Culture

When you slip into sleep, it's easy to imagine that your brain shuts down, but University of Michigan research suggests that groups of neurons activated during prior learning keep humming, tattooing memories into your brain.

U-M researchers have been studying how memories associated with a specific sensory event are formed and stored in mice. In a study conducted prior to the coronavirus pandemic and recently published in Nature Communications, the researchers examined how a fearful memory formed in relation to a specific visual stimulus.

They found that not only did the neurons activated by the visual stimulus keep more active during subsequent sleep, sleep is vital to their ability to connect the fear memory to the sensory event.

Previous research has shown that regions of the brain that are highly active during intensive learning tend to show more activity during subsequent sleep. But what was unclear was whether this "reactivation" of memories during sleep needs to occur in order to fully store the memory of newly learned material.

"Part of what we wanted to understand was whether there is communication between parts of the brain that are mediating the fear memory and the specific neurons mediating the sensory memory that the fear is being tied to. How do they talk together, and must they do so during sleep? We would really like to know what's facilitating that process of making a new association, like a particular set of neurons, or a particular stage of sleep," said Sara Aton, senior author of the study and a professor in the U-M Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. "But for the longest time, there was really no way to test this experimentally."

Now, researchers have the tools to genetically tag cells that are activated by an experience during a specific window of time. Focusing on a specific set of neurons in the primary visual cortex, Aton and the study's lead author, graduate student Brittany Clawson, created a visual memory test. They showed a group of mice a neutral image, and expressed genes in the visual cortex neurons activated by the image.

To verify that these neurons registered the neutral image, Aton and her team tested whether they could instigate the memory of the image stimulus by selectively activating the neurons without showing them the image. When they activated the neurons and paired that activation with a mild foot shock, they found that their subjects would subsequently be afraid of visual stimuli that looked similar to the image those cells encode. They found the reverse also to be true: after pairing the visual stimulus with a foot shock, their subjects would subsequently respond with fear to reactivating the neurons.

"Basically, the precept of the visual stimulus and the precept of this completely artificial activation of the neurons generated the same response," Aton said.

The researchers found that when they disrupted sleep after they showed the subjects an image and had given them a mild foot shock, there was no fear associated with the visual stimulus. Those with unmanipulated sleep learned to fear the specific visual stimulus that had been paired with the foot shock.

"We found that these mice actually became afraid of every visual stimulus we showed them," Aton said. "From the time they go to the chamber where the visual stimuli are presented, they seem to know there's a reason to feel fear, but they don't know what specifically they're afraid of."

This likely shows that, in order for them to make an accurate fear association with a visual stimulus, they have to have sleep-associated reactivation of the neurons encoding that stimulus in the sensory cortex, according to Aton. This allows a memory specific to that visual cue to be generated.The researchers think that at the same time, that sensory cortical area must communicate with other brain structures, to marry the sensory aspect of the memory to the emotional aspect.

Aton says their findings could have implications for how anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder are understood.

"To me this is kind of a clue that says, if you're linking fear to some very specific event during sleep, sleep disruption may affect this process. In the absence of sleep, the brain seems to manage processing the fact that you are afraid, but you may be unable to link that to what specifically you should be afraid of," Aton said. "That specification process may be one that goes awry with PTSD or generalized anxiety."

Abu Dhabi, UAE, February 22, 2021: Learning more about what motivates people to join violent ideological groups and engage in acts of cruelty against others is of great social and societal importance. New research from Assistant Professor of Psychology at NYUAD Jocelyn Bélanger explores the idea of ideological obsession as a form of addictive behavior that is central to understanding why people ultimately engage in ideological violence, and how best to help them break this addiction.

In the new study, The Sociocognitive Processes of Ideological Obsession: Review and Policy Implications which appears in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Bélanger draws from evidence collected across cultures and ideologies to describe four processes through which ideological obsession puts individuals on a path toward violence.

The first is moral disengagement: ideological obsession deactivates moral self-regulation processes, which allows unethical behaviors to happen without self-recrimination. The second is hatred: ideologically obsessed individuals are ego-defensive and easily threatened by information that criticizes their beliefs, which leads to greater hatred and potentially violent retaliation. Third, ideological obsession changes people's social interactions, causing them to gravitate toward like-minded people - networks -- who support their violent thinking. And finally, these individuals are prone to psychological reactance, which makes them immune to communications that attempt to dissuade them from violence.

"As we seek ways to prevent and combat violent radicalization, we must understand this behavior as an addiction to an ideology, rooted in a feeling of absence of personal significance," said Belanger. "Common approaches, like trying to provide information that counters someone's hateful ideology, are not only futile, but often counterproductive. To steer people away from ideologically-motivated violence, we must focus on their psychological needs, such as meaning and belonging, and helping them attain richer, more satisfying, and better-balanced lives."

Establishing a consistent sleep schedule for a toddler can be one of the most challenging aspects of child rearing, but it also may be one of the most important.

Research findings from a team including Lauren Covington, an assistant professor in the University of Delaware School of Nursing, suggest that children with inconsistent sleep schedules have higher body mass index (BMI) percentiles. Their findings, published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, suggest sleep could help explain the association between household poverty and BMI.

