Culture

Adalatherium is an important piece in a very large puzzle on early mammalian evolution in the southern hemisphere, one in which most of the other pieces are still missing

New research published today in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology describes a bizarre 66 million-year-old mammal that provides profound new insights into the evolutionary history of mammals from the southern supercontinent Gondwana - recognized today as Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica, the Indian subcontinent, and the Arabian Peninsula.

Named Adalatherium, which, translated from the Malagasy and Greek languages means "crazy beast," it is described based on a nearly complete, exquisitely preserved skeleton, the most complete for any mammal yet discovered in the southern hemisphere prior to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The research, carried out over 20 years, demonstrates that Adalatherium was a "giant" relative to the mostly shrew- or mouse-sized mammals that lived during the Cretaceous period.

Its "bizarre" features include more trunk vertebrae than most other mammals, muscular hind limbs that were placed in a more sprawling position (similar to modern crocodiles) coupled with brawny sprinting front legs that were tucked underneath the body (as seen in most mammals today), front teeth like a rabbit and back teeth completely unlike those of any other known mammal, living or extinct, and a strange gap in the bones at the top of the snout.

A team of 14 international researchers led by Dr David Krause (Denver Museum of Nature & Science) and Dr Simone Hoffmann (New York Institute of Technology) published the comprehensive description and analysis of this opossum-sized mammal that lived among dinosaurs and massive crocodiles near the end of the Cretaceous period (145¬-66 million years ago) on Madagascar.

The 234-page monographic treatment, consisting of seven separate chapters, is part of the prestigious Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) Memoir Series, a special yearly publication that provides a more in-depth treatment of the most significant vertebrate fossils. Initial announcement of the discovery was made in the journal Nature earlier this year.

Adalatherium, from Madagascar, belongs to an extinct group of mammals known as gondwanatherians, which were first discovered in the 1980s and, until recently, were only represented by a few isolated teeth and jaw fragments. But even those meager remains already indicated that gondwanatherians were very different from other contemporaneous mammals. So many mysteries had surrounded gondwanatherians that it was unclear how they fit into the mammalian family tree.

Now the research team presents the first skeleton for this mysterious group that once roamed much of South America, Africa, Madagascar, the Indian subcontinent, and even Antarctica.

The completeness and excellent preservation of the skeleton of Adalatherium opens new windows into what gondwanatherians looked like and how they lived, but the bizarre features still have the team perplexed.

"Knowing what we know about the skeletal anatomy of all living and extinct mammals, it is difficult to imagine that a mammal like Adalatherium could have evolved; it bends and even breaks a lot of rules," Krause explains.

Although the life-like reconstruction of Adalatherium is superficially similar to a run-of-the-mill badger, its "normality" is only skin deep. Below the surface, its skeleton is nothing short of outlandish.

As Hoffmann puts it, "Adalatherium is simply odd. Trying to figure out how it moved, for instance, was challenging because its front end is telling us a completely different story than its back end."

While its muscular hind legs and big claws on the back feet may indicate that Adalatherium was a powerful digger (like badgers), its front legs were less brawny and are more similar to those of living mammals that can run fast.

The limbs of Adalatherium also indicate that its posture was a hybrid between those of living mammals and more ancient relatives. Its forelimbs were tucked underneath the body (as seen in most mammals today) but its hind limbs were more sprawling (as in crocodiles and lizards).

This is not were the strangeness stops.

The teeth of Adalatherium, reconstructed by employing high-resolution micro-computed tomography and extensive digital modeling, are indicative of herbivory but are otherwise beyond bizarre.

Not only did Adalatherium have rabbit- or rodent-like ever-growing front teeth, but the back teeth are completely unlike those of any other known mammal, living or extinct. If just these teeth had been found, the mystery of what this animal was would likely not have been solved! Added to the seeming chaos is a hole in the top of the snout for which there is simply no parallel.

About the size of a Virginia opossum, the 3.1 kg Adalatherium was very large for its day. While not particularly large by today's standards, it was a giant compared to the mostly shrew- and mouse-sized mammals living in the Cretaceous.

The geological history of Gondwana provides clues as to why Adalatherium is so bizarre.

Adalatherium was found in rocks dated to near the end of the Cretaceous, at roughly 66 million years ago. At this time Madagascar had already been an island separated from Africa for over 150 million years and from the Indian subcontinent for over 20 million years. "Islands are the stuff of weirdness," says Krause, "and there was therefore ample time for Adalatherium to develop its many extraordinarily peculiar features in isolation."

"Adalatherium is an important piece in a very large puzzle on early mammalian evolution in the southern hemisphere, one in which most of the other pieces are still missing," adds Hoffmann.

More than anything, the discovery of Adalatherium underscores how much more remains to be learned from new finds of early mammals in Madagascar and other parts of the southern hemisphere.

In recent years, the number of high-risk groups for ischemic diseases such as critical limb ischemia where tissues of toe may decay is increasing due to increase in the number of people with obesity, diabetes, and hypertension which are triggered by changes in dietary habits, and consumption of smoking and alcohol. A number of studies are actively conducted on endothelial progenitor cells (hEPCs), which are stem cells that contribute to the blood vessel regeneration in the ischemic tissues, to treat such ischemia diseases.

