Culture

Twenty percent of high school students have easy access to a handgun, according to a new study from the Colorado School of Public Health on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

In the study published today in The Journal of Pediatrics, the researchers examined the prevalence of handgun access among adolescents in Colorado and explored individual and geographic characteristics, as well as related health factors.

"Our findings highlight that it is relatively easy to access a handgun in Colorado for high school students. This finding, combined with the high prevalence of feeling sad or depressed and suicide attempts, is concerning for the safety of adolescents," said lead author Ashley Brooks-Russell, PhD, MPH, assistant professor in the Colorado School of Public Health.

The researchers examined data from more than 46,000 students who completed the Healthy Kids Colorado Survey, a voluntary statewide anonymous survey given to students in participating schools across Colorado. The survey results are used to assess health behaviors, risk and protective factors. In this study, the researchers reviewed survey questions about the perception of access to handguns.

They found that students were significantly more likely to report easy handgun access if they felt sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks (24.2%), had attempted suicide (30.1%) or had been in a physical fight in the past 12 months (31.8 %).

The survey data also revealed:

More male than female high school students reported handgun access.

A significantly higher proportion of transgender youth reported access.

Students in more rural areas are more likely to have access.

American Indian, multiracial students, followed by white students, access to handguns was significantly higher than among Hispanic, Black or African American or Asian American students.

"It's clear from our findings that we need to raise awareness and improve efforts to reduce firearm access for youth in Colorado to prevent suicide and fatal injuries," said Brooks-Russell. "We hope our findings will help inform public health strategies, such as educating parents on the importance of secure home firearm storage, particularly if an adolescent is at risk for suicide."

Recently, Colorado lawmakers advanced the Safe Storage of Firearms bill to require Colorado gun owners who share their homes with children to securely store their weapons. It passed its first committee on a party line vote.

There are also several gun shops and law enforcement agencies in Colorado that offer out-of-home gun storage options, if home gun storage is not a viable option. Faculty members at the Colorado School of Public Health announced the first out-of-home gun storage map in the country.

The researchers recommend future studies to explore where students access guns (at home or outside their house) and to look at their attempts to access them.

In a new publication in Nature Communications, associate professor of Plant Science at the University of Maryland Yiping Qi continues to innovate genome editing and engineering in plants, with the ultimate goal of improving the efficiency of food production. His recent work contributes six novel variants of CRISPR-Cas12a that have never before been proven in plants, testing them first in rice as a major global crop. In addition to allowing for a much broader scope of possible gene editing targets, these new tools can edit many different sites in the genome at once, or even repress gene expression to tone down undesirable traits. These patent-pending tools greatly expand the scope of what CRISPR-Cas12a can do in plants, which can help to produce food more effectively to feed a growing global population.

"We are excited about this paper because we've contributed two major breakthroughs," says Qi. "First, we've reported multiple Cas12a tools with genome editing capabilities in plants for the first time, and found one [Mb2Cas12a] that hugely broadens the targeting range of Cas12a. Second, we've developed a very efficient system that can edit many different sites at once [multiplexed editing], and that allows us to edit 16 different genes in rice in a single generation."

As Qi explains, Cas12a (like other CRISPR systems) has typically been tied to targeting a specific short sequence of DNA known as a PAM sequence. The PAM sequence is what CRISPR systems typically use to identify where to possibly make their molecular cuts in DNA. However, the new Mb2Cas12a variant introduced by Qi works under relaxed PAM requirements, broadening the scope of what can be targeted for editing the way Qi's lab recently did for CRISPR-Cas9.

In addition to this discovery, the multiplexed editing system introduced for Cas12a in plants provides specific strategies for efficiently editing multiple sites across the genome all at once. For this proof-of-concept, Qi's team first targeted six different sites in the genome to enhance rice yield and disease resistance. But when this was successful, the team didn't stop there.

"I wanted to add more targets to see if there is any limit," explains Qi. "So we added 10 more and tried to target 16 sites, and we found that across almost all rice chromosomes, we had an amazingly high efficiency with all sites being edited all at once in one generation. And that doesn't even represent the upper limit necessarily, but it is the most genes in a plant that has ever been recorded as being edited all at once in one generation for Cas12a."

This system has major implications for precision breeding and the efficiency of food production, says Qi. "For precision breeding, how many genes you can edit at once is really practically important because you can target almost anything and really tailor the product. We targeted disease resistance and yield, but you can add more traits like nitrogen use efficiency, climate resilience traits such as temperature tolerance, and more. It is really a robust system."

Qi is currently doing work to examine the off-targeting effects of editing more genes at once with more relaxed target site requirements. But in addition to these contributions, this paper also demonstrated Cas12a's utility as a synthetic repressor of genes in the model plant Arabidopsis as another tool for genome engineering.

"You can regulate activation or repression of certain genes by using CRISPR not as a cutting tool, but instead as a binding tool to attract activators or repressors to induce or suppress gene expression to engineer desirable traits. In this case, Cas12a is acting as glue, not as scissors. You use an inactivated form of Cas12a to inactivate the expression of other genes. It's a great new tool for the industry and for future research."

Future work will expand these tools out of rice and Arabidopsis, and into all kinds of plants and crops. "This type of technology helps increase crop yield and sustainably feed a growing population in a changing world," says Qi. "I am very pleased to continue to expand the impacts of CRISPR technologies."

