Culture

During the early phase of the pandemic, approximately 40% of the COVID-19 literature was shared as preprints - freely available manuscripts that are shared prior to peer-review. In a new study publishing in the open access journal PLOS Biology, researchers led by Dr Jonathon Coates (Queen Mary University of London), Dr Nicholas Fraser (Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Germany) and Dr Liam Brierley (University of Liverpool) explore the crucial role of preprint servers in hosting COVID-19 related science and how these preprints have been used to disseminate knowledge of COVID-19, leading to cultural shifts in journalistic and policy practices.

There has been a rapid and incredible scientific response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with research being shared less than a month after the first reported case, and vaccines being developed in less than a year. The researchers find that this has been matched by a striking change in the way in which research is accessed and communicated; preprints describing COVID-19 research are downloaded and accessed at unprecedented levels (up to 10-fold more than research unrelated to the pandemic) and are being heavily used by reporters and policy makers for the first time.

According to the study's lead author, Dr Jonathon Coates, "The pandemic has shone a light on the benefits of preprints over more traditional publishing and it was clear early in the pandemic that something was happening with preprint usage".

When the researchers explored how preprints were being shared, they found that COVID-19 preprints were being shared across online platforms such as Twitter at a rate of over 7 times that of non-COVID-19 preprints. Although traditionally rarely referenced by official policy documents or reported on by journalists, preprints describing COVID-19 research are frequently being cited in policy and reported in news media, bringing active research closer to policymakers as well as the general public than ever before.

"Prominent public officials, such as Dr Fauci, have stated that preprints have been important in accelerating our understanding of COVID-19. Our data provides evidence to support these statements and reveals a clear cultural shift in the use of preprints by scientists, the general public, journalists and policy makers" says Dr Coates, "What we hope is that the cultural shifts reported in this paper will remain after the pandemic and the biomedical community will continue to turn to preprint servers for disseminating new studies".

A new large-scale study led by UC Davis Health and UC San Francisco researchers assessed the risks of leukemia in children with Down syndrome. It pointed to stronger than expected associations between Down syndrome and acute myeloid leukemia (AML), one type of blood cancer.

Down syndrome is one of the most common genetic conditions in the U.S. and Canada. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 6,000 babies with Down syndrome are born in the United States each year. That's approximately one in every 700 babies born in the U.S. and one in 750 newborns in Canada.

Children with Down syndrome have a substantially increased risk of multiple health conditions compared to the general population. They have a particularly elevated risk (estimated 150-fold) of developing AML before age 5.

The study, published in The Journal of Pediatrics, confirmed that Down syndrome is a strong risk factor for childhood leukemia.

Study findings on leukemia in children with Down syndrome

The researchers examined medical data of more than 3.9 million children born 1996-2016 in seven U.S. healthcare systems or in Ontario, Canada. The data included the children's health information from birth to cancer diagnosis, death, age of 15 years, disenrollment, or Dec. 30, 2016.

"One main strength of this study is its large cohort with more leukemia cases in children with Down syndrome than most previous studies," said Emily Marlow, first author and a recent graduate from UC Davis Department of Public Health Sciences and Graduate Group in Epidemiology. "This allowed more precise risk estimation, especially for rare leukemia types such as AML-7, previously estimated from small case reports."

The study estimated the incidence and hazard ratios of leukemia for children with Down syndrome and other children, adjusting for health system, child's age at diagnosis, birth year and sex. It found that 2.8% of children with Down syndrome were diagnosed with leukemia, compared to 0.05% of other children.

Compared to other children, kids with Down syndrome had a higher risk of AML before age 5 and a higher risk of acute lymphoid leukemia (ALL) regardless of age. In children with Down syndrome, ALL was more common between ages 2-4 years, while AML was more common in younger kids - the highest incidence during the first year of life. For other children, AML incidence remained very low through age 14 years, whereas ALL peaked at age 3 years and steadily declined until age 8 years.

The study also found that males and Hispanic children were more likely to be diagnosed with Down syndrome and more likely to develop leukemia than their counterparts. White children have a higher incidence rate of ALL and more likely to have Down syndrome than Black children.

Catching leukemia in kids

The researchers urged parents with kids with Down syndrome to keep an eye for signs of leukemia. Common symptoms include fatigue or pale skin, infections and fever, easy bleeding or bruising, shortness of breath and coughing. Parents are advised to talk to the pediatrician if their children exhibit any of these symptoms.

"The good news is that childhood leukemia can be very treatable if caught early," said co-senior author Diana L. Miglioretti, professor and division chief of biostatistics at the UC Davis Department of Public Health Sciences and affiliate investigator with Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research.

Imaging technologies and leukemia

A steep rise in medical imaging over the past two decades, particularly in computed tomography (CT) exams, increased children's exposure to higher levels of radiation. Previous studies have shown that CT scanning increases leukemia risk.

"Given the potential for ionizing radiation to increase leukemia risk in children with Down syndrome, other non-ionizing radiation modes of imaging, such as ultrasound and MRI, should be used as the first line image tests," said co-senior author Rebecca Smith-Bindman, a UCSF School of Medicine professor with the Departments of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging and of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

Tweets about Russia by Donald Trump during his presidency caused short but noticeable depreciations of the rouble. Meanwhile, the introduction of new sanctions, upon which the president did not comment, had no such effect. This was the finding of a group of researchers, which included Elena Fedorova, Professor of the Faculty of Economic Sciences of HSE University. The group published their findings in in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

With the growing influence of social media, officials, politicians, and entrepreneurs increasingly express their positions on various issues directly (for example, using Facebook or Twitter), and their messages serve as an independent source of financial and business information. When global political and economic processes depend on the decisions of this person (as in the case of the President of the United States), their social media posts can even affect indicators such as oil prices or the rouble exchange rate. Researchers have already examined the impact of Trump's tweets on the stock market.

