Culture

A new study from the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology shows that the behavioral responses to COVID-19 differed by age. The research, led by Jung Ki Kim, research associate professor at the USC Leonard Davis School, examined how age affected the practice of preventive and risky behaviors in response to COVID-19 and how these behaviors changed over the first three months of the pandemic.

The article was co-authored by University Professor Eileen Crimmins, holder of the AARP Chair in Gerontology, and appeared online in the journal PLOS One on November 10, 2020.

Among the study's findings:

At the beginning of the quarantine period, older people were no more likely than younger people to practice preventive behaviors in response to the pandemic. In fact, in March, older people were no different from younger people in their engagement in wearing a facemask, washing hands frequently, canceling personal and social activities, and avoiding high-risk people, public places and eating at restaurants. However by May, older people were more likely to implement such behaviors.

Except for wearing a mask, people adopted preventive activities in the first month but then reduced the modification of their behaviors somewhat after April, so that the percentage of people taking these preventive behaviors was lower in May than April. However, the use of facemasks continued to increase over time such that the percentage in May was about double that of April.

In terms of risky behaviors, older people were less likely than younger people to have close contact with non-household people and less likely to go to other people's homes a month after the pandemic started. However, both younger and older people tended to resume these potentially risky social behaviors as the pandemic progressed.

"It is encouraging to observe older people taking more preventive personal behaviors as the pandemic progressed as this may have alleviated their risk of infection," said Kim. "However, at the same time, it is concerning that people increased risky social behaviors over time, particularly older people, who could have more adverse consequences from meeting with family and friends."

The researchers speculate that some risky behaviors, such as visiting or being visited by non-household friends and relatives, may be behaviors that people, regardless of age, cannot forgo for months.

Kim and Crimmins analyzed three waves of response data from the Understanding America Study's COVID-19 panel on how often more than 5000 participants, ranging in age from 18 to 101 and categorized into age groups of 18-34, 35-54, 55-64, and 65+, performed five virus-mitigating behaviors during the months of March, April and May of the coronavirus pandemic: (1) wearing a face mask, (2) washing hands with soap or using hand sanitizer several times per day, (3) canceling or postponing personal or social activities, (4) avoiding eating at restaurants, (5) and avoiding public spaces, gatherings or crowds. In addition, they also looked at risky health behaviors: going to another person's residence; having outside visitors such as friends, neighbors or relatives at one's home; attending a gathering with more than 10 people, such as a party, concert or religious service; or having close contact (within six feet) with someone who doesn't live with the respondent.

"Because there is no immediate cure and little treatment for the condition, while scientists are attempting to develop and distribute a vaccine, proper personal and social practices may be the only route to reducing infection for older people," said Kim. "Given more severe consequences for older people once infected, older people should be strongly encouraged to continue taking
preventive personal behaviors and not to increase risky behaviors since the virus could be transmitted during these activities."

In addition to age, the researchers also found that other characteristics are related to behavior during the ongoing pandemic: being female, Black, Hispanic or Asian; having a higher education; having underlying conditions; residing in a state where the COVID-19 outbreak was more prevalent; and trusting CNN more than Fox News were all linked to practicing more preventive behaviors in response to COVID-19.

The researchers say that the consistently higher preventive behavioral response of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians may reflect the knowledge that the pandemic was differentially affecting communities of color. They add that proper work accommodations and protective guidelines may need to be made for persons who are engaging in risky behaviors out of necessity. They also say that people may also respond to state and local government mandates and campaigns on the importance of face covering in states where infection cases are greater, and that apolitical, scientifically based recommendations for behavior through the media could have changed behaviors.

Arguably, almost all truly intriguing systems are ones that are far away from equilibrium -- such as stars, planetary atmospheres, and even digital circuits. But, until now, systems far from thermal equilibrium couldn't be analyzed with conventional thermodynamics and statistical physics.

When physicists first explored thermodynamics and statistical physics during the 1800s, and through the 1900s, they focused on analyzing physical systems that are at or near equilibrium. Conventional thermodynamics and statistical physics have also focused on macroscopic systems, which contain few, if any, explicitly distinguished subsystems.

In a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, physicist David Wolpert of the Santa Fe Institute presents a new hybrid formalism to overcome all of these limitations.

Fortunately, at the turn of the millennium, "a formalism now known as nonequilibrium statistical physics was developed," says Wolpert. "It applies to systems that are arbitrarily far away from equilibrium and of any size."

Nonequilibrium statistical physics is so powerful that it has resolved one of the deepest mysteries about the nature of time: how does entropy evolve within an intermediate regime? This is the space between the macroscopic world, where the second law of thermodynamics tells us that it must always increase, and the microscopic world where it can't ever change.

