Culture

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Purdue University innovators have created technology aimed at replacing Morse code with colored "digital characters" to modernize optical storage. They are confident the advancement will help with the explosion of remote data storage during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Morse code has been around since the 1830s. The familiar dots and dashes system may seem antiquated given the amount of information needed to be acquired, digitally archived and rapidly accessed every day. But those same basic dots and dashes are still used in many optical media to aid in storage.

A new technology developed at Purdue is aimed at modernizing the optical digital storage technology. This advancement allows for more data to be stored and for that data to be read at a quicker rate. The research is published in Laser & Photonics Reviews.

Rather than using the traditional dots and dashes as commonly used in these technologies, the Purdue innovators encode information in the angular position of tiny antennas, allowing them to store more data per unit area.

"The storage capacity greatly increases because it is only defined by the resolution of the sensor by which you can determine the angular positions of antennas," said Alexander Kildishev, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering in Purdue's College of Engineering. "We map the antenna angles into colors, and the colors are decoded."

Technology has aided in increasing storage space availability in optical digital storage technologies. Not all optical data storage media needs to be laser-writable or rewritable.

The majority of CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray discs are "stamped" and not recordable at all. This class of optical media is an essential part of disposable cold storage with a rapid access rate, long-lasting shelf life, and excellent archival capabilities.

The making of a Blu-Ray disc is based on the pressing process, where the silicon stamper replicates the same dot-and-dashes format the final disc is getting. A thin nickel coating is then added to get a negative stamp. The Blu-Rays, as well as DVDs and CDs, are just mass-produced.

"Our metasurface-based 'optical storage' is just like that," said Di Wang, a former Ph.D. student who fabricated the prototype structure. "Whereas in our demo prototype, the information is 'burnt in' by electron-beam lithography, it could be replicated by a more scalable manufacturing process in the final product."

This new development not only allows for more information to be stored but also increases the readout rate.

"You can put four sensors nearby, and each sensor would read its own polarization of light," Kildishev said. "This helps increase the speed of readout of information compared to the use of a single sensor with dots and dashes."

Future applications for this technology include security tagging and cryptography. To continue developing these capabilities, the team is looking to partner with interested parties in the industry.

According to the Barker hypothesis (Hales and Barker 1992) (also referred to as "small baby syndrome"), infants with too low body weight have an increased risk of suffering from cardiovascular diseases, high blood pressure, diabetes and chronic kidney diseases in adulthood. According to this hypothesis, fetal protective mechanisms enable adaptation to unfavorable intrauterine conditions (chronic oxygen or nutrient deficiency) and allow for fetal survival. At the same time, however, they lead to permanent structural and functional strains and changes into adulthood. The comprehensive study recently published in Nature Communications now clarifies central mechanisms of this phenomenon.

Fetuin-A plays a key role

Under the program of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Kidney Control of Homeostasis (Kidney.CH) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the research team has developed a mouse model of reduced growth attributable to fetal oxygen deprivation (fetal hypoxia). First of all, they demonstrated that fetal hypoxia causes local inflammation and microcalcifications with tissue damage in the kidney, resulting in a more rapid decline in renal function in adulthood. The experimental findings thus confirmed the Barker hypothesis. Concomitantly, the lack of oxygen activates the gene for the serum protein fetuin-A ectopically in the kidney, beyond the previously known site of expression in the liver. This is in line with the known function of Fetuin-A to protect the vascular system from calcification.

Furthermore, the study demonstrates a considerable number of previously unknown functions of fetuin-A in the kidney. These include preventing calcification and fibrotic changes of the kidney soft tissue, as well as inhibiting inflammatory processes. In addition, the research team was able to show that fetuin-A not only carries out these functions during development, but also protects against fibrotic remodeling of kidney tissue after acute oxygen deprivation in fully developed kidneys.

Fetuin-A with significant, pharmacological potential

The versatility of the effects of fetuin-A was initially just as surprising as the fact that kidneys are particularly affected by it. The study provides strong evidence that fetuin-A could play an important role in treating kidney damage caused by oxygen deficiency as well as after reperfusion of an ischemic circulatory disorder. First author Stefan Rudloff explains: "The discovery that fetuin-A is produced ectopically outside the liver under oxygen deprivation in the fetal kidney was a surprising initial finding for us. The further we extended the research the clearer became the significance of fetuin-A not only in coping with the damage caused by oxygen deprivation in the fetal phase, but also in adulthood."

Translational research and development facilitated by sitem-insel

The research team of Prof. Uyen Huynh-Do and Stefan Rudloff at the Department of Nephrology and at the Department for Biomedical Research at the University of Bern can rely on very favorable conditions in terms of environment. The follow-up project will be funded by the "Research Acceleration Initiative 2020" (RAI 2020) of the research department of CSL Behring as one of the three winners of the RAI 2020 funding. Prof. Uyen Huynh-Do, who heads the study, emphasizes: "Without the funding and the network of NCCR Kidney.CH this study would not have been possible. The future, close collaboration with the research department of CSL Behring as an industrial partner is facilitated by sitem-insel (Swiss Institute for Translational and Entrepreneurial Medicine), where translational research and development is taken very seriously and is actively supported. Thanks to the proximity of the department of Nephrology, the university's research facilities at DBMR and CSL Behring as the industry partner, it was now possible to launch a subsequent translational project that builds on the newly published research data."