To see if there is a connection between the former US president's tweets and the exchange rate of the Russian currency, researchers collected 5,548 of Trump's tweets posted from October 2016 to August 2018. Of these, the authors chose those that mentioned Russia, Moscow, the Kremlin, sanctions, the rouble, and other key words. For the remaining 296 tweets, they rated the tonality of the text (neutral, positive, or negative; those falling in the latter category were the most frequent).

'To assess the tonality of the English-language tweets, we used five already proven dictionaries, and as part of a textual analysis project group with undergraduate and graduate students, we are working on a toolkit for assessing economic and financial texts in Russian. So, I think there will be similar studies on the Russian market,' said Elena Fedorova, article co-author and professor of economics at HSE University.

Using mathematical methods, the authors of the study assessed the impact on the rouble exchange rate of several control variables reflecting oil prices; Central Bank policy; the intensity of sanctions imposed by the United States, the European Union, and other states; and the attention of the media to relations between Russia and Western countries. These were considered beyond the period of the tweets to make sure that the rouble exchange rate was in fact responding specifically to the tweets, and not these other factors.

The researchers found that of the two 'political' variables (tweets and the degree of sanctions), only the tweets affected the exchange rate. The authors of the work highlighted several episodes when, after Trump tweeted anti-Russia statements, the rouble exchange rate dropped and the drop lasted for several days. The researchers note that all these episodes coincide with the announcement of new sanctions. However, in cases where sanctions were introduced, but Trump did not comment on them on Twitter, the rouble did not fall.

Calculations of both Russian and foreign researchers show that if sanctions affect the Russian economy, they do so to a much lesser extent than fluctuations in oil prices. New research confirms this conclusion and additionally shows that the emotional reaction to the sanctions of various players affects the exchange rate more than the restrictions themselves. Based on the results of the analysis, the authors suggest that the way market participants assess the severity of the new sanctions and their consequences for the Russian economy is rather strongly influenced by the president's tweets and the reaction of the press.

'Our research, on the one hand, draws upon the contemporary field of behavioural finance. On the other hand, it partially touches upon the philosophical theories of Marxism-Leninism about the role of personality in history (which people of my generation studied both in school and college). Who would have thought more than a hundred years ago that now, with the development of technology for assessing the textual tonality, it would be possible to quantify the impact of statements made by important politicians on the financial and economic market!' said Elena Fedorova.

"On a scale of one to 10, how much pain are you in?"

In a recent study published by the Journal of Pain, co-authored by Elizabeth Losin, assistant professor of psychology and director of the Social and Cultural Neuroscience lab at the University of Miami, researchers found that a patient's pain responses may be perceived differently by others based on their gender.

According to "Gender biases in estimation of others' pain," when male and female patients expressed the same amount of pain, observers viewed female patients' pain as less intense and more likely to benefit from psychotherapy versus medication as compared to men's pain, exposing a significant patient gender bias that could lead to disparities in treatments.

The study consisted of two experiments. In the first, 50 participants were asked to view various videos of male and female patients who suffered from shoulder pain performing a series of range of motion exercises using their injured and uninjured shoulders. Researchers pulled the videos from a database that contains videos of actual shoulder injury patients, each experiencing a range of different degrees of pain. The database included patients' self-reported level of discomfort when moving their shoulders.

According to Losin, the study likely provides results more applicable to patients in clinical settings compared to previous studies that used posed actors in their stimuli videos.

"One of the advantages of using these videos of patients who are actually experiencing pain from an injury is that we have the patients' ratings of their own pain," she explained. "We had a ground truth to work with, which we can't have if it's a stimulus with an actor pretending to be in pain."

The patients' facial expressions were also analyzed through the Facial Action Coding System (FACS)--a comprehensive, anatomically based system for describing all visually discernible facial movements. The researchers used these FACS values in a formula to provide an objective score of the intensity of the patients' pain facial expressions. This provided a second ground truth for the researchers to use when analyzing the data.

The study participants were asked to gauge the amount of pain they thought the patients in the videos experienced on a scale from zero, labeled as "absolutely no pain," and 100, labeled as "worst pain possible."

In the second experiment, researchers replicated the first portion of this study with 200 participants. This time, after viewing the videos, perceivers were asked to complete the Gender Role Expectation of Pain questionnaire, which measures gender-related stereotypes about pain sensitivity, the endurance of pain, and willingness to report pain.

Perceivers also shared how much medication and psychotherapy they would prescribe to each patient and which of these treatments they believed would be more effective in treating each patient.

The researchers analyzed the results of the participants' responses to the videos compared to the patient's self-reported level of pain and the facial expression intensity data. The ability to analyze observers' perceptions relative to these two ground truth measures of the patients' pain in the videos allowed the researchers to measure bias more accurately, Losin explained. That is because bias could be defined as different ratings for male and female patients despite the same level of responses.

Overall, the study found that female patients were perceived to be in less pain than the male patients who reported, and exhibited, the same intensity of pain. Additional analyses using participants' responses to the questionnaire about gender-related pain stereotypes allowed researchers to conclude that these perceptions were partially explained by these stereotypes.

"If the stereotype is to think women are more expressive than men, perhaps 'overly' expressive, then the tendency will be to discount women's pain behaviors," Losin said. "The flip side of this stereotype is that men are perceived to be stoic, so when a man makes an intense pain facial expression, you think, 'Oh my, he must be dying!' The result of this gender stereotype about pain expression is that each unit of increased pain expression from a man is thought to represent a higher increase in his pain experience than that same increase in pain expression by a woman."