"We've known for a while that physical activity and diet quality are very strong predictors of weight and BMI," said Covington, the lead author of the article. "I think it's really highlighting that sleep may be playing a bigger role here than it's been given credit for."

The study used data from an obesity prevention trial for mothers and their children living in Baltimore. All of the families were eligible for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and 70% were living at or below the poverty line. As part of the trial, 207 toddlers wore accelerometers that measured their sleep and physical activity for up to a week at a time. Mothers also completed a food diary that was compared with the Healthy Eating Index, a measure of diet quality based on the recommendations from the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

Researchers wanted to examine the relationship between poverty and BMI, specifically looking at whether the consistency of when toddlers went to bed, their level of physical activity and diet quality could explain the association. They found that children from households with greater poverty had more overall inconsistent sleep onset times. And those with more inconsistent bedtimes had higher BMI percentages.

Covington said it is likely a bidirectional relationship. "There's a lot of teasing out the relationships of the mechanisms that are at play here, which is really difficult to do because I think they're all influencing each other," she said.

Sleep recommendations suggest children go to bed within an hour of their usual bedtime on a nightly basis. But for families living in poverty, such scheduling may not be so easily done, Covington said, especially if a caregiver is the only parent, juggling multiple jobs, parenting multiple children or dealing with a tenuous housing situation.

"There's so many factors that are at play and not necessarily controllable, especially in disadvantaged communities," said Covington, who hopes in the future to develop interventions for families that support healthy routines.

Covington, who joined the UD faculty in 2018, became interested in sleep research while working as a pediatric intensive care nurse. She encountered several families who lost a baby to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) as a result of their sleep environment.

"There's so much stigma and stereotypes out there and people are just so quick to judge," she said. "These families just want to do what's right for their child. They just either don't personally know how to or they don't have the resources to do it."

Covington is currently working on a study comparing the sleep similarities between children and their caregivers. She and other researchers, including Associate Professor Freda Patterson from the Department of Behavioral Health and Nutrition, School of Nursing professor Emily Hauenstein and UD graduate students Angeni Cordova and Shannon Mayberry, also completed a systematic review of the existing research literature looking at the influence of the family context in early childhood health sleep health.

Their findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Sleep Health, found that the presence of household chaos and poor-quality marital relationships were directly associated with early childhood sleep problems and variable sleep timing.

For families who have been struggling during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, creating a regular evening routine may be a doable way to make a difference in a child's health, despite the other upheaval going on at this time.

"Implementing a consistent bedtime could be one behavioral change that a family could potentially do," said Covington, who came to UD because of the opportunity to work with other sleep and disparity researchers. "It's more attainable than maybe getting healthy food at the grocery store or playing outside on the playground, especially now with the cold weather. Just having a consistent bedtime can help provide some sense of structure, but then maybe have better implications for health and BMI as well."

LOGAN, UTAH, USA -- You might not like mosquitoes, but they like you, says Utah State University biologist Norah Saarman. And where you lead, they will follow.

In addition to annoying bites and buzzing, some mosquitoes carry harmful diseases. Aedes aegypti, the so-called Yellow Fever mosquito and the subject of a recent study by Saarman and colleagues, is the primary vector for transmission of viruses causing dengue fever, chikungunya and Zika, as well as yellow fever, in humans.

"Aedes aegypti is an invasive species to North America that's become widespread in the eastern United States," says Saarman, assistant professor in USU's Department of Biology and the USU Ecology Center, whose research focuses on evolutionary ecology and population genomics. "We're examining the genetic connectivity of this species as it adapts to new landscapes and expands its range."

With Evlyn Pless of the University of California, Davis and Jeffrey Powell, Andalgisa Caccone and Giuseppe Amatulli of Yale University, Saarman published findings from a machine-learning approach to mapping landscape connectivity in the February 22, 2021 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The team's research was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

"We're excited about this approach, which uses a random forest algorithm that allows us to overcome some of the constraints of classical spatial models," Saarman says. "Our approach combines the advantages of a machine-learning framework and an iterative optimization process that integrates genetic and environmental data."

In its native Africa, Aedes aegypti was a forest dweller, drawing sustenance in landscapes uninhabited or scarcely populated by humans. The mosquito has since specialized to feed on humans, and thrives in human-impacted areas, favoring trash piles, littered highways and well-irrigated gardens.

"Using our machine-learning model and NASA-supplied satellite imagery, we can combine this spatial data with the genetic data we have already collected to drill down into very specific movement of these mosquitoes," Saarman says. "For example, our data reveal their attraction to human transportation networks, indicating that activities such as plant nurseries are inadvertently transporting these insects to new areas."

Public officials and land managers once relied on pesticides, including DDT, to keep the pesky mosquitoes at bay.

"As we now know, those pesticides caused environmental harm, including harm to humans," she says. "At the same time, mosquitos are evolving resistance to the pesticides that we have found to be safe for the environment. This creates a challenge that can only be solved by more information on where mosquitos live and how they get around."

Saarman adds the rugged survivors are not only adapting to different food sources and resisting pesticides, they're also adapting to varied temperatures, which allows them to expand into colder ranges.