-- Black middle-aged adults had an incidence rate of stroke 4 times higher than that of white middle-aged adults, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published March 29 in Hypertension.

The large national prospective study highlights the need to raise awareness among young and middle-aged Black adults about the impact of high blood pressure, called hypertension, on stroke, the research team said.

"What we found striking in this study was that the incidence of stroke began to increase rapidly starting at around age 40 for Black adults," said the study's co-author Jamal S. Rana, MD, PhD, an adjunct investigator with the Division of Research at Kaiser Permanente in Northern California, and cardiologist with The Permanente Medical Group. "It is well known that Black adults have higher rates of hypertension in general, but the fact that their blood pressure levels are starting to increase at such an early stage in life is concerning."

The research used data collected in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults study. Launched in 1985, CARDIA enrolled 5,115 Black and white women and men ages 18 to 30 at research hospitals in 4 cities. Blood pressure measurements and other tests were performed when participants entered the study, and were conducted every 5 years, with 2 additional exams at years 2 and 7.

This analysis included data collected on 5,079 participants starting from 1990 through 2018. In 1990, the Black adults already had higher rates of elevated blood pressure and diagnosed hypertension than the white adults. By 2018, 100 people in the study had had a stroke, at a median age of 49.8. The stroke incidence rate was 29 per 100,000 person-years for white adults compared with 120 per 100,000 person-years for Black adults -- a rate more than 4 times higher. A person-year is a measurement that takes into account the number of people in a study and the amount of time each person spends in the study. The analysis also took into account other risk factors for stroke, such as smoking, diabetes, high cholesterol, obesity, lack of physical activity, and excessive alcohol use.

"This study confirms that it's not only whether you have high blood pressure but how long you have had high blood pressure and how long the damage to the blood vessels has been occurring that matters," said the study's senior author Stephen Sidney, MD, MPH, a research scientist at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research. "It also tells us that interventions need to be put in place to prevent high blood pressure from ever even occurring."

The study's first author Yariv Gerber, PhD, a professor of epidemiology and head of the School of Public Health at Tel Aviv University in Israel, conducted the research while on a sabbatical at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research. "We demonstrated that the association of high blood pressure with stroke varies with age, strengthening from young adulthood to midlife," said Dr. Gerber. "The association was also dynamic, with the most recent measurement most strongly associated with subsequent stroke risk. This stresses the need for early public health interventions to maintain optimal blood pressure levels in young adulthood, particularly in high-risk Black young adults."

Previous research suggests young adults age 18 to 39 in the United States are less aware than adults age 40 and older about what their blood pressure numbers mean and why it is important to keep blood pressure low. "Anytime you talk about abnormal blood pressure, the biggest challenge is always that people are not feeling it in real time," said Dr. Rana. "It is not until a person's blood pressure has been out of control for a prolonged period of time that they feel any symptoms. Our goal should be to have people proactively think about blood pressure control."

Despite the enormous amount of research over the decades into lasers and their applications, there have been few ways to accurately, efficiently, and directly observe fine details of their interactions with materials. For the first time, researchers have found a way to acquire such data from a production laser using low-cost equipment that could vastly improve the accuracy of items cut or etched with lasers. Given the ubiquity of lasers, this could have wide-ranging implications in laboratory, commercial and industrial applications.

Lasers are used in an extraordinarily wide range of applications in the modern world. One area in particular that is increasingly important is in manufacture, the reason being the level of precision at which a laser can operate is far greater than that of the equivalent physical tool. However, this level of precision could be even higher in theory, leading to a new generation of yet unimagined technologies. There are some hurdles to overcome, though. One significant way in which laser precision could be improved is if there was a better means to obtain feedback on the way the laser interacts with a material. That way, there would be greater control and less uncertainty in the cutting and etching actions of a production laser. This problem has proven surprisingly difficult to tackle until now.

"To measure how far into a surface a laser has cut often requires tens or hundreds of depth readings to take place. This is a substantial barrier for fast, automated laser-based production systems," said Professor Junji Yumoto from the Department of Physics at the University of Tokyo. "So we have devised a new way to determine and predict the depth of a hole produced by laser pulses based on a single observation rather than tens or hundreds. This finding is an important step forward in improving the controllability of laser processing."

Yumoto and his team wondered how to determine the depth of a laser hole using the minimal amount of information possible. This led them to look at what is known as the fluence of a laser pulse, which is the optical energy the pulse delivers over a given area. Until recently, expensive imaging apparatus would have been required to observe this fluence, and this usually lacked sufficient resolution. But thanks to developments in other areas of electronics and optics, a relatively simple Raspberry Pi Camera Version 2 proved ample for the job.

As their test laser apparatus made a hole on sapphire, the camera recorded directly the fluence distribution of a laser pulse. Then a laser microscope measured the hole shape. By superimposing these two results and using some modern numerical methods, the team produced a large and reliable data set that could accurately tell you the relation between fluence and hole depth.

"This would be correspondent with the extraction of about 250,000 data points from a single measurement," said Yumoto. "Our new method could efficiently provide big data for machine learning and new numerical simulation methods to improve the accuracy and controllability of laser processing for manufacture."