What's more, psychotherapy was chosen as more effective than medication for a higher proportion of female patients compared to male patients.

Additionally, the study concluded that the gender of the perceivers did not influence pain estimation. Both men and women interpreted women's pain to be less intense.

The idea to study disparities in the perception of pain based on a patient's gender was derived from previous research, Losin said, that found women are often prescribed less treatment than men and wait longer to receive that treatment as well.

"There's a pretty wide literature showing demographic differences in pain report, the prevalence of clinical pain conditions, and then also a demographic difference in pain treatments," Losin pointed out. "These differences manifest as disparities because it seems that some people are getting undertreated for their pain based on their demographics."

Moving forward, Losin and her fellow researchers hope this study is a step in identifying and addressing gender disparities in health care. Co-authors of the study included the study's lead author, Lanlan Zhang, Guangzhou Sport University; Yoni K. Ashar, Weill Cornell Medical College; Leonie Koban, Paris Brain Institute; and senior author Tor D. Wager, Dartmouth College.

"I think one critical piece of information that could be conveyed in medical curricula is that people, even those with medical training in other studies, have been found to have consistent demographic biases in how they assess the pain of male and female patients and that these biases impact treatment decisions," Losin remarked. "Critically, our results demonstrate that these gender biases are not necessarily accurate. Women are not necessarily more expressive than men, and thus their pain expression should not be discounted."

Glycine regulates neuronal activity in the brain

Glycine is the smallest amino acid - one of the building blocks of proteins. It acts also as a neurotransmitter in the brain, enabling neurons to communicate with each other and modulating neuronal activity. Many researchers have focused on increasing glycine levels in synapses to find an effective treatment for schizophrenia. This could be done using inhibitors targeting Glycine Transporter 1 (GlyT1), a protein that sits in neuronal cell membranes and is responsible for the uptake of glycine into neurons. However, the development of such drugs has been hampered because the 3D structure of GlyT1 was not known.

To determine the structure of GlyT1, researchers at the Danish Research Institute of Translational Neuroscience (DANDRITE), which is part of the Nordic EMBL Partnership for Molecular Medicine, F. Hoffmann-La Roche, EMBL Hamburg, the University of Zurich, Aarhus University, and Linkster Therapeutics joined forces. "This project required multidisciplinary collaboration and unique expertise from different labs over several years," says Azadeh Shahsavar, first author of the study and now an assistant professor at DANDRITE. She performed the measurements for the study during her time as a postdoc in the EMBL Interdisciplinary Postdocs (EIPOD) programme, during which she worked at EMBL Hamburg, DANDRITE and Roche.

Poul Nissen, Director of DANDRITE and a senior researcher in the study, comments: "We are immensely grateful for the EMBL's EIPOD scheme and the Nordic EMBL Partnership to keep us on track for so long and allow us to explore very difficult approaches. We would not have succeeded without it, and without Azadeh's persistence of course!"

Overcoming challenges in studying Glycine Transporter 1

GlyT1 turned out to be particularly challenging to study, because it is unstable when extracted from the cell membrane. To stabilise it, scientists combined several approaches, such as creating more stable variants of the protein. To catch the transporter in a clinically relevant state, the team used a chemical created by Roche that binds and stabilises GlyT1 from the inside, and designed a synthetic mini-antibody (sybody) that binds it from the outside.

The scientists tested 960 different conditions and managed to obtain GlyT1 crystals in one of them. "The crystals were very small and difficult to image. We chose to measure them at EMBL Hamburg's beamline P14, which is well suited for challenging experiments like this one," says Azadeh. The X-ray beam at P14 is particularly strong and focused, and its equipment has features tailored for work with even micrometre-sized crystals. Yet the quality of the crystals was variable, which made data collection challenging. Eventually, Azadeh's perseverance paid off. "I remember when I saw electron density of the inhibitor for the first time. I was so excited, I couldn't sleep for two nights," she says. "You live for those rewarding moments."

The final challenge was the data analysis. While the crystals were giving only weak diffraction patterns due to their small size, the strong X-rays destroyed the crystals in less than a second. A single crystal would yield only partial information about the structure, so Azadeh had to collect data from hundreds of crystals. "Processing such a huge amount of data was possible thanks to the unique infrastructure at EMBL Hamburg," she says. Combining partial datasets was complex for the existing software, but the Schneider group at EMBL Hamburg wrote software specifically designed for such cases. It enabled Azadeh to merge datasets into a full picture of GlyT1 at 3.4 Å resolution (1 Å, or ångström, is one ten-billionth of a metre - about the size of a typical atom). "I really enjoyed working with people with different scientific backgrounds. Everybody contributed their unique expertise that made this study possible," says Azadeh.

For Thomas Schneider, Joint Head of Research Infrastructures at EMBL Hamburg, the study is a perfect example highlighting the importance of both scientific excellence and the availability of cutting-edge infrastructures for progressing research. "For challenging projects like this, we are happy to put the methodological expertise of our staff to work and to make full use of the technological capabilities of our beamlines and sample preparation facilities. The high-intensity microfocused beam produced by the PETRA III synchrotron on the DESY campus and the versatile high-precision diffractometer that was developed in a collaboration between EMBL Hamburg, EMBL Grenoble, and ARINAX were key for this project."

Azadeh agrees. "The excellence, infrastructure, hardware, and software provided by EMBL are of the highest quality, and they are constantly being improved," she adds.