Current methods to curb disease-carrying mosquitoes focus on biotechnological solutions, including cutting-edge genetic modification.

"We hope the tools we're developing can help managers identify effective methods of keeping mosquito populations small enough to avoid disease transmission," Saarman says. "While native species play an important role in the food chain, invasive species, such as Aedes aegypti pose a significant public health risk that requires our vigilant attention."

The cover for issue 46 of Oncotarget features Figure 6, "Establishment of a SARS-CoV-2 pseudovirus that expresses SPIKE protein variants on the envelope of a lentiviral core, infection of human airway epithelial cells or lung cancer cells, and demonstration of MEKi attenuation of infectivity on primary human cells," published in "MEK inhibitors reduce cellular expression of ACE2, pERK, pRb while stimulating NK-mediated cytotoxicity and attenuating inflammatory cytokines relevant to SARS-CoV-2 infection" by Zhou, et al. which reported that Natural Killer cells and innate-immune TRAIL suppress transformed and virally-infected cells.

In some human cells, remdesivir increases ACE2-promoter luciferase-reporter expression, ACE2 mRNA and protein, and ACE2 expression is attenuated by MEKi.

In serum-deprived and stimulated cells treated with remdesivir and MEKi we observed correlations between pRB, pERK, and ACE2 expression further supporting the role of proliferative state and MAPK pathway in ACE2 regulation.

Pseudotyped SARS-CoV-2 virus with a lentiviral core and SARS-CoV-2 D614 or G614 SPIKE protein on its envelope infected human bronchial epithelial cells, small airway epithelial cells, or lung cancer cells and MEKi suppressed infectivity of the pseudovirus.

The Oncotarget authors show a drug class-effect with MEKi to stimulate NK cells, inhibit inflammatory cytokines and block host-factors for SARS-CoV-2 infection leading also to suppression of SARS-CoV-2-S pseudovirus infection of human cells.

The Oncotarget authors show a drug class-effect with MEKi to stimulate NK cells, inhibit inflammatory cytokines and block host-factors for SARS-CoV-2 infection leading also to suppression of SARS-CoV-2-S pseudovirus infection of human cells

Dr. Wafik S. El-Deiry from The Brown University said, "Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection progresses to a rapidly lethal adult respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) associated with high mortality especially among the elderly or those with multiple comorbid conditions."

It is clear that while the host systemic inflammatory response makes patients critically ill, the host innate immune system including natural killer cells is involved in fighting and eliminating virally-infected cells.

Over the last 25 years the authors have studied this innate immune system pathway that the immune system uses to eliminate transformed and cancer cells as well as virally-infected cells.

Thus, their goal was to better understand and modulate the host immune response to increase the innate immune system early in SARS-CoV-2 infection while reducing the severe inflammation that occurs late in the disease course.

Since remdesivir has been shown to reduce hospitalization and may reduce mortality in patients with severe COVID-19 infection, they hypothesized that suppression of viral entry into cells through inhibition of ACE2 and TMPRSS2 would reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2 infection in a given COVID-19- patient and this would allow the innate immune system and antivirals such as remdesivir to more effectively suppress early infection.

Their results suggest that MEK inhibitors, as a class, suppress host SARS-CoV-2 infectivity factors such as ACE2 and TMPRSS2, and that alone or in combination with remdesivir, there is innate immune system activity along with suppression of inflammatory cytokines and stimulation of Natural Killer cell activity.

The El-Deiry Research Team concluded in their Oncotarget Priority Research Paper that Based on the data in this manuscript it may be reasonable to consider further preclinical experiments as well as clinical translation of the MEKi results.

Some of the open questions include a more detailed understanding of how the MAPK pathway activates ACE2, more direct evidence for effects of MEKi on actual SARS-CoV-2 infectivity of human cells, and more evidence for their effects on COVID-19 infection spread in preclinical models.

In the clinic, it may be reasonable to test MEKi such as VS-6766 or trametinib in COVID-19 infected but less severely ill patients to test the idea that MEKi could keep the infection from getting worse while allowing the body?s NK cells and innate immune mechanisms to more effectively attack virally infected cells prior to severe infection.

Consideration could be given to evaluation of MEKi ?/ antiviral agents such as remdesivir given results suggesting potentially favorable drug interactions that may allow suppression of infectivity, suppression of inflammatory cytokines, stimulation of NK cell activity, and lack of suppression of TRAIL-mediated cytotoxicity.

These effects may help antiviral agents achieve more potent disease suppression to attenuate or block COVID-19 infection that may be of use as a therapeutic approach in patients with early or less severe COVID-19 disease.

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DOI - https://doi.org/10.18632/oncotarget.27799

Full text - https://www.oncotarget.com/article/27799/text/

Correspondence to - Wafik S. El-Deiry - wafik@brown.edu

Keywords -
ACE2,
TMPRSS2,
SARS-CoV-2,
COVID-19,
pseudovirus

About Oncotarget

Oncotarget is a biweekly, peer-reviewed, open access biomedical journal covering research on all aspects of oncology.

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Journal

Oncotarget

DOI

10.18632/oncotarget.27799

In a new study out of University of California San Diego School of Medicine, researchers have identified a universal strain of bacteria derived from healthy human skin that can treat the most common type of eczema, also known as atopic dermatitis.