Each human being is made of billions of cells. In order to ensure his survival, cells must coordinate with each other and attach in the right place to perform their tasks. Scientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, in collaboration with the University of Tampere in Finland, have highlighted the key role of a protein called paxillin, which enables cells to perceive their environment and anchor at the right place with the help of cellular "crampons". Indeed, without functional paxillin, the cell is unable to attach properly and slips continuously. These results, to be read in the journal Communications Biology, shed new light on how cells adhere or migrate, mechanisms essential to the good functioning of our organs, but also involved in the development of metastatic tumors.

To ensure our survival, each cell performs specific functions in coordination with their neighbours. In such a dynamic system, the migration of cells and their anchoring at the right place are essential. But how do cells manage to coordinate with each other? Scientists have long believed that cells communicate mainly through chemical signals, such as hormones. However, recent discoveries suggest that mechanical signals play a major role in cell coordination. "This is why we started to study the ability of cells to decipher and respond to their physical environment", explains Bernhard Wehrle-Haller, Professor at the Department of cell physiology and metabolism at UNIGE Faculty of Medicine. "Especially as it could help us to understand how cancer cells use these mechanisms to invade other organs and form metastases."

From a mechanical cue to a biological signal

When a cell has to move, it "senses" its environment with the help of proteins on its surface, the integrins. When the cell detects a suitable location, a complex network of proteins, called focal adhesion, is then set up to form cellular crampons that anchor the cell to its environment. "But how is this anchoring mechanism regulated? This is what we wanted to find out," explains Marta Ripamonti, researcher in the laboratory of Prof. Bernhard Wehrle-Haller and first author of the study.

By studying paxillin, one of the many proteins that make up these crampons, researchers were able to unravel the mystery. "We knew that this protein played a role in the assembly of focal adhesions, but we didn't expect it to be the key regulator", says Prof. Bernhard Wehrle-Haller with enthusiasm. Without functional paxillin, cells are unable to anchor, regardless of the suitability of their environment. In addition, paxillin has also the function of informing the cell that anchoring has taken place correctly, thus transforming a mechanical response into a biological signal that the cell can understand.

Disrupting the crampons to prevent metastases?

These in vitro experiments highlight the major role of paxillin in the migration and adhesion of healthy cells, but they could also be a starting point for a better understanding of cancer development. "It is indeed likely that cancer cells use paxillin to find a place that enhance their survival. Would it be possible to block this mechanism in tumor cells and prevent the formation of metastases? Yes, we think so! " concludes Prof. Bernhard Wehrle-Haller.

Bioengineering researchers at Lehigh University have identified a previously unknown interaction between receptors in human cells and the spike, or "S," protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. This new information could aid in the development of new strategies to block SARS-CoV-2 entry into human cells.

X. Frank Zhang and Wonpil Im knew from recent studies that the interaction between the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptors in human cells is stronger than the interaction between the structurally identical spike protein of SARS-CoV-1, the virus that caused the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak, and the same receptors.

"Our goal was to characterize SARS-CoV-2 and study the protein-protein interactions during its invasion of human cells to provide more insights into the mechanisms that make this first step in its successful invasion process possible," says Zhang, an associate professor in Bioengineering and Mechanical Engineering & Mechanics at Lehigh.

Their findings appear in an article called "Biomechanical characterization of SARS-CoV-2 spike RBD and human ACE2 protein-protein interaction" in a special issue of Biophysical Journal, "Biophysicists Address Covid-19 Challenges I," published in mid-March. Additional authors include, from Lehigh University: Wenpeng Cao, Decheng Hou and Seonghan Kim in bioengineering; Chuqiao Dong in mechanical engineering and mechanics; and, from Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute, New York Blood Center, Wanbo Tai and Lanying Du.

Using combined single-molecule force spectroscopy and molecular dynamics simulations, Zhang's and Im's teams were able to identify a previously unknown interaction between ACE2 glycans (sugar groups attached to the surface of proteins) and the SARS-CoV-2 spike. It is this interaction that appears to be responsible for the strengthening of the virus-cell interaction. This may partially explain the higher infection rate of COVID-19 compared to the similar virus that caused the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak, they say.

"We were surprised to find that the specific interaction between ACE2 glycans and the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is what makes the separation of the virus from cells so difficult," says Im, who is a professor of bioengineering, computer science, chemistry and biological sciences, as well as the Presidential Endowed Chair in Health, Science and Engineering at Lehigh.

To arrive at these findings, the team employed Zhang's innovative single-molecule detection technique, measuring the detachment force of the spike protein-ACE2 receptor interaction. Using the all-atom molecular dynamics simulations of the complex system available in CHARMM-GUI developed by Im, they then identified the detailed structural information in this interaction.

"After we carefully removed all of the ACE2 glycans and measured the force of the interaction, we saw that the strength of the SARS-CoV-2 spike-ACE2 interaction fell back to levels similar to SARS-CoV-1," says Zhang.

"It is possible that this newly-discovered interaction with ACE2 glycans could be a contributing factor to the higher rates of COVID-19 than the structurally similar SARS-CoV-1, which has a weaker interaction," says Zhang. "Our hope is that researchers may be able to use this information to develop new strategies to identify, prevent, treat and vaccinate against COVID-19."

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Monitoring the progression of multiple sclerosis-related gait issues can be challenging in adults over 50 years old, requiring a clinician to differentiate between problems related to MS and other age-related issues. To address this problem, researchers are integrating gait data and machine learning to advance the tools used to monitor and predict disease progression.

