more than a decade, he was ranked as the third most widely cited medical researcher in the world by Science Watch.

Hennekens has collaborated for several decades with Felicita Andreotti, M.D., Ph.D., first author and a professor at Catholic University Cardiovascular Medicine in Rome; and brought the data when she served as visiting professor at FAU's Schmidt College of Medicine. Their collaborations have included the major role of therapeutic lifestyle changes, especially overweight and obesity and physical inactivity as well as statins, PCSK9 inhibitors, aspirin, converting enzyme inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers.

In this study, Hennekens and Andreotti collaborated with Janet Robishaw, Ph.D., co-author and senior associate dean for research and chair of the Department of Biomedical Sciences in FAU's Schmidt College of Medicine. Andreotti had conducted the study at the Hammersmith Hospital and London Chest Hospital in the United Kingdom.

"Recent advances in human genome sequencing as well as basic and population genetics may help identify specific genotypes that predispose to atherosclerosis, thrombosis, or both," said Robishaw, a world renowned functional and translational genomics researcher with 30 years of sustained federal funding from the National Institutes of Health who trained under Nobel Laureate Alfred G. Gilman, Ph.D. "Further studies also are needed to identify and quantify the functional role of candidate and marker genes for cardiovascular phenotypes and risk factors, as well as to better understand plausible independent contributions as well as interactions between nature and nurture concerning family history as a major and independent risk factor in cardiovascular disease, especially of premature onset."

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for many decades, heart disease has been the leading killer among American men and women, causing approximately 600,000 deaths each year of which about 25 percent present with sudden cardiac death.

Breast cancer survivors who are overweight have a statistically significant increased risk of developing second primary cancers, according to results from a study conducted by Kaiser Permanente researchers and published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

There are approximately 3.9 million breast cancer survivors in the United States today and studies have found women diagnosed with breast cancer have an 18% increased risk for developing a second cancer compared to the general population. This increased risk is likely due to shared risk factors between the first and second cancers, genetic susceptibility, and long-term effects of breast cancer treatment.

Obesity is also strongly associated with an increased risk of several types of cancer. In fact, an estimated 55% of all cancers in women occur in those who are overweight or obese. This study sought to examine the association between body weight, as measured by BMI, at initial breast cancer diagnosis and the risk of developing a second cancer among a large cohort of women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer.

Women diagnosed with an invasive breast cancer were at a small but statistically significant increased risk for second cancers associated with increasing BMI. The association was more pronounced when the analysis was limited to cancers that are "obesity-related," or for second breast cancers, and was strongest for a diagnosis of estrogen receptor-positive second breast cancer. This study was the first to examine the risk of a subsequent ER-positive breast cancer or obesity-related cancers specifically.

"These findings have important public health implications given the number of breast cancer survivors with excess body weight," said lead author Heather Spencer Feigelson, PhD, senior investigator at the Kaiser Permanente Colorado Institute for Health Research. "Our study examined whether cancer survivors are at an increased risk of developing a second cancer and what factors contribute to this increased risk. Our findings truly underscore the need for effective weight loss prevention strategies, including nutrition and physical activity guidelines for breast cancer survivors."

This study involved 6,481 women from Kaiser Permanente in Colorado and Washington, of whom 822 (12.7%) developed a second cancer. The majority of women were overweight (33.4%) or obese (33.8%) at the time of their initial diagnosis. The mean age at initial breast cancer diagnosis was 61 years, and most (82.2%) of the cohort was white. Black women comprised a small percentage of the cases but were more likely to be obese (50.9% of Black women were obese compared to 33.6% of white women). The patients' BMI at the first cancer was extracted from their medical records. The outcomes evaluated included: all second cancers, obesity-related second cancers, any second breast cancer, and ER-positive second breast cancers. Obesity related cancer includes colorectal, uterine, ovarian and pancreatic cancer.

"This study illustrates that modifying one's BMI may result in significant health and quality of life benefits among breast cancer survivors," explained Clara Bodelon, PhD, MS, Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Men were more likely to be the spouse with the most knowledge of a couple's finances in 2016 than they were in 1992 - especially in wealthy couples, a new study suggests.

Results come from a survey that interviewed the spouse in mixed-sex married couples that was identified by a household member as "more knowledgeable about the household finances."

In 2016, 56% of husbands were designated as most knowledgeable, up from 53% in 1992 and 49% in 1995. But among households in the top 1% of net worth, the husband was designated as the most knowledgeable in 90% of the households in 2016.

"Despite the progress women have made in society, there still seems to be a gender gap in who takes care of the finances, especially in wealthy households," said Sherman Hanna, lead author of the study and professor of consumer sciences at The Ohio State University.

The study was published online recently in the journal Financial Planning Review.

The researchers used data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Board. It included surveys of U.S. households conducted every three years from 1992 to 2016. The 2016 survey included 6,248 households.