In the paper published Feb. 22, 2021, in Nature Medicine, the research team investigated the safety and mechanisms of this certain bacteria in a first-in-human, Phase I, double-blinded clinical trial looking to treat people living with eczema. Of the 54 participants, two-thirds reported improvements in their symptoms, including fewer complaints of itchiness and inflammation.

"The main question we wanted to answer was if this was safe. This was a safety study," said Richard Gallo, MD, PhD, Ima Gigli Distinguished Professor of Dermatology and chair of the Department of Dermatology at UC San Diego School of Medicine. "We found exactly what we hoped to find. The eczema of participants who received the bacterial treatment improved and there were no adverse events."

Researchers screened more than 8,000 isolates of Staphylococcal bacteria derived from the skin of individuals without eczema, and identified a few strains that inhibited growth of Staphylococcal aureus, a pathogenic bacterium that aggravates skin conditions, such as eczema. These strains were evaluated for additional characteristics, such as decreased capacity to damage skin, and sensitivity to common antibiotics.

The screening resulted in the identification of a single strain of bacteria called Staphylococcus hominis A9 that could be used for the treatment of atopic dermatitis.

"That's how we found the universal strain. This was one out of 8,000 strains that were tested in a dish for their ability to kill Staphylococcal aureus and treat atopic dermatitis," said Gallo. "And it worked."

The first tests were performed in animal models where mice were given an experimental version of eczema. Researchers then mixed Staphylococcus hominis with unscented lotion and applied the mixture to the mice twice daily for three days. After treatment, also known as bacteriotherapy, the mice were essentially cured of the eczema.

Success with these animal models led to the Phase I clinical trial using bacteriotherapy to treat 54 trial participants with eczema. Two-thirds of the participants showed a large reduction in S. aureus populations on their skin and improvement in their eczema.

"This research is a unique approach to targeting the harmful Staphylococcal aureus on atopic dermatitis skin with beneficial bacteria," said study co-author Donald Leung, MD, allergist and immunologist at National Jewish Health and a co-author of the study. "It's our hope this will help patients with eczema rid their skin of the harmful bacteria causing the inflammation. Future studies will determine if this new cream can be used for long periods' of time to reduce the severity of eczema and improve the patient's quality of life."

Healthy human skin is alive with bacteria -- there are more microorganisms living in and on the human body than there are human cells. Most microbes reside on human skin without causing harm, but in some people, bacterial pathogens can negatively alter a person's health.

According to the National Eczema Association, nearly 18 million people in the United States have atopic dermatitis, the most common form of eczema, which is a chronic, itchy rash that commonly appears on the arms, legs and cheeks.

"From our research, we've determined this rational therapeutic approach for atopic dermatitis appears to be safe for people to use to treat their eczema," said Gallo. "And it's easy, too, because it's just a cream and avoids the side effects of steroids and other drugs that target the immune system."

The diversity and numbers of wild salmon in Northern B.C. have declined approximately 70 per cent over the past century, according to a new Simon Fraser University study.

Researchers drawing on 100-year-old salmon scales report that recent numbers of wild adult sockeye salmon returning to the Skeena River are 70 per cent lower than 100 years ago. Wild salmon diversity in the Skeena watershed has similarly declined by 70 per cent over the last century.

The research undertaken by Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Fisheries and Oceans Canada was published today in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

The research team applied modern genetic tools to salmon scales collected from commercial fisheries during 1913-1947 to reconstruct historical abundance and diversity of populations for comparison with recent information.

The analysis revealed that Canada's second largest salmon watershed - the Skeena River - once hosted a diverse sockeye salmon portfolio composed of many populations that fluctuated from year to year, yet overall remained relatively stable. However, the Skeena sockeye portfolio has largely eroded over the last century, such that it now is dominated by a single population that primarily is supported by artificial production from spawning channels.

"Our study provides a rare example of the extent of erosion of within-species biodiversity over the last century of human influence," says Michael Price, an SFU PhD candidate and lead author. "That loss in abundance and diversity from wild populations has weakened the adaptive potential for salmon to survive and thrive in an increasingly variable environment influenced by climate change."

Life-cycle diversity also has shifted: populations are migrating from freshwater at an earlier age, and spending more time in the ocean.

"Rebuilding a diversity of abundant wild populations - that is, maintaining functioning portfolios - should help ensure that important salmon watersheds like the Skeena are robust to global change," says John Reynolds, co-author, SFU professor, and Tom Buell BC Leadership Chair in Aquatic Conservation.

This research can help inform status assessments and rebuilding plan discussions for threatened salmon populations by expanding our understanding of historical diversity and production potential.

Boston, Mass. - Even with more than 1.5 million Americans receiving a COVID vaccine each day, officials estimate it will take many more months before enough people are protected from the deadly virus. Until then, and potentially beyond, experts agree that opening up schools, restaurants and other public places as safely as possible will rely on widespread testing for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

As of June 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had granted emergency use authorization for more than 85 different viral DNA test kits -- or assays -- each with widely varying degrees of sensitivity and unknown rates of accuracy. However, with no existing gold standard test for the novel coronavirus, there's little data on which to judge these various tests' usefulness to municipalities' efforts to safely re-open for business.

