Culture

Law enforcement and those in the military, rather than doctors and celebrities, are the most preferred messengers on firearm safety, a Rutgers study found.

The findings, published in the journal Preventive Medicine, can help communicate the importance of safe firearm storage and reduce the rate of suicides, Rutgers researchers say.

"We know that safe firearm storage is a key component to suicide prevention, but that belief is not widespread among firearm owners," said lead author Michael Anestis, executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and an associate professor of Urban-Global Public Health at Rutgers School of Public Health. "No matter how clear the message is, if it is being delivered by the wrong person, it is not going to have the desired effect."

Although "means safety," which emphasizes storing firearms so they are not readily available, has been shown to decrease suicide rates, researchers say the message will only take hold when clearly conveyed by a trusted source.

In the Rutgers study, 6,200 firearm owners in the United States were asked to rank 14 groups -- which included firearm dealers, firearm show managers, the National Rifle Association, family, friends and co-workers -- as trusted sources for messages about safe firearm storage.

They found that while law enforcement and military personnel ranked at the top, physicians and celebrities were the least-preferred messengers. Although both white and Black firearm owners had similar rankings for messengers overall, white firearm owners more strongly preferred law enforcement, military veterans, current military personnel and the National Rifle Association than did Black firearm owners, who preferred casual acquaintances, friends or co-workers, gun show managers, medical professionals and celebrities more than White firearm owners did.

"Our results show that certain groups like service members and veterans may be the best choices to voice the messages on safe storage, but they also show that not every community will view the same messenger the same way," Anestis said.

[Vienna, Feb 18, 2021] Communities worldwide are trying to address inequality. One promising approach could be to look at the design of a city, according to research with real-world data in the journal Nature Communications.

An international team of scientists, including members of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH), show that urban planning directly influences the formation of social networks in a city and subsequently the socio-economic equality or inequality of its citizens.

"We know how important social networks are for our social and economic outcomes," explains CSH researcher Johannes Wachs, one of the authors of the paper. Social relations provide individuals with essential access to resources, information, economic opportunities and other forms of support. In towns with more evenly distributed social networks, the economic inequality tended to be much lower than in towns with highly fragmented social networks, the study shows.

The scientists even found a vicious cycle: the higher the fragmentation of social networks, the higher was the income inequality in a town over time.

On the wrong side of the tracks?

But where does such fragmentation come from? The researchers argue that one root cause lies in geography.

To test their hypothesis, the complexity scientists used a large dataset from Hungary with 2 Mio individuals from about 500 towns. The data were retrieved from iWiW, a once - and before Facebook - very popular social media platform used by nearly 40 percent of the Hungarian population.

"Urban sociology research says that people cannot easily build social ties when they are separated by large physical obstacles such as rivers, railways, highways or walls," Johannes Wachs points out. "It was impressive to see this confirmed in our data: we could see evidence of strong physical boundaries in a city just by looking at its social network."

City design and income go hand in hand

"We hypothesized - and confirm it with our findings - that if valuable ideas and information cannot float freely through a city because that city is physically fragmented, which in turn causes social fragmentation, we will see inequality. We clearly see how strongly geography and income inequality are related."

Of course, social networks do not form in a vacuum. A lot of different mechanisms influence with whom we are in regular contact. For instance, humans tend to befriend similar people ("homophily"). Friends of friends also show the tendency to become friends too ("triadic closure"). Yet, the iWiW data found geographic indicators of towns as an additional strong predictor of fragmentation in social networks.

The findings are of great value for city planners.

„You hardly can change social networks directly via public policy - you cannot force people to interact if they don't want to," says the CSH researcher. Yet, towns and cities frequently make decisions about the built environment that will have effects on how their inhabitants can meet and interact. "If these decisions reflect on our findings, we predict that cities will have fewer problems with inequality in the future," Johannes Wachs concludes.

An irregular sleep schedule can increase a person's risk of depression over the long term as much as getting fewer hours of sleep overall, or staying up late most nights, a new study suggests.

Even when it comes to just their mood the next day, people whose waking time varies from day to day may find themselves in as much of a foul mood as those who stayed up extra late the night before, or got up extra early that morning, the study shows.

The study, conducted by a team from Michigan Medicine, the University of Michigan's academic medical center, uses data from direct measurements of the sleep and mood of more than 2,100 early-career physicians over one year. It's published in npj Digital Medicine.

The interns, as they are called in their first year of residency training after medical school, all experienced the long intense work days and irregular work schedules that are the hallmark of this time in medical training. Those factors, changing from day to day, altered their ability to have regular sleep schedules.

The new paper is based on data gathered by tracking the interns' sleep and other activity through commercial devices worn on their wrists, and asking them to report their daily mood on a smartphone app and take quarterly tests for signs of depression.

Those whose devices showed they had variable sleep schedules were more likely to score higher on standardized depression symptom questionnaires, and to have lower daily mood ratings. Those who regularly stayed up late, or got the fewest hours of sleep, also scored higher on depression symptoms and lower on daily mood. The findings add to what's already known about the association between sleep, daily mood and long-term risk of depression.