Results showed that the likelihood that the husband was designated as the most knowledgeable was not related to household income, but only overall wealth based on their assets. Age differences between the spouses and the age of the husband did not have any effects.

Education had a strong effect, with the more educated spouse being more likely to have the most knowledge about the household finances.

Overall, the percentage of husbands listed as most knowledgeable about household finances ranged from 49% to 57% over the 24 years of the study, with the percentage rising or falling slightly from survey to survey, with a slight upward trend, Hanna said.

But the most notable statistic may be the connection between household wealth and who knows the most about the finances, he said.

Among the lowest quartile of household total wealth in the 2016 survey, about half reported the husband as knowing the most. That went up to about 65% among those who were in the 75th to 95th percentile in wealth and 90% among those in the top 1% of wealth.

"As net worth increases, the husband is going to be designated as the most knowledgeable and presumably the one making the financial decisions," said study co-author Kyoung Tae Kim, associate professor of consumer sciences at the University of Alabama.

The data in the study can't say why, but the researchers have some ideas based on previous research.

For most people, the majority of their wealth was tied to houses and cars. But for the wealthiest, most of their assets were businesses, investment real estate and financial instruments such as stocks and bonds, the SCF data showed.

"These things generally mean taking big risks, and research suggests men are generally more comfortable than women with risky choices," Hanna said. "In addition, studies show that men generally have more financial confidence than women."

That interpretation is bolstered by the fact that the other group in which husbands were most likely to be designated as knowing the most about household finances - other than the wealthiest - were households with negative net worth.

"These may be cases where the risks that the husbands took did not pay off and actually put them in debt," Hanna said.

There may be some reliance on traditional gender roles, as well, the researchers said. In lower-wealth households, where the financial decisions are relatively simple and limited to bill paying and record keeping, men may be more willing to have their wives handle the money.

But as wealth increases and, with it, the complexity of the finances, men may push to be the decision-makers, Hanna said.

The results have important implications for financial professionals, especially those who work with the wealthy, said study co-author Sunwoo Tessa Lee, a doctoral student in consumer sciences at Ohio State.

"Wealth advisers need to make sure that they work with wives as well as husbands," Lee said.

"Our results suggest many of these wives may not know enough about their household finances, which may be critical if they are ever widowed or divorced."

ATLANTA - APRIL 12, 2021 - New study finds higher medical financial hardship in adult survivors of adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancers than in adults without a history of cancer in the United States. The study appears in JNCI: The Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Experts have known that cancer and its treatment can cause significant financial hardship to cancer survivors and their families. However, the long-term economic implications for adult survivors of AYA cancers were not fully understood. In this study, investigators led by Amy D. Lu, MD, The Hospital for Sick Children, and Zhiyuan "Jason" Zheng, Ph.D., American Cancer Society, used data from the National Health Interview Survey (2010-2018) and analyzed responses from adult (>18 years) survivors of AYA cancers (ages 15-39 at diagnosis) and adults without a cancer history. The study explored the various aspects of financial hardships including material (for example, ability to pay bills), psychological (for example, worries about medical bills), and behavioral (for example, delaying or foregoing medical care) measures.

Key study findings include:

Adult survivors of AYA cancers were more likely than adults without a cancer history, to report material and behavioral financial hardship, including problems paying medical bills or delaying or forgoing care because of cost.

Adult survivors of AYA cancers were more likely to report greater intensity of medical financial hardship than their counterparts without a cancer history.

Adult survivors of AYA cancers were more likely to report cost-related medication non-adherence, such as skipping medication doses, taking less medication, and delaying filling a prescription to save money.

"Multiple aspects of financial hardship associated with a cancer diagnosis may last for many years for survivors of AYA cancers," said Dr. Zheng.

As the incidences of AYA cancers increases, understanding the spectrum of medical financial hardship is critical to those caring for and designing policies for adult survivors of AYA cancers, and in guiding ongoing research in this area.

"Healthcare providers can help support increased awareness and assessment of financial hardship, as well as subsequent connection to existing financial and vocational assistance/support services. State and federal policies may have a broader impact through implementation of provisions of the Affordable Care Act in increasing insurance coverage options including affordability and accessibility," said the authors.

Study: "Disproportionate Burden: Estimating the Cost of FAFSA Verification for Public Colleges and Universities"

Authors: Alberto Guzman-Alvarez (University of Pittsburgh), Lindsay C. Page (University of Pittsburgh)

This study was published today in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.

Main Findings:

The institutional compliance costs of the FAFSA verification mandate in 2014 totaled nearly $500 million, with the burden falling disproportionately on public institutions and community colleges in particular.

Twenty-two percent of an average community college's financial aid office operating budget is devoted to verification procedures, compared to 15 percent at public four-year institutions and 1 percent at private four-year institutions.

Details:

The authors note that every year approximately 6 million of the 20 million students who apply for federal financial aid through the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) are selected by the U.S. Department of Education to undergo a verification process that requires them to further attest that the information reported on their FAFSA is accurate. The verification requirement is an unfunded mandate with the administrative costs falling on students' institutions.

