Culture

India's transition to clean cooking fuels may be hampered by users' belief that using firewood is better for their families' wellbeing than switching to Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), a new study reveals.

Women are considered primary family cooks in rural India and those featured in the study feel that both fuels support wellbeing. Understanding these viewpoints helps to explain why India's switch from traditional solid fuels is slower than expected.

Those cooks using firewood know it causes health problems, but feel that it contributes more to wellbeing than cooking with LPG would - although LPG users who previously cooked with firewood claim their new fuel has improved wellbeing.

India has more people relying on solid fuels for cooking than any other country in the world and providing universal access to clean cooking fuels has been identified as one of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to which the country is a signatory.

Researchers at the Universities of Birmingham (UK) and Queensland (Australia) conducted focus group discussions with women in four villages in the Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh. Two villages mostly used firewood whilst the other two comprised of mostly LPG users who had switched from using firewood. The researchers have published their findings today in Nature Energy.

Firewood users believed that cooking with this fuel improved their financial wellbeing because selling firewood generated income, whilst collecting the fuel gave them an opportunity to socialise and is a tradition they would like to continue. They viewed LPG as a financial burden that gave food an undesirable taste and feared a fatal canister explosion.

LPG users told researchers that their fuel allowed them to maintain or improve social status, as well as making it easier to care for children and other family members. Cooking with LPG freed up time which they could use to work outside the home and earn money. They also enjoyed extra leisure time with their family.

Study co-author Dr Rosie Day, Senior Lecturer in Environment and Society at the University of Birmingham, commented: "Despite India's aim of switching to clean fuels, the scale of solid fuel use in rural areas signals that widespread uptake and sustained use of clean fuels is a distant reality.

"Whilst cooking is not solely a woman's job, the reality is that, in rural India, women are considered the primary cooks. It is, therefore, critical to unravel how women see the relationship between wellbeing and cooking fuel if India is to make progress in transitioning to clean fuels."

Researchers suggest that future interventions to promote new fuels should actively involve women who used solid fuels and clean fuels - opening discussion about the benefits of each and allowing cooks to observe different cooking practices. Interaction programmes could inform firewood users about the positive wellbeing outcomes of LPG, address concerns, and promote learning from each other.

The study identifies three key lessons that have important implications for policy makers to consider:

Users feel that both fuels support at least some key dimensions of wellbeing

Understanding this helps to explain why people may not be persuaded to switch to cleaner fuels based only on seemingly obvious health benefits.

Women's views on cooking fuels and wellbeing change after switching fuels.

LPG and firewood users share some views, such as food tastes better cooked on firewood, but LPG users see more advantages in LPG than non-users.

Wellbeing benefits of LPG use were based on time saved over using firewood

In the study villages, women can enjoy recreation with friends and neighbours, as well as supporting their children's education. They can also re-allocate this saved time to doing paid work and choose how to spend the extra income resource themselves.

"We have gained important understanding of women's views in this setting, but further research is needed to analyse the perceived relationship between women's fuel use and multi-dimensional wellbeing in other settings - this will help to increase our understanding of how social and cultural factors come into play in transition to clean fuels," commented Dr. Day.

In Japan, the proportion of the population who are single has increased dramatically in the past three decades. In 2015, 1 in 4 women and 1 in 3 men in their 30s were single, and half of the singles say they are not interested in heterosexual relationships. Public health experts at the University of Tokyo found that those who are disinterested in relationships are more likely to have lower incomes and less education than their romantically minded peers, potentially pointing towards socioeconomic factors behind the stagnation of the Japanese dating market.

The Japanese media has dubbed the much-discussed increase in virginity and a purported decline in interest in dating and sex as symptoms of the "herbivore-ization" of younger generations. In popular culture, adults who are unmarried and seemingly disinterested in finding romantic or sexual partners are "herbivores" and those who are actively pursuing romantic partners are "carnivores."

"This herbivore phenomenon, both its definition and even does it really exist, has been hotly debated for a decade in Japan, but nationally representative data have been lacking," said Dr. Peter Ueda, an expert in epidemiology and last author of the research published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Millions more singles in Japan

The new analysis used data collected by the National Fertility Survey of Japan, a questionnaire designed and implemented approximately every five years between 1987 and 2015 by the Japanese National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

Japan does not yet have marriage equality for same-sex couples and the survey language explicitly asked only about heterosexual relationships. The research team says any nonheterosexual survey respondents would be hidden in the data, likely responding as single and not interested in a relationship, regardless of how they might prefer to describe themselves.

By 2015, there were 2.2 million more single women and 1.7 million more single men in Japan aged 18 to 39 compared to 1992. In 1992, 27.4% of women and 40.4% of men in Japan aged 18 to 39 were single. By 2015, 40.7% of women and 50.8% of men of the same age range were single.