"The advanced wearable technology allows us to study the behavioral and physiological factors of mental health, including sleep, at a much larger scale and more accurately than before, opening up an exciting field for us to explore," says Yu Fang, M.S.E., lead author of the new paper and a research specialist at the Michigan Neuroscience Institute. "Our findings aim not only to guide self-management on sleep habits but also to inform institutional scheduling structures."

Fang is part of the team from the Intern Health Study, led by Srijan Sen, M.D., Ph.D., that has been studying the mood and depression risk of first-year medical residents for more than a decade. The study collected an average of two weeks of data from before the doctors' intern years began, and an average of nearly four months of monitoring through their intern year.

For the new paper, the team worked with Cathy Goldstein, M.D., M.S., an associate professor of neurology and physician in the Sleep Disorders Center at Michigan Medicine.

She notes that wearable devices that estimate sleep are now being used by millions of people, including the Fitbit devices used in the study, other activity trackers, and smart watches.

"These devices, for the first time, allow us to record sleep over extensive time periods without effort on behalf of the user," says Goldstein. "We still have questions surrounding the accuracy of the sleep predictions consumer trackers make, though initial work suggests similar performance to clinical and research grade actigraphy devices which are cleared by the FDA."

Sen, who holds the Eisenberg Professorship in Depression and Neurosciences and is a professor of neuroscience and psychiatry, notes that the new findings build on what his team's work has already shown about high risk of depression among new physicians, and other underlying factors that as associated with a heightened risk.

"These findings highlight sleep consistency as an underappreciated factor to target in depression and wellness," he says. "The work also underscores the potential of wearable devices in understanding important constructs relevant to health that we previously could not study at scale."

The team notes that the relatively young group of people in the study - with an average age of 27, and holding both college and medical degrees - are not representative of the broader population. However, because all of them experience similar workloads and schedules, they are a good group to test hypotheses in. The researchers hope that other groups will study other populations using similar devices and approaches, to see if the findings about variation in sleep schedule hold up for them.

Fang, for instance, notes that the parents of young children might be another important group to study. "I also wish my 1-year-old could learn about these findings and only wake me up at 8:21 a.m. every day," she jokes.

The UK's first national lockdown from March 2020 and its immediate aftermath saw a massive shift in consumer habits that was initially mandated but then lingered as shops and restaurants opened but risks from the virus remained.

A new study from the universities of Cambridge and Newcastle used data from the ONS to compare retail, hospitality and online sales in the UK between March and August 2020 with average figures for the same months for the years 2010-2019.

Researchers took an approach normally used to estimate cumulative excess deaths to try and measure the impact of the COVID-19 shock on sales of UK retailers and restaurants.

They say their economic models suggest that shops predominantly selling food, such as supermarkets, saw a 5-10% bump in sales in lockdown, adding up to an additional £4 billion in earnings over "business as usual" expectations.

This is "consistent with large-scale stockpiling", they say, as people prepared for an indefinite future of home-cooked meals.

With many shops shut and people stuck indoors, online sales experienced a major boost, peaking at around a third higher than business-as-usual estimates during the first lockdown - an increase that amounts to an additional £4 billion.

Non-food high street shops, those selling everything from books to clothes, saw sales evaporate during the first lockdown when they had to shut, costing around £20 billion in turnover. Sales returned to normal once national lockdown lifted.

The shortfall for bars, pubs and restaurants was "dramatic", say researchers, with the first UK lockdown causing sales to fall as much as 90% below the business-as-usual level, equating to around a £25 billion revenue loss.

Hospitality sales saw some recovery post-lockdown, as government schemes such as 'Eat Out to Help Out' kicked in, but were still 25% below estimated business-as-usual revenues by the end of summer.

Writing in the journal Global Food Security, researchers say they found no evidence of a post-lockdown fall in food-shop sales as people used up their stockpiles, or an "overshoot" on the high street due to "pent-up demand" during lockdown.

"Lockdown restrictions led to behaviour changes in consumers and retailers that caused huge fluctuations in sales," said Dr Shaun Larcom from the University of Cambridge, who co-authored the study with his Cambridge colleague Dr Po-Wen She and Dr Luca Panzone from the Newcastle University.

"Shopping frequency dramatically reduced, and footfall vanished from many commercial areas, with people going online or using local outlets within residential areas when they had to shop."

"Consequences of lockdown, such as long queues outside supermarkets, led to 'forced experimentation'. Consumers had to explore new purchasing methods," said Larcom, from Cambridge's Department of Land Economy.

"Many people shopped online for the first time. They also bought directly from wholesalers or even farms, and trialled different types of home cooking. When people are forced to experiment, it can lead to behaviour changes that last well beyond the life of a crisis."

The researcher say that, while online sales peaked during lockdown, they remained above pre-lockdown levels in August 2020, which they suggest may be early signs of a more permanent "structural change" in shopping habits.

Recent media reports suggest that the UK Treasury is considering a one-off tax for online retailers who saw profits boosted by the lockdowns.

"Understanding the monetary impact of the pandemic is important to gauge the magnitude of the damage, and can help government design policies to assist these sectors," said Panzone from the University of Newcastle.