Boston, Mass. - COVID-19 has caused more than 2 million deaths worldwide since the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic in March 2020. Patients with severe COVID-19 frequently experience respiratory distress and require assistance breathing. For patients whose lungs are so injured that even a ventilator is unable to deliver enough oxygen, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) -- which does the work of the lungs by removing carbon dioxide and adding oxygen to blood outside the body -- may improve the odds of survival for certain patients with severe COVID-19.

A study by physician-researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) provides new evidence that critically ill patients with COVID-19 who were treated with ECMO had better odds of survival than those who were not treated with ECMO. The findings -- published in Intensive Care Medicine [LINK] -- represent the only published study to investigate ECMO's efficacy for treatment of critically ill patients with COVID-19.

"ECMO gives patients' lungs time to heal when we've exhausted every other aspect of care for these patients -- it can be a bridge to recovery," said corresponding author Shahzad Shaefi, MD, Co-Director of the ECMO Program at BIDMC and in the Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine. "But ECMO's efficacy in the context of COVID-19 remains unclear. This work sheds new light on that question in the most robust way possible during the COVID-19 pandemic."

The team analyzed observational data from Study of the Treatment and Outcomes in Critically Ill Patients with COVID-19 (STOP-COVID), a multicenter cohort study of patients with COVID-19 admitted to intensive care units at 68 hospitals across the United States. Spearheaded in March 2020 by senior author David E. Leaf, MD, Director of Clinical and Translational Research in Acute Kidney Injury in the Division of Renal Medicine at the Brigham, the STOP-COVID dataset includes more than 5,000 critically ill adult patients and depended on a dedicated volunteer workforce to collect more than 800 individual data elements per patient, all by manual chart review.

"This was a remarkable grassroots effort involving more than 400 research assistants, medical students, residents, fellows, and attendings across the United States collecting this data manually during the height of the pandemic," said Leaf, who is also Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. "People were highly motivated to get this database assembled, as it represents the best data we have about critically ill patients with COVID-19 in this country."

Overall, the scientists found that 190 of the 5,122 critically ill adults (3 percent) admitted to the ICU with COVID-19 between March 1 and July 1, 2020, received treatment with ECMO. Among those 190 patients, nearly 70 percent survived to hospital discharge or at least 60 days following ICU admission.

Next, Shaefi, Leaf and colleagues delved deeper into the data using an analytic technique called target trial emulation, which allows researchers to use observational data to infer causality when randomized controlled trials are unavailable. By this method, the researchers examined selected patients with severe respiratory failure, defined as those with a very low ratio of oxygen content in their blood divided by the amount of inspired oxygen delivered by the ventilator. They found that patient treated with ECMO in the first seven days of ICU admission had a considerable reduction in mortality compared to those who were similarly ill but who were not treated with ECMO. Specifically, among the 1,297 patients eligible for the target trial emulation, just over a third of the 130 who received ECMO died, compared to nearly half of those who did not receive ECMO.

"These findings are not only statistically significant, but very clinically meaningful," said Leaf. "They show a considerable magnitude of benefit with ECMO - a 45 percent reduction in death - among the sickest patients. That's very compelling evidence that ECMO saves lives."

"The real question with ECMO is, are we saving lives, or -- candidly -- are we prolonging poor outcomes and death," said Shaefi, who is also Assistant Professor in Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School. "The benefit of ECMO prevailed across all of our analyses. In the absence of a randomized controlled trial, which traditionally been very difficult to cleanly do in ECMO, this work represents perhaps the best current evidence we have of the role of ECMO in treating select critically ill COVID 19 patients."

Over the last three decades, the United States prison population has exploded from 300,000 to more than 2 million. More than 1.1 million are African American men - the vast number of whom have returned within one to three years of their release. In fact, according to the World Prison Brief, America boasts the highest recidivism rate at more than 50 percent.

Although African American men are more likely to participate in re-entry programs, they continue to struggle with recidivism and reunification at higher rates. The common conception of assisting individuals impacted by incarceration is to provide practical needs such as housing, food and employment. Often, these services are insufficient when the core of their issues is related to psychological factors.

For African American males, the consequences of low social status due to incarceration are compounded by racial discrimination and stereotypes. Consequently, the portrait of African American males puts them under heightened scrutiny and increases the number of adverse encounters with police and society.

This issue led researchers from Florida Atlantic University's College of Social Work and Criminal Justice and Charles E. Schmidt College of Science to examine why re-entry programs are not as effective for African American men when compared to others. Their study, published in the Journal of Prison Education and Re-entry, looked at African American men's re-entry experience, family reunification and recidivism. Participants (ages 23 to 56) were selected from a program in southeastern Florida; each had been in prison more than once and participated in at least three re-entry programs.

Results from the study demonstrate why re-entry programs need a more holistic approach that accounts for the negative associations developed in the centuries of oppression and segregation that shape African American men's current interactions with society. In addition to providing practical needs and psychological assistance, re-entry programs should serve as a mediator between the individual impacted by incarceration and the various environmental constructs encountered upon release. Improving outcomes for African American men in re-entry programs must be centered on easing their transition into the complex systems of the family, workforce and society-at-large, while also considering their mental and emotional well-being.

"Many factors contribute to the high recidivism rates of African American men, but how their environment perceives them plays a significant role. Therefore, they respond differently to the environment compared to their non-African American counterparts," said Precious Skinner-Osei, Ph.D., lead author and interim undergraduate program coordinator in FAU's Phyllis and Harvey Sandler School of Social Work. "Because they face many oppressive factors, re-entry programs must consider the indifferences they endure, particularly trauma and their environment, and how it influences their behavior. Institutions involved in the criminal justice system must be part of the solution to alter the hostile environment experienced by these men."