The research team speculates that the higher numbers of single men might be due to women, on average, dating men who are older than themselves, such that many of their male partners were older than 39 years and thus outside of the investigated age range. Other contributing factors could be that Japan's total population of 18- to 39-year-olds includes more men, men being more likely to date more than one partner, or differences in how men and women report their own relationship status.

Singles more common in Japan than Britain or America

Separate surveys conducted between 2010 and 2018 in Britain, the U.S. and Japan reveal that although similar proportions of women are single at ages 18 to 24, substantially more Japanese women stay single as they age. The proportion of women aged 18 to 24 and the proportion of women aged 35 to 39 who are currently single were 65.6% and 24.4% in Japan, 41.5% and 14.0% in Britain, and 62.6% and 16.6% in the U.S.

The numbers of single men are higher in Japan than in Britain or the U.S., but less dramatically different than women. British data come from the Natsal-3 survey from 2010 to 2012. American data come from the General Social Survey from 2012 to 2018.

Disinterested in a relationship now, but still hoping for marriage someday

The steady increase in single people since 1992 in Japan is driven mostly by steady decreases in marriages, while the number of people who describe themselves as "in a relationship" has remained stable.

"After age 30, either you're married or you're single. Very few people in the older age groups are unmarried and in a relationship. It could be speculated that promoting marriage as the most socially acceptable form of relationship between adults has built a barrier to forming romantic relationships in Japan," said Ueda.

In the 2015 survey, single people were asked follow-up questions about whether they were interested or not interested in finding a relationship. Over half of all single people who said they were disinterested in relationships also said they still hoped to get married eventually, 62.9% of women and 65.7% of men.

Younger Japanese were more likely to say they were disinterested in relationships. About one-third of women (37.4%) and men (36.6%) aged 18 to 24 described themselves as single and not interested in a relationship. Only 1 in 7 (14.4%) women and 1 in 5 men (19.5%) aged 30 to 34 described themselves as single and disinterested.

Employment, education increase eligibility for marriage

"Among men, lower income was strongly associated with being single, although this does not necessarily represent causality. If we transferred a million dollars into their bank account right now, it is not clear if single people would increase their interest in changing their relationship status. However, it would not be too far-fetched to expect that lower income and precarious employment constitute disadvantages in the Japanese dating market," said Ueda.

Regardless of age, married men were most likely to have regular employment and had the highest incomes. While 32.2% of married men had an annual income of at least 5 million Japanese yen (about US$48,000), this proportion was 8.4%, 7.1% and 3.9% among those in a relationship, single with interest and single without interest, respectively.

"The herbivore phenomenon may be partly socioeconomic adversity. If government policies directly addressed the situation of low-income, low-education populations, I think some people with a lack of job security or financial resources may have new interest in dating," said Dr. Haruka Sakamoto, an expert in public health and co-author of the research publication.

In Europe and the U.S., marriage is often associated with higher incomes and education among both women and men, but it is not known how these factors influence single people's interest in romantic relationships.

Economic effects of the pandemic may further decrease young adults' interest in finding romance.

"If low socioeconomic status is contributing to this decrease in dating in Japan, we can guess that COVID-19 economic stress could lead to even fewer romantic pursuits in the country," said Ueda.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Similar to bacteria evolving resistance to antibiotics, viruses can evolve resistance to vaccines, and the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 could undermine the effectiveness of vaccines that are currently under development, according to a paper published November 9 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by David Kennedy and Andrew Read from Pennsylvania State University, USA. The authors also offer recommendations to vaccine developers for minimizing the likelihood of this outcome.

"A COVID-19 vaccine is urgently needed to save lives and help society return to its pre-pandemic normal," said David Kennedy, assistant professor of biology. "As we have seen with other diseases, such as pneumonia, the evolution of resistance can quickly render vaccines ineffective. By learning from these previous challenges and by implementing this knowledge during vaccine design, we may be able to maximize the long-term impact of COVID-19 vaccines."

The researchers specifically suggest that the standard blood and nasal-swab samples taken during clinical trials to quantify individuals' responses to vaccination may also be used to assess the likelihood that the vaccines being tested will drive resistance evolution. For example, the team proposes that blood samples can be used to assess the redundancy of immune protection generated by candidate vaccines by measuring the types and amounts of antibodies and T-cells that are present.

"Much like how combination antibiotic therapy delays the evolution of antibiotic resistance, vaccines that are designed to induce a redundant immune response -- or one in which the immune system is encouraged to target multiple sites, called epitopes -- on the virus's surface, can delay the evolution of vaccine resistance," said Andrew Read, Evan Pugh Professor of Biology and Entomology and director of the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences. "That's because the virus would have to acquire several mutations, as opposed to just one, in order to survive the host immune system's attack."

The researchers also recommend that nasal swabs typically collected during clinical trials may be used to determine the viral titer, or amount of virus present, which can be considered a proxy for transmission potential. They noted that strongly suppressing virus transmission through vaccinated hosts is key to slowing the evolution of resistance, since it minimizes opportunities for mutations to arise and reduces opportunities for natural selection to act on those mutations that do arise.