"Food services and non-food retailers lost a huge share of their yearly business, compared to food stores and online retailers that actually gained from lockdown. One-size-fits-all policy approaches across retail won't work," he said.

NOTES:

In February 2020, stores primarily selling food had sales figures almost identical to business-as-usual (BAU) estimates produced by the researchers' econometric models: £12.6 billion. Sales for March ran at £17.5 billion - around 10% higher than the £16 billion BAU estimates - but had returned to BAU levels by July.

For online retail, sales sharply diverged from BAU estimates by May - £5.3 billion against a predicted value of £4.1 billion (+29%) - and peaked in June at £6.8 billion compared to £5 billion BAU estimate (+36%). While online sales then started to fall, they were still above BAU estimates by the end of summer.

Non-food shops had February sales figures almost equal to their BAU estimates: £11.6 and £11.9 billion respectively. Actual sales tumbled as the pandemic took hold, with an April nadir of £5.9 billion compared to BAU estimates of £13 billion (-54.6%). Sales then started to recover, and by August only just lagged BAU estimates.

Sales in "food and beverage serving services" suffered most in terms of lost revenue. In February, turnover was £5.7 billion, just shy of the £6 billion BAU estimate. By March this had slumped to £4.3 billion against a prediction of £6.7 billion.

April sales for bars, pubs and restaurants were just £0.7 billion compared to a BAU estimate of £6.7 billion: an approximate shortfall of 90%. While this gap shrank it remained startling. Even with the 'Eat Out to Help Out' scheme, August sales were £5.2 billion compared to a BAU estimate of £7 billon (-25%).

A research team from the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) has improved the protective effect of a molecule against ischemic stroke, which is caused by an interruption of blood flow to the brain. The results of the study, conducted in collaboration with a Spanish team, were published in the Communications Biology of Nature Research journal.

Every year in Quebec, about 20,000 people have a stroke. Also known as a "cerebral infarction", this sudden neurological deficit can lead to psychological and physical after-effects. These effects result from an increase in glutamate in the brain, which destroys neurons. "Glutamate is an essential neurotransmitter for neuronal communication, learning and memory processes, yet above a certain concentration, it becomes toxic to neuronal cells," explains Ahlem Zaghmi, a newly graduated INRS doctoral student under the supervision of Professor Marc A. Gauthier.

The research team aimed at developing an effective treatment that would compensate for the increase in glutamate. What makes its approach unique? It works on the periphery. "Unlike other drugs, our molecule does not need to cross the blood-brain barrier to achieve its therapeutic effect. It represents one fewer obstacle, since it could be injected intravenously," emphasizes the doctoral student.

The modified molecule, glutamate-oxaloacetate transaminase (GOT), is already known for its therapeutic effects. This enzyme breaks down the glutamate circulating in the bloodstream which creates a kind of siphon effect. "By decreasing concentrations of this neurotransmitter in the blood, excess glutamate in the brain will move out to compensate for the loss. This "siphons" the glutamate out of the brain," she says.

A single dose of the molecule typically lasts three hours in rats. Due to the modification made by the research team, the treatment is now effective for six days! "Adding a polymer, polyethylene glycol, on the surface of the GOT enzyme increases its circulation time in the blood. The polymer will, among other things, protect the molecule from the immune system," says Professor Gauthier, a specialist in bioorganic chemistry and biomaterials. "This has the advantage of maintaining the siphon effect over a period of time that exceeds the duration of the glutamate peak caused by the stroke in the brain, while reducing the number of doses given and the risk of side effects," adds Ahlem Zaghmi.

The research team now intends to observe the longer-term effect of the molecule and explore applications to other neuronal diseases. Since glutamate toxicity is also associated with head trauma, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease, the research group could, among other things, test whether the modified molecule accelerates healing or, if so, slows the development of the disease.

PHOENIX, Ariz. and DUARTE, Calif. -- Feb. 17, 2021 -- Urinalysis has long been a staple of physical exams to detect and manage a number of diseases and disorders, but not cancer. What if it were that easy, though, and cancer was detected in its very earliest stages when the disease responds more favorably to treatment and improved outcomes are more likely?

That was the question posed by scientists at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, who have found a way of zeroing in on early-stage cancer by analyzing short strands of cell-free DNA in urine. Their study's findings were published today in the scientific journal Science Translational Medicine.

Previous thought once held that DNA fragments in urine were degraded at random and were too short to provide any meaningful information about a disease as complex as cancer. TGen and City of Hope researchers and their colleagues from Baylor University and Phoenix Children's Hospital found that these DNA fragments are not random at all, and can clearly indicate a difference between healthy individuals and those with cancer.

"There are many steps between where we are now and where we want to go -- detecting cancer from a urine sample -- but without doubt this is an encouraging first step," said Muhammed Murtaza, M.B.B.S., Ph.D., an Associate Professor and Co-Director of TGen's Center for Noninvasive Diagnostics, and the study's senior author.