A new study of this approach led by University of Illinois Urbana Champaign graduate student Rachneet Kaur, kinesiology and community health professor Manuel Hernandez and industrial and enterprise engineering and mathematics professor Richard Sowers is published in the journal Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

Multiple sclerosis can present itself in many ways in the approximately 2 million people that it affects globally, and walking problems are a common symptom. About half of the patients need walking assistance within 15 years of onset, the study reports.

"We wanted to get a sense of the interactions between aging and concurrent MS disease-related changes, and whether we can also differentiate between the two in older adults with MS," Hernandez said. "Machine-learning techniques seem to work particularly well at spotting complex hidden changes in performance. We hypothesized that these analysis techniques might also be useful in predicting sudden gait changes in persons with MS."

Using an instrumented treadmill, the team collected gait data - normalized for body size and demographics - from 20 adults with MS and 20 age-, weight-, height- and gender-matched older adults without MS. The participants walked at a comfortable pace for up to 75 seconds while specialized software captured gait events, corresponding ground reaction forces and center-of-pressure positions during each walk. The team extracted each participant's characteristic spatial, temporal and kinetic features in their strides to examine variations in gait during each trial.

Changes in various gait features, including a data feature called the butterfly diagram, helped the team detect differences in gait patterns between participants. The diagram gains its name from the butterfly-shaped curve created from the repeated center-of-pressure trajectory for multiple continuous strides during a subject's walk and is associated with critical neurological functions, the study reports.

Click here to see a video describing this research.

"We study the effectiveness of a gait dynamics-based machine-learning framework to classify strides of older persons with MS from healthy controls to generalize across different walking tasks and over new subjects," Kaur said. "This proposed methodology is an advancement toward developing an assessment marker for medical professionals to predict older people with MS who are likely to have a worsening of symptoms in the near term."

Future studies can provide more thorough examinations to manage the study's small cohort size, Sowers said.

"Biomechanical systems, such as walking, are poorly modeled systems, making it difficult to spot problems in a clinical setting," Sowers said. "In this study, we are trying to extract conclusions from data sets that include many measurements of each individual, but a small number of individuals. The results of this study make significant headway in the area of clinical machine learning-based disease-prediction strategies."

SPOKANE, Wash. - New research led by scientists at Washington State University has found that a protein known as GBP5 appears to play a key role in suppressing inflammation in rheumatoid arthritis, a potentially debilitating disease in which the immune system mistakenly attacks the body's own joint tissues.

Published in the journal Arthritis & Rheumatology, the discovery could someday lead to new treatments to slow or halt the progress of the disease, which affects an estimated 1.5 million Americans. The researchers said it may also have applications in other inflammatory diseases.

First author Mahamudul Haque first stumbled upon GBP5 back in 2015, when he was working toward a Ph.D. in pharmaceutical sciences in WSU's College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. Now a postdoctoral research associate in the WSU Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, Haque had been tasked with comparing the expression of different genes in joint tissue from rheumatoid arthritis patients and non-diseased joint tissue. Among the thousands of genes included in his analysis, one gene stood out in particular because its expression level was several times greater in rheumatoid arthritis tissue. That gene was guanylate binding protein 5 (GBP5), which helps produce the GBP5 protein.

"That caught our attention and interest," said senior author Salah-Uddin Ahmed, a professor in the College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences who oversaw the work.

As far as Ahmed and Haque could tell, no other studies had looked at the role of GBP5 in rheumatoid arthritis or other auto-immune diseases, so they decided to take on the task.

The inflammation seen in rheumatoid arthritis causes painful swelling of joint tissues that can result in bone loss and deformed joints. Previous research conducted by Ahmed and his team has suggested that this inflammation is driven primarily by a cytokine protein known as interleukin-1 beta (IL-1 beta). To find out what role GBP5 plays, the researchers designed a series of experiments using rheumatoid arthritis synovial fibroblasts, a type of cell located in the tissue that lines joints and is known to play a role in inflammation and joint destruction. When they manipulated the cells to stop producing GBP5 and then added IL-1 beta to induce inflammation, they saw much higher levels of inflammation in cells that lacked GBP5 versus in non-manipulated cells. What's more, when they increased levels of GBP5 in those same cells, inflammation triggered by IL-1 beta went down.

"Our initial thought had been that the GBP5 protein played a role in causing the disease, but as we worked to decipher the mechanism of GBP5 in rheumatoid arthritis we found that it was induced in response to inflammation and was trying to cut back inflammation before it goes out of control," Ahmed said.

In addition, their research revealed how GBP5 interacts with interferon gamma, another cytokine that has been shown to fight inflammation under certain circumstances. When they silenced the GBP5 gene, the researchers found that it reduced interferon gamma's ability to fight the inflammation triggered by IL-1 beta. This suggests that, on top of having its own anti-inflammatory effect, GBP5 also supports the anti-inflammatory function of interferon gamma.

Finally, the researchers confirmed their findings in a rodent model of rheumatoid arthritis, which showed that joint inflammation and bone loss increased when the GBP5 gene was turned off.

Ahmed said he and his team are conducting additional research to confirm that their findings hold up in other pre-clinical models of rheumatoid arthritis. Pending further, clinical studies to test this concept in rheumatoid arthritis patients at different stages of the disease, Ahmed said their findings could someday lead to the development of new combination therapies that could boost GBP5 levels to reduce inflammation and bone loss.