We now know it's only the expected entropy of a system that can't decrease with time. "There's always a non-zero probability that any particular sample of the dynamics of a system will result in decreasing entropy -- and the probability of shrinking entropy grows as the system gets smaller," he says.

At the same time that this revolution in statistical physics was occurring, major advances involving so-called graphical models were being made within the machine learning community.

In particular, the formalism of Bayesian networks was developed, which provides a method to specify systems with many subsystems that interact probabilistically with each other. Bayes nets can be used to formally describe the synchronous evolution of the elements of a digital circuit -- fully accounting for noise within that evolution.

Wolpert combined these advances into a hybrid formalism, which is allowing him to explore thermodynamics of off-equilibrium systems that have many explicitly distinguished subsystems coevolving according to a Bayes net.

As an example of the power of this new formalism, Wolpert derived results showing the relationship between three quantities of interest in studying nanoscale systems like biological cells: the statistical precision of any arbitrarily defined current within the subsystem (such as the probabilities that the currents differ from their average values), the heat generated by running the overall Bayes net composed of those subsystems, and the graphical structure of that Bayes net.

"Now we can start to analyze how the thermodynamics of systems ranging from cells to digital circuits depend on the network structures connecting the subsystems of those systems," says Wolpert.

On 29 October 2020, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) announced the "successful recovery" of the US gray wolf population, with US Secretary of the Interior Secretary David Bernhardt stating that the species had "exceeded all conservation goals for recovery." These claims have been rebutted by numerous experts, who argue that the delisting decision is premature.
Writing in BioScience, independent ecologist Carlos Carroll and colleagues argue that the declarations of recovery should be based on a more ambitious definition of recovery than one requiring the existence of a single secure population. Instead, they propose a framework for the "conservation of adaptive potential," which builds on existing agency practice to enhance the effectiveness of the Act. The authors argue that such an approach is particularly crucial in light of climate change and other ongoing threats to species.
On this episode of BioScience Talks, Dr. Carroll is joined by coauthors Adrian Treves, Bridgett vonHoldt, and Dan Rohlf to discuss the recent USFWS action as well as prospects for gray wolf conservation.

To hear the whole discussion, visit this link for this latest episode of the BioScience Talks podcast.

Yale researchers have discovered a protein that helps protect hosts from infection with the tick-borne spirochete that causes Lyme Disease, a finding that may help diagnose and treat this infection, they report Nov. 11 in the journal PLOS Pathogens.

Lyme Disease is the most common vector-borne disease in North America and is transmitted by ticks infected with the spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi. The course of the disease varies among individuals, with the majority experiencing mild symptoms easily treated by antibiotics. However, in some cases of untreated Lyme the infection can spread to the heart, joints, nervous system, and other organs.

For the study, the Yale team expressed more than 1,000 human genes in yeast and analyzed their interactions with 36 samples of B. burgdorferi. They found that one protein, Peptidoglycan Recognition Protein 1 (PGLYRP1), acts like an early warning signal to the immune system when exposed to the bacteria. When exposed to the Lyme spirochete, mice lacking PGLYRP1 had much higher levels of B. burgdorferi than mice with the protein and showed signs of immune system dysfunction, the researchers report.

"Stimulating the ability of people to make more of this protein could help fight infection," said Yale's Erol Fikrig, the Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) and professor of epidemiology (microbial diseases) and of microbial pathogenesis and co-corresponding author of the study.

Fikrig and his colleagues are also investigating whether people with higher levels of PGLYRP1 may be less susceptible to infection by B. burgdorferi, which would help explain why some infected individuals have better outcomes.

Management scholars generally agree that being proactive at work yields positive outcomes. Studies show proactive -- as compared to reactive -- people tend to perform at higher levels.

A new study from the University of Notre Dame offers the first examination of proactive personality in times of immediate response to a crisis -- the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic at a hospital in Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak. The general hospital where the study took place had been instructed by the central government to immediately transition to a COVID-19 hospital, and as the crisis unfolded the researchers were able to collect real-time data from more than 400 doctors and nurses who had to shift from their previous specialties to respiratory medicine -- an area for which they were not previously trained.

"When there is a will there is a way: The role of proactive personality in combating COVID-19" is forthcoming in the Journal of Applied Psychology from Mike Crant, the Mary Jo and Richard M. Kovacevich Professor of Excellence in Leadership Instruction at Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business. Crant, a longtime researcher in the area of workplace behavior, is one of the creators of the proactive personality scale, the most frequently used measure of proactivity in the organizational literature.

Relying primarily on a public health care system, China's hospitals are crowded even in normal times, especially in large and fast-growing areas of the country like Wuhan.

The hospital provided a unique window through which to learn about job performance during a time of incredible stress in the formative days of the pandemic when very little was known about the nature of COVID-19 and its treatment.