A team of researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) has developed a mathematical means of assessing tests' false-negative rate. The team's methodology, which allows an apples-to-apples comparison of the various assays' clinical sensitivity, is published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

"For getting back to business as usual, we all agree we've got to massively ramp up testing to figure out who's negative and who's infectious -- but that's only going to work optimally if you can catch all the positive cases," said co-corresponding author James E. Kirby, MD, Director of the Clinical Microbiology Laboratories at BIDMC. "We found that clinical sensitivities vary widely, which has clear implications for patient care, epidemiology and the social and economic management of the ongoing pandemic."

"These results are especially important as we transition from testing mostly symptomatic individuals to more regular screening across the community," said co-corresponding author Ramy Arnaout, MD, DPhil, Associate Director of the Clinical Microbiology Laboratories at BIDMC. "How many people will be missed--the false negative rate--depends on which test is used. With our model, we are better informed to ask how likely these people are to be infectious."

COVID test results are usually reported as simply positive or negative. However, positive individuals can harbor radically different amounts of virus, or viral load, depending on how long they've been infected or how severe their symptoms are. In fact, viral load can vary as much as a hundred million-fold among individuals, said Kirby.

Using data from more than 27,000 tests for COVID-19 performed at Beth Israel Lahey Health hospital sites from March 26 to May 2, 2020, Kirby, Arnaout, and colleagues first demonstrated that viral loads can be dependably reported. "This helps distinguish potential superspreaders, at one extreme, from convalescent people, with almost no virus, and therefore low likelihood of spreading the infection," Arnaout said.

Next, the researchers estimated the clinical sensitivity and the false-negative rate first for the in-house test -- which was among the first to be implemented nationwide and considered among the best in class. Analyzing repeat test results for the nearly 5,000 patients who tested positive allowed the researchers to determine that the in-house test provided a false negative in about 10 percent of cases, giving the assay a clinical sensitivity of about 90 percent.

To estimate the accuracy of other assays, the team based their calculations on each tests' limit of detection, or LoD, defined as the smallest amount of viral DNA detectable that a test will catch 95 percent or more of the time.

Arnaout, Kirby, and colleagues demonstrated that the limit of detection can be used as a proxy to estimate a given assay's clinical sensitivity. By the team's calculations, an assay with a limit of detection of 1,000 copies viral DNA per mL is expected to detect just 75 percent of patients with COVID-19, providing one out of every four people with a false-negative. The team also showed that one test available today misses as many as one in three infected individuals, while another may miss up to 60 percent of positive cases.

While not every COVID positive patient missed by sensitive PCR and antigen detection tests will be infectious to others, some will, the researchers note.

"These misses will undermine public health efforts and put patients and their contacts at risk," said Arnaout. "This must give us pause, and we really need to benchmark each new test even in our rush to increase testing capacity to understand how well they support our testing goals."

ITHACA, N.Y. - Cornell University scientists have identified a new contender when it comes to quantum materials for computing and low-temperature electronics.

Using nitride-based materials, the researchers created a material structure that simultaneously exhibits superconductivity - in which electrical resistance vanishes completely - and the quantum Hall effect, which produces resistance with extreme precision when a magnetic field is applied.

"This is a beautiful marriage of the two things we know, at the microscale, that give electrons the most startling quantum properties," said Debdeep Jena, the David E. Burr Professor of Engineering in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Jena led the research, published Feb. 19 in Science Advances, with doctoral student Phillip Dang and research associate Guru Khalsa, the paper's senior authors.

The two physical properties are rarely seen simultaneously because magnetism is like kryptonite for superconducting materials, according to Jena.

"Magnetic fields destroy superconductivity, but the quantum Hall effect only shows up in semiconductors at large magnetic fields, so you're having to play with these two extremes," Jena said. "Researchers in the past few years have been trying to identify materials which show both properties with mixed success."

The research is the latest validation from the Jena-Xing Lab that nitride materials may have more to offer science than previously thought. Nitrides have traditionally been used for manufacturing LEDs and transistors for products like smartphones and home lighting, giving them a reputation as an industrial class of materials that has been overlooked for quantum computation and cryogenic electronics.

"The material itself is not as perfect as silicon, meaning it has a lot more defects," said co-author Huili Grace Xing, the William L. Quackenbush Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and of Materials Science and Engineering. "But because of its robustness, this material has thrown pleasant surprises to the research community more than once despite its extremely large irregularities in structure. There may be a path forward for us to truly integrate different modalities of quantum computing - computation, memory, communication."

Such integration could help to condense the size of quantum computers and other next-generation electronics, just as classical computers have shrunk from warehouse to pocket size.

"We're wondering what this sort of material platform can enable because we see that it's checking off a lot of boxes," said Jena, who added that new physical phenomena and technological applications could emerge with further research. "It has a superconductor, a semiconductor, a filter material - it has all kinds of other components, but we haven't put them all together. We've just discovered they can coexist."

For this research, the Cornell team began engineering epitaxial nitride heterostructures - atomically thin layers of gallium nitride and niobium nitride - and searching for conditions in which magnetic fields and temperatures in the layers would retain their respective quantum Hall and superconducting properties.