"What we would like to understand is, if we introduced this protein very early during the onset of rheumatoid arthritis, could we reverse or suppress the course of the disease?" Ahmed said.

Haque also suggested that researchers should take a closer look at the role of GBP5 in other conditions that involve inflammation. This includes other types of arthritis, such as gout and osteoarthritis.

EU imports of products including palm oil, soybeans, and beef contribute significantly to deforestation in other parts of the world. In a new study, researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and the University of Louvain, Belgium, evaluated over a thousand policy proposals for how the EU could reduce this impact, to assess which would have the largest potential to reduce deforestation - while also being politically feasible.

"Unsurprisingly, there is weaker support for tougher regulations, such as import restrictions on certain goods. But our study shows that there is broad support in general, including for certain policies that have real potential to reduce imported deforestation," says Martin Persson, Associate Professor of Physical Resource Theory at Chalmers University of Technology.

Previous research from Chalmers University of Technology has already shown the EU's great impact in this area. More than half of tropical deforestation is linked to production of food and animal feed, such as palm oil, soybeans, wood products, cocoa and coffee - goods which the EU imports in vast quantities. The question is, what can the EU do to reduce its contribution to deforestation?

"This issue is particularly interesting now, as this year the EU is planning to present legislative proposals for reducing deforestation caused by European consumption. The question has been discussed by the EU since 2008, but now something political is actually happening," says Simon Bager, a doctoral student at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, and lead author of the study.

The authors of the article mapped 1141 different proposals, originating from open consultations and workshops, where the EU has collected ideas from companies, interest groups and think tanks. The researchers also compiled proposals from a large number of research reports, policy briefs and other publications, where different stakeholders have put forward various policy proposals. After grouping together similar proposals, they arrived at 86 unique suggestions.

Two suggestions stand out from the crowd

Finding proposals for measures that would have the desired effect but are also possible to implement in practice, and enjoy the necessary political support, is no easy task. But after their extensive survey, the researchers identify two policy options in particular which show promise. The first is to make importers of produce responsible for any deforestation in their supply chains, by requiring them to carry out the requisite due diligence.

"If the importing companies' suppliers have products that contribute to deforestation, the company may be held responsible for this. We consider such a system to be credible and possible to implement both politically and practically - there are already examples from France and England where similar systems have been implemented or are in the process thereof," says Simon Bager.

"Due diligence is also the measure which is most common in our survey, put forward by many different types of actors, and there is broad support for this proposal. However, it is important to emphasise that for such a system to have an impact on deforestation, it must be carefully designed, including which companies are affected by the requirements, and which sanctions and liability options exist."

The other possibility is to support multi-stakeholder forums, where companies, civil society organisations, and politicians come together to agree on possible measures for ridding a supply-chain, commodity, or area, of deforestation. There are positive examples here too, the most notable being the Amazon Soy Moratorium from 2006, when actors including Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature gathered with soy producers and exporters and agreed to end soy exports from deforested areas in the Amazon rainforest.

"Examples such as these demonstrate the effect that multi-stakeholder forums can have. And in our opinion, it is a measure that is easier to get acceptance for, because it is an opportunity for the affected parties to be directly involved in helping design the measures themselves," says Martin.

Such discussions can also be adapted to the relevant areas or regions, increasing the likelihood of local support for the initiatives.

A delicate balance

The researchers also investigated how to deal with the trade-off between policy impacts and feasibility. An important part of this is combining different complementary measures. Trade regulations on their own, for example, risk hitting poorer producing countries harder, and should therefore be combined with targeted aid to help introduce more sustainable production methods, increasing yields without having to resort to deforestation. This would also reduce the risk of goods that are produced on deforested land simply being sold in markets other than the EU.

"If the EU now focuses on its contribution to deforestation, the effect may be that what is produced on newly deforested land is sold to other countries, while the EU gets the 'good' products. Therefore, our assessment is that the EU should ensure that the measures introduced are combined with those which contribute to an overall transition to sustainable land use in producing countries," says Simon Bager.

In conclusion, the researchers summarise three essential principles needed for new measures, if the EU is serious about reducing its impact on tropical deforestation.

"First, enact measures that actually are able to bring about change. Second, use a range of measures, combining different tools and instruments to contribute to reduced deforestation. Finally, ensure the direct involvement of supply chain actors within particularly important regions, expanding and broadening the measures over time," concludes Simon Bager.

The authors hope that the research and identified policy options can serve as inspiration for policy makers, NGOs, industries, and other stakeholders working to address the EU's deforestation footprint. With at least 86 different unique alternatives, there is a wide range of opportunities to focus on the problem - very few of these are political 'non-starters' or proposals which would have no effect on the issue.

The full study, Eighty-six EU policy options for reducing imported deforestation is available open-access in the journal One Earth.

For more information, contact:

Martin Persson, Associate Professor, Physical Resource Theory at Chalmers University of Technology, martin.persson@chalmers.se, +46 31 772 2148

Simon Bager, Ph.D. candidate UCLouvain and MSCA fellow COUPLED, simon.bager@uclouvain.be, +45 2721 7414

More detailed information regarding how the study was conducted:

To investigate the potential impact and political feasibility of the 1141 proposals, the researchers first categorised them based on who submitted the proposal, who the policy would affect, and what type of policy is proposed. Since many of the proposals were essentially the same or similar, they were then summarised, resulting in 86 unique suggestions. The majority are based on weaker measures, such as making more information and types of support available to producers, rather than statutory restrictions and regulations on imports and exports. The researchers interpret this as meaning that there is greater support for softer proposals. However, the researchers themselves consider these proposals to be less effective.