In addition, the team suggests that the genetic data acquired through nasal swabs can be used to examine whether vaccine-driven selection has occurred. For example, differences in alleles, or forms of genes that arise from mutations, between the viral genomes collected from vaccinated versus unvaccinated individuals would indicate that selection has taken place.

"According to the World Health Organization, at least 198 COVID-19 vaccines are in the development pipeline, with 44 currently undergoing clinical evaluation," said Kennedy. "We suggest that the risk of resistance be used to prioritize investment among otherwise similarly promising vaccine candidates."

What The Study Did: This randomized trial compares the effects of hydroxychloroquine versus placebo on patients' clinical status at 14 days (home, requiring noninvasive or invasive ventilation or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, hospitalized, died) among adults hospitalized with COVID-19.

Authors: Wesley H. Self, M.D., M.P.H., of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, is the corresponding author.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jama.2020.22240)

Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

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A pre-emptive memory management system developed by KAUST researchers can speed up data-intensive simulations by 2.5 times by eliminating delays due to slow data delivery. The development elegantly and transparently addresses one of the most stubborn bottlenecks in modern supercomputing--delivering data from memory fast enough to keep up with computations.

"Reducing the movement of data while keeping it close to the computing hardware is one of the most daunting challenges facing computational scientists handling big data," explains Hatem Ltaief from the research team. "This is exacerbated by the widening gap between computational speed and memory transmission capacity, and the need to store high-volume data on remote storage media."

The key challenge in processing big data is the cost and scale of storing the data in memory. The faster the memory, the more expensive it is, and the faster the data need to be moved between computing elements. Because only relatively small capacities of the fastest memory are available on even the most powerful supercomputing platforms, system engineers add successively larger, slower and more remote layers of memory to hold the tera- and petabytes of data typical of big data sets.

"It is in this hostile landscape that our system comes into play by reducing the overhead of moving data in and out of remote storage hardware," says Ltaief.

Ltaief with colleagues David Keyes and Tariq Alturkestani developed their multilayer buffer system (MLBS) to work proactively to maintain the data as close as possible to the computing hardware by orchestrating data movement among memory layers.

"MLBS relies on a multilevel buffering technique that outsmarts the simulation by making it 'see' all the hundreds of petabytes of data as being in fast memory," says Alturkestani. "The buffering mechanism prevents the application from stalling when it would have needed to access data located on remote storage, allowing the application to proceed at full speed with asynchronous computing operations."

This synergism provided by MLBS achieved a speedup of 2.5 times for a three-dimensional seismic exploration simulation involving hundreds of petabytes of data movements using KAUST's Shaheen-2 supercomputer.

"This approach also reduces the energy required to move data to and from remote storage media, which can be hundreds of times higher than the energy to perform a single computation on local memory," says Ltaief. "Using MLBS, we can mitigate the energy overhead of data movement, which is one of the main goals of our center."

Nature has inspired engineers at UNSW Sydney to develop a soft fabric robotic gripper which behaves like an elephant's trunk to grasp, pick up and release objects without breaking them.

The researchers say the versatile technology could be widely applied in sectors where fragile objects are handled, such as agriculture, food and the scientific and resource exploration industries - even for human rescue operations or personal assistive devices.

Dr Thanh Nho Do, Scientia Lecturer and UNSW Medical Robotics Lab director, said the gripper could be commercially available in the next 12 to 16 months, if his team secured an industry partner.

He is the senior author of a study featuring the invention, published in Advanced Materials Technologies this month.

Dr Do worked with the study's lead author and PhD candidate Trung Thien Hoang, Phuoc Thien Phan, Mai Thanh Thai and his collaborator Scientia Professor Nigel Lovell, Head of the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering.

"Our new soft fabric gripper is thin, flat, lightweight and can grip and retrieve various objects - even from confined hollow spaces - for example, a pen inside a tube," Dr Do said.

"This device also has an enhanced real-time force sensor which is 15 times more sensitive than conventional designs and detects the grip strength required to prevent damage to objects it's handling.

"There is also a thermally-activated mechanism that can change the gripper body from flexible to stiff and vice versa, enabling it to grasp and hold objects of various shapes and weights - up to 220 times heavier than the gripper's mass."

Nature-inspired robotics

Dr Do said the researchers found inspiration in nature when designing their soft fabric gripper.

"Animals such as an elephant, python or octopus use the soft, continuum structures of their bodies to coil their grip around objects while increasing contact and stability - it's easy for them to explore, grasp and manipulate objects," he said.

"These animals can do this because of a combination of highly sensitive organs, sense of touch and the strength of thousands of muscles without rigid bone - for example, an elephant's trunk has up to 40,000 muscles.