Prior research has shown that verification serves as a potentially unnecessary hurdle to college enrollment and success, especially for low-income and historically marginalized students, and creates a disproportionate burden on institutions these students are likely to attend.

This study provides new evidence on the estimated institutional costs of complying with and administrating the federal FAFSA verification mandate, by institution type and sector, and the scale of these costs in comparison with institutional aid office operating budgets and total student services expenditures.

The authors analyzed 2014 data from National Center for Education Statistics that included all U.S. postsecondary institutions participating in federal student financial aid programs. Their sample included 2,837 not-for-profit institutions that serve students receiving federal study aid and, as such, fall under the verification mandate.

The authors found that, on average, institutions were required to verify 39 percent of undergraduates who received aid. Two-year publics were required to verify nearly half (46 percent) of aid recipients compared to lower rates at four-year publics (35 percent) and privates (38 percent).

In 2014, the average institution spent $170,000 processing verifications. The total cost across U.S. institutions was $481 million. Verification costs fall more to public institutions, with two-year publics spending $225 million and four-year publics spending $189 million. The four-year private sector faces a considerably lower compliance cost burden ($67 million).

To scale the estimates by institutional resources, the authors draw on information from the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators' Administrative Burden Survey for estimates of average financial aid office operating budgets by sector.

The results show that four-year and two-year public institutions devote a sizable share of their financial aid operating budget to administrating verification. The average four-year public spent 15 percent of its financial aid office operating budget to conducting verification, compared to 1 percent at the typical four-year private institution. The average community college spends 22 percent of its aid office budget on verification.

The authors also compared institution-level verification expenditures to total student service expenditures. The average four-year public devotes 1.5 percent of its student services budget to the verification process, compared to 0.5 percent at the typical four-year private. Community colleges, on average, spend 4 percent of student services budgets on verification.

"Community colleges devote a larger percentage of their financial aid operating and student services budgets to managing FAFSA verification," said coauthor Alberto Guzman-Alvarez, a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh. "This is concerning given that these colleges enroll nearly half of all undergraduates, and they disproportionately serve the least well-resourced students who most need financial aid to support their access to higher education."

"Financial aid administrators have experienced an increase in administrative burden due to increases in the rate with which students are selected for verification, which crowded out other supports that financial aid offices might provide, that may be especially important for lower-income and historically marginalized students," said Guzman-Alvarez.

The authors note that prior evidence suggests that current verification processes are not preventing the misappropriation of federal aid and students selected for verification had little to no change in their aid eligibility.

"We call for greater transparency in how the education department selects students for verification; an external audit of the current processes; and careful consideration of how compliance expenditures could be re-purposed to address other pressing needs within the financial aid system," said Lindsay C. Page, an associate professor of research methodology at the University of Pittsburgh.

To talk to the study authors, please contact AERA Communications: Tony Pals, Director of Communications, tpals@aera.net, cell: (202) 288-9333; Tong Wu, Communications Associate, twu@aera.net, cell: (202) 957-3802

Study: "21st Century Tracking and De Facto School Segregation: Excluding and Hoarding Access to College Prep"
Author: Heather E. Price (Marian University)

This study will be presented today at the AERA 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting.
Session: Schools and Social Policy: Segregation, Housing, and Transportation
Date/Time: Monday, April 12, 9:30 a.m. - 11:00 a.m. ET

Main Finding:

The prevalence of Black, non-Hispanic students in high schools that do not offer any AP or IB courses in multi-school districts that fund college-prep curricula cannot be explained by resource or school factors.

Details:

Using national data, this study examined how the characteristics of a high school related to whether it offers students Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) programs, when the high school is in a multi-high school district that offers these college-preparation curricula.

The author found that nationally, Indigenous students as well as Black, non-Hispanic students often find themselves enrolled in high schools without these curricula offered even though their district offers it in another high school. Students with other racial or ethnic identities do not find themselves relegated to schools without college-prep curricula.

The author found that bigger high schools with more resources are more likely to offer AP or IB curricula. Title I schools that serve substantial numbers of students experiencing poverty are 22 percent less likely to offer AP or IB compared to the schools in their district that are not Title I schools. (Prior research shows that Title I schools often need to minimalize gifted and talented curricular needs in lieu of more urgent student needs of special education, language, or health which demand the use of the schools' finite resources.)

The author's analysis found that school size explains the upward skew related to Asian enrollments in AP and IB, and that Title I status explains the Indigenous enrollments downward skew. This means that the differences in the racialized enrollment patterns of these student groups is a function of resources in these districts and not independently associated with heritage.

However, this is not the case for Black, non-Hispanic students; the differences in their enrollments in schools without college-preparation courses are not explained away with Title I or school size factors.