The team surveyed the doctors and nurses three times during the first four months of the transition to a COVID-19 hospital. They collected information on their proactivity, how they redesigned their jobs, and COVID-related factors like exposure to the virus and routine disruption. They also asked about their well-being (resilience and thriving), collected performance data from supervisors and obtained performance bonus data from the human resources department.

Proactive individuals have a tendency to create change through personal initiative. They are better at scanning for and creating opportunities to make things better. People have unique characteristics and abilities that make them more engaged at work, and allow them to perform at higher levels. But not all jobs bring out these strengths. The transition to working exclusively with COVID-19 patients created an opportunity for proactive people to redesign their jobs in a way that allowed them to play from their strengths.

"We found that having a proactive personality was a tremendous benefit to doctors and nurses working to combat this new and deadly disease," Crant said. "More proactive doctors and nurses were able to redesign their jobs more effectively in a way that allowed them to capitalize on their personal strengths. That, in turn, led to higher job performance and greater well-being. These effects were magnified for doctors and nurses who experienced greater exposure to the virus, whose jobs were more upended because of the transition to COVID-19 medicine, and when they felt more support from their colleagues and hospital administration. This latter finding suggests that factors specific to COVID-19 strongly affected the doctors' and nurses' performance and well-being."

The team studied two elements of well-being -- resilience and thriving. Resilience refers to how you deal with adversity or how you rebound from threatening circumstances. Thriving is having a sense of vitality and learning at work. Their data also showed the doctors and nurses who redesigned their jobs more effectively to utilize their strengths suffered less insomnia during this stressful period.

"Imagine if your job were changed to another that had nothing to do with your previous work," Crant said. "And you were overwhelmed with more work than ever. Add to that an element of danger -- you significantly increased your risk of catching a deadly disease by doing this new job. That is the situation the frontline health care professionals found themselves in. Not everyone performed at the same level, nor did they deal with the stress equally effectively."

The unique study confirmed the importance of being proactive rather than reactive in a novel setting, indicating that leaders of organizations facing crises should emphasize the importance of crafting employees' jobs to align with their strengths.

"Proactivity is a valuable resource in dealing with the stress associated with a crisis, so emphasizing that to employees at all levels is advisable," Crant said. "We also found that perceived organizational support played a crucial role in the success of the doctors and nurses. It is vital for employees on the frontlines of a crisis to feel that the organization and people who work there have their backs."

Artificial intelligence is supposed to make machines perform at ever more amazing levels. A robot that can do little more than a remote-controlled model car has a limited range of applications. But from an automatic machine to an autonomous robot, it is a big, almost revolutionary step. Robotics researchers Mirko Kovac and Aslan Miriyev, who both work at Empa's "Materials and Technology Center of Robotics" in Dübendorf and at the "Aerial Robotics Lab" of Imperial College London, are convinced that one decisive component can make this evolutionary step possible: Physical artificial intelligence, PAI for short. Only when the artificial intelligence of a digital "brain" is merged with an intelligent body could new types of robots be created that have properties comparable to those of intelligent living organisms. They have now published their concept in the latest issue of the renowned scientific journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

Thinking outside the box

In order to develop fully autonomous, intelligent robot systems, researchers must recognize and utilize the synergies of different disciplines, such as materials science, biology, mechanical engineering, chemistry and computer science, according to the Empa scientists. "We imagine that PAI robots will only become reality through the use of a variety of unconventional materials and by combining research methods from various disciplines," says Mirko Kovac. To do this, researchers would need a much broader range of skills than is usually seen in conventional robotics. Interdisciplinary cooperation, partnerships and an adaptation of the curriculum for young researchers are therefore called for. "Working in a multidisciplinary environment requires courage and constant learning. Researchers must leave their comfort zones and think beyond the boundaries of their own field".

Symbiosis of man and machine

The Empa researchers want to promote the vision of a society in which people are "living" together seamlessly with machines. "This symbiosis can only be achieved if safe interaction is possible and if the machines have true, Physical AI, allowing them to live like benevolent animals together with nature and people," says Kovac. The researchers now hope that their work will encourage active discussion of the topic.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- An implantable smart wrap that fits safely and securely around the bladder may one day help people who have under-active bladders, a condition that hinders patients from urinating regularly and comfortably, according to an international team of researchers.

In a study, the implant, which combines sensors and a polymer wrap, is an integrated device that can detect when the bladder needs to be completely emptied and then send a signal to a polymer web with an electronic thread that expands or contracts with the bladder. After the bladder is emptied, the band returns to its initial formation.

"Researchers have been interested in studying urinary control for a while because a lot of diseases and conditions are related to this," said Larry Cheng, the Dorothy Quiggle Professor in Engineering and an affiliate of the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. "There are two conditions in particular that researchers have been studying. The first condition is to force the urine out of the bladder when the muscle might be in a diseased state so that it really can't provide enough force to get the urine out. The second is an overactive bladder, in which an individual experiences the sudden or frequent tendency to urinate, which is related to urinary incontinence."