Dr. Murtaza previously led a team of TGen scientists who pioneered the use of circulating tumor DNA in blood, using genetic fragments to detect cancer with a simple blood draw. This "liquid biopsy" method sidesteps the need for many surgical biopsies of suspected tumors, and means that physicians can monitor cancer in their patients more frequently given the less invasive nature of the procedure.

Collecting a urine sample reduces the physical invasiveness to zero, Dr. Murtaza explained, and may eliminate a lab visit, given that the sample could be collected at home and mailed in for analysis.

By studying tissue samples from children with various cancers, whose malignancies often move extraordinarily fast, and adults with pancreatic cancer, whose early detection is critical to their disease outcomes, researchers mapped the DNA fragmentation profiles in their urine.

"We found that certain regions of the genome are protected from fragmentation in urine from healthy individuals, but the same regions are more fragmented in patients with cancer," Dr. Murtaza said.

The fragmentation profiles were remarkably similar across multiple individuals; the length of the DNA fragments were similar, the regions of the genome where the fragmentation occurred were consistent, and informed researchers what type of cells contributed the fragments.

Ajay Goel, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Molecular Diagnostics and Experimental Therapeutics and Associate Director for Basic Science at City of Hope, a world-renowned independent research and treatment center for cancer and diabetes, is one of the study's authors. He is a leading expert in developing early-detection blood tests for colon, pancreatic and ovarian cancers.

"If the study results come to fruition, our urinalysis technology would be a remarkable breakthrough in the detection of many cancers, especially in pancreatic cancer," Dr. Goel said. "If cancer is detected early, it could substantially lower the mortality rate for what is currently the third leading cause of cancer death in the U.S."

While early results are promising, the researchers indicate the need to test their findings in much larger populations of cancer patients and identify differences between men and women, young and old, and those with co-morbidities, such as diabetes and other chronic diseases.

"This is a fundamental new finding and provides a potentially dynamic path forward for the early diagnosis of cancer, given that urine is one of the easiest samples to collect," said Daniel D. Von Hoff, M.D., TGen Distinguished Professor and one of the paper's authors. "If follow-on studies yield positive results, I could one day see this test becoming an integral part of one's annual physical."

Severe forms of malaria such as Plasmodium falciparum may be deadly even after treatment with current parasite-killing drugs. This is due to persistent cyto-adhesion of infected erythrocytes even though existing parasites within the red blood cells are dead. As vaccines for malaria have proved less than moderately effective, and to treat these severe cases of P. falciparum malaria, new avenues are urgently needed. Latest estimates indicate that more than 500 million cases of malaria and more than 400,000 deaths are reported worldwide each year. Anti-adhesion drugs may hold the key to significantly improving survival rates.

Using venom from the Conus nux, a species of sea snail, a first-of-its-kind study from Florida Atlantic University’s Schmidt College of Medicine in collaboration with FAU’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Science and the Chemical Sciences Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology

suggests that these conotoxins could potentially treat malaria. The study provides important leads toward the development of novel and cost-effective anti-adhesion or blockade-therapy pharmaceuticals aimed at counteracting the pathology of severe malaria.

Results, published in the Journal of Proteomics, expand the pharmacological reach of conotoxins/ conopeptides by revealing their ability to disrupt protein-protein and protein-polysaccharide interactions that directly contribute to the disease. Similarly, mitigation of emerging diseases like AIDS and COVID-19 also could benefit from conotoxins as potential inhibitors of protein-protein interactions as treatment. Venom peptides from cone snails has the potential to treat countless diseases using blockage therapies.

"Molecular stability, small size, solubility, intravenous delivery, and no immunogenic response make conotoxins excellent blockade-therapy candidates," said Andrew V. Oleinikov, Ph.D., corresponding author and a professor of biomedical science, FAU's Schmidt College of Medicine. "Conotoxins have been vigorously studied for decades as molecular probes and drug leads targeting the central nervous systems. They also should be explored for novel applications aimed to thwart amiss cellular responses or foil host parasite interactions through their binding with endogenous and exogenous proteins. Further investigation is likely to yield breakthroughs in fields continuously toiling for more efficient therapeutic approaches such as cancer, autoimmune diseases, novel emerging viral diseases as well as malaria where venom-based peptidic natural products can be put into practice."

The disruption of protein-protein interactions by conotoxins is an extension of their well known inhibitory action in many ion channels and receptors. Disabling prey by specifically modulating their central nervous system is a ruling principle in the mode of action of venoms.

"Among the more than 850 species of cone snails there are hundreds of thousands of diverse venom exopeptides that have been selected throughout several million years of evolution to capture their prey and deter predators," said Frank Marí, Ph.D., corresponding author and senior advisor for biochemical sciences at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. "They do so by targeting several surface proteins present in target excitable cells. This immense biomolecular library of conopeptides can be explored for potential use as therapeutic leads against persistent and emerging diseases affecting non-excitable systems."

For the study, researchers used high-throughput assays to study Conus nux collected off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. They revealed the in vitro capacity of cone snail venom to disrupt protein-protein and protein-polysaccharide interactions that directly contribute to pathology of P. falciparum malaria. They determined that six fractions from the venom inhibit the adhesion of recombinant P. falciparum erythrocyte membrane protein 1 (PfEMP-1) domains to their corresponding receptors, which express on the endothelial microvasculature and the placenta.