Skinner-Osei and co-author Peter Claudius Osei, a Ph.D. student in the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, combined perspectives from social work and neuroscience to develop a new approach for re-entry programs, which offers a solution by focusing on the environmental and psychological elements influencing behavior. Their "Care" model suggests implementing four steps: collaboration; amend; reintegration; and empowerment to successfully reunite justice-involved African American men with their families, the labor market, and their communities.

Components of the Care model include cultural competency; implementing trauma-informed care strategies when working with these men; amendments to legislation and policies to include more psychological services and mental health resources, particularly post-release and in the communities where these men are returning; and empowering justice-involved African American men to perceive themselves as a valuable member of society. Empowerment is a key component of this model to reduce the stigma and emotional insecurity that perpetuate the increased recidivism rates of African American men.

On the practice side of re-entry programs, the researchers say words make a difference. They suggest that one significant improvement that professionals can make post-release is to change the language they use in their practices such as excluding terms like "felon," "offender," "convict," and "juvenile delinquent," to allow justice-involved individuals to gain a more positive self-image and shed some of the stigma associated with incarceration.

"African American men have been so severely impacted by incarceration and confinement that it is ingrained in their mentality from childhood, thereby distorting their worldview," said Peter Claudius Osei. "A more rounded approach is needed to account for the negative associations developed in the centuries of oppression and segregation that shape their current interactions with society. Only when we address their psychological and historical trauma in conjunction with the environmental factors that perpetuate the stigma they experience, can the chains of incarceration be broken."

It is important for patients to understand the information they need for making health decisions, yet studies have shown that a large segment of the population lacks the health literacy to do so. Health literacy refers to capacity of people to obtain, process, and understand health information needed for making health decisions. A researcher in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is addressing this topic.

"Many people have inadequate health literacy to support them in understanding health information and/or performing basic self-care activities," said Assistant Professor Jessie Chin. "Successful self-care would lead to better health outcomes, especially for patients with chronic illness."

Chin's paper, "Health Literacy, Processing Capacity, Illness Knowledge, and Actionable Memory for Medication Taking in Type 2 Diabetes: Cross-Sectional Analysis," was recently published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. The paper's coauthors include Huaping Wang, Adam W. Awwad, and James F. Graumlich, University of Illinois College of Medicine in Peoria; Michael S. Wolf, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine; and Daniel G. Morrow, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Illinois.

In their study, Chin and her colleagues investigated the relationship between health literacy and "actionable memory," or memory for medication purposes, among patients with diabetes. Their results demonstrated the link between health literacy and self-care, which the researchers said could be accounted for by both the processing capacity and health knowledge of the patients.

"The study also showed that there are individual differences in the way that people can compensate for limitations in their cognitive capacities in order to maintain their health literacy. The implications of our study include improving medication adherence for patients with chronic illness through multiple strategies to promote the actionable memory of medication-taking," said Chin.

Key Takeaways:

Airbnb does have an impact on housing prices and rents.

Impact is stronger in areas with fewer owner-occupiers, such as vacation destination towns.

Airbnb contributes to an increase in the supply of short-term rentals, while decreasing the long-term supply of rentals.

CATONSVILLE, MD, February 2, 2021 - According to new research, the presence of an Airbnb property can actually contribute to an increase in housing prices and rental rates in a local neighborhood. But it depends on where the property is located.

The study sought to assess the impact of home-sharing on residential house prices and rents using data from Airbnb listings from across the United States. Researchers found that in local neighborhoods with a lower share of owner-occupancy, Airbnb had a higher impact on rising housing prices and rents. In areas with a higher share of owner-occupancy, Airbnb had somewhat less of an impact on property prices and rents.

The research study to be published in the February issue of the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, titled "The Effect of Home-Sharing on House Prices and Rents: Evidence from Airbnb," is authored by Kyle Barron of the National Bureau of Economic Research; Edward Kung of California State University; and Davide Proserpio of the University of Southern California.

The study also found that the total supply of housing was not impacted by the entry of an Airbnb property in a given neighborhood, and that Airbnb listings tend to increase the supply of short-term rental units, while contributing to a decrease of the supply of long-term rental units.

"Home-sharing has been the subject of its share of criticism," said Proserpio. "Critics have alleged that home-sharing platforms such as Airbnb raise the cost of living for local renters while primarily benefitting local landlords and nonresident tourists. But whether home-sharing increases housing costs for local residents is an empirical question."

The researchers used data from all U.S. properties listed on Airbnb, the world's largest home-sharing platform, pulling it from public-facing pages on the Airbnb website between 2012 and the end of 2016. Researchers also used Zillow, a website that focuses on residential real estate transactions, to obtain house price and rental rate indices. All data was analyzed down to the zip code-year-month level of detail.

"Ultimately, we found that the number of Airbnb listings in some zip codes were positively associated with both property price increases and rental rates," said Kung. "Concerns about the effect of Airbnb on the housing market do not appear unfounded. But more research is needed into the long-run effects on the housing supply."

Good news: The bacteria living on your toothbrush reflect your mouth - not your toilet.

After studying microbial communities living on bristles from used toothbrushes, Northwestern University researchers found those communities matched microbes commonly found inside the mouth and on skin. This was true no matter where the toothbrushes had been stored, including shielded behind a closed medicine cabinet door or out in the open on the edge of a sink.