"There is a real and substantial relationship between the proportion of Black, non-Hispanic students enrolled in a school and whether the district puts college-prep resources in that school," said author Heather E. Price, an assistant professor of education at Marian University. "These separate schools within a district work to specifically de facto segregate Black, non-Hispanic students from schools with college-prep learning opportunities."

The author explained that districts with multiple high schools often concentrate college-prep resources into single schools. This is done by funneling students into standalone "college-prep specialty" tracked schools that house particularly large portions of their college-prep curricula in a single school. Multi-school districts commonly offer a variety of high schools: specialty schools, schools with no college prep, and/or comprehensive schools with some college-prep learning opportunities.

In districts with fairly diverse student populations, where specialty schools have not existed, the author found that specialty schools are less likely to be created as the proportion of White, non-Hispanic student population increases in a district. That is, the district is slower to establish a specialty school as the proportion of the White, non-Hispanic students in the district rise. But districts are more likely to establish college-prep specialty schools as the proportion of White, non-Hispanic students becomes less of the majority.

The author found that college-prep specialty schools also occur more often among hyper-segregated districts or in districts with smaller White populations.

"Some districts relegate students to schools that offer no AP or IB while other students in their district get the chance to take these courses," said Price. "My research found that between-school tracking of Black students to no college-prep schools is especially prevalent."

"There is glaring race-based inequality--schools with no college-prep curricula serve substantially greater proportions of Black students than the other schools in the same district," Price said.

"While tracking in the 20th century meant funneling certain students within a school on the honors course track, today it's happening under the auspice of AP and IB courses, not only within schools but between them," said Price.

"Formal between-school tracking with college prep in some schools and absent from others within the same district likely is a direct consequence of the rise of school choice," said Price. "This has given more power to wealthy parents who demand their children's placement in specialty schools in their districts over their neighborhood school."

The study used data from the U.S. Department of Education's Civil Rights Data Collection, the National Center for Education Statistics, and the Stanford Education Data Archive. One limitation to these data is the absence of information on the schools' achievement scores, which means the study could not test whether the schools not offering AP or IB serve students with lower-than-average achievement scores.

Study: "Paying for Whose Performance? Teacher Incentive Pay and the Black-White Test Score Gap"
Authors: Andrew J. Hill (Montana State University), Daniel B. Jones (University of Pittsburgh)

This study was published today in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.

Key Finding:

Teacher incentive pay programs that focused on raising student achievement in high-need high schools expanded the test score gap between Black and White students by between 64 percent and 85 percent.

Details:

The Black-White test score gap has proven to be one of the most persistent phenomena in American education, for reasons that cannot be entirely explained by student characteristics or school and teacher quality.

Teacher performance pay is increasingly common in the United States and often introduced with the goal of reducing gaps in test scores across groups of students. Performance pay aims to directly increase the effectiveness of teaching within high-need schools.

The authors used robust administrative data available in North Carolina to study the impacts of teacher incentive pay programs introduced for teachers in several districts in the state during the 2000s. Teachers in 34 high-need high schools were offered bonuses if their classroom test score averages increased sufficiently on state standardized tests over the course of the school year.

The authors found that performance pay had little impact on average student achievement overall. However, they found a considerable difference in the effect on Black students relative to White students.

Black students experience significantly smaller gains than White students under performance pay, and in some cases actually suffer as a result of the reforms. The result was that the gap in test scores between White and Black students, controlling for other factors, expanded by between 64 percent and 85 percent.

The authors also found some evidence that Hispanic students, like Black students, experience smaller gains than White students. Asian students are not impacted differently relative to White students.

"One potential explanation is drawn from existing work documenting that teachers' expectations of students differ by student race," said Andrew J. Hill, an associate professor of labor economics at Montana State University. "When average student achievement is incentivized--as is common in the U.S. and in the programs we studied--teachers may target their attention toward students they expect to achieve higher levels of growth. This may cause gaps to grow between groups of students, potentially by race."

The authors note their results should not be taken as evidence that performance pay, generally speaking, cannot have a positive impact on reducing test score gaps. Rather, they provide implications for how performance pay programs should be designed to meet the objectives of policymakers.

"We know from previous research that when performance pay explicitly incentivizes helping the lowest performing students, it leads to more attention from teachers and large gains among those students," Hill said.

To talk to the study authors, please contact AERA Communications: Tony Pals, Director of Communications, tpals@aera.net, cell: (202) 288-9333; Tong Wu, Communications Associate, twu@aera.net, cell: (202) 957-3802

A new test that measures the quantity and quality of inactive HIV viruses in the genes of people living with HIV may eventually give researchers a better idea of what drugs work best at curing the disease.

Currently no cure exists for HIV and AIDS, but antiretroviral therapy drugs, or ARTs, effectively suppress the virus to undetectable levels.

Published today in Cell Reports Medicine, the study discusses how a new test, developed jointly by scientists at the University of Washington School of Medicine and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, will give researchers, and eventually doctors, an easier way to gauge how much HIV virus might reside in a patient's genome.