Blueprint for new therapeutics

The analysis revealed an unexpected structure of GlyT1. In contrast to other neurotransmitter transporters, which are bound by their inhibitors from the outer side of the cell membrane, GlyT1 is bound by its inhibitor from the inner side. "The structure was a surprise for us. It seems that the GlyT1 inhibitor must first cross the cell membranes before it can access GlyT1 from the inside of the neurons," says Roger Dawson, a senior author in the study.

"This structure provides a blueprint for developing new inhibitors of GlyT1, be they organic molecules or antibodies," explains Roger. "The sybody developed for this study binds GlyT1 at a previously unknown binding site and locks it in a state in which it cannot transport glycine any more. We could use this knowledge to develop drugs targeting not only GlyT1, but also other membrane transport proteins in the future."

The adage goes, "Two is better than one." Well, that might be true for endeavors involving human heads, but when it comes to ears, hybrid maize tends to have a superior advantage over the parental stocks in most cases. This phenomenon, called hybrid vigor or "heterosis," has been used by agriculturalists across ages to create higher-yielding, more resistant varieties of maize all over the world.

But what are the factors contributing to the increased hybrid vigor of maize? Several different genetic models have been proposed to explain heterosis in varied crops including maize, but none have hitherto been able to comprehensively unravel the mystery of heterosis.

A possible reason for this may be the complex genetic origin of the present-day maize species--Zea mays. Maize is supposed to have diverged from sorghum during an ancient speciation event, following which there was a duplication of the entire chromosomal materials or the genomic set in the ancestral stock via a process called polyploidization, giving rise to an ancestral tetraploid, or a plant with four genomic sets, i.e., double the usual number. Each genomic set in this tetraploid maize ancestor, called a subgenome, underwent dramatic breaks and fusion to eventually give rise to the current diploid genome (which bears two sets of genetic materials). During this genomic reorganization, redundant copies of genes from both subgenomes were lost through a process called fractionation.

In plants where such fractionation has been identified, including maize, there is a tendency for one subgenome to experience more gene loss than the other--a process called fractionation bias. For instance, the two subgenomes in present-day maize, termed maize1 and maize2, show differential expression of constituent genes, with maize1 typically identified as the dominant between the two.

It could be that differential expression of proteins coded by the maize subgenomes is responsible for the increased vigor of the hybrid maize lines, which are referred to as F1. However, this has not been clearly established. Until now.

Now, researchers in China have explored the transcriptome (the full complement of protein-coding mRNA molecules derived from information coded in DNA) and translatome (the actual mRNA set that gets translated to proteins in cell) of maize to identify factors that may be potentially responsible for heterosis in maize.

Using the new ribosome profiling technique, the researchers, led by Professor Lin Li of National Key Laboratory of Crop Genetic Improvement, Huazhong Agricultural University, evaluated the maize parental lines B73 and Mo17, and their F1 offspring. Their findings, published in The Crop Journal, suggest the presence of prominent subgenome bias at the translation level, especially skewed towards translated subgenome maize1 genes, which had a nonadditive effect on heterosis in F1 plants.

Furthermore, some genes switched to the dominant form in the hybrid than in the parental lines, quite surprisingly. As Prof. Li observes, "More genes switched the dominant isoforms between the F1 and the two parents than between the two parents. This observation indicates that the best gene variant is more likely to be selectively utilized in hybrids for a given environment, leading to higher efficiency of protein accumulation in the hybrids."

Moreover, the switched gene isoforms mostly belonged to subgenome maize2, while the conserved gene isoforms belonged to subgenome maize1. This knowledge, the researchers suggest, can help in selective breeding for further improving hybrid vigor.

Additionally, the researchers found evidence for additive effects of gene expression at both the transcriptome and the translatome levels in the hybrid. According to Prof. Li, "All these results are in accordance with the 'Goldilocks hypothesis,' suggesting that additive expression is advantageous for both transcriptome and translatome."

These findings suggest the potential role of asymmetric subgenome translation as an important factor contributing to heterosis in maize. These insights can provide crop breeders with effective gene manipulation tools to increase yield of not just maize, but other food crops, which might serve to address the looming food scarcity in face of the growing human population across the world.

Pain will lessen over time

Results include longer distance and walking time

8.5 million people in U.S., 250 million worldwide, have PAD

CHICAGO --- No pain means no gain when it comes to reaping exercise benefits for people with peripheral artery disease (PAD), reports a new Northwestern Medicine study.

In people with peripheral artery disease, walking for exercise at an intensity that induces ischemic leg pain (caused by restricted blood flow) improves walking performance -- distance and length of time walking -- the study found. Walking at a slow pace that does not induce ischemic leg symptoms is no more effective than no exercise at all, the study showed.

This randomized trial is the first to show that a home-based walking exercise program improved walking ability in people with peripheral artery disease when exercise was conducted at a high intensity that induced ischemic leg symptoms but not when the exercise was conducted at a low intensity without ischemic leg symptoms.

"We've shown you have to walk to elicit ischemic leg pain to reap the benefits," said lead investigator Dr. Mary McDermott, professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "It will lessen over time, and most people eventually will be able to walk further without discomfort."

The study was published in JAMA April 6, 2021.

McDermott's previous research suggested that pain during exercise prevented many people with PAD from walking.

While the trial did not identify the biological changes that lead to walking improvement, McDermott said prior research shows intensive exercise stimulates certain biologic pathways that promote improved mitochondrial activity, the cell's chemical energy source.

"Perhaps for people with PAD, the exercise promotes growth of new small blood vessels to their muscles," McDermott said.