The study's senior author, Erica Hartmann, was inspired to conduct the research after hearing concerns that flushing a toilet might generate a cloud of aerosol particles. She and her team affectionately called their study "Operation Pottymouth."

"I'm not saying that you can't get toilet aerosols on your toothbrush when you flush the toilet," Hartmann said. "But, based on what we saw in our study, the overwhelming majority of microbes on your toothbrush probably came from your mouth."

The study will be published Feb. 1 in the journal Microbiome.

Hartmann is an assistant professor of environmental engineering at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering. Ryan Blaustein, a former postdoctoral fellow in Hartmann's lab, was the paper's first author. Blaustein is now a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Collecting samples

To obtain toothbrushes for the study, Hartmann's team launched the Toothbrush Microbiome Project, which asked people to mail in their used toothbrushes along with corresponding metadata. Hartmann's team then extracted DNA from the bristles to examine the microbial communities found there. They compared these communities to those outlined by the Human Microbiome Project, an NIH initiative that identified and catalogued microbial flora from different areas of the human body.

"Many people contributed samples to the Human Microbiome Project, so we have a general idea of what the human microbiome looks like," Blaustein said. "We found that the microbes on toothbrushes have a lot in common with the mouth and skin and very little in common with the human gut."

"Your mouth and your gut are not separate islands," Hartmann added. "There are some microbes that we find both in the human gut and mouth, and those microbes are found on toothbrushes. But, again, those are probably coming from your mouth."

Clean mouth, clean toothbrush

During the research, Hartmann's team examined how many different types of microbes lived on the toothbrushes. They found people with better oral hygiene, who regularly flossed and used mouthwash, had toothbrushes with less diverse microbial communities.

"If you practice good oral hygiene, then your toothbrush also will be relatively clean," Hartmann said. "But it's a small difference. It's not like people who regularly floss, brush and use mouthwash have no microbes and those who don't have tons. There's just a bit less diversity on toothbrushes from people who do all those things."

The researchers also found that microbes from toothbrushes of people with better oral hygiene had slightly more antimicrobial-resistance genes. Hartmann said microbes with these genes did not match the human body and were likely from air or dust in the bathroom.

Hartmann stresses that there's no need to be alarmed by microbes living on your toothbrush. Unless your dentist recommends otherwise, people should not reach for antimicrobial toothpastes and toothbrushes.

"By using antimicrobials, you aren't just getting rid of microbes," Hartmann said. "You are pushing the surviving microbes toward antimicrobial resistance. In general, for most people, regular toothpaste is sufficient."

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture, forestry and other land uses (AFOLU sector) cover the 24% of global emissions, representing the second hot spot in the contribution to climate change after the energy sector.

The main drivers are CO2 emissions from deforestation, methane (CH4) emissions produced by ruminant livestock and by anaerobic fermentation of organic matter, mainly from rice crops, and nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions from fertilizer use. Thus, the land sector plays a crucial role in the contribution to climate change.

A new study lead by the CMCC Foundation explores to which extent sustainable land management options applied at small-scale rural landscape level can be a valuable solution for increasing the mitigation potential of the land sector. In particular, possible land-based mitigation options are identified to reduce and offset GHG emissions from the livestock sector that represents one of the main sources of GHG emissions of the whole agricultural sector. Although GHG emissions from the livestock sector decreased since 1990, with ?20% in Europe in 2018, they still contribute to more than 60% to the total agricultural emissions at European level.

"The land sector", explains Maria Vincenza Chiriacò, CMCC researcher and lead author of the study, "has the unique characteristic to be at the same time both a contributor to climate change and part of its solution, thanks to the carbon sink function in soils and biomass that can be enhanced by an appropriate and sustainable land management. Our proposed land-based approach consists of two consecutive steps: we assess first the GHG emissions from the livestock activities, that is carbon footprint, in a small-scale rural area, then we evaluate the mitigation potential of a set of land-use options against livestock emissions assessed in the previous step. Our aim is to understand the extent to which land-based mitigation options at small-scale landscape level can lead to carbon neutral livestock systems".

CMCC scientists developed a land-based approach by combining different methodologies, including geographic information system (GIS) elaboration, life cycle assessment (LCA) and methodologies from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to investigate how and how much GHG emissions from livestock activities can be decreased and compensated through carbon removals in the same area. They tested the approach on a pilot area in central Italy corresponding to a portion of the Municipality of Viterbo (Lazio region) characterized by a strong agricultural vocation, aiming at estimating the livestock GHG emissions and the mitigation potential of sustainable land-use options applied in the same small-scale rural landscape, in the immediate proximity of the livestock emissions source.

"The results", Prof. Riccardo Valentini (CMCC Foundation and University of Tuscia) says, "show the potential for a total offsetting of the livestock GHG emissions in the pilot area, indicating possible pathways for the carbon neutral livestock systems. Besides, depending on the type and intensity of the land-based mitigation options, results undermine also the possibility to even turn the system into a net carbon sink, producing negative emissions in the land sector that can significantly contribute to the global climate change mitigation targets."

"It's important to highlight", Maria Vincenza Chiriacò adds, "the idea of proximity of our land-based approach. There are already many existing mechanisms of carbon offsetting but they work on a logic of carbon compensation on a global scale, where the carbon removals usually take place in areas that are geographically far from those in which the emissions to be compensated are generated. In our study, instead, mitigation is achieved through the implementation of land-based mitigation options that reduce emissions or increase carbon sink in the immediate proximity of the livestock GHG emissions source. This, besides contributing to the global climate change mitigation targets, entails a wide-ranging improvement of the entire agro-ecosystem at local scale, providing co-benefits that involve the local rural communities as well as the local institutions and the citizens that can gain in terms of environmental co-benefits, quality of life and territorial image."