Vascular hEPCs migrate to regions requiring angiogenesis, such as ischemic regions, and then differentiate into endothelial cells of blood vessels or release growth factors that help formation of blood vessels to induce regeneration of the damaged blood vessels. Hence, these cells can be developed into stem cell therapy for diseases related to blood vessels including ischemic diseases.

However, when the hEPCs with outstanding blood vessel regeneration capability are used as stem cell therapy in ischemic diseases, the therapeutic treatment efficacy may differ depending on various variables such as survival of the transplanted cells and migration to the treatment region. Accordingly, treatments for ischemic diseases are remaining in the clinical stage without being commercialized due to the limitations in accurately observing and predicting the therapeutic efficacy.

The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) recently announced that the collaborative research team led by Dr. Kwangmeyung Kim from Center for Theragnosis and Sung-Hwan Moon from Stem Cell Research Institute, T&R Biofab Co. Ltd developed a method that can predict the therapeutic efficacy based on the distribution of the initial transplantation of hEPCs by tracking the initial distribution and migration of the transplanted cells using fluorescence romographic images.

The KIST research team first enabled observing fluorescence signals through fluorescence molecular tomography by binding fluorescent dyes to the surface of hEPCs. Subsequently, the team transplanted the cells into the hind limb of mouse with severe limb ischemia and tracked them through images for 28 days to evaluate the cell movement in the body; then, tracked and observed the regeneration process of the blood flow through laser scanning microscope(Laser Doppler imaging). As a result, it was revealed that the hEPCs migrate to the damaged tissues where the ischemic disease is found.

Additionally, the shapes of cell clusters were observed to be injected in two different shapes as a result of analyzing the images of hEPCs during the initial transplantation of the cell therapy treatment. The two shapes were condensed round shape and spread shape. When the therapeutic efficacy was observed by classifying the experimental groups into these two shapes, it was found that the initial condensed 'round shape' cells migrated better and showed superior therapeutic efficacy in the experimental groups. Based on these findings, the research team predicted that the treatment efficacy will be superior when the treatment cells are formed into a condensed 'round shape' during the initial treatment.

"Our developed technology, which can quickly and accurately monitor the initial transplantation forms and changes of stem cell therapy, will enable predicting the efficacy of the transplanted hEPCs in the early stages of ischemic disease treatments, and we expect it to be used in the development of stem cell therapy treatments for ischemic diseases in the future," said Dr. Kwangmeyung Kim at KIST, who led the research.

Mathematicians have used machine learning to develop a new model for measuring poverty in different countries that junks old notions of a fixed 'poverty line'.

The study by academics at Aston University, published in the journal Nature Communications, suggests mainstream thinking around poverty is outdated because it places too much emphasis on subjective notions of basic needs and fails to capture the full complexity of how people use their incomes.

They say their new model - which uses computer algorithms to synthesise vast amounts of spending and economic data - could help policymakers worldwide predict future poverty levels and plan interventions to alleviate the problem.

"No-one has ever used machine learning to decode multidimensional poverty before," said lead researcher Dr Amit Chattopadhyay of Aston University's College of Engineering and Physical Sciences. "This completely changes the way people should look at poverty."

Established measures of poverty attempt to identify a threshold monetary level below which a person or household is defined as 'poor'. These definitions trace their origins back to methods developed in the 19th and early 20th century by reformers such as Ernst Engel and Seebohm Rowntree.

Currently, the World Bank sets the International Poverty Line at US$1.90 per day, with around 10% of the world's population - about 700m people - living on less than this. This is based on a subjective assessment of income needed to cover basic needs in the poorest countries, adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP).

In the new study, the researchers analysed 30 years' worth of data from India, dividing expenditure into three broad categories of 'basic food' such as cereals, 'other food' including meat and 'non-food' covering other spending such as housing and transport costs. The model can be applied to any country.

By recognising the 'push-and-pull' interplay between the three categories - more spending in one area usually means a reduction in spending in another -it allows for a more holistic poverty measure that can adjust to the circumstances of individual countries. The researchers combined datasets on incomes, asset and commodity markets from the World Bank and other sources to produce a mathematical model that was able not only to accurately predict past poverty levels in both India and the United States, but also to predict future levels based on certain economic assumptions.

By taking account of the elasticity of supply and demand in the market, the model revises the number of people traditionally deemed 'poor' into a more practical 'middle class'. It can be scaled to reflect conditions in sub-regions of a country, or even scaled down to a single city or neighbourhood depending on the available data.

"Current thinking on poverty is highly subjective, because 'poverty' will mean different things in different countries and regions," added Dr Chattopadhyay. "With this model, we finally have a multi-dimensional poverty index that reflects the real-world experience of people wherever they live and largely independent of the social class they are deemed to belong to.

"Importantly, it's a model that takes account of the economic circumstances people find themselves in - and the factors that can make the biggest difference to their material wellbeing. As such, it can be an important tool for governments and policymakers globally in identifying poverty and putting in place interventions that really tackle it."