About 8.5 million in the United States and about 250 million people worldwide have lower extremity peripheral artery disease (PAD). People with PAD have blockages in their arteries that slow or stop the blood flood flow to their legs. As a result, they have pain and difficulty walking even short distances. It is comparable to angina for people who have symptomatic heart disease. Few therapies exist to treat it.

The first month consisted of weekly in-person visits with the coach. These sessions helped the participants to learn the difference between walking at high versus low intensity, allowed them to learn to use the technology used to monitor their exercise intensity at home and helped them get started with their exercise activity. The program then consisted of telephone calls and remote monitoring by a coach.

The remote monitoring aspect is important, McDermott said. Although supervised exercise is covered by Medicare and other insurance companies, most people with PAD do not participate in supervised exercise because of the burden associated with traveling three times weekly to the medical center for participation.

For the study, 305 people with peripheral artery disease at four medical centers were randomized to high-intensity exercise, low-intensity exercise or a control group that got telephone calls that were not about exercise. Those randomized to an exercise intervention were asked to walk up to 50 minutes per session, five days a week. Those in high intensity were asked to walk at a pace that was fast enough to elicit ischemic leg symptoms during exercise. Those randomized to low intensity were asked to walk at a comfortable pace that did not induce ischemic leg symptoms.

Intensity was monitored remotely using an ActiGraph activity monitor that participants wore during exercise. These data were uploaded to the study website and viewed by study coaches. The six-minute walk, treadmill testing and patient-reported outcomes were measured at baseline and at 12-month follow-up.

Patients who participated in high-intensity walking exercise significantly improved the distance they could walk in six minutes compared to either the low-intensity group or the control group. The high-intensity exercise group also significantly improved the length of time they could walk on the treadmill at the end of the study, compared to each of the other two groups.

"Patients with PAD should be advised to walk for exercise at a pace that induces ischemic leg symptoms in order to get a benefit," McDermott said. "Exercise is the most effective non-invasive therapy to improve walking in people with PAD."

The next step in the research is to determine the biologic explanation for the finding that ischemia of the lower extremities appears necessary to gain benefit from walking exercise in people with PAD.

Chestnut Hill, Mass. (4/6/2021) -- Compact logos can encourage favorable brand evaluations by signaling product safety, according to a new study by researchers at Boston College's Carroll School of Management and Indian Institute of Management Udaipur, who reviewed the opinions of 17,000 consumers and conducted additional experiments with a variety of logos.

The findings reveal that typography -- specifically tracking, or the spacing between letters in a word -- can influence consumers' interpretations of brand logos. Further, the interpretation is influenced by cultural factors, the researchers reported in a recent edition of the Journal of Consumer Research.

In addition to the survey data, the results were confirmed in experiments, even during the Covid-19 pandemic, when public health guidance on social or physical distancing put a new emphasis on space, Hagtvedt said.

"We found fairly consistent patterns in these responses, even during the pandemic, when some brands were experimenting with placing the letters of logos farther apart to emulate a social distancing signal," said Boston College Associate Professor of Marketing Henrik Hagtvedt, who co-authored the paper with IIM's Tanvi Gupta.

The researchers analyzed data from 17,000 consumers rating 629 brands. Hagtvedt and Gupta found compact logos, where tight tracking leaves less space, encouraged favorable brand attitudes when compared to loose logos, where loose tracking creates a more spacious appearance. According to consumers, compact logos signaled that the brand was reliable, secure, and trustworthy.

Logos are central to the ways brands communicate with consumers. Logos that appear physically robust imply a brand's products are safe to use, Hagtvedt said. Compact logos were shown to send a message to consumers implying their products were sturdy and secure. This is particularly the case with textual logos, where consumers show sensitivity to the spacing between letters. Tight lettering equates to sturdiness in the minds of most consumers, whereas too much space may imply vulnerability, Hagtvedt said.

Cultural influences are also at play, according to the new report, titled "Safe Together, Vulnerable Apart: How Interstitial Space in Text Logos Impacts Brand Attitudes in Tight versus Loose Cultures." Drawing on the work of anthropologists, the researchers focused on two groups of consumers: those considered culturally "tight" or "loose." Tight cultures are a function of adapting to threats, such as violence or natural disasters. Individuals from this group are likely to favor the appearance of tight structure.

In the US, studies have shown southern states tend to display cultural tightness, while states in the west and northeast reveal looser structure. Factors such as religion, organization, or industry, can influence cultural tightness.

Gupta and Hagtvedt report that consumers tended to favor compact logos over spacious ones, regardless of cultural tightness, under ordinary circumstances. However, when the experiments involved contexts with potential safety concerns (such as products related to pharmaceuticals or mobile financial services), only culturally tight consumers responded more favorably to the compact logos.

The researchers suspect that the latter findings stem from culturally loose individuals associating space with freedom or autonomy, and being especially sensitive to that signal when safety is threatened. Among these individuals, the restrictive associations of compact logos can balance out the positive security signal.

The findings add to the understanding of how people draw meaning from visual communications, a key insight for brand managers and businesses of all sizes, said Hagtvedt. At the same time, they provide practical tips to organizations and individuals seeking to signal safety, depending on the context as well as the relevant culture.

Developing better quantitative standards can help organizations better assess how their designs may be perceived, rather than going on "gut" intuition about what makes a successful logo.

"It is important to know what kind of signal a logo sends," said Hagtvedt. "Businesses spend millions on not just designing their logos, but on using their logos in brand communications. It is arguably the most prominent representation of a brand, wherever that brand operates. It has an enormous influence on consumers. To design and deploy a logo haphazardly is a questionable practice."