The device, which was tested in mice, uses sensors to enable precise monitoring in real-time of the bladder to address the under-active bladder condition, he added.

Cheng said that past research focused on a mechanical aid to stress the bladder and encourage urination, but the option is difficult to implement and the wrap that surrounded the bladder can slip off. The researchers, who published their findings in Science Advances, said they designed a serpentine-shaped polymer wrap to create a wrap that can stay in place, while expanding to suit the changing shape of the bladder during urination. It can also hold all the necessary sensors and wiring.

"With the serpentine design built into the structure, we can stretch it to a much bigger geometry," said Cheng. "So, if we stretch that serpentine wrap, which is placed around and against the bladder, it would provide a sufficient force to hold the electronic thread with the sensors in place so that it won't be able to slip off."

The microLEDs, which are an array of micro light-emitting diodes, on the electronic thread are designed to deliver light to the bladder for optogenetic neuromodulation, which modulates the function of the targeted organ.

Cheng said that the device is made from materials that are biologically safe and designed to operate for long-time operation in the body. The wrap does not need sutures or glue to be held in place, which is another benefit, he added.

The team used computational resources from ICDS to investigate various designs of the polymer wrap.

"The computational power is really useful because we needed to design this polymer wrap to different geometries," said Cheng. "In this case, we had two different geometries that we investigated. One is a straight line and the other is the serpentine design. And, of course, we tried a few others, so the computational power allowed us to look at different polymer designs and then single out the best one to use."

In the future, the researchers said the wrap might be re-tooled to help people who have unconscious urination due to overactive bladders. The "smart wrap" implant may also help people with other disease conditions to go from diagnostic confirmation to advanced therapeutic options in clinical medicine.

Below please find a summary and link(s) of new coronavirus-related content published today in Annals of Internal Medicine. The summary below is not intended to substitute for the full article as a source of information. A collection of coronavirus-related content is free to the public at http://go.annals.org/coronavirus.

1. Insights From Rapid Deployment of a "Virtual Hospital" as Standard Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has been disrupting traditional health care operations by overwhelming system resource capacity, but also has created opportunities for care innovation. Researchers from Atrium Health describe the development and rapid deployment of a virtual hospital program, Atrium Health hospital at home (AH-HaH), within a large health care system.

During their study, 1,477 patients with COVID-19 received care through a virtual observation unit (VOU) and/or a virtual acute care unit (VACU) with a median stay of 11 days. Of these, 1,293 patients received care in the VOU, and 40 patients required inpatient hospitalization. Of those 40 patients, 16 spent time in the ICU, 7 required ventilator support, and two died during hospital admission. In total, 184 patients were ever admitted to the VACU, in which 22 percent required respiratory inhaler or nebulizer treatments, 22 percent used supplemental oxygen, and 13 percent (24 patients) were admitted as an inpatient to a conventional hospital.

The researchers note that their study has limitations, such as needing patients with a working telephone and ability to comply with monitoring protocols. Overall, virtual hospital programs have the potential to provide health systems with additional inpatient capacity during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Read the full text: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-4076.

Media contacts: A PDF for this article is not yet available. Please click the link to read full text. The lead corresponding author, Kranthi Sitammagari, MD, can be reached directly at Kranthi.sitammagari@atriumhealth.org or 914-413-9406.

2. Sixty-Day Outcomes Among Patients Hospitalized With COVID-19

Although characteristics and in-hospital outcomes for persons with COVID-19 have been well described, less is known about the longer-term outcomes of hospitalized patients. Authors from the University of Michigan Health System and The Michigan Hospital Medicine Safety Collaborative describe 60-day postdischarge clinical, financial, and mental health outcomes of patients with COVID-19.

The authors reviewed patients hospitalized with COVID-19 at 38 participating hospitals and found nearly one in three patients died during hospitalization or within 60 days of discharge. For most patients who survived, ongoing morbidity, including the inability to return to normal activities, physical and emotional symptoms, and financial loss, was common. Adverse events after COVID-19 hospitalization are common and the authors emphasize that policies and clinical and research programs targeting these are much needed. Read the full text: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-5661.

Media contacts: A PDF for this article is not yet available. Please click the link to read full text. The lead author, Vineet Chopra MD, MSc, can be reached through Kara Gavin at kegavin@med.umich.edu.

"Age gates" that aim to keep underage users off alcohol websites are mostly ineffective, a Texas A&M University alcohol researcher found.

"Alcohol brand age gates are weak, at best, and likely an inconsequential barrier that someone with limited math abilities can easily overcome," said Adam Barry, a professor in the Department of Health and Kinesiology.