Bans on shark fishing are only partially effective in protecting sharks, new research suggests.

Scientists from the University of Exeter, international conservation charity ZSL (Zoological Society of London) and Sri Lankan NGO Oceanswell examined the effects of a blanket ban on landing thresher sharks, brought in by the Sri Lankan government in 2012.

Information gathered from local fishers suggests the ban has stopped targeted fishing for the sharks - but persistent "bycatch" (accidental catching) continues.

The study also found that bycatch appears to be widely unrecorded, partly due to "mistrust and confusion" amongst fishers.

"Sri Lanka's long-standing ban offers us an opportunity to assess the impacts of bans, which are increasingly being implemented globally to protect sharks," said lead author Claire Collins, of the University of Exeter and ZSL's Institute of Zoology.

"The ban has almost completely halted targeted fishing for these sharks, so in this sense it has been very successful.

"However, continued bycatch is a problem not only because of the direct impact on this vulnerable species, but also because it makes it tempting for fishers to get round the ban.

"Because it is easy to conceal threshers as other shark species, by cutting fins off before landing, fishers can sell them easily and the ban can be hard for authorities to enforce.

"Without addressing continued bycatch, there's always going to be a temptation to land these sharks - especially because in Sri Lanka there is a strong market for shark meat as well as fins."

The study does not address ways to reduce bycatch, but methods could include local fishing bans in areas known for sharks, modifying fishing gear, and reducing the time gear is left in the water so sharks caught by accident have a higher chance of being freed before they die.

Oceanswell researchers gathered data from fishers over a ten-month period last year.

Despite many fishers reporting feeling disengaged with authorities in advance of the ban, compliance with it was very high among communities that used to rely on threshers for their livelihoods.

The study notes "unequal" impacts of the ban.

Unsurprisingly, fishers involved in targeted shark fishing were affected most severely, and the researchers say such impacts should be mitigated whenever possible.

Dr Ana Nuno, senior author of the paper, based at University of Exeter and NOVA University Lisbon (Portugal), added: "If we want conservation and fisheries policies to work, we need to get much better at understanding how they might impact resource users and take that into account during policy design.

"That's key to implementing robust policies that deliver positive outcomes for people and biodiversity."

Researchers from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that assesses the implications of the growth of private genetic testing for the field of marketing and evaluates ethical challenges that arise. The researchers review past research in the field of behavioral genetics and use these findings to incorporate genetic influences into existing consumer behavior theory. They then survey potential uses of genetic data for marketing strategy and research, and raise concerns regarding significant ethical challenges that arise from unique features of genetic data.

The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "Genetic Data: Potential Uses and Misuses in Marketing" and is authored by Remi Daviet, Gideon Nave, and Jerry Wind.

Development of cost-effective techniques for measuring the human genome has led to an exponential growth in the direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DTC-GT) industry over the past two decades. It is estimated that over 30 million customers have already taken a DNA test. At the same time, large-scale, publicly-funded genetic data collection efforts have taken off in many countries around the globe. As a result, vast datasets containing individual-level genetic measures now reside on servers owned by private companies and governments. Several global firms, including AirBnB and Spotify, have already jumped on the bandwagon and partnered with DTC-GT companies to develop business strategies that use genetic data for marketing purposes.

The authors review potential marketing applications, which include using genetic measures for identifying and reaching subsets of customers with similar needs, an approach that is expected to be particularly effective for marketing health, nutrition, and beauty products. Consumers' fascination with their genomes can also be used creatively, to increase their sense of community and personalization by building bridges between people and their distant familial and cultural histories.

On the research side, potential applications include reliance on genetically informed study designs to test causal relations between variables and refinement of consumer theory by uncovering biological mechanisms underlying behavior.

But while it may be tempting to see the potential upside, the authors also raise challenges. Daviet notes, "The use of genetic data by marketers is already taking place, and we have concerns about this trend, due to unique features of genetic data: (1) individuals can easily be identified by a small fraction of their genetic data; (2) it is informative about one's relatives; (3) it is predictive, to some degree, about almost every human trait; and (4) it is immutable."

Nave adds: "Because of these unique features, the use of genetic data by marketers might create threats to consumer autonomy and privacy. There is also potential for misinformation because consumers' perceptions of genetics might lead them to believe that genetic-based recommendations are always backed by solid science, which might not always be the case."

The authors further caution that their concerns are barely, if ever, addressed by current regulations. In the US, the license to use and share genetic data for marketing purposes depends on the privacy policy of each individual company. Many such companies do not provide customers any privacy information before they purchase genetic-testing kits, and the policies of many others indicate that they may use genetic data for purposes other than delivering ancestry and health reports. Under current European laws, one must explicitly consent to processing of such data. However, consumers might end up approving mining of their genetic data without reading the legal terms and services. Then, virtually every marketing application becomes possible despite the strict sharing restrictions.

Finally, the study highlights several gaps in the current state of knowledge and sets an agenda for future research. Important open questions include the need to evaluate how predictive genetic measures are, relatively to other types of data that are readily available to marketers, and how consumers will react to the use of their data by private companies.