This latent HIV reservoir results from HIV's integration into DNA, specifically in the chromosomes of T lymphocytes and macrophages, said Dr. Florian Hladik. He is the paper's senior author and a UW research professor of obstetrics and gynecology. Viral integration into the host cell genome is a unique feature of retroviruses, he added.

Current tests are complicated, expensive, and sometimes give inaccurate readings of viral load, said Hladik.  The two existing tests are done through sequencing the viral DNA from patient cells or inducing functional viral outgrowth in vitro from patient cell cultures. Both are time-consuming and expensive and do not lend themselves easily to the testing of new drug candidates to cure HIV.

"Our laboratory test is a simpler way to quantify the reservoir of intact viruses" he said.

The evaluation of novel therapies to cure HIV infection relies on repeatedly measuring the number of cells that contain HIV DNA before, during and after treatment. Current assays do not give this information quickly enough or with enough accuracy to be useful in future clinical trials.  And some of the assays require several blood draws from each patient-subject.

The test works by using a new type of assay that takes advantage of the multiplexing capacity of droplet digital polymerase chain reaction (ddPCR). It probes each isolated DNA molecule not only for the presence of integrated HIV DNA, but also to determine whether the viral DNA is intact or defective.  Commercial software and custom analyses are used calculate the number of T cells containing intact HIV DNA in the genome.

"This gives us a lot more information about the particular virus in a person's body than previous PCR assays," added Claire Levy, a UW research technologist in OB-GYN and the paper's lead author. Previous assays, she said, were only partway effective - like searching for someone's information online and learning only their first name. To continue that analogy, the new assay would yield more information, such as full name, age and height.

In the case of HIV, this extra information about the virus helps scientists understand how it is behaving in the human body.

Practically, this new PCR assay will help researchers determine the effectiveness of a drug candidate being tested against HIV/AIDS by closely tracking how many cells with intact HIV DNA exist after each dose, Levy and Hladik explained.

"I can see a patient going to a doctor and adding this to the list of questions they might ask. Now they ask about their viral load and T-cell count. I hope in the future they may be able to ask how large their HIV reservoir might be," Hladik said. "What gets me excited is that one day, this number may tell them how long it will take to entirely eliminate HIV from their body."

Osaka, Japan - Humans are exposed to many types of bacteria daily, the majority of which are harmless. However, some bacteria are pathogenic, which means they can cause disease. An extremely common pathogenic bacterial infection is Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) in the stomach, where it can lead to chronic inflammation (gastritis), ulcers, and even cancer. A group of researchers from Osaka University have determined a specific molecular mechanism that H. pylori uses to adapt to growing in the human stomach for long periods of time.

In a report published in Nature Communications, this group found that a small RNA molecule called HPnc4160 plays a key role in how H. pylori invades the stomach and leads to disease.

Previous studies showed that HPnc4160 is conserved in different strains of H. pylori, suggesting that it has an important function. Yet, the amount of this molecule produced in the bacteria is variable among strains. Genetic analysis revealed that a specific part of the H. pylori gene, called the T-repeat region, varied in length from strain to strain. The researchers became interested in how this region affected HPnc4160 expression. Additionally, they were curious how these fluctuations would allow some strains to colonize the human stomach more efficiently than others.

"Slight differences in the genetic sequence of H. pylori can sometimes give certain strains advantages over others that allow it to grow better," says lead author of the study Ryo Kinoshita-Daitoku. "We were interested in the genetic and molecular reasons behind why particular strains are more pathogenic and can live in the stomach for decades, leading to cancer development."

To address these questions, the researchers infected gerbils and mice with wild type (normal) H. pylori for 8 weeks, then extracted and genetically characterized the mutant strains that appeared. They discovered that strains with a higher number of T-repeats had lower expression of HPnc4160.

"We found that the H. pylori strains with low HPnc4160 levels were more infectious," explains Hitomi Mimuro, senior author. "When this RNA was completely absent, the amounts of several bacterial pathogenic factors significantly increased and the strain showed stronger colonization within the rodent stomach."

One of the pathogenic factors was the bacterial protein CagA, which is known as an oncoprotein because it can promote cancer development.

"Interestingly, we observed longer T-repeat regions, lower levels of HPnc4160, and higher levels of CagA in gastric cancer patients compared with those not suffering from cancer," describes Kinoshita-Daitoku.

These novel findings provide crucial information regarding the molecular and genetic landscape of highly pathogenic H. pylori and may assist in the development of innovative therapeutics for the treatment of H. pylori related illnesses, including gastric cancer.

Inserting lightweight optimization code in high-speed network devices has enabled a KAUST-led collaboration to increase the speed of machine learning on parallelized computing systems five-fold.

This "in-network aggregation" technology, developed with researchers and systems architects at Intel, Microsoft and the University of Washington, can provide dramatic speed improvements using readily available programmable network hardware.