Age gates are virtual barriers intended to prevent people of ceratin age groups from accessing a website. Alcohol brand sites employ them to ensure the user attempting entry is of legal drinking age. Users are typically asked if they are 21 years of age or older, or asked to enter their birth date.

Barry's research, which was recently published in Alcohol or Alcoholism, assessed the effectiveness of the digital age gates of the top alcohol brands among American adolescents. The study found that for the vast majority of the sites, users could gain access after continuously entering dates of birth until eventually providing one indicating they were older than 21. Many sites also had no process for verifing the accuracy of the provided date of birth.

Barry is a health behavior social scientist with training and expertise in alcohol use, alcohol-induced impairment and intoxication. He said exposure to alcohol advertising can alter an adolescent's views, perceptions and expectations on alcohol consumption.

"Exposure to alcohol advertising has been linked to underage alcohol-related behaviors and intentions to consume alcohol," Barry said.

Barry's research examined alcohol webpages, but he also found that alcohol advertising on social media platforms is problematic. He said it's important to ensure that young people are not marketed to, don't interact with inappropriate content and don't fall prey to predators. However, this is often not the case.

"Unfortunately, the current strategies employed, such as asking for a birthdate, feel more like industry is concerned about their liability, as opposed to the welfare of users," Barry said.

He hopes to raise awareness of the lack of regulation in alcohol marketing. Brands themselves control the "safety measures" in place, rather than a larger entity.

"Currently, there is no formal legislation in the United States prohibiting alcohol advertisements that appeal to adolescents, the placement of alcohol advertising or how the age affirmation process and outcomes should be implemented," Barry said.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers have discovered a previously undescribed population of neurons that help control our eyes as they view in three-dimensional space.

During normal viewing, we direct our eyes between objects in the three-dimensional space many times a minute. With each change, the left and right eyes will rotate, generally in the same direction, but mostly by different degrees of rotation. These unequal movements are known as disjunctive saccades.

Disjunctive saccades differ from two other eye movements: one, called conjugate saccades, where the eyes rotate in unison, and one called symmetrical vergence eye movements, where the eyes rotate in equal but opposite directions. The underlying mechanism for disjunctive saccades is not known.

Several models of eye movement predicted the existence of a population of neurons called saccade-vergence burst neurons, or SVBNs, that would produce a burst of activity solely during disjunctive saccades, while not firing during the other two types of eye movements.

The UAB researchers, led by Julie Quinet, Ph.D., hunted for these putative neurons in a region of the midbrain located near to the oculomotor nucleus called the central mesencephalic reticular formation, or cMRF. Recent anatomical studies had suggested that the cMRF might contain premotor neurons involved in the neural control of disjunctive saccades.

Using brain recordings from trained rhesus monkeys, Quinet and colleagues found and recorded 18 SVBNs in the cMRF. "To our knowledge," said Quinet, a researcher V in the UAB Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, "no such class of cells has been reported in prior recording studies."

This novel population of SVBNs displayed three unique characteristics that were predicted by models: 1) The neurons discharged when animals performed a disjunctive saccade; 2) The neurons remained silent during the unison eye movement called conjugate saccades and also during the eye movement when the eyes rotate in equal but opposite directions, called symmetric vergence eye movement, and; 3) The neurons burst without regard to the direction -- rightward or leftward -- of the disjunctive saccade. Furthermore, the bursts of spikes during disjunctive saccades were highly correlated with vergence velocity -- the speed at which the eyes move toward or away from each other.

Intriguingly, half of the recorded cells increased their firing rate for convergence disjunctive saccades, while half increased their firing rate for divergence disjunctive saccades.

Quinet and colleagues say that further studies of disjunctive saccades in brain areas that may supply input to SVBNs can help explain and advance solutions to treat strabismus, a condition in which eyes do not properly align with each other while looking at an object.

The results of this study and previous studies elsewhere and at UAB, Quinet says, suggest that SVBNs could play a role in all the components of the near triad responses -- lens accommodation, pupillary constriction and vergence.

Ever receive a vaccination that seemed to burn a lot while it was injected? The vaccine solution likely contained a lot of salt or sugar -- natural preservatives that help keep it stable, in addition to the cold temperature at which it was kept.

The viruses in vaccines, which train our cells to identify and vanquish viral invaders must be kept cold to keep them from bursting apart. The typical shipping temperature for vaccines ranges from 2 to 8 degrees Celsius (35 to 47 degrees Fahrenheit).

Viruses are kept cold for the same reason we refrigerate food items. "You wouldn't take a steak and leave it out on your counter for any length of time and then eat it," said Caryn Heldt, director of the Health Research Institute at Michigan Technological University and professor of chemical engineering. "A steak has the same stability issues - it has proteins, fats, and other molecules that, in order to keep them stable, we need to keep them cold."