The results are noteworthy as each of these six venom fractions, which contain a mostly single or a very limited set of peptides, affected binding of domains with different receptor specificity to their corresponding receptors, which are proteins (CD36 and ICAM-1), and polysaccharide. This activity profile suggests that the peptides in these conotoxin fractions either bind to common structural elements in the different PfEMP1 domains, or that a few different peptides in the fraction may interact efficiently (concentration of each is lower proportionally to the complexity) with different domains.

Extending the symptoms that trigger a PCR test for COVID-19 could help detect around a third more cases of the disease.

New research led by researchers at King's College London and published in the Journal of Infection suggests that restricting testing to the 'classic triad' of cough, fever and loss of smell which is required for eligibility for a PCR test through the NHS may have missed cases. Extending the list to include fatigue, sore throat, headache and diarrhoea would have detected 96% of symptomatic cases.

A team of researchers at King's College London and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) analysed data from more than 122,000 UK adult users of the ZOE COVID Symptom Study app. These users reported experiencing any potential COVID-19 symptoms, and 1,202 of those reported a positive PCR test within a week of first feeling ill.

While PCR swab testing is the most reliable way to tell whether someone is infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the analysis suggests the limited list of three does not catch all positive cases of COVID-19.

Testing people with any of the three 'classic' symptoms would have spotted 69% of symptomatic cases, with 46 people testing negative for every person testing positive. However, testing people with any of seven key symptoms - cough, fever, anosmia, fatigue, headache, sore throat and diarrhoea - in the first three days of illness would have detected 96% of symptomatic cases. In this case, for every person with the disease identified, 95 would test negative.

Researchers also found users of the Symptom Study App were more likely to select headache and diarrhoea within the first three days of symptoms, and fever during the first seven days, which reflects different timings of symptoms in the disease course. Data from the ZOE app shows that 31% of people who are ill with COVID-19 don't have any of the triad of symptoms in the early stages of the disease when most infectious.

The researchers applied a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) to generate a set of optimal symptom combinations, each characterised by a good trade-off between specificity and sensitivity. MOEA starts generating a population of random symptom combinations and then evolves that population towards better combinations ending with a set of optimal symptom combinations. The choice of the optimal combination to use depends on the testing capacity.

Cough or dyspnoea (shortness of breath) were reported by 46% of individuals positive for COVID-19 within the first three days of symptom onset. When users reported fever, the sensitivity increased to 60%, while logging anosmia/ageusia increased sensitivity to 69%. When headache and fatigue was added the proportion of COVID-19 cases increased to 92% but the tests per case doubled.

The findings may be valuable in situations where there is a limited testing capacity. Researchers suggest a range of optimal symptom combinations that could be used in vaccine efficacy trials or in public health settings, when assessing financial and logistical resources.

Professor Sebastien Ourselin from King's College London said: ""The identification of this combination of symptoms through the COVID Symptom Study app is another prime demonstration of the value of big data analytics and mobile health technology to support the management of this pandemic. Daily self-reported symptoms from a mobile application at the scale of an entire country has offered a new perspective for public health research and response towards the rapid spread of infectious diseases such as COVID-19."

Dr Claire Steves, Reader at King's College London, said: "There are many symptoms which occur in acute COVID, including some like fatigue and headache which are also common in other conditions. Depending on the testing available, different symptom combinations can be used to be as sensitive or specific as possible. We hope these models are of use in a range of settings - from vaccine trials to detecting and treating COVID outbreaks going forward."

Professor Tim Spector from King's College London said: "We've known since the beginning that just focusing testing on the classic triad of cough, fever and anosmia misses a significant proportion of positive cases. We identified anosmia as a symptom back in May and our work led to the government adding it to the list, it is now clear that we need to add more. By inviting any users who log any new symptoms to get a test, we confirmed that there are many more symptoms of COVID-19. This is especially important with new variants that may cause different symptoms. For us, the message for the public is clear: if you're feeling newly unwell, it could be COVID and you should get a test."

Dr Jakob Cramer, Head of Clinical Development, at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, said: "Accurate diagnosis of COVID-19 cases is crucial when assessing the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccine candidates in large-scale studies, especially since the signs and symptoms associated with the disease are extensive and overlap with other common viral infections. The findings of this study provide important insights that will help optimise the choice of triggering symptoms for diagnostic work-up in COVID-19 vaccine-efficacy trials. We hope the findings of this study will not only aid CEPI's COVID-19 vaccine-development partners but also the wider R&D community."

Astronomers have tested a method for reconstructing the state of the early Universe by applying it to 4000 simulated universes using the ATERUI II supercomputer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). They found that together with new observations the method can set better constraints on inflation, one of the most enigmatic events in the history of the Universe. The method can shorten the observation time required to distinguish between various inflation theories.