The fundamental benefit of artificial intelligence (AI) that gives it so much power to "understand" and interact with the world is the machine-learning step, in which the model is trained using large sets of labeled training data. The more data the AI is trained on, the better the model is likely to perform when exposed to new inputs.

The recent burst of AI applications is largely due to better machine learning and the use of larger models and more diverse datasets. Performing the machine-learning computations, however, is an enormously taxing task that increasingly relies on large arrays of computers running the learning algorithm in parallel.

"How to train deep-learning models at a large scale is a very challenging problem," says Marco Canini from the KAUST research team. "The AI models can consist of billions of parameters, and we can use hundreds of processors that need to work efficiently in parallel. In such systems, communication among processors during incremental model updates easily becomes a major performance bottleneck."

The team found a potential solution in new network technology developed by Barefoot Networks, a division of Intel.

"We use Barefoot Networks' new programmable dataplane networking hardware to offload part of the work performed during distributed machine-learning training," explains Amedeo Sapio, a KAUST alumnus who has since joined the Barefoot Networks team at Intel. "Using this new programmable networking hardware, rather than just the network, to move data means that we can perform computations along the network paths."

The key innovation of the team's SwitchML platform is to allow the network hardware to perform the data aggregation task at each synchronization step during the model update phase of the machine-learning process. Not only does this offload part of the computational load, it also significantly reduces the amount of data transmission.

"Although the programmable switch dataplane can do operations very quickly, the operations it can do are limited," says Canini. "So our solution had to be simple enough for the hardware and yet flexible enough to solve challenges such as limited onboard memory capacity. SwitchML addresses this challenge by co-designing the communication network and the distributed training algorithm, achieving an acceleration of up to 5.5 times compared to the state-of-the-art approach."

While pollinators such as bees and butterflies provide crucial ecosystem services today, little is known about the origin of the intimate association between flowering plants and insects.

Now, a new amber fossil unearthed by researchers from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) and the University of Bristol sheds light on some of the earliest pollinators of flowering plants.

The study was published in Nature Plants on April 12.

Two hundred million years ago the world was as green as today, overgrown with dense vegetation, but it was not as colorful. Flowering plants (angiosperms) that make up over 80% of all plant species today, only began to diversify in the Cretaceous, about 125 million years ago.

Some scientists have attributed the huge evolutionary success of angiosperms to their mutualistic relationships with insect pollinators, but fossil evidence of Cretaceous pollinators has so far been scarce.

In this study, the paleontologists describe a new fossil beetle species named Pelretes vivificus from mid-Cretaceous amber originating from northern Myanmar. The new species lived in the Burmese Cretaceous rainforest some 99 million years ago. Its closest relatives are short-winged flower beetles (Kateretidae) that today occur in Australia, visiting a diverse range of flowers and feeding on their pollen.

"Pelretes vivificus is associated with clusters of pollen grains, suggesting that short-winged flower beetles visited angiosperms in the Cretaceous. Some aspects of the beetle's anatomy, such as its hairy abdomen, are also adaptations associated with pollination," said Prof. CAI Chenyang, a paleontologist from NIGPAS.

The Hukawng Valley in northern Myanmar is one of the richest amber deposits known. "Besides the unparalleled abundance of fossil insects, the amber dates back to the mid-Cretaceous, right when angiosperms were taking off," said Erik Tihelka, entomologist and paleontologist at the University of Bristol. Cretaceous amber fossils provide an important source of evidence for understanding the biology of early angiosperms.

While Pelretes is not the first pollinating beetle to be described from Cretaceous amber, this unique specimen preserves a bizarre clue about its diet. The fossil is associated with beetle coprolites - fossil fecal pellets - that provide a very unusual but important insight into the diet of short-winged flower beetles in the Cretaceous.

The fossil fecal pellets are completely composed of pollen, the same type that is found in clusters surrounding the beetle and attached to its body, which suggest that Pelretes visited angiosperms to feed on their pollen. This finding provides a direct link between early flowering plants in the Cretaceous and their insect visitors; it shows that these insect fossils were not just incidentally co-preserved with pollen, but that there was a genuine biological association between the two.

"The pollen associated with the beetle can be assigned to the fossil genus Tricolpopollenites. This group is attributed to the eudicots, a living group of derived angiosperms, that includes the orders Malpighiales and Ericales," said Dr. LI Liqin, fossil pollen specialist from NIGPAS.

"This shows that pollinators took advantage of early angiosperms soon after their initial diversification and visited a diverse range of groups by the mid-Cretaceous," said Prof. CAI.

While the new Coronavirus will, hopefully, be effectively controlled sooner rather than later, its latest namesake is here to stay - a small caddisfly endemic to a national park in Kosovo that is new to science.

Potamophylax coronavirus was collected near a stream in the Bjeshkët e Nemuna National Park in Kosovo by a team of scientists, led by Professor Halil Ibrahimi of the University of Prishtina. After molecular and morphological analyses, it was described as a caddisfly species, new to science in the open-access, peer-reviewed Biodiversity Data Journal.