"So, we wanted to mimic these gripping capabilities - holding and manipulating objects are essential motor skills for many robots."

Improvement on existing grippers

Dr Do said the researchers' new soft gripper was an improvement on existing designs which had disadvantages that limited their application.

"Many soft grippers are based on claws or human hand-like structures with multiple inward-bending fingers, but this makes them unsuitable to grip objects that are oddly shaped, heavy or bulky, or objects smaller or larger than the gripper's opening," he said.

"Many existing soft grippers also lack sensory feedback and adjustable stiffness capabilities, which means you can't use them with fragile objects or in confined environments.

"Our technology can grip long, slender objects and retrieve them from confined, narrow spaces, as well as hook through holes in objects to pick them up - for example, a mug handle."

Lead author Trung Thien Hoang said the researchers' fabrication method was also simple and scalable, which allowed the gripper to be easily produced at different sizes and volumes - for example, a one-metre long gripper could handle objects at least 300 millimetres in diameter.

During testing, a gripper prototype weighing 8.2 grams could lift an object of 1.8 kilograms - more than 220 times the gripper's mass - while a prototype 13 centimetres long could wrap around an object with a diameter of 30 mm.

Prof. Nigel Lovell said: "We used a manufacturing process involving computerised apparel engineering and applied newly designed, highly sensitive liquid metal-based tactile sensors for detecting the grip force required.

"The gripper's flat continuum also gives it superior contact with surfaces as it wraps around an object, while increasing the holding force.

"What's more, the total heating and cooling cycle for the gripper to change structure from flexible to rigid takes less than half a minute, which is among the fastest reported so far."

Integrating robotic arms and the sense of touch

Dr Do has filed a provisional patent for the new gripper, having successfully tested and validated the technology as a complete device.

He expects the gripper to be commercially available in the next 12 to 16 months, if he finds an industry partner.

"We now aim to optimise the integrated materials, develop a closed-loop control algorithm, and integrate the gripper into the ends of robotic arms for gripping and manipulating objects autonomously," Dr Do said.

"If we can achieve these next steps, there will be no need to manually lift the gripper which will help for handling very large, heavy objects.

"We are also working on combining the gripper with our recently announced wearable haptic glove device, which would enable the user to remotely control the gripper while experiencing what an object feels like at the same time."

Bionanotechnology Lab of Kazan Federal University works on adapting nematodes to consuming oil waste.

Co-author, Chief Research Associate Rawil Fakhrullin explains, "We've improved existing methods of biological remediation of soils. Our lab experiment was successful, and we have a new way of delivering oil-consuming bacteria into the soil."

The team wanted to find out whether parasitic nematodes can serve as "public transit" for marine bacteria which can consume and break down oil products into fatty acids.

"We took Caenorhabditis elegans nematodes and fed them Alcanivorax borkumensis bacteria. Nematodes have bacteria as a usual part of their diet, so there were no negative consequences for them. Furthermore, undigested bacteria changed the gut microflora of worms, which led to enhanced digestion of oil, and then left their bodies through natural ways. As another takeaway from the experiment, we found out that worms can themselves eat oil products if they are not fed anything else," says Fakhrullin.

In the worms' guts, oil dissipates into small particles of 5-6 micrometers, and bacteria easily break them down further. "Petroleum is a complex system, and there are many variations of it. We experimented with oil found in Tatarstan. We have yet to find out which components other types of oil produce while digested by nematodes," adds the researcher. As he assumes, the technology may be feasible for water bodies as well as soils.

Tokyo, Japan - The development and progression of cancer is a complicated process that occurs when cells in the body grow out of control. Many different mechanisms and pathways that directly affect cell proliferation have been uncovered. Researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) have made an additional discovery; a unique anti-cancer function for an enzyme previously believed to only influence RNA molecule structure.

In a report published in The EMBO Journal, a group of researchers from TMDU detail the identification of the protein TruB1 as a regulator of the microRNA (miRNA) let-7, which has significant implications for the fight against various cancers.

MiRNAs are small RNA molecules that serve as a sort of molecular brakes. They work by blocking certain gene expression messages from being formed into proteins. Let-7 was one of the first of over 1,500 miRNAs to be discovered and is present in the cells of many species, including humans. Previous work has shown that many tumor cells have fewer let-7 molecules than normal cells, and therefore this miRNA may be important in cancer development. Because of this, the researchers at TMDU were curious if there were any cellular proteins that could help increase the amount of let-7 present in cells.

"Let-7 is a very important miRNA in human cells that can affect many processes from development to tumor suppression," says lead author of the study Ryota Kurimoto. "However, it is still unclear how levels of let-7 in cells are controlled, so we wanted to investigate this further."

To do this, the researchers performed a cell-based screening of proteins that can bind to RNA molecules. They did this with a system called a luciferase assay, which helped them identify proteins that could assist with increasing let-7 levels.