Like proteins, viruses unfold when it's hot or there's space to move around. Heat provides energy for viruses to shake themselves apart, and not being crowded gives them the room to fall apart. Stable vaccines need cold or crowding.

But what if cold storage isn't available? What if someone accidentally leaves the package on the counter? What if the power goes out?

Heldt, together with Sarah Perry, professor of chemical engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has developed a way to mimic the body's environment in vaccines using a process called complex coacervation. Rather than relying on refrigeration, Perry and Heldt tap the other method to keep viruses stable -- crowding.

Freezer Camp

To keep the viruses in vaccines stable, everyone along the supply chain, from manufacturing facility to shipping company to doctor's office, must maintain the cold temperature. This cooperative effort is known as the cold chain. If a vaccine is kept above that temperature range for even an hour, it may become ruined and unusable.

The World Health Organization estimates that up to 50% of vaccines are wasted every year because the cold chain and ideal temperature for storage cannot be maintained.

The human body is a crowded place. Cells of varying shapes and sizes jockey for position. This includes viruses, who do their nefarious work by hostile takeover. Viruses invade our cells, commandeering them to replicate. Unchecked, virus copies explode out of the cells like darts through a balloon. Then all of those replicas go and do the same to other cells -- and before you know it, you're sick.

Heldt researches vaccine manufacturing techniques and the COVID-19 pandemic has served as a masterclass. But SARS-CoV-2 isn't the only virus in the world -- there is still need for other vaccines and storage methods that don't rely on refrigeration.

"The conditions for a vaccine that make it good to be injected into someone's body are almost the opposite of what makes a virus stable," Heldt said. "There's a really hard trade-off of keeping the virus stable to get good immune response, while having the right components in the vaccine that are safe to inject."

Virus Burritos

Heldt and Perry use polypeptides -- synthetic proteins -- that have positive or negative charges. When these charged peptides are put in solution, they stick together and form a separate liquid phase, a process called complex coacervation. The liquid wraps around virus capsids, holding the virus material together like a burrito's tortilla.

"Coacervate materials are something that we actually see all of the time in our daily lives," Perry said. "Many shampoos undergo coacervation. When you put the shampoo onto your wet hair, the water that is present dilutes the shampoo, causing it to phase separate and facilitating the removal of dirt and oil from your hair."

Complex coacervation works for nonenveloped viruses, which have no lipid, or fatty layer, around them. Nonenveloped viruses include polio, rhinovirus (which causes the common cold) and hepatitis A.

Next Steps

Heldt and Perry received a $400,000 developmental research grant in March 2020 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue their research through early 2022, which includes exploring ways to reduce salt concentrations (used in the vaccine to break apart the coacervate phase when it is injected by altering peptide sequences). Additionally, the chemical engineers are working on ways to apply complex coacervation to enveloped viruses -- like SARS-CoV-2 -- which require a balance of tightness and compartmentalization in the lipid layer in a way nonenveloped viruses do not.

"Looking forward, we want to think more about the specific materials that we use in our coacervates," Perry said. "Crowding alone isn't a universal strategy to improve virus stability. We need to understand how different polymers interact with our viruses and how we can use this to create a toolbox that can be applied to future challenges."

As the taco bar of vaccine storage expands, the research shows that naturally occurring proteins improve our vaccines and make them more widely accessible around the world, refrigerated or not.

"The great thing about these amino acids is that they are the same building blocks as in our bodies," Heldt said. "We're not adding anything to the vaccines that aren't already known to be safe."

Solving the cold storage conundrum promises to improve access to vaccinations against viruses. Bypassing the cold chain with polypeptides and innovative chemical engineering stands to improve health care and reduce medical emergencies around the world.

The effects of climate change are sometimes difficult to grasp, but now a virtual reality forest, created by geographers, can let people walk through a simulated forest of today and see what various futures may hold for the trees.

"The main problem that needs to be addressed is that climate change is abstract," said Alexander Klippel, professor of geography, Penn State. "Its meaning only unfolds in 10, 15 or 100 years. It is very hard for people to understand and plan and make decisions."

The researchers combined information on forest composition with information on forest ecology to create a forest similar to those found in Wisconsin.

"As part of an NSF-funded CNH program grant with Erica Smithwick (E. Willard and Ruby S. Miller Professor of Geography at Penn State) we are working with the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin," said Klippel, who also is director of Penn State's Center for Immersive Experience. "Inspired by the Menominee's deeper connection to the environment we believe that experiencing the future is essential for all environmental decision making."

The virtual-reality experience takes the extensive climate change models, sophisticated vegetation models and ecological models and creates a 2050 forest that people can experience by walking through it, investigating the tree types and understory, and seeing the changes.

Visualizing Forest Futures.

The first step, of course, was to create a forest of today. Using data on a typical Wisconsin forest, the researchers could have used strict or deterministic rules and placed trees in the forest. However, they chose to use a procedural method that would populate the forest using a set of ecological rules, creating a more organic, natural feel.