The proposed land-based approach has been recently developed in a web tool. Designed and developed by the CMCC and Istituto di Servizi per il Mercato Agricolo Alimentare (ISMEA), with the financial support of the Programme "Rete Rurale Nazionale 2014-2020", the tool is freely available online. The web tool is based on rigorous scientific information (IPCC methodology), but it's designed to be easy to use for everyone.

The platform allows Italian livestock farmers to assess the carbon footprint of their farms by compiling a simple online questionnaire that considers the main characteristics of their livestock systems. Then, they can also assess the potential of sustainable land-based options needed to reduce and compensate their livestock emissions. Therefore, the web tool will help farmers, policy makers, and other relevant stakeholders in recognizing the best options to be applied for sustainable land management in particular at small-scale rural landscape level.

CMCC researchers aim to develop in collaboration with ISMEA and the Programme "Rete Rurale Nazionale 2014-2020" a traceability system for sustainable land-use leveraging on the developed land-based approach, through a voluntary mechanism of carbon farming practices at local level, aiming at reducing and offsetting GHG emissions from the livestock activities in Italy.

Hence, this mechanism has the potential to reduce and compensate the impacts caused by livestock products, making farmers and rural systems an important target for climate change mitigation.

Students from lower socio-economic groups (SEG) are less likely to participate in sport or physical activity at university, research from Sheffield Hallam University has found.

The main barriers affecting participation were found to be down to cost of being part of a sports team, lack of time due to academic commitments, part-time working or their social life taking precedence and limited prior knowledge of and participation in sport before starting university.

Funded by British Universities and Colleges Sport and published in the peer-reviewed Sport, Education and Society journal, the study surveyed over 700 students from 20 universities and found those that had participated in sport and physical activity prior to starting university were more likely to continue participating when at university, regardless of socio-economic group.

New students to university were unlikely to take up a sport that they hadn't done previously, and confidence to try new activities declined with age.

Other university specific factors affecting participation included facilities and accessibility and whether or not students lived on or close to campus or commuted to university.

A large proportion of commuting students were in the low SEG group and were found to be less likely to be involved in university sports clubs and access university facilities, but they were found to be more likely to maintain any existing participation at home.

Dr Kerry Griffiths of the Sport Industry Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam, said: "Evidence suggests that participation in sport and physical activity declines as young people reach university age and it is clear that universities should have a key role in maintaining existing participation as well as in engaging and sustaining participation in potential new participants.

"There is also evidence to show that people from low socio-economic groups are less likely to participate in sport and physical activity at all ages.

"Universities could build on their outreach programmes with schools or local communities to look at ways in which they could help to develop sporting habits at an earlier age. Also, for those that do come to university as existing sport participants, there is a need to ensure that they have the right opportunities, support, and encouragement to be able to continue to participate. Exploring or developing links with local community clubs may also be a useful strategy to enable participation to be sustained amongst existing participants."Students from lower socio-economic groups (SEG) are less likely to participate in sport or physical activity at university, research from Sheffield Hallam University has found.

The main barriers affecting participation were found to be down to cost of being part of a sports team, lack of time due to academic commitments, part-time working or their social life taking precedence and limited prior knowledge of and participation in sport before starting university.

Funded by British Universities and Colleges Sport and published in the peer-reviewed Sport, Education and Society journal, the study surveyed over 700 students from 20 universities and found those that had participated in sport and physical activity prior to starting university were more likely to continue participating when at university, regardless of socio-economic group.

New students to university were unlikely to take up a sport that they hadn't done previously, and confidence to try new activities declined with age.

Other university specific factors affecting participation included facilities and accessibility and whether or not students lived on or close to campus or commuted to university.

A large proportion of commuting students were in the low SEG group and were found to be less likely to be involved in university sports clubs and access university facilities, but they were found to be more likely to maintain any existing participation at home.

Dr Kerry Griffiths of the Sport Industry Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam, said: "Evidence suggests that participation in sport and physical activity declines as young people reach university age and it is clear that universities should have a key role in maintaining existing participation as well as in engaging and sustaining participation in potential new participants.

"There is also evidence to show that people from low socio-economic groups are less likely to participate in sport and physical activity at all ages.

"Universities could build on their outreach programmes with schools or local communities to look at ways in which they could help to develop sporting habits at an earlier age. Also, for those that do come to university as existing sport participants, there is a need to ensure that they have the right opportunities, support, and encouragement to be able to continue to participate. Exploring or developing links with local community clubs may also be a useful strategy to enable participation to be sustained amongst existing participants."

The work of the research group under the guidance of Professor Leonid Martyushev (co-authors: Roman Bando and Evgenia Chervontseva) will help to predict the behavior of fluids in various environments.

"When oil wells are depleted, water is pumped there under pressure to force the residual oil to the surface. If the interface between water and oil were an even layer, then it would be safe to say that as a result of water injection we recover all the residual oil. But since the interface between the two liquids is a highly distorted section, oil, contrary to expectations, can still remain underground, while water comes out to the surface. This is where our calculations come in handy. In addition, they can be used for environmental safety purposes, to eliminate the spills of hazardous substances, " explains professor Martyushev.