"One example is eco-labelling, where the purpose is to influence consumers to stop buying products that contribute to deforestation. The intent is good, but previous research does not support the argument that this changes consumer behaviour to such a level that production itself is affected. But if import restrictions are instead introduced on goods that are linked to deforestation, it is already known that this has direct effects," says Martin Persson.

After evaluating the likely effects, the next step was to see which proposals could actually receive political support, and how complex and costly the formulation and implementation was likely to be. For this evaluation, methodological innovations were required.

"After categorising the 1141 proposals, we could see how many stakeholders, and of which kind, proposed a certain type of measure. If the same option was proposed by many actors, of different kinds - environmental organisations, companies, and authorities - we interpreted that as strong, broad support for the proposal," explains Martin Persson.

The last two steps in the assessment of the measures were then about how complicated and expensive it would be to realise the proposals.

"For example, commissioning a research institute to investigate, at a detailed level, what drives deforestation - that would be quite easy. But a new tax or punitive duty at EU-wide level would be very difficult and costly to successfully implement. There are some measures, which the EU can take alone, while others require cooperation with the individual member states or third countries. And there we simply rated the institutional difficulty for implementation of each proposal," says Simon Bager.

The last aspect for assessing the political feasibility was looking at the economic impact of the proposal.

"If you influence a large import flow, that will result in major economic consequences. Directing the EU aid budget to support less forest-intensive production, meanwhile, would have a significantly smaller financial impact," says Martin Persson.

The consequences for the economy also depend on how much of a market is affected. It is important that a will to change taxation or regulation in the area exists.

A Japanese research group combined motion analysis that uses smartphone application and machine learning that uses an anomaly detection method, thereby developing a technique to easily screen for carpal tunnel syndrome. Carpal tunnel syndrome is common amongst middle-aged women. The disease causes compressed nerves in the wrist, causing numbness and difficulty with finger movements. While an accurate diagnosis can be reached with nerve conduction study, this is not widely used because it requires expensive devices and specialized skills. Thus, a simple screen tool that does not require any specialized knowledge or techniques is desired.

The research group of Dr. Koji Fujita of Tokyo Medical and Dental University and associate professor Yuta Sugiura of Keio University focused on increasingly poor movements of the thumb with the advancement of the disease, and analyzed its characteristics. They developed a game application for smartphones that is played using the thumbs and prepared a program that acquires the trajectory of the thumb during a game play and estimates the possibility of the disease with machine learning. The application can screen for possible carpal tunnel syndrome using a simple game that can be played in 30 sec - 1 minute. Even without gathering patient data, they were able to effectively construct an estimate mode from the data of 12 asymptomatic participants using the anomaly detection method. When this program was applied to 15 new asymptomatic subjects and 36 patients with carpal tunnel syndrome to verify its accuracy, the result was promising with 93% sensitivity, 69% specificity, and 0.86 Area Under the Curve (AUC)(1). This is equivalent or better than the results of physical examinations by expert orthopedic surgeons.

The developed tool can be used to screen for possible carpal tunnel syndrome at sites where no expert is present, such as at home or at a health center. In the future, the research group aims to develop a system that is able to encourage an examination by an expert when the disease is suspected in order to prevent exacerbation. It would prevent inconvenience and social loss associated with exacerbation of a disease, which is more common among women, and contribute to creating a society where women play an active role.

Astronomers found a number of stellar eggs containing baby stars around the center of the Milky Way using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Previous studies had suggested that the environment there is too harsh to form stars. These findings indicate that star formation is more resilient than researchers thought.

Stars form in stellar eggs, cosmic clouds of gas and dust which collapse due to gravity. If something interferes with the gravity driven contraction, star formation will be suppressed. There are many potential sources of interference near the Galactic Center. Strong turbulence can stir up the clouds and prevent them from contracting, or strong magnetic fields can support the gas against self-gravitational collapse. Previous observations indicated that star formation near the Galactic Center is much less efficient.

To investigate the mysteries of the suppressed star formation, a team led by Xing Lu, an astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, used ALMA to observe regions near the Galactic Center which contain ample gas, but no known star formation. Surprisingly, the team discovered more than 800 dense cores of gas and dust.

"The discovery leads to the question of whether they are actually 'stellar eggs' or not." explains Lu. To answer this question, the team again used ALMA to search for energetic gas outflows which are indicative of stars forming in stellar eggs. Thanks to ALMA's high sensitivity and high spatial resolution, they detected 43 small and faint outflows in the clouds. Lu comments, "our observations prove that even in the strongly disturbed areas around the Galactic Center, baby stars still form."

The research team is now analyzing ALMA's higher resolution observation data to better understand the processes driving the gas outflows and star formation near the Galactic Center.

Japan -- The tooth fairy is a welcome guest for any child who has lost a tooth. Not only will the fairy leave a small gift under the pillow, but the child can be assured of a new tooth in a few months. The same cannot be said of adults who have lost their teeth.