Researchers at The City College of New York have uncovered a novel way in which Vibrio cholerae, the aquatic microbe that causes cholera, may increase its competitive fitness, and the likelihood of creating pandemic strains of the bacteria.

The finding was revealed by examining the type VI secretion system, or T6SS for short, a secretion system used by Vibrio cholerae to inject toxic proteins into neighboring bacterial cells, killing them and increasing its survival advantage. The researchers studied a gene cluster within the T6SS called auxiliary cluster 3 (Aux3). The gene cluster exists in two states: one, which is highly mobile, is found in environmental strains of V. cholerae--these do not cause disease--and a second, which is a less mobile form of the gene cluster. This second, less mobile form of the gene cluster is "locked" in the pandemic V. cholerae genome and potentially helped create the pandemic strains.

"We wanted to look at how a harmless environmental strain of Vibrio cholerae acquires the unique traits needed to become the pandemic strain of the bacteria," said Francis J. Santoriello, from City College's Department of Biology. "With this in mind, we located an island in the chromosome of the bacteria that only exists in the pandemic strain. Unexpectedly, we found a much larger form of the DNA island in a couple strains in the environment that seems to be jumping from one strain to another."

Stefan Pukatzki, lead author of the CCNY study, added, "Even though we may not have a cure for cholera, this research contributes to our understanding of how these pathogens evolve and become pandemic."

More than a decade after committing $130+ billion to Closing the Gap, there has been little improvement in health outcomes experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations.

A significant life expectancy gap remains, with cardiovascular disease the leading cause of death for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, responsible for almost 20 per cent of this gap.

So where have things gone wrong?

A new study led by University of South Australia PhD candidate Katharine McBride in partnership with Aboriginal women suggests the answer may lie partially in the Government's failure to approach health from an Aboriginal perspective.

"Current strategies to address heart disease in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are framed within a western context and focus on bad behaviour and a deficit approach," McBride says.

"These policies fail to take into account the unique world view of our first nations women, centred on spirit, culture and community."

The study explored the perspectives of 28 Aboriginal women from five different communities across central and southern Australia, with the work overseen by an Aboriginal Women's Advisory Group. Via yarning circles, women identified 10 attributes which either kept their heart strong or put it at risk, and the drivers of these.

"Identity as an Aboriginal woman, having a healthy body and life, connectedness within family and community and health knowledge all strengthen the heart, according to the Aboriginal women in our study. Stress, grief, racism, government policies and financial hardship were recognised as weakening the heart."

The government's strategy, focusing solely on clinical and behavioural cardiovascular risk factors, fails to recognise the Aboriginal conceptualisation of health which is centred on strength, resilience and connectedness, according to McBride.

The research team, which included Aboriginal women with lived and professional experience of heart disease, recommends a new model of health delivery and care in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and communities.

"Aboriginal women are leaders and nurturers of community. They have described what is needed to have a healthy heart; hopefully the government will heed the message," McBride says.

Her paper, titled "Good Heart: Telling Stories of Cardiovascular Protective and Risk Factors for Aboriginal Women," is published in Heart, Lung and Circulation.

"Let it go." "Think about something else." "Clear your head."

In our attempts to de-clutter our busy minds and make room for new, often more productive thoughts, people tap an array of different approaches. Which works best, and how does each strategy distinctly impact the brain?

Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Texas have taken a first stab at answering this question, combining novel brain imaging with machine learning techniques to offer an unprecedented window into what happens in the brain when we try to stop thinking about something.

The findings, published this month in the journal Nature Communications, lend new insight into the basic building blocks of cognition and could inform new therapies for issues like post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder. They also provide clues on how to form better study habits or innovate at work.

"We found that if you really want a new idea to come into your mind, you need to deliberately force yourself to stop thinking about the old one," said co-author Marie Banich, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at CU Boulder.

For the study, Banich teamed up with Jarrod Lewis-Peacock, a cognitive neuroscience at UT-Austin, to examine brain activity in 60 volunteers as they tried to flush a thought from their working memory.

As Lewis-Peacock describes it, working memory is the "scratch pad" of the mind where we store thoughts temporarily to help us carry out tasks. But we can only keep three or four thoughts in working memory at a time. Like a sink full of dirty dishes, it must be cleaned out to make new ideas possible.

"Once we're done using that information to answer an email or address some problem, we need to let it go so it doesn't clog up our mental resources to do the next thing," he said.

When we ruminate over something - perhaps the fight we had with a friend or an offending text -- that can color new thoughts in a negative light. Such rumination is at the root of many mental health disorders, said Banich.

"In obsessive compulsive disorder it could be the thought of as, 'If I don't wash my hands again I will get sick.' In anxiety, it might be, 'This plane is going to crash.'"
To determine if people can truly purge a thought, and how, the team asked each volunteer to lay down inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI) at the Intermountain Neuroimaging Center on the Boulder campus.

They were shown pictures of faces, fruits and scenes and asked to maintain the thought of them for 4 seconds. Meanwhile, researchers created individualized 'brain signatures' showing precisely what each person's brain looked like when they thought of each picture.