"Orientation and small details of the trees are also randomized in the approach so that the trees don't look exactly the same," said Jiawei Huang, graduate student in geography, Penn State.

The researchers report today (Nov. 11) in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science that, "Procedural rules allowed us to efficiently and reproducibly translate the parameters into a simulated forest." They used analytical modeling to convert the data for procedural modeling. They also worked with ecological experts to provide feedback and evaluate the results.

To capture the ecology of the forest, the researchers used LANDIS II, a well-established, powerful model.

"Our ecologist colleagues, coauthors on this paper -- Melissa S. Lucash, research assistant professor of geography, University of Oregon, and Robert M. Scheller, professor of geography, North Carolina State University -- ensured the expertise that is necessary to make the predictions accurate," said Klippel.

The researchers note that the model is powerful enough to deal with events such as windstorms, fire and flooding, and, of course, climate change.

A virtual walk through this Wisconsin forest shows tall trees and understory. Strollers, using VR headsets and controllers, can reveal the types of trees in the forest, change elevations from forest floor to birds-eye view and in-between, and more closely examine the forest composition.

The researchers chose two future scenarios, a base scenario and a hot and dry scenario. Using VR, visitors to the forest can see the changes in tree types and abundance and compare the base scenario to the hot and dry scenario.

"Our approach to create visceral experiences of forests under climate change can facilitate communication among experts, policymakers and the general public," the researchers report.

The researchers aim is to create a medium to communicate things in the future or the past that allows for a more holistic and visceral access so that non-experts can see the changes brought on by climate change.

Across the United States, weather stations made up of instruments and sensors monitor the conditions that produce our local forecasts, like air temperature, wind speed and precipitation. These systems aren’t just weather monitors, they are also potent tools for research on topics from farming to renewable energy generation.

Commercial weather stations can cost thousands of dollars, limiting both their availability and thus the amount of climate data that can be collected. But the advent of 3D printing and low-cost sensors have made it possible to build a weather station for a few hundred dollars. Could these inexpensive, homegrown versions perform as well as their pricier counterparts?

“ I didn't expect that this station would perform nearly as well as it did. Even though components started to degrade, the results show that these kinds of weather stations could be viable for shorter campaigns.” — Adam Theisen, Argonne atmospheric and Earth scientist

The answer is yes — up to a point, according to researchers, who put a 3D-printed weather station to the test in Oklahoma. Adam K. Theisen, an atmospheric and Earth scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, led the project, which compared the printed station with a commercial-grade station for eight months to see whether it was accurate and how well it could hold up against the elements.

Three-dimensional printing uses digital models to produce physical objects on the fly. Its low cost and the ability to print parts wherever you can lug a printer could help expand the number of these stations, helping to bring data collection to remote areas and educate tomorrow's researchers.

A team at the University of Oklahoma followed the guidance and open source plans developed by the 3D-Printed Automatic Weather Station (3D-PAWS) Initiative at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research to print over 100 weather station parts. Instead of using polylactic acid, more commonly used in 3D printing, they turned to acrylonitrile styrene acrylate, a type of plastic filament considered more durable outdoors. Coupled with low-cost sensors, the 3D-printed parts provide the basis for these new systems, which the 3D-PAWS Initiative established as promising in earlier experiments.

“In order for this to get more widespread adoption, it has to go through verification and validation studies like this,” Theisen said.

While the 3D-printed system did start showing signs of trouble about five months into the experiment — the relative humidity sensor corroded and failed, and some parts eventually degraded or broke — its measurements were on par with those from a commercial-grade station in the Oklahoma Mesonet, a network designed and implemented by scientists at the University of Oklahoma and at Oklahoma State University.

“I didn't expect that this station would perform nearly as well as it did,” said Theisen. “Even though components started to degrade, the results show that these kinds of weather stations could be viable for shorter campaigns.”

Theisen, who was based at the University of Oklahoma when the research began, continued to oversee the effort after joining Argonne.

In the experiment, the low-cost sensors accurately measured temperature, pressure, rain, UV and relative humidity. With the exception of a couple of instruments, the plastic material held up in the Oklahoma weather from mid-August 2018 to mid-April the following year, a period that saw strong rainstorms, snow and temperatures ranging from 14 to 104°F (-10 to 40°C). A 3D-printed anemometer, which measures wind speed, did not perform as well, but could be improved partly with better printing quality.

The project, which was led by undergraduate students at the University of Oklahoma, confirmed both the accuracy of a 3D-printed weather station and its value as an education tool.

“The students learned skill sets they would not have picked up in the classroom,” Theisen said. “They developed the proposal, designed the frame, and did most of the printing and wiring.”