Fossil discoveries often help answer long-standing questions about how our modern world came to be. However, sometimes they only deepen the mystery--as a recent discovery of four new species of ancient insects in British Columbia and Washington state is proving.

The fossil species, recently discovered by paleontologists Bruce Archibald of Simon Fraser University and Vladimir Makarkin of the Russian Academy of Sciences, are from a group of insects known as snakeflies, now shown to have lived in the region some 50 million years ago. The findings, published in Zootaxa, raise more questions about the evolutionary history of the distinctly elongated insects and why they live where they do today.

Snakeflies are slender, predatory insects that are native to the Northern Hemisphere and noticeably absent from tropical regions. Scientists have traditionally believed that they require cold winters to trigger development into adults, restricting them almost exclusively to regions that experience winter frost days or colder. However, the fossil sites where the ancient species were found experienced a climate that doesn't fit with this explanation.

"The average yearly climate was moderate like Vancouver or Seattle today, but importantly, with very mild winters of few or no frost days," says Archibald. "We can see this by the presence of frost intolerant plants like palms living in these forests along with more northerly plants like spruce."

The fossil sites where the ancient species were discovered span 1,000 kilometers of an ancient upland from Driftwood Canyon in northwest B.C. to the McAbee fossil site in southern B.C., and all the way to the city of Republic in northern Washington.

According to Archibald, the paleontologists found species of two families of snakeflies in these fossil sites, both of which had previously been thought to require cold winters to survive. Each family appears to have independently adapted to cold winters after these fossil species lived.

"Now we know that earlier in their evolutionary history, snakeflies were living in climates with very mild winters and so the question becomes why didn't they keep their ability to live in such regions? Why aren't snakeflies found in the tropics today?"

Pervious fossil insect discoveries in these sites have shown connections with Europe, Pacific coastal Russia, and even Australia.

Archibald emphasizes that understanding how life adapts to climate by looking deep into the past helps explain why species are distributed across the globe today, and can perhaps help foresee how further change in climate may affect that pattern.

"Such discoveries are coming out of these fossil sites all the time," says Archibald. "They're an important part of our heritage."

Starting your day by thinking about what kind of leader you want to be can make you more effective at work, a new study finds.

"It's as simple as taking a few moments in the morning while you're drinking your coffee to reflect on who you want to be as a leader," said Remy Jennings, a doctoral student in the University of Florida's Warrington College of Business, who authored the study in the journal Personnel Psychology with UF management professor Klodiana Lanaj.

When study participants took that step, they were more likely to report helping co-workers and providing strategic vision than on days they didn't do the morning reflection. They also felt more leaderlike on those days, perceiving more power and influence in the office.

The effects also extended to aspiring leaders.

"Leadership is really challenging, so a lot of people are hesitant to tackle leadership roles or assignments," Lanaj said. "Reflecting a few minutes in the morning really makes a difference."

And unlike being given extra responsibility or leading a team project, a morning reflection is under the employee's control.

"They're not dependent on their organization to provide formal opportunities. They don't have to wait until they have that title that says they're a leader to take on leadership in their work," Jennings said.

Want to try a morning leadership boost? Here are some prompts recommended by the researchers.

What are some of your proudest leadership moments?

What qualities do you have that make you a good leader, or will in the future?

Think about who you aspire to be as a leader, then imagine everything has gone as well as it possibly could in this leader role. What does that look like?

What effect do you want to have on your employees? Do you want to motivate them? Inspire them? Identify and develop their talents? What skills or traits do you have that can help with those goals?

Whether you're the boss or on your way up the ladder, "this is a tool to be more effective at work." Lanaj said. "Just a few minutes can entirely change your focus for the rest of your day."

A revolutionary technology developed within the Trabolsi Research Group at NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) could dramatically improve the well-being of diabetic patients through a simple and straightforward way: an insulin oral delivery system that could replace traditional subcutaneous injections without the side effects caused by frequent injection.

Using prepared layers of nanosheets with insulin loaded in between layers to protect it, researchers developed gastro-resistant imine-linked-covalent organic framework nanoparticles (nCOFs) that exhibited insulin protection in the stomach as well in diabetic test subjects whose sugar levels completely returned to normal within two hours after swallowing the nanoparticles. Led by NYUAD's Research Scientist Farah Benyettou and Program Head of Chemistry Ali Trabolsi, the findings were published today in Chemical Science.

Compared to the two FDA-approved technologies for the oral delivery of insulin, the system developed at NYUAD is biocompatible, highly stable in the stomach, specific, and able to deliver the right amount of insulin based on the diabetic subject's blood sugar levels. This treatment represents a step forward in treating this disease that is the seventh leading cause of death worldwide.

"Our work overcomes insulin oral delivery barriers by using insulin-loaded nCOF nanoparticles which exhibit insulin protection in the stomach as well as a glucose-responsive release," said Benyettou. "This technology responds quickly to an elevation in blood sugar, but would promptly shut off to prevent insulin overdose and will dramatically improve the well-being of diabetic patients across the UAE and worldwide," she added.

The development of this treatment was in collaboration with an international team of researchers from Algeria, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom. The project was completed with the help of NYUAD's Core Platform Technology. A US patent application is pending for this innovative technology.

OAK BROOK, Ill. - Screening with digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) reduces the rate of interval breast cancers compared to screening with digital mammography, according to a study published in Radiology. The study adds to a growing body of evidence supporting DBT as a breast cancer screening tool with important advantages over mammography.

DBT works by capturing a series of X-ray images of the breast from different angles. Previous research has shown that it has a higher sensitivity for breast cancer detection than digital mammography.