They eventually discovered a small window in which the properties were observed simultaneously, thanks to advances in the quality of the materials and structures produced in close collaboration with colleagues at the Naval Research Laboratory.

"The quality of the niobium-nitride superconductor was improved enough that it can survive higher magnetic fields, and simultaneously we had to improve the quality of the gallium-nitride semiconductor enough that it could exhibit the quantum Hall effect at lower magnetic fields," Dang said. "And that's what will really allow for potential new physics to be seen at low temperature."

Potential applications for the material structure include more efficient electronics, such as data centers cooled to extremely low temperatures to eliminate heat waste. And the structure is the first to lay the groundwork for the use of nitride semiconductors and superconductors in topological quantum computing, in which the movement of electrons must be resilient to the material defects typically seen in nitrides.

"What we've shown is that the ingredients you need to make this topological phase can be in the same structure," Khalsa said, "and I think the flexibility of the nitrides really opens up new possibilities and ways to explore topological states of matter."

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Feb. 22, 2021--A team of quantum theorists seeking to cure a basic problem with quantum annealing computers--they have to run at a relatively slow pace to operate properly--found something intriguing instead. While probing how quantum annealers perform when operated faster than desired, the team unexpectedly discovered a new effect that may account for the imbalanced distribution of matter and antimatter in the universe and a novel approach to separating isotopes.

"Although our discovery did not the cure the annealing time restriction, it brought a class of new physics problems that can now be studied with quantum annealers without requiring they be too slow," said Nikolai Sinitsyn, a theoretical physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Sinitsyn is author of the paper published Feb. 19 in Physical Review Letters, with coauthors Bin Yan and Wojciech Zurek, both also of Los Alamos, and Vladimir Chernyak of Wayne State University.

Significantly, this finding hints at how at least two famous scientific problems may be resolved in the future. The first one is the apparent asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the universe.

"We believe that small modifications to recent experiments with quantum annealing of interacting qubits made of ultracold atoms across phase transitions will be sufficient to demonstrate our effect," Sinitsyn said.

Explaining the Matter/Antimatter Discrepancy

Both matter and antimatter resulted from the energy excitations that were produced at the birth of the universe. The symmetry between how matter and antimatter interact was broken but very weakly. It is still not completely clear how this subtle difference could lead to the large observed domination of matter compared to antimatter at the cosmological scale.

The newly discovered effect demonstrates that such an asymmetry is physically possible. It happens when a large quantum system passes through a phase transition, that is, a very sharp rearrangement of quantum state. In such circumstances, strong but symmetric interactions roughly compensate each other. Then subtle, lingering differences can play the decisive role.

Making Quantum Annealers Slow Enough

Quantum annealing computers are built to solve complex optimization problems by associating variables with quantum states or qubits. Unlike a classical computer's binary bits, which can only be in a state, or value, of 0 or 1, qubits can be in a quantum superposition of in-between values. That's where all quantum computers derive their awesome, if still largely unexploited, powers.

In a quantum annealing computer, the qubits are initially prepared in a simple lowest energy state by applying a strong external magnetic field. This field is then slowly switched off, while the interactions between the qubits are slowly switched on.

"Ideally an annealer runs slow enough to run with minimal errors, but because of decoherence, one has to run the annealer faster," Yan explained. The team studied the emerging effect when the annealers are operated at a faster speed, which limits them to a finite operation time.

"According to the adiabatic theorem in quantum mechanics, if all changes are very slow, so-called adiabatically slow, then the qubits must always remain in their lowest energy state," Sinitsyn said. "Hence, when we finally measure them, we find the desired configuration of 0s and 1s that minimizes the function of interest, which would be impossible to get with a modern classical computer."

Hobbled by Decoherence

However, currently available quantum annealers, like all quantum computers so far, are hobbled by their qubits' interactions with the surrounding environment, which causes decoherence. Those interactions restrict the purely quantum behavior of qubits to about one millionth of a second. In that timeframe, computations have to be fast--nonadiabatic--and unwanted energy excitations alter the quantum state, introducing inevitable computational mistakes.

The Kibble-Zurek theory, co-developed by Wojciech Zurek, predicts that the most errors occur when the qubits encounter a phase transition, that is, a very sharp rearrangement of their collective quantum state.

For this paper, the team studied a known solvable model where identical qubits interact only with their neighbors along a chain; the model verifies the Kibble-Zurek theory analytically. In the theorists' quest to cure limited operation time in quantum annealing computers, they increased the complexity of that model by assuming that the qubits could be partitioned into two groups with identical interactions within each group but slightly different interactions for qubits from the different groups.

In such a mixture, they discovered an unusual effect: One group still produced a large amount of energy excitations during the passage through a phase transition, but the other group remained in the energy minimum as if the system did not experience a phase transition at all.

"The model we used is highly symmetric in order to be solvable, and we found a way to extend the model, breaking this symmetry and still solving it," Sinitsyn explained. "Then we found that the Kibble-Zurek theory survived but with a twist--half of the qubits did not dissipate energy and behaved 'nicely.' In other words, they maintained their ground states."