Having carried out extensive numerical hydrodynamic calculations for various geometries and parameters, physicists of Ural Federal University have constructed diagrams of stable / unstable behavior of the interface between fluids. So, in the calculations, the researchers for the first time found that with close values of the viscosity of the displacing and displaced fluids, a large number of different shapes of liquid-liquid interfaces can coexist at the same pressure. Determining the motion and shape of the interface between fluids is a very old and complex hydrodynamic problem. At first, the interface between the displacing and displaced immiscible liquids is quite simple, but from a certain moment it becomes unstable.

"First, the so-called 'fingers' appear, which then, as a result of complex transformations, turn into a branched structure resembling the crown of a tree. Physicists have long been able to calculate the loss of stability of the interface between fluids in the presence of very small perturbations. But until now it was not clear how to make predictions under arbitrary influences. But this is the most important point in most practical applications, " the scientist adds.

The data obtained are in good agreement with theoretical predictions made by Prof. Martyushev about 15 years ago. His assumption is based on the principle of maximum entropy production, which states that in any non-equilibrium system, the measure of chaos increases as fast as possible.

The coronavirus crisis has led to some of the general public developing a critical view of the current food consumption model, as shown by a recent survey by the Catalan Consumer Agency, which reveals that 60.5% of all Catalans tend to think that the pandemic will promote more responsible, sustainable and fair consumption. Moreover, the various lockdowns have caused a significant increase in online shopping throughout Spain, with a 92% rise in volume and a 114.5% rise in value, according to aggregated consumption data from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. This change in shopping habits and the awareness of the food model may also have an impact on the development of alternative, local models such as agroecological consumption cooperatives, where producers and consumers interact in order to promote the consumption of food products based on agroecology.

According to Ricard Espelt, member of the Digital Commons (Dimmons) research group at the UOC's Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), who has recently published a study analysing the role of new information and communication technologies (ICT) and the organizational model in these cooperatives' growth potential, "These are initiatives based on a fair relationship between producers and consumers, in which the consumption of local products is encouraged, as is the optimal use of natural resources without synthetic chemicals or genetically modified organisms. Moreover, the social and political impact of food production is taken into account". The results show that in organizations that have professionalized some of the tasks, digital adoption is better and they have greater potential for scalability.

He said: "The home lockdown highlighted the real nature of our consumer model. The long queues of people wearing masks to buy food and essential items in supermarkets and, in parallel, the organization of small producers on the internet, are two phenomena that offer a very good illustration of the real nature of the current food model." The researcher also explained that, "At this time of awareness-raising, we need to work to promote a change of scale in terms of local consumption. Within this framework, our research aims to discover whether cooperatives are able to have another level of impact, and it also intends to study the role of information technologies in this scalability."

A sector representative of the social and solidarity economy in Barcelona

The new study has focused on the role played by digital platforms and social media in Barcelona's agroecological network, which, with 56 cooperatives and 177 suppliers, has the highest number of this type of cooperative in Spain and is one of the 10 most outstanding areas in the world. These organizations represent over half of the activities in the city's so-called social and solidarity economy (SSE), which represents 7% of its GDP. Espelt said: "The expansion of digitization in this sector since the 2000s, when digital technologies became more accessible, affordable and easier to use, has played a significant role as a facilitator of the network among the agents that participate in it, and has become a key element characteristic of new-age agroecological consumption cooperativism."

Based on qualitative interviews and website content analysis, the research has studied the levels of digital adoption, as well as assessing compliance with the principles of the social and solidarity economy of fair trade and cooperation, and the organizations' level of professionalization. The researcher said: "The city's tradition of cooperativism has shown a certain resistance to establishing professionalized structures and has favoured a particular consumer model - totally self-managed organizations - with a strong track record. However, at the same time, it has probably limited the scale of growth. This research also tries to respond to this debate on the impact of professionalization."

Technological sovereignty, a pending matter

The results show that ICT have become a very useful tool for interaction between cooperatives and consumers, and most use them. However, there are significant differences between professionalized cooperatives - 100% of which have adopted a digital platform - and those that have totally voluntary management, in which they are adopted in 82% of cases. Only 34% of all the cooperative platforms use free or open-source programming. Espelt said: "Despite the fact that these organizations are committed to the promotion of food sovereignty, which is linked to the desire to control food and decide on the rules of the game that create a space for social justice between consumers and producers, the same attention is not paid to technological sovereignty, in other words, the control over technology and data."

Social media constitute another key element in the dissemination of agroecological consumption cooperatives' activity and in the entire ecosystem. The researcher said: "Through these channels, a lot of work has been carried out in terms of awareness-raising, knowledge and interest, reaching a broader population base." Once again, the study reveals differences in accordance with the various management models: all the professionalized cooperatives are present in these digital areas, while only 53% of those managed voluntarily have a social media profile. Moreover, the use varies significantly: the professionalized organizations' profiles are updated regularly, while the rest are only updated occasionally, depending on the manager's availability.

Professionalization compatible with the principles of proximity, fair trade and cooperation

In addition to the digital switchover, the study also paints a picture in which professionalized cooperatives have greater scalability potential. Only 8.8% include the professionalization of tasks, but have a larger number of members, 72 on average, in comparison with 29 in the case of organizations managed by volunteers. These data show that they have more growth potential, since they exert their influence on a larger consumer group, in comparison with the self-managed groups. "This is particularly important, since professionalized organizations do not set themselves an upper limit for growth, unlike groups based on volunteers," the researcher noted.