The impact of these additional DBT-detected cancers is not fully understood. While they may constitute a screening benefit, they could also contribute to overdiagnosis, a term for the diagnosis of early-stage, slow-growing cancers that would not have caused harm to the patient in their lifetime.

The rate of interval cancers--cancers that arise between routine screenings--offers one way to better elucidate screening benefits. They are considered more aggressive than cancers detected during a screening exam.

"Interval cancers have, in general, a more aggressive biological profile than screen-detected cancers," said study lead author Kristin Johnson, M.D., radiology resident at Skåne University Hospital in Malmö, and Ph.D. student at Lund University, Sweden. "This means that the prognosis is less favorable for interval cancers compared to screen-detected cancers."

Interval cancer detection rate reporting is required in many screening programs as an indicator of effectiveness. A reduction in the interval cancer rate when using DBT might be attributed to improved detection of rapidly growing cancers with poorer prognosis, possibly contributing to lower breast cancer mortality.

For the new study, Dr. Johnson and colleagues compared interval cancer rates in Sweden's population-based Malmö Breast Tomosynthesis Screening Trial with those from an age-matched control group of patients who underwent digital mammography at the same center.

The study group included almost 15,000 women who were screened with DBT and digital mammography between 2010 and 2015. Those women were matched with a control group of more than 26,000 women who had only digital mammography screening during the same time period.

The interval cancer rate in the patients screened with DBT and digital mammography was 1.6 per 1,000 screened, significantly lower than 2.8 per 1000 in the group screened with digital mammography only. The interval cancers in the trial generally had non-favorable characteristics.

The reduced interval cancer rate after screening with DBT could translate into screening benefits, according to Dr. Johnson.

"One could speculate that some of the additional cancers detected in DBT screening would have been diagnosed as interval cancers if not detected by DBT," she said.

The results support the growing evidence of DBT as a screening modality with potential to replace digital mammography in future breast cancer screening. However, Dr. Johnson cautioned that other trials have not shown significantly reduced interval cancer rates in DBT screening compared to digital mammography screening. And interval cancer rates, while important, are not the only measure when evaluating the potential benefits from DBT in screening.

"Other factors, such as cancer types detected and cost-benefit, have to be taken into account," Dr. Johnson said.

Toward that end, the researchers are working on a cost-benefit analysis of the Malmö Breast Tomosynthesis Screening Trial. They are also analyzing the trial for false positive recalls, those instances when patients are called back for additional screening for suspicious findings that end up being benign.

TUCSON, Ariz., April 6, 2021 - Dry periods between rainstorms have become longer and annual rainfall has become more erratic across most of the western United States during the past 50 years, according to a new study published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service and the University of Arizona

Against the backdrop of steadily warming temperatures and decreasing total yearly rainfall, rain has been falling in fewer and sometimes larger storms, with longer dry intervals between. Total yearly rainfall has decreased by an average of 0.4 inches over the last half century, while the longest dry period in each year increased from 20 to 32 days across the West, explained co-senior author Joel Biederman, a research hydrologist with the ARS Southwest Watershed Research Center in Tucson, Arizona.

"The greatest changes in drought length have taken place in the desert Southwest. The average dry period between storms in the 1970s was about 30 days; now that has grown to 45 days," Biederman said.

Extreme droughts are also occurring more often in the majority of the West according to historical weather data as there has been an increase in the year-to-year variation of both total rainfall amounts and the duration of dry periods.

Biederman emphasized the growing fluctuations in drought and rain patterns as the most significant change.

"Consistency of rainfall, or the lack of it, is often more important than the total amount of rain when it comes to forage continuing to grow for livestock and wildlife, for dryland farmers to produce crops, and for the mitigation of wildfire risks," Biederman said.

The rate of increasing variability of rainfall within each year and between years also appears to be accelerating, with greater portions of the West showing longer drought intervals since 2000 compared to previous years.

Notable exceptions to these drought patterns were seen in Washington, Oregon and Idaho and the Northern Plains region of Montana, Wyoming, and the most western parts of North and South Dakota. In these regions, the researchers found some increases in total annual rainfall and decreases in drought intervals. Together, these changes support what models have predicted as a consequence of climate change: a northward shift in the mid-latitude jet stream, which brings moisture from the Pacific Ocean to the western United States, according to Biederman.

A critical aspect of this study is the use of actual rainfall data from 337 weather stations spread across the western United States. Biederman contrasted this with the more common use of "gridded" data, which relies on interpolations between reporting stations and tends to smooth out some of the variability revealed by this work.

"Fangyue Zhang, lead author of the manuscript and a post-doctoral researcher on our team, did the hard, painstaking work of compiling and analyzing data from more than 300 weather stations with complete daily records to reveal these changing drought and rainfall patterns," Biederman said.

"We were surprised to find widespread changes in precipitation have already occurred across large regions of the West. For regions such as the desert Southwest, where changes clearly indicate a trend towards longer, more erratic droughts, research is urgently needed to help mitigate detrimental impacts on ecosystem carbon uptake, forage availability, wildfire activity, and water availability for people," said co-senior author William K. Smith, assistant professor, University of Arizona.

Seafood is a pillar of global food security--long recognized for its protein content. But research is highlighting a critical new link between the biodiversity of aquatic ecosystems and the micronutrient-rich seafood diets that help combat micronutrient deficiencies, or 'hidden hunger', in vulnerable populations.