Unfortunately, the other half of the qubits did produce many computational errors--thus, no cure so far for a passage through a phase transition in quantum annealing computers.

A New Way to Separate Isotopes

Another long-standing problem that can benefit from this effect is isotope separation. For instance, natural uranium often must be separated into the enriched and depleted isotopes, so the enriched uranium can be used for nuclear power or national security purposes. The current separation process is costly and energy intensive. The discovered effect means that by making a mixture of interacting ultra-cold atoms pass dynamically through a quantum phase transition, different isotopes can be selectively excited or not and then separated using available magnetic deflection technique.

HOUSTON - (Feb. 22, 2021) - Governments with strong female representation are more likely to deliver on campaign promises, according to new research from Rice University.

"The Effects of Women's Descriptive Representation on Government Behavior" by author Jonathan Homola, an assistant professor of political science at Rice, examines campaign promises and subsequent policymaking by parties in power in 10 European countries, the United States and Canada along with data on women in party leadership and elected offices.

The study also showed that promises are even more likely to be kept when women in government assume leadership roles.

Homola said the research demonstrates the importance of women playing part in the policymaking process. Voters "are usually very well-informed about broken and partially fulfilled promises" and will hold candidates accountable in the voting booth, he said.

"Women may in fact be more effective at this process than men, even when faced with the same institutional challenges," he said.

In future studies, Homola hopes to research how greater female government representation impacts passage of legislation related to women's issues.

Homola used data from the Comparative Party Pledge Group (CPPG) for his analysis. The CPPG identifies pledges in party platforms and evaluates the extent to which they are later fulfilled. The European countries included in the study were Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

A new study by an international team of researchers found that adults with Down syndrome are more likely to die from COVID-19 than the general population, supporting the need to prioritize vaccinating people with the genetic disorder.

Investigators found that adults with Down syndrome were roughly three times more likely to die from COVID-19 than the general population. This increased risk was especially apparent in from fifth decade of life: A 40-year-old with Down syndrome had a similar risk of dying from COVID-19 as someone 30 years older in the general population.

The study was published this week in The Lancet's EClinical Medicine.

"Our results, which are based on more than 1,000 COVID-19 unique patients with Down syndrome, show that individuals with Down syndrome often have more severe symptoms at hospitalization and experience high rates of lung complications associated with increased mortality," said Anke Huels, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health, and the study's first author. "These results have implications for preventive and clinical management of COVID-19 patients with Down syndrome and emphasize the need to prioritize individuals with Down syndrome for vaccination."

Down syndrome is a genetic condition typically caused by the trisomy--or having an extra copy--of chromosome 21. This extra copy changes how a baby's body and brain develop, which can cause both mental and physical challenges.

To collect data for the study, T21RS COVID-19 Initiative launched an international survey of clinicians and caregivers of individuals with Down syndrome infected with COVID-19 between April and October, 2020. Survey respondents were mainly from Europe, the United States, Latin America and India. (The survey was available in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Bengali, Hindi and Mandarin).

"We are delighted to see that, partly based on our findings, the CDC included Down syndrome in the list of 'high-risk medical conditions,' which will prioritize those with this genetic condition for vaccination," said co-author Alberto Costa, professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. "Similar decisions have been made in the United Kingdom and Spain, and we hope that other countries will soon follow."

Climate change impacts are broad and far reaching. A new study by University of Oklahoma researchers from the Institute for Environmental Genomics explores the impacts of climate warming on microbial network complexity and stability, providing critical insights to ecosystem management and for projecting ecological consequences of future climate warming.

"Global climate change is one of the most profound anthropogenic disturbances to our planet," said Jizhong Zhou, IEG's director, a George Lynn Cross Research Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences and an adjunct professor in the Gallogly College of Engineering. "Climate warming can alter soil microbial community diversity, structure and activities, but it remains uncertain whether and how it impacts network complexity and its relationships to stability in microbial communities."

To understand whether and how climate warming affects the complexity and stability of ecological networks in soil microbial communities, the research team examined temporal dynamics of soil microbial communities in a long-term experiment carried out in a tallgrass prairie ecosystem in central Oklahoma.

"Our study provides explicit evidence that network complexity begets stability in microbial ecology," Zhou said. "Molecular ecological networks under warming became significantly more robust, with network stability strongly correlated with network complexity, supporting the central ecological belief that complexity begets stability."

"Furthermore, these results suggest that preserving microbial 'interactions' is critical for ecosystem management and for projecting ecological consequences of future climate warming," he added.

The study's findings have implications for projecting ecological consequences of future climate warming and for ecosystem management. Although climate warming has impacted decreased biodiversity and associated ecosystem functioning, this study suggests that the microbial community stability in the grassland ecosystem and the linked ecosystem functions could be less vulnerable in the warmer world.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - If depression is making it more difficult for some unemployed people to land a job, one type of therapy may help, research suggests.

In a new study, 41% of unemployed or underemployed people undergoing cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) found a new job or went from part- to full-time work by the end of the 16-week treatment for depression.

Those who had a job but found it difficult to focus on and accomplish work tasks because of depression said the treatment helped to significantly reduce these problems.