A new study by scientists at Kyoto University and the University of Fukui, however, may offer some hope. The team reports that an antibody for one gene -- uterine sensitization associated gene-1 or USAG-1 -- can stimulate tooth growth in mice suffering from tooth agenesis, a congenital condition. The paper was published in Science Advances.

Although the normal adult mouth has 32 teeth, about 1% of the population has more or fewer due to congenital conditions. Scientists have explored the genetic causes for cases having too many teeth as clues for regenerating teeth in adults.

According to Katsu Takahashi, one of the lead authors of the study and a senior lecturer at the Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine, the fundamental molecules responsible for tooth development have already been identified.

"The morphogenesis of individual teeth depends on the interactions of several molecules including BMP, or bone morphogenetic protein, and Wnt signaling," says Takahashi.

BMP and Wnt are involved in much more than tooth development. They modulate the growth of multiple organs and tissues well before the human body is even the size of a raisin. Consequently, drugs that directly affect their activity are commonly avoided, since side effects could affect the entire body.

Guessing that targeting the factors that antagonize BMP and Wnt specifically in tooth development could be safer, the team considered the gene USAG-1.

"We knew that suppressing USAG-1 benefits tooth growth. What we did not know was whether it would be enough," adds Takahashi.

The scientists therefore investigated the effects of several monoclonal antibodies for USAG-1. Monoclonal antibodies are commonly used to treat cancers, arthritis, and vaccine development.

USAG-1 interacts with both BMP and Wnt. As a result, several of the antibodies led to poor birth and survival rates of the mice, affirming the importance of both BMP and Wnt on whole body growth. One promising antibody, however, disrupted the interaction of USAG-1 with BMP only.

Experiments with this antibody revealed that BMP signaling is essential for determining the number of teeth in mice. Moreover, a single administration was enough to generate a whole tooth. Subsequent experiments showed the same benefits in ferrets.

"Ferrets are diphyodont animals with similar dental patterns to humans. Our next plan is to test the antibodies on other animals such as pigs and dogs," explains Takahashi.

The study is the first to show the benefits of monoclonal antibodies on tooth regeneration and provides a new therapeutic framework for a clinical problem that can currently only be resolved with implants and other artificial measures.

"Conventional tissue engineering is not suitable for tooth regeneration. Our study shows that cell-free molecular therapy is effective for a wide range of congenital tooth agenesis," concludes Manabu Sugai of the University of Fukui, another author of the study.

A group of researchers from Russia, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Switzerland contest the common belief that resource-based economies have higher levels of within-country inequality than resource-scarce economies. The researchers document a direct causal link between natural resources and within-country inequality and conclude that the extraction of oil and gas can reduce inequality or has no significant effect on it. The results were published in the journal Empirical Economics.

"When we compare the natural resource rents to GDP 10 years after the discovery of natural resources vs. 1 year before the discovery, we observe that the resource rents increase by approximately 3 times in Denmark, 13 times in Norway, and 42 times in the Netherlands," says an associate professor of the department of economics at Ural Federal University and a senior researcher at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, co-author of the study Olga Popova. "However, we did not observe an increase in income inequality in the studied countries compared to the control ones. Moreover, in Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands, inequality was significantly lower."

The researchers have examined the causal effect of natural resource discoveries on income inequality using data from 1947 to 2009 and applying the synthetic control method, a method proposed by American and European economists in early 2000s. They focused on the natural discoveries in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway in the 1960-1970s and used top 1% and top 10% income shares as the measure of income inequality. The data was compared with the statistics of the same period on the income of the population in the control countries - Finland, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, France, Switzerland. These countries are comparable to Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands geographically and in terms of ethnic diversity, level of democracy, economic development, education, and health, but are not rich in natural resources.

The researchers believe that by the time the oil and gas were discovered in these countries, political and economic institutions were developed there. This blocked the risks of concentration of control over resources, property, and capital in the hands of the elites, expansion of the state apparatus, and the exacerbation of corruption.

"The maturity of democratic and market institutions hindered the flow of labor to the extractive industries and regions, prevented inflation, degradation of education, and technological lags. Combining these achievements, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands have avoided the "resource curse" and, ultimately, an increase in inequality," the researchers state.

Equal and fair redistribution of resource rents ensured real accountability of the government to voters, and an open and transparent economy. This happened, for example, with the help of national reserve fund and high taxes. This stimulated further economic growth, including in high-tech industries, the development of the social sphere, the creation of new jobs, and a salary growth. Moreover, these developments have occurred soon after the start of production and export of oil and gas resources. The result is the creation of welfare states and, at the same time, a 5-10% reduction in taxes on personal and corporate income by the end of the last decade.

"The key to understanding the causal link between the availability and use of natural resources, on the one hand, and income inequality, on the other, should be sought in the history of the producing countries, in the prevailing political and economic structures and principles," says Olga Popova.

Pedestrian movements are tricky to track, but now the first large-scale statistical analysis of pedestrian flow using anonymous phone data collected in three European capital cities, London, Amsterdam and Stockholm, has been conducted by researchers from KAUST with Swedish colleagues from Gothenburg.

Analyzing the flow of pedestrians through city streets provides insights into how city design influences walking behavior. Studies of pedestrian flow inform new urban developments, enable designers to define quieter areas and "urban buzz" zones and reveal how spaces are used at different times.