Ironically, the study of this new insect was impacted by the same pandemic that inspired its scientific name. Although it was collected a few years ago, the new species was only described during the global pandemic, caused by SARS-CoV-2. Its name, P. coronavirus, will be an eternal memory of this difficult period.

In a broader sense, the authors also wish to bring attention to "another silent pandemic occurring on freshwater organisms in Kosovo's rivers," caused by the pollution and degradation of freshwater habitats, as well as the activity increasing in recent years of mismanaged hydropower plants. Particularly, the river basin of the Lumbardhi i Deçanit River, where the new species was discovered, has turned into a 'battlefield' for scientists and civil society on one side and the management of the hydropower plant operating on this river on the other.

The small insect order of Trichoptera, where P. coronavirus belongs, is very sensitive to water pollution and habitat deterioration. The authors of the new species argue that it is a small-scale endemic taxon, very sensitive to the ongoing activities in Lumbardhi i Deçanit river. Failure to understand this may drive this and many other species towards extinction.

Interestingly, in the same paper, the authors also identified a few other new species from isolated habitats in the Balkan Peninsula, which are awaiting description upon collection of further specimens. The Western Balkans and especially Kosovo, have proved to be an important hotspot of freshwater biodiversity. Several new insect species have been discovered there in the past few years, most of them being described by Professor Halil Ibrahimi and his team.

Many women "risk" allowing natural grey hair to show in order to feel authentic, a new study shows.

Researchers from the University of Exeter surveyed women who chose not to dye their grey hair, and found a "conflict" between looking natural and being seen as competent.

Participants in the study - mostly from English-speaking countries - belonged to online groups whose members allow their natural grey hair to show, and the researchers noted "solidarity and sisterhood" among these women.

"We are all constrained by society's norms and expectations when it comes to appearance, but expectations are more rigorous for women - especially older women," said lead author Vanessa Cecil, of the University of Exeter.

"The 'old woman' is an undesirable character in Western societies, being seen as incompetent or unpleasant - if she is seen at all.

"In our study, we wanted to understand why some women choose natural grey hair.

"In the face of impossible standards to be natural and remain youthful forever, these women are doing what they can to retain status.

"Although many reported negative consequences such as being ignored or treated as less competent, they also felt happier to be 'flying my natural flag'.

"We also found that women chose to compensate for going grey by using other beauty practices - so embracing grey isn't the same as embracing looking old.

"Grey-haired and youthfully glamorous is one thing, but in Western societies it's still not OK to look old."

Responses from the 80 participants, members of two Facebook groups about transitioning to natural grey hair, suggested the key trade-off was between authenticity and being seen as competent.

Women reported being shamed - including by family and friends - for being too natural ("let oneself go") but also wanted to avoid looking as if they have tried too hard to conceal their age ("mutton dressed as lamb").

Those who were supported by partners, family and friends had an "easier time" of the transition to grey, Cecil said.

Many women have chosen natural grey hair during COVID lockdowns - both because hairdressers have been closed and due to spending less time in public, including at work.

"This appears to have accelerated a shift that was already happening, with more and more women choosing not to dye their hair," Cecil said.

In 2018, Pompeu Fabra University launched its Planetary Wellbeing initiative, a long-term institutional strategy spurred by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and based on the Planetary Health project promoted by the Rockefeller Foundation and The Lancet.

Fifteen academics and public officials, led by the three directors of the initiative, Josep Maria Antó, scientific director of ISGlobal; Josep Lluís Martí, UPF vice-rector for innovation projects, and Jaume Casals, UPF rector, are the authors of an academic article published in the journal Sustainabilty, in which they present the Planetary Wellbeing initiative.

Josep Lluís Martí: "The article is a presentation to the world of the Planetary Wellbeing initiative and an ambitious commitment by UPF to invite other universities and research centres to collaborate in this strategic agenda for the future".

The article involves the participation of several proponents of the initiative from different departments of the University, as well as research institutions in France, the United Kingdom and the United States, including two prestigious international researchers: Howard Frumkin, one of the world's leading experts in Planetary Health, and Marc Fleurbaey, one of the most renowned international economists in the field of wellbeing and climate change.

We live in a time of pressing planetary challenges, many of which threaten catastrophic change to the natural environment and require massive and novel coordinated scientific and societal efforts on an unprecedented scale. In this context, UPF understands that Universities and other academic institutions have the opportunity and responsibility to assume a leading role in an era when the destiny of the planet is precisely in the hands of human beings.

Josep Lluís Martí, UPF vice-rector for innovation projects and co-author, explains that the article is the first 'concept paper' drafted in the framework of the University's Planetary Wellbeing initiative: "This paper seeks to explain what we might understand by Planetary Wellbeing, why it was decided to extend the original term of Planetary Health to the field of wellbeing, and why universities and research centres should undertake a commitment to the UN's SDG in its three main areas of activity: teaching, research and knowledge transfer".