"For the most part, researchers have focused on showing that therapy relieves symptoms of depression," said Daniel Strunk, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.

"But reducing symptoms isn't the only goal people have when they start CBT. Many are hoping to find a job or improve their productivity at their current job. Here we found that therapy can help people achieve these goals, as well."

Strunk conducted the study with Iony Ezawa and Graham Bartels, who were graduate students at Ohio State when the study was conducted. The research was published online this month in the journal Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.

This study involved 126 people who participated in a 16-week course of CBT at the Ohio State Depression Treatment and Research Clinic.

CBT teaches coping skills that help patients counteract and modify their negative beliefs, Strunk said.

"It works on the idea that people with depression invariably hold these overly negative views of themselves and their futures," he said.

"For example, if an unemployed patient doesn't get one job they interviewed for, they may think 'no one is ever going to hire me.'"

In this study, 27 patients were seeking to improve their employment status (land a job or go from part- to full-time) at the beginning of treatment. Eleven of them (41%) had succeeded by the end of the 16 weeks.

"It is hard to say exactly how good this success rate is since we don't know how many would have gotten jobs without the treatment," Strunk said.

"But the findings were encouraging and suggest that the CBT is having an impact."

CBT had a clear impact for those who had jobs and reported at the beginning of the treatment that depression was hurting their effectiveness.

"Working patients reported at the end of treatment that they were much more successful at concentrating and accomplishing tasks at their jobs," he said.

Findings showed that one way CBT had this effect was by reducing patients' "negative cognitive style," or the extent to which patients view negative events in overly pessimistic ways, according to Strunk.

"CBT helps patients overcome these views by teaching them that the experience of depression is not their fault and that they can take steps to improve their concentration and accomplish work more successfully even when experiencing depressive symptoms," Strunk said.

The U.S. pulp and paper industry uses large quantities of water to produce cellulose pulp from trees. The water leaving the pulping process contains a number of organic byproducts and inorganic chemicals. To reuse the water and the chemicals, paper mills rely on steam-fed evaporators that boil up the water and separate it from the chemicals.

Water separation by evaporators is effective but uses large amounts of energy. That's significant given that the United States currently is the world's second-largest producer of paper and paperboard. The country's approximately 100 paper mills are estimated to use about 0.2 quads (a quad is a quadrillion BTUs) of energy per year for water recycling, making it one of the most energy-intensive chemical processes. All industrial energy consumption in the United States in 2019 totaled 26.4 quads, according to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

An alternative is to deploy energy-efficient filtration membranes to recycle pulping wastewater. But conventional polymer membranes -- commercially available for the past several decades -- cannot withstand operation in the harsh conditions and high chemical concentrations found in pulping wastewater and many other industrial applications.

Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have found a method to engineer membranes made from graphene oxide (GO), a chemically resistant material based on carbon, so they can work effectively in industrial applications.

"GO has remarkable characteristics that allow water to get through it much faster than through conventional membranes," said Sankar Nair, professor, Simmons Faculty Fellow, and associate chair for Industry Outreach in the Georgia Tech School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. "But a longstanding question has been how to make GO membranes work in realistic conditions with high chemical concentrations so that they could become industrially relevant."

Using new fabrication techniques, the researchers can control the microstructure of GO membranes in a way that allows them to continue filtering out water effectively even at higher chemical concentrations.

The research, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy-RAPID Institute, an industrial consortium of forest product companies, and Georgia Tech's Renewable Bioproducts Institute, was reported recently in the journal Nature Sustainability. Many industries that use large amounts of water in their production processes may stand to benefit from using these GO nanofiltration membranes.

Nair, his colleagues Meisha Shofner and Scott Sinquefield, and their research team began this work five years ago. They knew that GO membranes had long been recognized for their great potential in desalination, but only in a lab setting. "No one had credibly demonstrated that these membranes can perform in realistic industrial water streams and operating conditions," Nair said. "New types of GO structures were needed that displayed high filtration performance and mechanical stability while retaining the excellent chemical stability associated with GO materials."

To create such new structures, the team conceived the idea of sandwiching large aromatic dye molecules in between GO sheets. Researchers Zhongzhen Wang, Chen Ma, and Chunyan Xu found that these molecules strongly bound themselves to the GO sheets in multiple ways, including stacking one molecule on another. The result was the creation of "gallery" spaces between the GO sheets, with the dye molecules acting as "pillars." Water molecules easily filter through the narrow spaces between the pillars, while chemicals present in the water are selectively blocked based on their size and shape. The researchers could tune the membrane microstructure vertically and laterally, allowing them to control both the height of the gallery and the amount of space between the pillars.

The team then tested the GO nanofiltration membranes with multiple water streams containing dissolved chemicals and showed the capability of the membranes to reject chemicals by size and shape, even at high concentrations. Ultimately, they scaled up their new GO membranes to sheets that are up to 4 feet in length and demonstrated their operation for more than 750 hours in a real feed stream derived from a paper mill.

Nair expressed excitement for the potential of GO membrane nanofiltration to generate cost savings in paper mill energy usage, which could improve the industry's sustainability. "These membranes can save the paper industry more than 30% in energy costs of water separation," he said.