The data gathered during the study also prove that professionalization is not incompatible with the principles of SSE that have been assessed (proximity, fair trade and cooperation), since they comply with these indicators just like the other cooperatives. In fact, the professionalized organizations have better levels of cooperation (double those of their voluntary counterparts) with other SSE organizations.

The challenge of the sector's sustainability

All these factors indicate that professionalization is an important element for sustainability and the extension of a consumption model that promotes the SSE values. Espelt said: "The greatest challenge for the agroecological cooperatives is sustainability, which is linked to a large extent to the capacity for scalability. Not because all the initiatives should be large, but rather because they must have viable sustainability models, which they have not done up to now. In the search for a balance between growth and maintaining these organizations' missions, in both production and consumption organizations, our results show that the facilitation of groups with professionalized activities is what can promote growth on a larger scale."

These data are particularly relevant at a time like the present, in which the COVID-19 crisis has revealed an alternative environment of local channels, which facilitate more direct interaction between the producer and the consumer. Nevertheless, the researcher recognized the need to make deeper changes in order to underpin this sustainability: "Strategically, it is an opportunity to push the most consolidated and the most renowned shopping channels (supermarkets and the internet, respectively) towards more democratic and fairer models. Despite this potential, structural measures must be supported in order to promote effective change and reconsider the food model. In this challenge, public policies will play an essential role in the consolidation (or not) of this (new) opportunity."

New research by Swansea University scientists found that boat ramps facilitate the dispersal of the highly invasive zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha).

To contain the dispersion of this invasive species Dr Marta Rodriguez-Rey and co-authors suggest in the new study, that strict control measures and target monitoring around boat ramps should be implemented.

Invasive bivalves are a problem as they can cause widespread environmental damage, and eradication has proved difficult. The zebra mussel is one of the most damaging invasive bivalves - it reproduces fast, disperses widely, and damages the economy. In Great Britain, £5 million are lost each year due to pipe fouling and damage to water infrastructures caused by zebra mussels.

In this study, the research team examined the distribution of the zebra mussel in Great Britain using a model to generate maps that can predict future dispersion. The model shows that distance to boat ramps is the best way to predict the mussel's distribution - and mussels are more likely to be present within 3 km upstream of boat ramps.

Dr Rodriguez-Rey said: "Using these maps, we detected many areas in most catchments currently without zebra mussel that have a high risk of becoming invaded. For instance, we know this mussel species is already established in some areas in the Thames River but not in all areas, and these free zones should be targeted for monitoring and prevention."

In Rome lies the Santi Apostoli church, cared for by Franciscan brothers for more than 500 years. For more than 1500 years, this site has held the believed remains of two of the earliest Christians and Jesu apostles: St. Philip and St. James the Younger - relics of the Holy Catholic Church.

In the first few centuries of Christianity, life was difficult for the Christian minority, but gradually towards fourth century Christianity became the dominant religion and after Emperor Theodosius in 380 declared Christianity the state religion, churches were erected all over the Roman Empire.

Shortly after the churches were erected, remains of Christian martyrs were moved from their graves to designated worship churches in the towns. This also applied for the remains of the two apostles, St. Philip and St. James. Such movements of remains were called translations.

A foot, a femur and a tibia

It is unknown who translated the believed remains of St. Philip and St. James and where from, but it is a fact, that they came to glorify the current church of Santi Apostoli in Rome, constructed in their honor. It is also a fact that the remains have been kept in the church since the sixth century.

So, are the relics really the remains of St. James and St. Philip? And what else can we learn from the bones?

The skeletons are today far from complete. Only fragments of a tibia, a femur and a mummified foot remain. The tibia and foot are attributed to St. Philip, the femur to St. James. It appears likely that this has been the case since the sixth century.

Radiocarbon dating

Professor of chemistry and archaeometry, Kaare Lund Rasmussen from University of Southern Denmark has led the scientific investigations of these remains supported by a team consisting of colleagues from University of Groningen in Holland, University of Pisa in Italy, Cranfield Forensic Institute in England, Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology in Italy and the National Museum of Denmark.

The results are published in the scientific journal Heritage Science.

The researchers considered the remains of St. Philip too difficult to de-contaminate and radiocarbon date, and their age thus remains unknown so far. But the femur, believed to belong to St. James, underwent several analyses. Most importantly, it was radiocarbon dated to AD 214-340.

Thus, the preserved relic, the femur, is not that of St. James. It originates from an individual some 160-240 years younger than St. James, explains Professor Kaare Lund Rasmussen, University of Southern Denmark, adding:

- Though the relic is not that of St James, it casts a rare flicker of light on a very early and largely unaccounted for time in the history of early Christianity.

Who that person was, is of course impossible to say.

Searching for martyr corpses

- We consider it very likely, that whoever moved this femur to the Santi Apostoli church, believed it belonged to St. James. They must have taken it from a Christian grave, so it belonged to one of the early Christians, apostle or not, comments Professor Kaare Lund Rasmussen.

The same goes for the believed remains of St. Philip, he adds.

- One can imagine that when the early church authorities were searching for the corpse of the apostle, who had lived hundreds of years earlier, they would look in ancient Christian burial grounds where bodies of holy men might have been put to rest at some earlier time, the researchers write in Heritage Science.