The article describes how UPF is responding to these challenges, and thus it provides an example of how higher education institutions might meet their responsibility in confronting those challenges through conceptualization of the underlying sustainable aim of the transformation required in the existing institution.

But the article goes further as it is an invitation for others to join in to work towards this shared goal. According to Josep Lluís Martí, publishing in Sustainability, one of the top international scientific journals in this field, "represents a presentation to the world of the Planetary Wellbeing initiative and an ambitious commitment by UPF to invite other universities and research centres to collaborate in this strategic agenda for the future".

How does the University understand the concept of Planetary Wellbeing and what implications does it have?

The Planetary Wellbeing initiative defines this concept as "the highest attainable standard of wellbeing for human and non-human beings and their social and natural systems". Developing the potential of these new concepts involves substantial theoretical and empirical effort in many different fields, all of them interrelated by the crosscutting challenges of global complexity, interdisciplinarity, and urgency. "Close collaboration of science, humanities, and culture is more desperately needed now than ever before in the history of humankind", the authors assert.

"Close collaboration of science, humanities and culture is more desperately needed now than ever before in the history of humankind".

Josep Lluís Martí is of the opinion that "the concept of planetary wellbeing, as we understand it at UPF, provides a particularly fruitful framework in which to develop this threefold commitment to the SDG in the areas of research, teaching and knowledge transfer, and its own research agenda aimed at finding solutions for the major urgent, complex planet-wide challenges that humanity faces today, such as climate change, the pandemic and sustainability".

The article examines how the Planetary Wellbeing initiative applies the three challenges that need to be addressed in order to succeed: conceptual, knowledge and implementation and governance. The conceptual challenges refer to the rules, that is, to set a regulative ideal for all humanity and for the planet; the knowledge ones, to the opportunity for new research to stimulate connections between different scientific disciplines on issues relevant to the future of the planet; and those of implementation and governance, to the various actions needed to address, for example, climate change, and will be decisive for the future of humanity.

What actions has UPF got underway?

The article reviews the various transformative educational initiatives implemented and planned by the University, which in 2019 made a "Declaration of Climate Emergency" as part of its institutional sustainability strategy, which has contributed to an initial assessment of its carbon footprint and establishing several specific ambitious goals to reduce this footprint.

An annual plenary meeting, an annual call for internal research seed funding, the organization of several annual conferences and international research meetings, the design of new courses and specific, interdisciplinary programmes on Planetary Wellbeing, such as a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), a master's degree (jointly with the UOC and ISGlobal), and a minor; the awarding of a prize for the best master's degree thesis and for the best doctoral thesis on Planetary Wellbeing, and the organization of public talks and dialogues, are some of the actions that UPF has initiated.

Universities have a central role not only in developing much needed research on the complex issues concerning Planetary Wellbeing but also in teaching and promoting the view that a new kind of science and approach to such issues is needed", the authors conclude.

A shared set of systems in the brain may play an important role in controlling the retrieval of facts and personal memories utilised in everyday life, new research shows.

Scientists from the University of York say their findings may have relevance to memory disorders, including dementia, where problems remembering relevant information can impact on the daily life of patients.

Researchers say the findings may also have important implications for the development of a new generation of artificial intelligence systems, which use long-term memory in solving computational problems.

The brain's long-term memory stores are categorised into two: factual memory and memory of personal experiences.

Together, these two long-term memory stores help us understand and respond to the world around us.

Decades of clinical and experimental research has shown that these two memory stores are represented across two separate brain regions.

But the new study suggests that a shared set of brain regions play an important role in controlling the successful retrieval of weak memories.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging technology, researchers studied how these regions were shown to increase their activity when participants were asked to retrieve fact memories and personal memories.

Lead researcher Dr Deniz Vatansever, formerly of the University of York and now working for the Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-inspired Intelligence, Fudan University said: "The new research suggests that despite their functional differences, successfully retrieving weak information from these two memory systems might be dependent upon a shared brain mechanism.

"Our memories allow us to make sense and flexibly interact with the world around us. Although in most cases, our strongly encoded memories might be sufficient for the task at hand, remembering to pack a beach towel for an upcoming seaside holiday, this strong memory may be irrelevant in other instances, such as when packing for a business trip. As such, we need to tightly control the retrieval of relevant memories to solve different tasks under different circumstances. Our results indicate that this control process might be shared across both factual and personal memory types."

Senior author Prof. Elizabeth Jefferies from the Department of Psychology, University of York, said: "In order to generate appropriate thoughts and behaviours, we have to draw on our memory stores in a highly flexible way. This new study highlights control processes within the brain that allow us to focus on unusual aspects of the meanings of words and to retrieve weakly encoded personal experiences. This control over memory allows us to be creative and to adapt as our goals or circumstances change."