"Our main finding was quite unexpected," describes Hiroshi Asahara, senior author. "The protein TruB1 significantly promoted maturation of let-7 in our experiments."

The results were mainly surprising because TruB1 had previously only been characterized as a protein that participates in a process called RNA modification.

"When binding to let-7, TruB1 didn't perform the modification it had always been known for," says Kurimoto. "In fact, TruB1 helped other proteins bind to let-7, which enhanced expression levels of this miRNA."

Additionally, through regulation of let-7, TruB1 could suppress growth and division of cells. This is quite significant because it implies that TruB1 has an anti-cancer role in cells. This study provides crucial information that will be critical for the development of novel cancer therapeutics.

Scientists around the world have been working to grow arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi without their host plants because they can be used as organic fertilizer in agriculture and forestry. AM fungi help plants receive nutrients from the soil through a network that is efficient and far more reaching than their own roots can provide. A group led by graduate students Yuta Sugiura, Rei Akiyama and Associate Professor Katsuharu Saito of Shinshu University successfully demonstrated that AM fungi can be grown asymbiotically when given myristate as a carbon and energy source.

The history of the relationship between AM fungi and plants growing on land goes back 460 million years. For the first time in its 460 million year history, arbuscular mycorrhizal is about to gain independence from plants, so that it can be used to help plants grow in less fertile soil. Corresponding author Professor Saito states "although it was considered difficult, AM fungi has been successfully grown in a culture medium. With advancements, microbial materials for agricultural use can be produced."

"The growth speed and efficiency is still low and we are working on spore formation so the next generation can be grown. We hope to work on a collection of cultures that can be grown independently and be applied for use in agriculture." Currently, the only way for AM fungi to be used in agriculture is with their host plants, making its use as fertilizer expensive and hard to implement. With the advancement in asymbiotic culture, the hope is that less chemical fertilizer will be needed for use in agriculture.

Among the most damaging natural hazards, earthquakes are still today one of the least understood phenomena in Earth Sciences. Earthquakes happen when rocks on either side of a tectonic fault slide. The sliding, however, does not occur along the whole fault at once but starts at one point, the hypocenter, and then spreads over the entire fault at a speed known as the "rupture speed" of the earthquake. Geophysicists are particularly interested in rupture speeds because the faster they are, the stronger the seismic waves and therefore the greater the damage caused.

Seismic models developed so far concluded that earthquakes could not propagate in a stable and sustainable way at arbitrary speeds. Scientists had therefore determined a "forbidden speed" range situated between the speed of P and S waves, the two main seismic waves that propagate through the Earth. However, progress in the seismological observation of earthquakes has made it possible to demonstrate that recent earthquakes had actually propagated within the forbidden range. Such was the case for the 2018 earthquake in Palu, Indonesia, for example, which caused a destructive tsunami.

Uninterrupted rupture speeds due to oblique sliding

To resolve this puzzling inconsistency between earthquake theory and observations, researchers of Université Côte d'Azur and the IRD developed a new model to predict the propagation speed of earthquakes. This feat was accomplished using the high-performance computer of the Côte d'Azur Observatory, one of the participants in OPAL, a shared platform that provides access to all the computational resources of the region.

The researchers managed to overcome two crucial limitations of the previous models. The first was to rely on 2-dimensional models, while the Earth is 3-dimensional. The second was to assume either a horizontal or a vertical direction of sliding, while earthquake sliding can be oblique. By overcoming these two limitations, they were able to explain why the "forbidden speeds" are actually admissible.

"One of the main challenges in the prevention of earthquakes is to predict their impact. We need to seize this opportunity to introduce more physics in the evaluation of seismic hazards, which has been very empirical so far," points out Huihui Weng, researcher at Université Côte d'Azur. "The new model provides validated theoretical elements which could ultimately be used to improve the way seismic risk is evaluated," adds Jean-Paul Ampuero, seismologist at the IRD.

A researcher at University of Limerick in Ireland has played a key role in examining some of the secrets behind Game of Thrones.

What are the secrets behind one of the most successful fantasy series of all time? How has a story as complex as the one in George R.R. Martin's novels enthralled the world and how does it compare to other narratives?

Researchers from five universities across the UK and Ireland - including UL's Dr Padraig MacCarron - came together to unravel 'A Song of Ice and Fire', the books on which the TV series is based.

In a paper that has just been published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, the team of physicists, mathematicians and psychologists from Coventry, Warwick, Limerick, Cambridge and Oxford universities used data science and network theory to analyse the acclaimed book series by George R.R. Martin.

The study shows the way the interactions between the characters are arranged is similar to how humans maintain relationships and interact in the real world. Moreover, although important characters are famously killed off at random as the story is told, the underlying chronology is not at all so unpredictable, the research shows.