Afterward, participants were told to: replace the thought ("replace apple with mountain"); clear all thoughts (akin to mindfulness meditation); or suppress the thought (focus on it and then deliberately try to stop thinking about it). In each case, the brain signature associated with the image visibly faded.

"We were thrilled," said Banich. "This is the first study to move beyond just asking someone, 'Did you stop thinking about that?' Rather, you can actually look at a person's brain activity, see the pattern of the thought and then watch it fade as they remove it."

The researchers also found that "replace," "clear" and "suppress" had very different impacts.

While 'replace' and 'clear' prompted the brain signature of the image to fade faster, it didn't fade completely, leaving a shadow in the background as new thoughts were introduced.
'Suppress,' on the other hand, took longer to prompt forgetting but was more complete in making room for a new thought.

Behavioral studies outside the scanner yielded similar results.

"The bottom line is: If you want to get something out of your mind quickly use 'clear' or 'replace,'" said Banich. "But if you want to get something out of your mind so you can put in new information, 'suppress' works best."

More research is necessary, but the findings suggest that students may want to pack up their algebra notes, take a break and deliberately try not to think about quadratic equations before moving on to study for physics.

Hit a wall on that report at work? Let it go for a while.

"People often think, 'If I think about this harder I am going to solve this problem.' But work by clinicians suggests it can actually give you tunnel vision and keep you in a loop that is hard to get out of," said Banich.

In a counseling setting, the findings suggest that to fully purge a problematic memory that keeps bubbling up, one might need to deliberately focus on it and then push it away.

Someday, the brain imaging technique could potentially be used during sessions as a sort of cognitive mirror to help people learn how to put destructive thoughts out of their minds.

Banich and Lewis-Peacock intend to study that next.

"If we can get a sense of what their brain should look like if they are successfully suppressing a thought, then we can navigate them to a more effective strategy for doing that," said Lewis-Peacock. "It's an exciting next step."

On December 10, 2020 (Hawai?i Standard Time), the Subaru Telescope imaged the small asteroid 1998 KY26, the target of Hayabusa2's extended mission. The positional data for 1998 KY26 collected during the observations will be used to more accurately determine the orbital elements of this object.

Operated by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the asteroid explorer Hayabusa2 delivered a reentry capsule to Earth containing samples from the asteroid (162173) Ryugu on December 6 (Japan Standard Time). After this drop-off, Hayabusa2 set out again, this time for the extended mission utilizing its remaining fuel. In this extended mission, Hayabsa2 is supposed to approach and observe its next target, the small asteroid 1998 KY26.

This asteroid is predicted to approach to within 0.47 AU of Earth in mid to late December 2020, giving us a rare opportunity that comes only once every three and a half years. However, the diameter of 1998 KY26 is estimated to be no more than 30 meters, and thus its brightness is so dim that ground-based observations of the asteroid are difficult without a very large telescope.

The observations with the Subaru Telescope were conducted upon the request of the Institute for Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), JAXA. And as a result, 1998 KY26 was photographed in the direction of the constellation Gemini as a 25.4-magnitude point of light with a measurement uncertainty of 0.7 mag. The positional data collected during these observations will be used to improve the accuracy of the orbital elements of the asteroid. Similar observations were conducted with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

"We successfully photographed the next target asteroid for Hayabusa2. We hope that these data will facilitate Hayabusa2's new mission," says Dr. Michitoshi Yoshida, Director of Subaru Telescope.

"After returning its reentry capsule to Earth, Hayabusa2 departed for a new target object, a small asteroid known as 1998 KY26. This will be the first mission to this small of an asteroid, so it is very meaningful both in terms of planetary science and planetary defense (protecting Earth from collisions with stellar objects). These Subaru Telescope observations will not only become very important data for Hayabusa2's extended mission, they will also give a boost to future missions. We are grateful to everyone at Subaru Telescope." says Dr. Makoto Yoshikawa, the Hayabusa2 Mission Manager at ISAS, JAXA.

New research from Brigham Young University finds college students could be just as at risk for developing skin cancer in the dead of winter as they are in the middle of summer.

The study, published by researchers in BYU's College of Nursing, finds college students almost never use sunscreen, and they use tanning beds far too often, with a significant uptick in colder months. Those two factors, combined with increased exposure to ultraviolet (UV) rays reflecting off snow and ice, means that winter can be just as devastating to skin.

"The worst sunburn I ever got was when I went skiing and didn't put on sunscreen," said senior study author Katreena Merrill, a BYU professor of nursing. "Many people think they will be fine in the winter, but it's just as important to protect yourself in the winter sun as it is the summer sun."

Skin cancer is the most prevalent cancer in the United States, with more people diagnosed each year than all other cancers combined. According to the Skin Cancer Foundation, one in five Americans will develop skin cancer by 70, and having five or more sunburns doubles your risk for melanoma.

The study from Merrill and grad student Emily Graham finds that only 9% of college students surveyed use sunscreen and that tanning bed use surges in winter, especially among men. (Studies have shown more than 50% of college students use tanning beds.) Tanning beds use ultraviolet radiation, which is known to damage skin. People who use tanning beds before 35 increase their risk of melanoma by 75%, according to the CDC.