"Getting the most nutritional value per gram of seafood is crucial in fighting hidden hunger and meeting United Nations Sustainable Development Goals," says Dr. Joey Bernhardt, an ecologist from the University of British Columbia (UBC) who led the study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We've found that aquatic species contain distinct and complementary sets of micronutrients, so the most efficient way to fulfill our nutritional requirements is to fill our diets with small amounts of a variety of species. In order to be able to do that, we need to preserve the biodiversity of our aquatic ecosystems locally and globally."

Dr. Bernhardt and UBC biodiversity researcher Dr. Mary O'Connor analyzed nutrient concentrations in the edible portions of 547 aquatic finfish and shellfish species. While different animals offered similar amounts of protein, they varied greatly in concentrations of micronutrients like iron, zinc, calcium and two fatty acids (docosahexaenoic and eicosapentaenoic acid, known as DHA and EPA). This variation is critical to the value of biodiversity to human well-being.

Most animals did not meet a single micronutrient recommended dietary allowance (RDA) in a 100g portion--fewer than half reached a target of 10% RDA for calcium, iron and EPA. Increasing biodiversity from one to 10 species in seafood diets was correlated with reaching more nutrient targets established by the US Institute of Medicine--and the nutritional value increased even when the seafood portion size remained constant.

"We know that biodiversity is a critical component of the many economic, cultural and ecological benefits humans enjoy from healthy natural ecosystems--from elevated forest production to water quality to nutrient cycling. Our analysis proves that biodiversity also enhances nutritional metrics in aquatic systems, and this benefit is at least as great as the biodiversity benefits we've seen in other sectors," says Dr. O'Connor.

"And this study further demonstrates the importance of biodiversity, measured as the number of different kinds of animals out there, for human-wellbeing in wild ecosystems--showing that protecting biodiversity in nature is as important as maintaining agro-biodiversity."

The finding is of particular importance coastal communities, including many Indigenous communities, who eat on average 15 times more seafood than other groups--and tend to rely more on locally available seafood.

"Aquatic ecosystems are under threat from human activities, and we're observing major changes in biodiversity patterns worldwide," adds Dr. Bernhardt.

"Until now, we didn't understand the consequences of these aquatic biodiversity changes for human nutrition and health. With this new work, we have bridged the gap between biodiversity science and human nutrition science, demonstrating that aquatic biodiversity change can have direct and immediate impact on human nutrition and well-being."

LOS ANGELES (April 5, 2021) -- New research from the Smidt Heart Institute shows that more patients--specifically those with medical risk factors or from underserved communities--opted into telehealth appointments for their cardiovascular care during the COVID-19 pandemic. The data also suggests these telehealth patients underwent fewer diagnostic tests and received fewer medications than patients who saw their doctors in person.

The findings, published in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) Network Open, point to "digital shifts" in cardiovascular care amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

"We were encouraged to learn that access to cardiovascular care was maintained for high-risk and underserved communities during the pandemic," said Joseph Ebinger, MD, director of Clinical Analytics in the Smidt Heart Institute and senior author of the study. "This same study, however, identified some differences in care that we need to delve into further to better understand."

The researchers examined data collected from 87,182 pre-COVID in-person visits, 74,498 COVID-era in-person visits, 4,720 COVID-era telehealth video visits and 10,381 COVID-era telephone visits.

Across all categories, patients accessing COVID-era remote visits were more likely to be from racial or ethnic minority groups, have private insurance and have cardiovascular conditions such as hypertension, coronary artery disease, atrial fibrillation and heart failure.

Researchers then compared how often medications or follow-up tests, including electrocardiograms and echocardiograms, were ordered. Findings suggest a decrease when compared to pre-COVID visits.

"Our data reveal a reduced rate of testing and prescribing, likely due to a number of factors," said Ebinger. "We see these results as being not obviously negative or positive but a trend that is important to understand. For instance, lower rates of testing and prescribing may-in many instances-reflect reductions in the types of care that are not really needed to achieve good health outcomes while adding costs to the system."

Benefits and Pitfalls of Telehealth

One of the key benefits to telehealth visits, researchers say, is access to a cardiologist at a distance, which is vital for individuals who cannot--or do not want to--travel for care due to concerns over virus exposure, lack of transportation, increased family demands or inability to take time off of work. Without telehealth visits, Ebinger said, many of these patients may well not have received any healthcare at all.

But researchers also note the importance of recognizing potential pitfalls of telehealth services, many of which disproportionately affect communities of color.

"Being a relatively new platform for patients and providers alike, there is a learning curve with telehealth, both technically and with respect to comfort and confidence," said Susan Cheng, MD, MPH, MMSc, associate professor, Cedars-Sinai Department of Cardiology, director of the Institute for Research on Healthy Aging in the Department of Cardiology at the Smidt Heart Institute, and an author on the study.

As an example, Cheng notes that patients must have access to a device that allows them to connect with their provider. Similarly, patients must be comfortable with the telehealth platform and feel confident around how to access and use it effectively.

Notwithstanding the challenges of telehealth, there are also conveniences. Researchers say past reports have indicated that racial and ethnic minority populations make up a disproportionate size of the essential job market. Essential worker schedules have been even busier during the pandemic, making it more difficult to fit in an in-person medical appointment during regular business hours. This factor could have contributed to the higher rates of telehealth use among racial and ethnic minority patients.

As a next step, researchers plan to determine whether the changes in clinician practices during the pandemic will lead to changes in patient outcomes.

"We plan to next examine if the ordering of fewer tests, such as stress tests, might predispose to missed diagnoses," said Ebinger. "To understand the balance of risks and benefits, we are also investigating whether the fewer tests ordered might actually represent opportunities to streamline away from certain types of care that were not important contributors to health in the prior system of only in-person visits."