Just after the Universe came into existence 13.8 billion years ago, it suddenly increased more than a trillion, trillion times in size, in less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a microsecond; but no one knows how or why. This sudden "inflation," is one of the most important mysteries in modern astronomy. Inflation should have created primordial density fluctuations which would have affected the distribution of where galaxies developed. Thus, mapping the distribution of galaxies can rule out models for inflation which don't match the observed data.

However, processes other than inflation also impact galaxy distribution, making it difficult to derive information about inflation directly from observations of the large-scale structure of the Universe, the cosmic web comprised of countless galaxies. In particular, the gravitationally driven growth of groups of galaxies can obscure the primordial density fluctuations.

A research team led by Masato Shirasaki, an assistant professor at NAOJ and the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, thought to apply a "reconstruction method" to turn back the clock and remove the gravitational effects from the large-scale structure. They used ATERUI II, the world's fastest supercomputer dedicated to astronomy simulations, to create 4000 simulated universes and evolve them through gravitationally driven growth. They then applied this method to see how well it reconstructed the starting state of the simulations. The team found that their method can correct for the gravitational effects and improve the constraints on primordial density fluctuations.

"We found that this method is very effective," says Shirasaki. "Using this method, we can verify of the inflation theories with roughly one tenth the amount of data. This method can shorten the required observing time in upcoming galaxy survey missions such as SuMIRe by NAOJ's Subaru Telescope."

University of Queensland scientists have developed an ultraviolet 'television' display designed to help researchers better understand how animals see the world.

Until now, standard monitors on devices like televisions or computer screens have been used to display visual stimuli in animal vision studies, but none have been able to test ultraviolet vision - the ability to see wavelengths of light shorter than 400 nanometres.

Dr Samuel Powell, from the Queensland Brain Institute's Marshall lab, said this new technology will help unveil the secrets of sight in all sorts of animals, such as fish, birds and insects.

"Human TVs generally use three colours - red, green and blue - to create images, but our newly-developed displays have five, including violet and ultraviolet," Dr Powell said.

"Using this display, it's now possible to show animals simple shapes, to test their ability to tell colours apart, or their perception of motion by moving dot patterns.

"We affectionately call it the 'UV-TV', but I doubt that anyone would want one in their home!

"You'd have to wear sunglasses and sunscreen while watching it, and the resolution is quite low - 8 by 12 pixels in a 4 by 5 centimetre area - so don't expect to be watching Netflix in ultraviolet anytime soon.

"This very low resolution is enough to show dot patterns to test fish perception, in what's known as an Ishihara test, which would be familiar to anyone who's been tested for colour blindness.

"In this test, humans read a number hidden in a bunch of coloured dots, but as animals can't read numbers back to us, they're trained to peck the 'odd dot' out of a field of differently coloured dots."

Dr Karen Cheney from UQ's School of Biological Sciences said this technology will allow researchers to expand our understanding of animal biology.

"There are many colour patterns in nature that are invisible to us because we cannot detect UV," Dr Cheney said.

"Bees use UV patterns on flowers to locate nectar, for example, and fish can recognise individuals using UV facial patterns.

"We've recently started studying the vision of anemonefish or clownfish - aka, Nemo - which, unlike humans, have UV-sensitive vision.

"Our research is already showing that the white stripes on anemonefish also reflect UV, so we think UV colour signals may be used to recognise each other and may be involved in signalling dominance within their social group.

"Who knows what other discoveries we can now make about how certain animals behave, interact and think.

"This technology is allowing us to understand how animals see the world, helping answer significant questions about animal behaviour."

Mitochondria are organelles that act as the powerhouses in our body. They use oxygen which we inhale and food we eat to produce energy that supports our life. This molecular activity is performed by bioenergetic nano-factories incorporated in specialized mitochondrial membranes. The nano-factories consist of proteins cooperatively transporting ions and electrons to generate chemical energy. Those have to be constantly maintained, replaced and duplicated during cell division. To address this, mitochondria have their own bioenergy protein-making machine called the mitoribosome. Given its key role, a deregulation of the mitoribosome can lead to medical disorders such as deafness and diseases including cancer development. The first fundamental understanding of how mitoribosomes look was achieved in 2014.

"Seven years ago, our work on the structure of mitoribosome from yeast was termed the Resolution Revolution. The current study represents an additional advance on the original breakthrough. Not only does it reveal how the human mitoribosome is designed at an unprecedented level of detail, but it also explains the molecular mechanism that drives the process of bioenergetics to fuel life" says lead author, Alexey Amunts.

The term Resolution Revolution was coined at Science magazine in relation to the first successful structure determination of the mitoribosome. This represented a methodological innovation in applying electron cryo-microscopy to understand molecular structures. However, that first glimpse into the architecture revealed only a partial picture of a static model. Yet the mitoribosome is a flexible molecular machine that requires the motion of its parts relative to each other to perform work. Therefore, in the current study the team used an advanced infrastructure to collect and process 30 times more data that enabled them to obtain enough information to describe conformational changes during the process of protein synthesis and association with the membrane adaptor.

"Our study reveals that the mitoribosome is much more flexible and active than previously thought. The discovery of intrinsic conformational changes represents a gating mechanism of the mitoribosome without similarity in bacterial and cytosolic systems. Together, the data offer a molecular insight into how bioenergetic proteins are synthesized in human mitochondria," adds Alexey Amunts.