The team found that, despite over 2,000 named characters in 'A Song of Ice and Fire' and over 41,000 interactions between them, at chapter-by-chapter level these numbers average out to match what we can handle in real life.
Even the most predominant characters - those who tell the story - average out to have only 150 others to keep track of. This is the same number that the average human brain has evolved to deal with.

While matching mathematical motifs might have been expected to lead to a rather narrow script, George R. R. Martin keeps the tale bubbling by making deaths appear random as the story unfolds. But, as the team show, when the chronological sequence is reconstructed the deaths are not random at all: rather, they reflect how common events are spread out for non-violent human activities in the real world.

"These books are known for unexpected twists, often in terms of the death of a major character, it is interesting to see how the author arranges the chapters in an order that makes this appear even more random than it would be if told chronologically," explained Dr Padraig MacCarron, a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Social Issues Research and Mathematics Applications Consortium for Science and Industry (MACSI) at UL.

"Social networks of the most connected characters, while seemingly extensive, mirrored the typical range of social networks that humans maintain. Furthermore, characters' social networks did not extend beyond the cognitive limit of social connections that humans are able to sustain.

"Although the time intervals between significant deaths in relation to the story's timeline may appear random, they are not told in chronological order. Re-arranging them in order of which they occur, they follow a pattern more commonly observed in reality," added Dr MacCarron.

'Game of Thrones' has invited all sorts of comparison to history and myth and the marriage of science and humanities in this paper opens new avenues to comparative literary studies. It shows, for example, that it is more akin to the Icelandic sagas than to mythological stories such as the Tain Bo Cuailnge or Beowulf. The trick in Game of Thrones, it seems, is to mix realism and unpredictability in a cognitively engaging manner.

"People largely make sense of the world through narratives, but we have no scientific understanding of what makes complex narratives relatable and comprehensible. The ideas underpinning this paper are steps towards answering this question," explained Professor Colm Connaughton, from the University of Warwick.

Fellow researcher Professor Robin Dunbar, from the University of Oxford, observed: "This study offers convincing evidence that good writers work very carefully within the psychological limits of the reader."

COLUMBUS, Ohio - African Americans who attend Historically Black Colleges or Universities (HBCUs) may be at lower risk for health problems later in adulthood compared to African Americans who attend predominantly white institutions, a new study suggests.

The research showed that Black adults who had enrolled in an HBCUs had a 35% lower probability of developing metabolic syndrome by midlife compared to Black adults who enrolled in predominantly white schools. Additionally, the benefit of attending an HBCU was more pronounced in African Americans who grew up in more segregated environments.

Metabolic syndrome is defined as the presence of at least three of five factors that increase the risk for heart disease, diabetes and stroke - excess belly fat, elevated blood pressure, low "good" cholesterol, and high levels of blood glucose and triglycerides.

"We've known for a very long time that the more years of completed schooling someone has, the better their health is likely to be across the life course, but there's been very little research looking at the different contexts in which education occurs and their impact on subsequent health outcomes," said Cynthia Colen, lead author of the study and associate professor of sociology at The Ohio State University.

"This study really points to a strength of HBCUs that people don't normally think about: Not only can they be health protective, but they can be health protective for years to come, not just while people are in school."

Colen conducted the study with Nicolo Pinchak, an Ohio State graduate student in sociology, and Kierra Barnett, a postdoctoral researcher in Ohio State's Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. The research is published online in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

The team used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), which consists of periodic interviews with people who were middle- and high-school students in grades 7-12 in 1994-95. Colen specifically used information collected during follow-up interviews that were conducted in 1996, 2001 and 2008.

The 727 Black respondents in the final study sample attended a total of 319 institutions of higher learning - 273 predominantly white institutions and 46 HBCUs. The National Center for Education Statistics describes Historically Black Colleges and Universities as "institutions that were established prior to 1964 with the principal mission of educating Black Americans."

This national survey (Add Health) collected detailed health data during all interview waves, providing the Ohio State researchers with the specific measures they used to assess whether the Add Health respondents had developed metabolic syndrome by 2008 when they were in their late 20 and early 30s.

Colen and colleagues constructed statistical models to determine the extent to which HBCU attendance was associated with metabolic syndrome in midlife. These models controlled for a number of characteristics that could influence both HBCU enrollment and adult health, such as age, sex and region of the country, as well as a series of family, school and neighborhood conditions they experienced during their childhoods.

The analysis showed that 31% of the respondents who had attended predominantly white institutions had metabolic syndrome by midlife, compared to 23% of those who had attended HBCUs, and that HBCU attendance was associated with a 35% reduction in the odds of having metabolic syndrome among college-educated African Americans. The researchers noted that this kind of health benefit mirrors the risk reduction that scientific studies suggest people can achieve through change in diet or exercise.

Overall, almost 30% of college-educated Black adults in the study sample developed metabolic syndrome by the time of their interviews in 2008, when they were still relatively young.

"That is the time period of the life course, when people are in their 30s and 40s, when we see the fastest growth in Black/white health disparities. This is largely driven by the emergence of chronic diseases, such as hypertension, diabetes and obesity," Colen said.