"Tanning beds are very purposefully exposing your skin to potential cancer," Merrill said. "UV radiation comes from the sun and artificially from tanning beds. It penetrates through glass and clouds, damaging the cell's DNA and aging skin."

The study also analyzed protective behaviors by phenotypic risk, another key factor in developing skin cancer. Phenotypic risk is associated with skin types that contain different amounts of melanin. Melano-compromised individuals, often those with fairer skin and red hair, lack melanin and are at the highest risk of developing skin cancer.

Surprisingly, researchers found fair-skinned students are no more likely to wear sunscreen as their lower-risk friends and are just as likely to go tanning.

"Not enough college-aged individuals are wearing sunblock consistently," said Graham, lead author and current MD candidate at the University of Utah. "That's especially concerning in Utah, which has the highest incidence of melanoma in the country."

Merrill said students need to be more proactive about protecting their skin while they are still young. She suggests not only using sunscreen year-round when in the sun, but also wearing hats and clothing as protection. And she pleads with students to avoid purposefully getting a base tan "or any kind of tan" from a tanning bed.

"There is something you can do and something you cannot do," she said.

A combination of astrophysical measurements has allowed researchers to put new constraints on the radius of a typical neutron star and provide a novel calculation of the Hubble constant that indicates the rate at which the universe is expanding.

"We studied signals that came from various sources, for example recently observed mergers of neutron stars," said Ingo Tews, a theorist in Nuclear and Particle Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who worked with an international collaboration of researchers on the analysis to appear in the journal Science on December 18. "We jointly analyzed gravitational-wave signals and electromagnetic emissions from the mergers, and combined them with previous mass measurements of pulsars or recent results from NASA's Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer. We find that the radius of a typical neutron star is about 11.75 kilometers and the Hubble constant is approximately 66.2 kilometers per second per megaparsec."

Combining signals to gain insight into distant astrophysical phenomena is known in the field as multi-messenger astronomy. In this case, the researchers' multi-messenger analysis allowed them to restrict the uncertainty of their estimate of neutron star radii to within 800 meters.

Their novel approach to measuring the Hubble constant contributes to a debate that has arisen from other, competing determinations of the universe's expansion. Measurements based on observations of exploding stars known as supernovae are currently at odds with those that come from looking at the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which is essentially the left over energy from the Big Bang. The uncertainties in the new multimessenger Hubble calculation are too large to definitively resolve the disagreement, but the measurement is slightly more supportive of the CMB approach.

Tews' primary scientific role in the study was to provide the input from nuclear theory calculations that are the starting point of the analysis. His seven collaborators on the paper comprise an international team of scientists from Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, and the United States.

A combination of astrophysical measurements has allowed researchers to put novel constraints on the radius of a typical neutron star and provide a new calculation of the Hubble constant that indicates the rate at which the universe is expanding.

"We studied signals that came from various sources, for example recently observed mergers of neutron stars," said Ingo Tews, a theorist in Nuclear and Particle Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who worked with an international collaboration of researchers on the analysis to appear in the journal Science on December 18. "We jointly analyzed gravitational-wave signals and electromagnetic emissions from the mergers, and combined them with previous mass measurements of pulsars or recent results from NASA's Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer. We find that the radius of a typical neutron star is about 11.75 kilometers and the Hubble constant is approximately 66.2 kilometers per second per megaparsec."

Combining signals to gain insight into distant astrophysical phenomena is known in the field as multi-messenger astronomy. In this case, the researchers' multi-messenger analysis allowed them to restrict the uncertainty of their estimate of neutron star radii to within 800 meters.

Their novel approach to measuring the Hubble constant contributes to a debate that has arisen from other, competing determinations of the universe's expansion. Measurements based on observations of exploding stars known as supernovae are currently at odds with those that come from looking at the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which is essentially the left over energy from the Big Bang. The uncertainties in the new multimessenger Hubble calculation are too large to definitively resolve the disagreement, but the measurement is slightly more supportive of the CMB approach.

Tews' primary scientific role in the study was to provide the input from nuclear theory calculations that are the starting point of the analysis. His seven collaborators on the paper comprise an international team of scientists from Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, and the United States.

WSU researchers have developed a sustainable wastewater treatment system that relies on electron-producing microbial communities to clean the water.

The work could someday lead to reduced reliance on the energy-intensive processes that are used to move and treat wastewater, which accounts for as much as two percent of the total electrical energy consumption in the United States.

Led by Abdelrhman Mohamed, postdoctoral research associate, and Haluk Beyenal, Paul Hohenschuh Distinguished Professor in the Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, the researchers report on their work in the journal, Bioelectrochemistry.

In wastewater treatment, aeration is an energy intensive and necessary procedure to remove contaminants. Pumps work continuously to mix air into water, adding oxygen that bacteria then use to oxidize organic matter and contaminants. In their work, the researchers used a unique microbial fuel cell system they developed as a substitute for external aeration.