The ability to print specialized components could make weather stations more feasible in remote areas because replacement parts could be fabricated right away when needed. And even if a cheaper sensor breaks after a few months, the math still works out for a low budget.

“If you're talking about replacing two or three of these inexpensive sensors versus maintaining and calibrating a $1,000 sensor every year, it's a strong cost-benefit to consider,” noted Theisen.

Researchers investigating the heritage of thousands of rice varieties have identified just two distinct maternal lineages, a discovery which could help address the issue of global food security.

University of Queensland scientists studied more than 3000 rice genotypes and found diversity was inherited through two maternal genomes identified in all rice varieties.

Lead researcher UQ's Professor Robert Henry said the finding was important in understanding how rice adapted to its environment.

"We think there were two separate domestications of virgin wild plants that diverged around a million years ago in the wild, and then in the last 7000 thousand years human domestication of rice has occurred," Professor Henry said.

The two domesticated varieties interbred with the local wild rices throughout Asia.

"The wild rice has pollinated the domesticated rices planted nearby and the seed of the domesticated variety has then incorporated the genetics of the local wild varieties," he said.

"The maternal lineage is preserved via the seed, and we've identified that because rice farmers have and still continue to collect the seed from the field, the local varieties become very much like the local wild rices."

Professor Henry said the finding had implications for domestication of rice and breeding for adaptation to climate change to address food security.

"It gives us clues as to how we might try to capture more of the diversity in the wild and bring it into the domesticated gene pool to improve rice crops," he said.

"It also points to the need to understand the significance of the maternal genotype in terms of performance of rice because we did not previously understand there are two very distinct maternal functional types."

Rice is the staple food of more than half of the world's population and is the third-largest worldwide agricultural crop, with more than 630 million tonnes produced annually.

"Now we've got an ongoing collaboration with mathematicians to try and find a way of analysing the rice data in more detail, we want to look at relationships between lots of different subgroups," Professor Henry said.

"This would include examining how the Basmatis and the Japonicas really relate and the various types of Indica rices."

EUGENE, Ore. - Nov. 11, 2020 - The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board launched the Real-time Transaction Reporting System in 2005 to tighten the gap in trade reporting in municipal bond markets from a full day to fifteen minutes.

The system brought real-time price discovery to the $4 trillion over-the-counter market, transforming muni trading, investing and potentially the financing of civic projects. In a new study, a team of researchers investigated the effects of improved disclosure of trading information for muni investors and bond dealers.

In a paper, "The Difference a Day Makes: Timely Disclosure and Trading Efficiency in the Muni Market," the researchers argue that faster and more accurate disclosure benefits all major market stakeholders, finding three-fold benefits.

The paper, published online ahead of print in the Journal of Financial Economics, was written by John Chalmers and Z. Jay Wang, professors of finance in the Lundquist College of Business at the University of Oregon, and Steve Yu Liu, who earned a doctorate at the UO and is now with the Department of Business and Information Technology at the Missouri University of Science and Technology.

"First, we find a significant reduction in transaction costs that varies with investor sophistication," they wrote in the paper. "Second, we find significant increases in municipal trading volume across the liquidity spectrum. Third, we find that dealers increased market-making activities after the introduction of the RTRS."

An alternative explanation for the findings, they noted, is that they could reflect overall improvement in access to information in the over-the-counter markets due to the increased use of online resources in the period surrounding the implementation of the real-time reporting system.

To address this concern, the authors selected a subset of corporate bonds as a control group. These corporate bonds were not subject to similar changes in disclosure requirement in the sample period and should have captured the impact of common improvements to the over-the-counter markets. By comparing the changes in trading costs between the muni bonds and the control group, the authors were able to isolate the effects of RTRS, apart from other factors.

More timely disclosure in the muni markets was a particular boon to investors, with the average trading costs declining by 30 basis points or 14 percent.

Interestingly, they noted, the impact of the RTRS varies significantly across investor sophistication. While retail investors benefited mainly from a reduction in dealer's costs of intermediating trades, sophisticated traders were able to take advantage of more timely trading information and negotiate better trading terms with dealers, reflecting improved bargaining positions.

The authors also studied the impact of the RTRS on bond dealers' market making activities. They find an increase in trading volume for all bond liquidity groups sorted by pre-RTRS trading volume. Consistent with this, the researchers found, dealers committed more capital and were more actively engaged in intermediating muni bond trading in the post-RTRS period. These findings alleviate concerns that bond dealers may decrease market-making efforts due to deteriorating bargaining positions.

While switching to real-time reporting incurs additional costs, the research suggests that the sacrifices are likely to be well worth it for both investors and bond dealers. Further, by taking costs out of the system and improving investor welfare, municipalities can, in principal, benefit from cheaper access to capital markets, creating benefits for society as municipal bond offerings fund infrastructure investments that often improve quality of life, education and public safety.