The sequencing of the human mitochondrial genome 40 years ago was a turning point in mitochondrial research, postulating a putative specialized mechanism for the synthesis of the mitochondrial transmembrane proteins. The discovered gating mechanism of the human mitoribosome represents a unique occurrence. Therefore, the structural data offer a crucial long-waited understanding into how bioenergetic proteins are synthesized by the mitoribosome in our body. This knowledge will help to better understand human diseases and be used for development of new therapeutics.

Among strategies to curb hospital prices among the commercially insured population in the U.S., direct price regulations such as setting rates are likely to achieve greater savings than other approaches like increasing competition or improving price transparency, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

But price regulations face the greatest political obstacles and historically have been strongly opposed by medical providers, according to the report.

Setting prices for all commercial health care payers could reduce hospital spending by $61.9 billion to $236.6 billion annually if the rates were set as high as 150% to as low as 100% of the amounts paid by the federal Medicare program, a change that would cut overall national health spending by 1.7% to 6.5%, according to the analysis.

Researchers estimate that improving health care price transparency could reduce U.S. spending by $8.7 billion to $26.6 billion per year. Meanwhile, increasing competition by decreasing hospital market concentration could reduce hospital spending by $6.2 billion to $68.9 billion annually, depending on the magnitude of the change and how sensitive hospital prices are to market concentration.

"Improving markets through increased price transparency and competition could help reduce prices, but would not reduce hospital spending to the extent that aggressively regulating prices could," said Jodi Liu, the study's lead author and a policy researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. "Direct price regulation could have the largest impact on hospital spending, but this approach faces the biggest political challenges."

Spending on hospital services is the largest health spending category in the United States, accounting for one-third of national health expenses.

Private insurers such as employers and insurance companies cover about 40% of hospital spending. Compared with public payers, private insurers pay higher prices to hospitals and those costs have risen faster over time.

The RAND study analyzes the impact of three policy options -- regulating hospital prices, improving price transparency and increasing competition among hospitals -- on hospital spending by employer-sponsored and individual market plans and their enrollees.

Using nationwide data from the federal Hospital Cost Report Information System, researchers explored key considerations for each strategy and estimated the potential impact on hospital prices and spending.

The report provides a menu of policy scenarios to help policymakers understand how key design choices or stakeholder responses might affect the impact of a given policy.

For example, the effectiveness of price transparency initiatives would depend on details such as whether patients would use price transparency tools to choose lower-cost providers. RAND researchers modeled both patient-driven scenarios, in which patients use price information to seek lower prices, and employer-driven scenarios, in which employers use price information to create health plans that steer patients toward lower-cost hospitals.

For rate-setting scenarios, researchers changed average commercial plan prices to an amount relative to Medicare prices for a given hospital. Prices were pegged to multiples of the Medicare price, as well as blended rates in between commercial and Medicare prices (such as using 25% of the Medicare rate and 75% of the commercial rate).

Researchers modeled competition scenarios by reducing hospital market concentration in hospital referral regions, computing a price reduction with respect to the change in market concentration.

However, researchers concluded that given how concentrated today's hospital markets are, policymakers would need to radically restructure hospital markets beyond what the study modeled for prices to approach competitive levels.

"Regulating commercial hospital prices is a direct way to create significant reductions in spending, but doing so could potentially lead to hospital closures, erode quality, and face daunting political hurdles," said study co-author Christopher Whaley, a RAND policy researcher. "As policymakers consider options for reducing hospital prices paid by private health plans, they will need to weigh the potential impact of different policies on hospital revenues and the quality of care, and they will also need to take into account the political and administrative feasibility of each option."

A new study published in Economic Inquiry is the first to assess the willingness of consumers to adopt advisory services in the banking sector that are based on artificial intelligence (AI). Investigators examined whether the likelihood that consumers adopt AI in banking services depends on tastes for human interaction across different cultures.

The study focused on robo-advisory services, which are automated investment platforms that provide investment advice without the intervention of a human advisor. When investigators analyzed an ING Bank dataset encompassing 11,000 respondents from 11 countries, they found that different attitudes across cultures shape differences in local consumers' likelihood of adopting robo-advisory services.

The analysis revealed that robo-advisory services may be adopted where they compensate for feelings of a lack of trust and reliability towards human advisors among consumers. Also, fear of being cheated had a strong influence in enhancing consumers' preference to use AI. Places where social interaction is considered important did not welcome the AI novelty, even when controlling for all of the usual factors that determine the adoption of new technology.

"There is some special value that people place on human interaction in services, which an AI-based service simply cannot substitute. Even when using a classical economic model for the adoption of innovation, such as the model by eminent economist Arrow and co-authors (previously used for understanding the adoption of new medicines), we see that the value of human interaction shows a clear importance for the AI customer in the service sector," said corresponding Annie Tubadji, PhD, of Swansea University.

Nearly 1.7 million times in the past year, Americans have checked into hospitals to get treated for severe cases of COVID-19.