Moving bones - a popular tradition:

The first known movement of a martyr's remains to a church is that of St Babylas in AD 354. His remains were transferred from a cemetery in Antioch to Daphne and placed in a church especially built for the purpose by Governor Caesar Gallus

Immediately after this, translations got popular: the translations of St Timotheus, St Andrew, and St Lukas to Constantinople followed in a year's time

At the same time, sources reflect an increasing popularity and circulation of relics from the second part of the 4th century onwards

Despite the criticism of bishop Athanasius of Alexandria († 373) and Shenoute († 465) at the end of the same century and in the following, relics of martyrs and saints began to be moved into the churches

Throughout the Roman empire, bodies or body parts were exhumated, transferred, and reburied in the apse in close vicinity of the altar of many important churches.

It has sometimes been suggested that humans use a tiny fraction of their brains. But, is this statement true? The authors of a study published on 20 January in the journal Nature Communications answer this question using neural records of mice subjected to visual stimuli.

This paper demonstrates, in the visual system of mice, the presence of a type of coordination of neural activity called differential correlations. A study by Rubén Moreno-Bote, a researcher at the Center for Brain and Cognition (CBC) and Serra Hunter research professor with the UPF Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC); of Jan Drugowitsch's laboratory at Harvard University (USA), with the participation of researchers from the University of Zaragoza and the University of the Basque Country.

Both sensory and visual information is distributed across dozens of brain areas and hundreds of millions of neurons. If visual information (such as the identity of a face) is divided into small packets located in each neuron and these packets were independent, then it would be necessary to "read" the activity of all neurons to extract complete sensory information. "Another possibility is that the packets of information are larger, so that a neuron has a lot of sensory information, as if the information could be condensed and repeated in many neurons. In this case, the neural code would be redundant", explains Rubén Moreno-Bote.

The advantage of a redundant code is that only a tiny fraction of neurons would need to be "used" to extract all the visual information contained in the brain, which could happen if there were a type of correlation in the brain, or coordination of neural activity, called differential correlations.

Differential correlations in the brain visual system of rodents

The presence of such coordination in activity between neurons was already predicted in a previous study by Moreno-Bote et al., published in Nature Neuroscience (2014). This paper postulated that these differential correlations could be very faint and difficult to measure. However, despite their weakness, they were thought to greatly limit the information content of the brain.

Now, in this new study, published in Nature Communications, the authors demonstrate the presence of differential correlations in the visual system of mice. To do so, they have used calcium ion imaging techniques. enabling the researchers to study the activity of almost 500 neurons simultaneously. These techniques enable detecting differential correlations despite their weakness.

The results of the study revealed that differential correlations limit the information in the brains of rodents. The study shows that by reading nearly 10% of the neurons in the primary visual cortex it is possible to extract all the information contained in 100% of neurons, and hence it is enough to "read" a tenth of neural activity to extract all the information present in the primary visual cortex.

In answering the initial question, Moreno-Bote states: "Our results suggest that maybe we don't always use the entire brain, that in some cases there is no need to use 100% of the neurons to perfectly identify a stimulus, so using 10% allows us to act as well as if we used 100%". And he adds, "our results indicate that the brain is a highly efficient machine capable of distributing the sensory signal efficiently because using a small fraction of neurons all the information needed can be extracted, given a sensory stimulus".

Scientists have revealed new insights into the behaviour of black holes with research that demonstrates how a phenomenon called backreaction can be simulated.

The team from the University of Nottingham have used their simulation of a black hole, involving a specially designed water tank, for this latest research published in Physical Review Letters. This study is the first to demonstrate that the evolution of black holes resulting from the fields surrounding them can be simulated in a laboratory experiment.

The researchers used a water tank simulator consisting of a draining vortex, like the one that forms when you pull the plug in the bath. This mimics a black hole since a wave which comes too close to the drain gets dragged down the plug hole, unable to escape. Systems like these have grown increasingly popular over the past decade as a means to test gravitational phenomena in a controlled laboratory environment. In particular, Hawking radiation has been observed in an analogue black hole experiment involving quantum optics.

Using this technique the researchers showed for the first time that when waves are sent into an analogue black hole, the properties of the black hole itself can change significantly. The mechanism underlying this effect in their particular experiment has a remarkably simple explanation. When waves come close to the drain, they effectively push more water down the plug hole causing the total amount of water contained in the tank to decrease. This results in a change in the water height, which in the simulation corresponds to a change in the properties of the black hole.

Lead author, Post-doctoral researcher Dr Sam Patrick from the University of Nottingham School of Mathematical Sciences explains: "For a long time, it was unclear whether the backreaction would lead to any measurable changes in analogue systems where the fluid flow is driven, for example, using a water pump. We have demonstrated that analogue black holes, like their gravitational counterparts, are intrinsically backreacting systems. We showed that waves moving in a draining bathtub push water down the plug hole, modifying significantly the drain speed and consequently changing the effective gravitational pull of the analogue black hole.

What was really striking for us is that the backreaction is large enough that it causes the water height across the entire system to drop so much that you can see it by eye! This was really unexpected. Our study paves the way to experimentally probing interactions between waves and the spacetimes they move through. For example, this type of interaction will be crucial for investigating black hole evaporation in the laboratory."

Black hole research at the University of Nottingham has recently received a £4.3 million funding boost for a three-year project that aims to provide further insights into the physics of the early universe and black holes.

The research team will use quantum simulators to mimic the extreme conditions of the early universe and black holes. The Nottingham team will be using a new state laboratory to set up a novel hybrid superfluid optomechanical system to mimic quantum black hole processes in the laboratory.