What is notable about this particular study is that college-educated African Americans were not being compared to whites - which was a strength of this research, she said: "Here, we are looking at how health is unequally distributed among African Americans. And we identify HBCUs as an opportunity not only for upward mobility, but as a potential driver of better health over the life course for individuals who spent their formative years at these types of institutions of higher learning."

Though the available data can't explain why or how former HBCU students' risk for metabolic syndrome is lower than those who attended predominantly white schools, Colen has some possible theories: At HBCUs, Black students regularly interact with African American faculty, staff and students who can serve as mentors, and they are less likely to be chronically exposed to the racial discrimination that has been shown to erode both mental and physical health years after people first encounter this type of unfair treatment.

Similarly, the researchers can only speculate about why the health-protective benefits of HBCUs are stronger for Black adults who grew up in more segregated environments.

"Our findings suggest that HBCUs are likely to be health protective for the segment of society who needs it most - those growing up in the most racially isolated environments," the researchers noted. "Moreover, this finding underscores the important role that place, in general, and segregation, specifically, plays in the unequal distribution of health."

DURHAM, N.C. - Biomedical engineers at Duke University have developed a new way of modeling how potentially beneficial packages of DNA called plasmids can circulate and accumulate through a complex environment that includes many bacterial species. The work has also allowed the team to develop a new factor dubbed the "persistence potential" that, once measured and computed, can predict whether or not a plasmid will continue to thrive in a given population or gradually fade into oblivion.

The researchers hope that their new model will lay the groundwork for others to better model and predict how important traits such as antibiotic resistance in pathogens or metabolic abilities in bacteria bred to clean environmental pollution will spread and grow in a given environment.

The results appear online on November 4 in the journal Nature Communications.

In addition to the Darwinian process of handing down genes important for survival from parents to offspring, bacteria also engage in a process called horizontal gene transfer. Bacteria are constantly sharing genetic recipes for new abilities across species by swapping different packages of genetic material called plasmids with one another.

"In an examination of just a single bottle of seawater, there were 160 bacterial species swapping 180 different plasmids," said Lingchong You, professor of biomedical engineering at Duke. "Even in a single bottle of water, using current methods to model plasmid mobility would far exceed the collective computing power of the entire world. We've developed a system that simplifies the model while maintaining its ability to accurately predict the eventual results."

The potential of any one of these genetic packages to become common throughout a given population or environment, however, is far from certain. It depends on a wide range of variables, such as how quickly the packages are shared, how long the bacteria survive, how beneficial the new DNA is, what the trade-offs are for those benefits and much more.

Being able to predict the fate of such a genetic package could help many fields -- perhaps most notably the spread of antibiotic resistance and how to combat it. But the models required to do so in a lifelike scenario are too complicated to solve.

"The most complex system we've ever been able to model mathematically is three species of bacteria sharing three plasmids," said You. "And even then, we had to use a computer program just to generate the equations, because otherwise we'd get too confused with the number of terms that were needed."

In the new study, You and his graduate student, Teng Wang, created a new framework that greatly reduces the complexity of the model as more species and plasmids are added. In the traditional approach, each population is divided into multiple subpopulations based on which plasmids they're carrying. But in the new system, these subpopulations are instead averaged into a single one. This drastically cuts down on the number of variables, which increases in a linear fashion as new bacteria and plasmids are added rather than exponentially.

This new approach enabled the researchers to derive a single governing criterion that allows the prediction of whether or not a plasmid will persist in a given population. It's based on five important variables: the cost to the bacteria of having the new DNA, how often the DNA is lost, how quickly the population is diluted by the flux through the population, how quickly the DNA is swapped between bacteria, and how fast the population as a whole is growing.

With measurements for these variables in hand, researchers can calculate the population's "plasmid persistence." If that number is greater than one, the genetic package will survive and spread, with higher numbers leading to greater abundance. If less than one, it will fade away into oblivion.

"Even though the model is simplified, we've found that it's reasonably accurate under certain constraints," said Wang. "As long as the new DNA doesn't place too great of a burden on the bacteria, our new framework will succeed."

You and Wang tested their new modeling approach by engineering a handful of different synthetic communities, each with different strains of bacteria and genetic packages for swapping. After running the experiments, they found that the results fit quite well within the expectations of their theoretical framework. And to go the extra mile, the researchers also took data from 13 previously published papers and ran their numbers as well. Those results also supported their new model.

"The plasmid persistence criterion gives us the hope of using it to guide new applications," said You. "It could help researchers engineer a microbiome by controlling the genetic flow to achieve a certain function. Or it can give us guidance on what factors we can control to eliminate or suppress certain plasmids from bacterial populations, such as those responsible for antibiotic resistance."