"If we cut the energy use even by a small percentage in the U.S., that is billions of dollars in annual costs," said Mohamed. "Energy costs are one part but that also means reducing environmental emissions, too."

Microbial fuel cells work by having microbes convert chemical energy to electricity in a manner that is similar to a battery. They don't generate a lot of electricity, so they have been used in low-power applications especially in remote areas where batteries are not feasible.

In the case of wastewater treatment, the microbial fuel cell can fill the role that aeration and oxygen plays - accepting electrons that bacteria generate as a product of their metabolic work.

In addition to substituting for the oxygen, the system can also generate a small amount of electricity, which can be used to do additional aeration.

"We tried to think about it in two steps," said Mohamed. "We lower the energy costs because you don't have to aerate and add oxygen, but the second part is we generate a little power that we can use for some useful applications in the wastewater treatment plant itself."

"It's like we're double dipping," added Beyenal. "We use the electrodes and then the electron acceptor to promote microbial growth. On the other hand, we gain a little bit of electricity for the pump and to aerate. With this approach it is more powerful and can treat the wastewater faster."

The fuel cells have been used experimentally in wastewater treatment systems under ideal conditions, but under real-world and varying conditions, they often fail.

"The microbial fuel cells lack internal regulation controlling the potential of anodes and cathodes, and thus cell potential," said Mohamed. "This can cause system failure."

In the system the WSU team developed, the researchers added an extra electrode that allows additional control to their fuel cell system. The system is switchable. It can either work by itself as a microbial fuel cell, using no energy as it slowly cleans up waste, or it can be switched to one that uses a smaller amount of energy than aeration and that cleans more intensively. Mohamed invented a cheap portable electronic device that controls the electrodes.

The researchers were able to operate their system for a year in the laboratory without failure as well as at the pilot scale at a test wastewater treatment facility in Moscow, Idaho. The pilot scale treatment facility is owned and operated by University of Idaho Environmental Engineering Professor Erik R. Coats, who was a collaborator on the project. The system removed waste at comparable rates to aeration.

The system could potentially be used entirely independently from the power grid, and the researchers hope it could someday be used for small scale wastewater treatment facilities, such as for clean up around cattle operations or in very rural areas.

"Over time, we have made a lot of progress," said Mohamed, who first became interested in microbial fuel cells as an undergraduate at WSU. "There are still challenges that we need to overcome to see this as a real application, but it's exciting to see the field moving significantly over a period of time."

"These are difficult systems to build," added Beyenal. "I think everything is so easy when I write the proposal, but this takes a lot of time and a lot of new discovery. There is nothing like this on the market."

Osaka, Japan - Researchers from the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research at Osaka University have devised a new method to determine the degree of fibrillation in wood pulp. By taking advantage of the intrinsic optical birefringence of cellulose, they were able to measure the morphology change through optical retardation distribution. This work may lead to clear grading and smart utilization of renewable biomass, cellulose nanofibers.

Cellulose, the primary structural component of most plants, has been harvested by humanity for millennia as an important biomaterial for clothing, paper, and wooden structures. More recently, cellulose nanofibers have been produced, which have the advantage of various functionalities derived from the extended chain crystals that make up cellulose, including optical birefringence. Birefringence occurs when the effective speed of light inside a material depends on its polarization; in this case, whether the light is polarized parallel or perpendicular to the polymer chains.

Now, a team of scientists at Osaka University has developed an optical analysis system that can directly quantify the degree of fibrillation of wood pulps. Fibrillation is the process of decreasing the bundling of cellulose molecules in micro-scale pulp fibers to form nanoscale fibers. Compared with painstakingly measuring fiber widths with an electron microscope, this technique quickly and easily determines if the cellulose fibers are aligned or dispersed in random orientations. "Our system offers clear and quantifiable criteria for grading the quality of cellulose nanofibers," says first author Kojiro Uetani.

This is accomplished by observing cellulose fibers in a quartz flow cell with a birefringence microscope. The sample is illuminated from below with circularly polarized light, which has an electrical field orientation that rotates in space like a helix. Regions of the fibers with large birefringence will cause a larger optical retardation in the phase of the light. Using a birefringence microscope, the researchers were able to record this value pixel-by-pixel. They found that both the average optical retardation and its standard deviation were correlated with the degree of fibrillation. Large retardation values were associated with intact pulp fibers, while smaller values were seen with balloon-like structure in fibrillating pulps, and very small values occurred with dispersed nanofibers.

"We hope to promote the precise structure control and advanced use of wood pulps and cellulose nanofibers," says senior author Masaya Nogi. In addition to the results of the article described above, the team has also confirmed that it is possible to automatically determine the degree of fibrillation of unknown pulp samples by deep learning of retardation images. This system is expected to lead to a clearer and more automatic definition of the degree of fibrillation by artificial intelligence (AI) in the future and will become a key analysis technology for indicating the quality of pulp materials and cellulose nanofibers.