"In a previous study, we found strong links between the total number of people walking on a given street in one day and certain characteristics of the urban environment," says David Bolin at KAUST. Specifically, built density type, which is a variable based on the total floor space and ground space taken up by buildings on a street, correlated with the intensity of pedestrian flow, while the relative position of each street in a city -- its "centrality" or street type -- explained flow variations within each area.

Many similar studies have been hampered by methodological inconsistencies and small datasets, but this one had a large dataset.

"We took advantage of the power of large-scale data collection to determine if these same variables (density and street type) could explain both the full-day counts in different streets and the variations in flow over the day," says Bolin. "We developed a functional ANOVA model to explore our results."

Data was collected over three weeks in October 2017 from detection devices on almost 700 street segments across 53 neighborhoods. The detectors collected anonymous signals from mobile phones traveling at under 6 kilometers per hour to differentiate pedestrians from people traveling on transport.

"We chose streets that provided a wide mix of street types and density types from each city," says Bolin.

Daily total pedestrian counts were influenced by built density, street type and a street's "attraction variables", such as the presence of local markets or public transport stops. Built density explained the fluctuations in flow across the day but street type did not. There were also differences between each city, especially in the highest density built-up areas, making it difficult to generalize the findings to other cities. The model predicted pedestrian flow for certain parts of the three cities better than others.

"The results provide insights into the importance of street and density types in designing areas with different qualities," says Bolin. "Accurate predictions for other cities would require more data from multiple cities in different seasons."

Dwindling water supplies and a growing population will halve per capita water use in Jordan by the end of this century. Without intervention, few households in the arid nation will have access to even 40 liters (10.5 gallons) of piped water per person per day.

Low-income neighborhoods will be the hardest hit, with 91 percent of households receiving less than 40 liters daily for 11 consecutive months per year by 2100.

Those are among the sobering predictions of a peer-reviewed paper by an international team of 17 researchers published March 29 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Jordan's deepening water crisis offers a glimpse of challenges that loom elsewhere as a result of climate change, population growth, intensifying water use, demographic shocks and heightened competition for water across boundaries, said study co-author and Stanford hydrologist Steve Gorelick, who directs the Global Freshwater Initiative at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment. The World Health Organization estimates half of humanity may live in water-stressed areas by 2025, and the United Nations anticipates water scarcity could displace 700 million people by 2030.

In Jordan, flows in the region's biggest river system - the Jordan-Yarmouk - have declined as a result of upstream diversion in Israel and Syria. Groundwater levels in some areas have dropped by more than 1 meter per year, and a major aquifer along Jordan's boundary with Saudi Arabia is heavily pumped on both sides of the border.

Demand for water has climbed largely because of population growth punctuated by waves of refugees, including more than 1 million Syrian refugees in the past decade.

Extreme water scarcity and wide disparities in public water supplies are potent ingredients for conflict. Jordan's water situation - long deemed a crisis - is now on the brink of "boiling over" into instability, said lead study author Jim Yoon, a water security and resilience scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

"Jordan's unique role as a bastion of peace in the region makes these findings all the more cause for concern," said Yoon, who began work on the study as a PhD student at Stanford University.

The U.N. has committed to ensuring sustainable freshwater management and universal access to clean water and sanitation as one of its 17 sustainable development goals. But until now, analytic frameworks have been lacking, said Gorelick, who led the Jordan Water Project and its continuation, the FUSE Project (Food-water-energy for Urban Sustainable Environments).

The new predictions derive from a first-of-its-kind computer model of Jordan's freshwater system that simulates interactions among natural processes and human behaviors. Under a range of climate and socioeconomic scenarios, the researchers quantified the effects of maintaining status quo versus introducing measures such as fixing leaky pipes, eliminating water theft, raising tariffs for big water users and reallocating a quarter of water from farms to cities.

The team's modeling suggests efforts to simultaneously increase supply, slash demand and reform distribution are likely to deliver "exponential" improvements in national water security.

Access to Jordan's public water supply today is highly unequal, with wealthier households and firms often supplementing rationed municipal supplies with costly deliveries from private tanker truck operators. German economist and study co-author Christian Klassert said, "Avoiding large disparities in public water supply will be necessary to avoid water stress under growing water scarcity in Jordan and regions around the world."

The many facets of Jordan's water crisis make it an especially valuable place to explore the impacts of individual versus simultaneous interventions, Gorelick said. Now that a model exists for this complex environment, it can be adapted with relative ease to other regions.

The single most effective step Jordan can take is to increase supply through large-scale desalination. One proposal among many Jordan has pursued to this end since the 1960s would desalinate water from the Red Sea in the south, transport freshwater north to the capital city Amman and dispose of the leftover highly saline water in the rapidly shrinking Dead Sea.

While water policy debates often present selected supply and demand interventions as opposing alternatives, the authors write, suites of interventions in both modes actually work best in concert.

"You would think that any one of these interventions would have a greater impact. But it turns out you have to do everything," Gorelick said.

For a country whose economic output per person is less than one-tenth that of the U.S., the scale and cost of near-total reform of its water sector are particularly daunting. "In water-scarce regions where sustainability planning is most needed, it is challenging to think beyond how to distribute scarce freshwater tomorrow, next month, and to some extent, in the next several years," Gorelick said. "It's in these places where our long-term policy evaluations are most valuable."