And for the most part, that care hasn't cost them anything, thanks to insurance companies and government programs that absorbed the usual costs patients would owe for any other hospital stay.

But as some insurers phase back in those out-of-pocket costs, a new study estimates that many people over 65 hospitalized for COVID-19 in 2021 may owe an average of nearly $1,000 after they get out of the hospital, due to co-pays, deductibles and co-insurance. A few may owe hundreds or thousands more.

That estimate is based on a new analysis of out-of-pocket costs for influenza-related hospitalizations in 2018 that were paid by people with Medicare Advantage plans, which are Medicare plans run by private insurance companies.

Nearly 40% of Americans over age 65 - who have a high chance of needing hospital-level care if they catch the coronavirus - have the kind of insurance analyzed in the study.

Most insurers that offer Medicare Advantage plans currently cover COVID-19 hospitalization costs fully for their Medicare Advantage enrollees, but one of these insurers quietly started to allow cost-sharing for its non-Medicare Advantage enrollees in February. This raises concerns that cost-sharing waivers may soon be a thing of the past for many or all patients hospitalized for COVID-19.

"Insurers may choose to extend their waivers for enrollees with Medicare Advantage and private insurance coverage," says Kao-Ping Chua, M.D., Ph.D., the study's first author and an assistant professor at the U-M Medical School. "But if they don't, patients will be faced not only with the physical and emotional toll of COVID-19 hospitalizations, but also the financial toll."

Writing in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, a pair of health care researchers from the University of Michigan and Boston University describe data from 14,278 people hospitalized during one of the worst flu years in recent times.

On average, the flu patients in the study were hospitalized for an average of 6 days, and one-third of patients needed intensive care. This is around the same or slightly lower than the averages for hospitalized adults over 65 who have COVID-19.

Those who needed intensive care for flu, and those with longer stays at any level of care, faced out-of-pocket costs that were higher than the general average. About 3% of the flu patients faced out-of-pocket costs over $2,500.

Another study of cost-sharing among people with private non-Medicare insurance who were hospitalized for respiratory infections in pre-COVID times suggests out-of-pocket costs could be even higher for them. In part this is because so many private plans have high deductibles that must be paid each year before insurance coverage fully kicks in.

Chua notes that the choice of flu or other respiratory infection hospitalizations is not a perfect stand-in for COVID-19, which is having far more impact on the United States than even the worst flu year. But it is as close a stand-in as possible.

People with traditional Medicare also must share in the cost of their hospital care, but the current study did not analyze data from people with that form of coverage.

In 2018, 40% of Americans lacked enough savings to pay for a $400 emergency, according to federal data. The pandemic has put even more economic pressure on the lowest-income Americans.

Chua and his co-author Rena Conti, Ph.D. of Boston University's Institute for Health System Innovation and Policy, note that worries about out-of-pocket costs might keep some people from seeking emergency or inpatient care. They call for federal legislation mandating insurers to fully cover the costs of COVID-19 hospitalizations for the duration of the pandemic, and for insurers to extend waivers due to expire soon.

PITTSBURGH--"The Queen's Gambit," the recent TV mini-series about a chess master, may have stirred increased interest in chess, but a word to the wise: social media talk about game-piece colors could lead to misunderstandings, at least for hate-speech detection software.

That's what a pair of Carnegie Mellon University researchers suspect happened to Antonio Radi?, or "agadmator," a Croatian chess player who hosts a popular YouTube channel. Last June, his account was blocked for "harmful and dangerous" content.

YouTube never provided an explanation and reinstated the channel within 24 hours, said Ashiqur R. KhudaBukhsh a project scientist in CMU's Language Technologies Institute (LTI). It's nevertheless possible that "black vs. white" talk during Radi?'s interview with Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura triggered software that automatically detects racist language, he suggested.

"We don't know what tools YouTube uses, but if they rely on artificial intelligence to detect racist language, this kind of accident can happen," KhudaBukhsh said. And if it happened publicly to someone as high-profile as Radi?, it may well be happening quietly to lots of other people who are not so well known.

To see if this was feasible, KhudaBukhsh and Rupak Sarkar, an LTI course research engineer, tested two state-of-the-art speech classifiers -- a type of AI software that can be trained to detect indications of hate speech. They used the classifiers to screen more than 680,000 comments gathered from five popular chess-focused YouTube channels.

They then randomly sampled 1,000 comments that at least one of the classifiers had flagged as hate speech. When they manually reviewed those comments, they found that the vast majority -- 82% -- did not include hate speech. Words such as black, white, attack and threat seemed to be triggers, they said.

As with other AI programs that depend on machine learning, these classifiers are trained with large numbers of examples and their accuracy can vary depending on the set of examples used.

For instance, KhudaBukhsh recalled an exercise he encountered as a student, in which the goal was to identify "lazy dogs" and "active dogs" in a set of photos. Many of the training photos of active dogs showed broad expanses of grass because running dogs often were in the distance. As a result, the program sometimes identified photos containing large amounts of grass as examples of active dogs, even if the photos didn't include any dogs.

In the case of chess, many of the training data sets likely include few examples of chess talk, leading to misclassification, he noted.