When the corona pandemic began in March, it fundamentally changed many people's everyday lives. A normal working day, vibrant public life, carefree social contacts - all these things now seem like a memory from another age. In order to find out what effects these restrictions are having on people's emotional well-being, the researchers carried out a survey on how people dealt with the pandemic. "Our analyses showed that most people have been doing relatively well during these times," explains Lara Kröncke from Münster University's Institute of Psychology. Kröncke is a PhD student and she headed the study. "These results match other studies showing that most people are coping with the restrictions better than expected," she adds.

The study consisted of two parts and began shortly before the start of the first lockdown in Germany on March 18. In a wide-ranging online questionnaire, those taking part first supplied personal details, as well as information relating to their personal attitudes and behaviours in dealing with the coronavirus. This was followed by a two-week phase, lasting till April 3, of further short questions which the participants - over 1,600 in number - received on their smartphones several times a day. The questions related, for example, to their current emotional state and to social interactions.

"There were some people who frequently experienced emotions such as fear and uncertainty and who were emotionally more unstable - in other words, who reported stronger emotional mood swings," says Kröncke. In order to find out which groups of people were affected the most, the team of researchers compared the impact of demographic features and personality traits on emotional well-being in everyday life. Here, the personality trait of neuroticism - the tendency to be insecure and nervous and to have a negative view on oneself, the world and the future - turned out to be the greatest risk factor for emotional problems. Over the entire period of the study, neurotic people reported experiencing more negative feelings and greater affective variability. They also paid more attention to coronavirus and worried more about their health. This in turn reinforced negative feelings such as fear, uncertainty and tension in neurotic people in particular. The impact of neuroticism on people's emotional state was actually higher than the influence of demographic factors such as gender, age and health status. "These findings show that our personality exerts a decisive influence on how we deal with the crisis," is how co-author Prof. Mitja Back from the Institute of Psychology summarises the results.

These results can be used to identify people who have a particularly high risk of suffering emotional problems during the corona crisis. "This is important if we specifically want to address risk groups," explains Lara Kröncke. Future studies should examine which measures are especially effective in the case of these people, and how their emotional well-being develops over a longer period of time.

An international team of researchers has developed a new nanomaterial from the silk produced by the Tetranychus lintearius mite. This nanomaterial has the ability to penetrate human cells without damaging them and, therefore, has "promising biomedical properties".

The Nature Scientific Reports journal has published an article by an international scientific team led by Miodrag Grbi?, a researcher from the universities of La Rioja (Spain), Western Ontario (Canada) and Belgrade (Serbia), in its latest issue entitled 'The silk of gorse spider mite Tetranychus lintearius represents a novel natural source of nanoparticles and biomaterials' (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-74766-7).

In it, researchers from the Murcian Institute for Agricultural and Food Research and Development (IMIDA), the Barcelona Institute of Photonic Sciences, the University of Western Ontario (Canada), the University of Belgrade (Serbia) and the University of La Rioja describe the discovery and characterisation of this mite silk. They also demonstrate its great potential as a source of nanoparticles and biomaterials for medical and technological uses.

The interest of this new material, which is more resistant than steel, ultra flexible, nano-sized, biodegradable, biocompatible and has an excellent ability to penetrate human cells without damaging them, lies in its natural character and its size (a thousand times smaller than human hair), which facilitates cell penetration.

These characteristics are ideal for use in pharmacology and biomedicine since it is biocompatible with organic tissues (stimulates cell proliferation without producing toxicity) and, in principle, biodegradable due to its protein structure (it does not produce residues).

Researcher Miodrag Grbi?, who heads the international group that has researched this mite silk, highlights "its enormous potential for biomedical applications, as thanks to its size it is able to easily penetrate both healthy and cancerous human cells", which makes it ideal for transporting drugs in cancer therapies, as well as for the development of biosensors to detect pathogens and viruses.

THE 'RIOJANO BUG'

Tetranychus lintearius is an endemic mite from the European Atlantic coast that feeds exclusively on gorse (Ulex europaeus). It is around 0.3 mm in size, making it smaller than the comma on a keyboard, while the strength of its silk is twice as high as standard spider silk.

It is a very rare species that has only been found so far in the municipality of Valgañón (La Rioja, Spain), in Sierra de la Demanda. It was located thanks to the collaboration of Rosario García, a botanist and former dean of the Faculty of Science and Technology at the University of La Rioja, which is why researchers call it "the Rioja bug" ("El Bicho Riojano").

The resistance of the silk produced by Tetranychus lintearius is twice that of spider silk, a standard material used for this type of research, and stronger than steel. It also has advantages over the fibres secreted by the silkworm due to its higher Young's modulus, its electrical charge and its smaller size. These characteristics, along with its lightness, make it a promising natural nanomaterial for technological uses.

This finding is the result of work carried out by the international group of researchers led by Miodrag Grbi?, who sequenced the genome of the red spider Tetranychus urticae in 2011, publishing the results in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10640.

Unlike the red spider (Tetranychus urticae), the gorse mite (Tetranychus lintearius) produces a large amount of silk. It has been reared in the laboratories of the Department of Agriculture and Food of the University of La Rioja, under the care of Professor Ignacio Pérez Moreno, allowing research to continue. Red spider silk is difficult to handle and has a lower production rate.