When and how did the first animals appear? Science has long sought an answer. Uppsala University researchers and colleagues in Denmark have now jointly found, in Greenland, embryo-like microfossils up to 570 million years old, revealing that organisms of this type were dispersed throughout the world. The study is published in Communications Biology.

"We believe this discovery of ours improves our scope for understanding the period in Earth's history when animals first appeared - and is likely to prompt many interesting discussions," says Sebastian Willman, the study's first author and a palaeontologist at Uppsala University.

The existence of animals on Earth around 540 million years ago (mya) is well substantiated. This was when the event in evolution known as the "Cambrian Explosion" took place. Fossils from a huge number of creatures from the Cambrian period, many of them shelled, exist. The first animals must have evolved earlier still; but there are divergent views in the research community on whether the extant fossils dating back to the Precambrian Era are genuinely classifiable as animals.

The new finds from the Portfjeld Formation in the north of Greenland may help to enhance understanding of the origin of animals. In rocks that are 570-560 mya, scientists from Uppsala University, the University of Copenhagen and the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland have found microfossils of what might be eggs and animal embryos. These are so well preserved that individual cells, and even intracellular structures, can be studied. The organisms concerned lived in the shallow coastal seas around Greenland during the Ediacaran period, 635-541 mya. The immense variability of microfossils has convinced the researchers that the complexity of life in that period must have been greater than has hitherto been known.

Similar finds were uncovered in southern China's Doushantuo Formation, which is nearly 600 million years old, over three decades ago. Since then, researchers have been discussing what kinds of life form the microfossils represented, and some think they are eggs and embryos from primeval animals. The Greenland fossils are somewhat younger than, but largely identical to, those from China.

The new discovery means that the researchers can also say that these organisms were spread throughout the world. When they were alive, most continents were spaced out south of the Equator. Greenland lay where the expanse of the Southern Ocean (surrounding Antarctica) is now, and China was roughly at the same latitude as present-day Florida.

"The vast bedrock, essentially unexplored to date, of the north of Greenland offers opportunities to understand the evolution of the first multicellular organisms, which in turn developed into the first animals that, in their turn, led to us," Sebastian Willman says.

Bacteria are considered to be true experts in survival. Their rapid adaptive response to changing environmental conditions is based, among other things, on two competing signaling molecules. As the "Yin and Yang" of metabolic control they decide on the lifestyle of bacteria, as reported by researchers from the University of Basel. The new findings also play a role in the context of bacterial infections.

Whether they are pathogens, deep-sea microbes or soil-dwelling organisms, in order to survive, microorganisms must be able to adapt rapidly to diverse changes in their environment, including nutrient depletion. Bacteria owe their extraordinary ability to quickly adjust to adverse living conditions to small signaling molecules.

Scientists headed by Professor Urs Jenal and Professor Tilman Schirmer from the Biozentrum, University of Basel, have now discovered that bacteria use two chemically related signaling molecules to adapt their lifestyle to the prevailing living conditions. The researchers present their results in the latest issue of "Nature Microbiology". Like Yin and Yang, the two molecules embody two forces that control bacterial growth and metabolism reciprocally.

Bacterium with two different lifestyles

The researchers investigated the antagonistic nature of the two signaling molecules ppGpp and c-di-GMP in the cell using Caulobacter crescentus as a model organism. This bacterium can slip into two different roles: It can be found in a free-swimming form that is unable divide and in a surface-attached, reproductive state.

Both the lifestyle and the environmental conditions are reflected in the concentration of the two signaling molecules. This information is detected by a protein that binds both signaling molecules and acts a molecular switch, controlling growth, metabolism and lifestyle of the bacterium.

Signaling molecules determine bacterial way of life

The signaling molecules ppGpp und c-di-GMP compete for binding to the master switch. "In swarming bacteria with high levels of ppGpp, the protein is switched on; it is active," explains Urs Jenal. "In this state, glucose consumption is in full swing. Simultaneously, the resulting harmful oxygen radicals are efficiently neutralized." This ensures, that metabolic reactions adapt to the high energy demand of the motile swimmer cells and cell damage is averted.

Under favorable living conditions, providing sufficient nutrients, the level of c-di-GMP increases constantly, forcing the swimmer to develop into a sessile form. "In this case, c-di-GMP displaces ppGpp from the protein's binding pocket, it changes its structure and turns itself off," says Jenal. "This redirects metabolic reactions allowing bacteria to settle, grow and reproduce. The production of building blocks for the cell is boosted along with adhesive substances for surface attachment."

Important role also in pathogens

With the molecular master switch, the scientists have discovered the link between two large regulatory networks, which until now have been thought to operate independently. Although Caulobacter is a harmless environmental bacterium, the newly uncovered "Yin and Yang" mechanism could also play an important role in pathogens.

This may prove to be of key importance: Both ppGpp and c-di-GMP influence bacterial virulence and persistence as well as antibiotic resistance in different ways, thus influencing the course of many infections.