Culture

LA JOLLA--As scientists around the world develop life-saving COVID-19 vaccines and therapies, many are still wondering exactly why the disease proves deadly in some people and mild in others.

To solve this puzzle, scientists need an in-depth understanding of how the body's many types of immune cells respond to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

A new international study led by scientists at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI), The University of Liverpool and the University of Southampton is the first to give a detailed snapshot of how the body's CD4+ T cells respond to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Among the findings, their work suggests that early in the illness, patients hospitalized with severe cases of COVID-19 develop a novel T cell subset that can potentially kill B cells and reduce antibody production.

The study, published on October 6, 2020, in Cell, provides a crucial foundation for further detailed analysis--and shows the power of a cutting-edge technique called single-cell RNA sequencing (RNA-seq).

Zooming in on individual cells

"This study employs single-cell RNA-seq to analyze RNA molecules expressed by CD4+ T cells that specifically recognize SARS-CoV-2" says LJI Associate Professor Pandurangan Vijayanand, M.D., Ph.D., who led the study with long-time collaborator Christian H Ottensmeier, M.D., Ph.D., FRCP, professor at the University of Liverpool and adjunct professor at LJI. "This lets us show, for the first time, the complete nature of the cells that respond to this virus."

"This is the beginning," says Ottensmeier, a physician scientist who co-led the study. "We needed to have a reference to look back at for further studies, and this work is novel, timely, detailed, innovative--and open."

Vijayanand and his colleagues at LJI have pioneered the use of single-cell RNA-seq in immunology. RNA-seq gives researchers a new window into the gene expression patterns that can make each person's immune response to a virus different. For the new study, the researchers focused on CD4+ T cells, which play many critical roles in fighting infection.

"CD4+ T cells play a central role in orchestrating the immune response," says study co-first author Benjamin Meckiff, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow at LJI. "They are a heterogeneous population of immune cells carrying out a wide range of functions, and we have been able to specifically analyze their response to SARS-CoV-2."

Vijayanand and Ottensmeier had planned to use single-cell RNA-seq to analyze CD4+ T cells from patients hospitalized for influenza this year. When the pandemic hit, the researchers applied in early March for approval to use samples from COVID-19 patients as well.

"We were collecting appropriate samples very early on in the pandemic," says Vijayanand.

The researchers studied samples from 40 COVID-19 patients in two groups. The hospitalized group included 22 patients (with nine treated in the ICU). The non-hospitalized group had 18 patients who had experienced milder COVID-19 symptoms.

The scientists used single-cell RNA-seq to analyze the types of CD4+ T cells that respond to SARS-COV-2 in these patients. Each type of T cell has a role in fighting viruses: some (the "helper" CD4+ T cells) alert the body to infection and recruit other immune cells, while others (TFH cells) signal B cells to make antibodies. Finally, some (Tregs) do the important job of inhibiting other T cells, keeping the immune system from damaging the body's own tissues.

"There are multiple flavors of T cells that respond to this virus," says Vijayanand.

The researchers caution that human studies are only correlative and cannot conclude that certain T cell populations are driving disease severity. They do believe some findings warrant a closer look.

For example, the scientists found that hospitalized patients have higher levels of "cytotoxic" TFH cells, which could potentially make an infection worse. Instead of doing their job and helping B cells make antibodies, the cytotoxic TFH cells seen in this study were very similar to cells that have been seen killing B cells in previous studies. The researchers then examined SARS-CoV-2-specific antibody concentrations in patients. Those with dysfunctional TFH cells also had fewer antibodies.

"The TFH cells in hospitalized patients displayed gene signatures that suggest they are dysfunctional and aren't giving the help to B cells that we would expect," says Meckiff.

A baseline for future investigations

Overall, the study gives the scientific community a starting place to explore CD4+ T cell responses to SARS-CoV-2, and the work establishes a baseline for comparing responses in people over time or with different disease severities. To support these efforts, the researchers made their data immediately available online, just two months after the project began.

"We had to be quick," says study co-first author Ciro Ramírez-Suástegui, a bioinformatics specialist at LJI. "Having the data available for everyone is essential."

"There's definitely more to explore," adds study co-author Vicente Fajardo, an LJI research technician who spearheaded the bioinformatics analysis alongside Ramírez-Suástegui.

In fact, the data and the research method could be important for more than infectious disease research. Ottensmeier explains that a better understanding of how the body responds to viruses can also guide future research into cancer immunotherapies, which would use the body's own immune system to target and kill cancer cells.

"With this study, we levied our long-standing collaboration for a new human health puzzle," says Ottensmeier. "Going forward, we can extend this understanding of what's going on in the blood in response to new viruses to understanding what goes on in the tissue when our immune system deals with cancer."

Ottensmeier and Vijayanand are working on further analysis of COVID-19 patients and also plan to expand their collaboration with the wider University of Liverpool community.

The presence of diamonds in an outcrop atop an unrealized gold deposit in Canada's Far North mirrors the association found above the world's richest gold mine, according to University of Alberta research that fills in blanks about the thermal conditions of Earth's crust three billion years ago.

"The diamonds we have found so far are small and not economic, but they occur in ancient sediments that are an exact analog of the world's biggest gold deposit--the Witwatersrand Goldfields of South Africa, which has produced more than 40 per cent of the gold ever mined on Earth," said Graham Pearson, researcher in the Faculty of Science and Canada Excellence Research Chair Laureate in Arctic Resources.

"Diamonds and gold are very strange bedfellows. They hardly ever appear in the same rock, so this new find may help to sweeten the attractiveness of the original gold discovery if we can find more diamonds."

Pearson explained that ex-N.W.T. Geological Survey scientist Val Jackson alerted his group to an unusual outcropping on the Arctic coast that has close similarities to the Witwatersrand gold deposits.

Pearson said this outcrop of rocks, known as conglomerates, are basically the erosion product of old mountain chains that get deposited in braided river channels.

"They're high-energy deposits that are good at carrying gold, and they're good at carrying diamonds," he said. "Our feeling was if the analogies are that close, then maybe there are diamonds in the Nunavut conglomerate also."

Pearson said finding new diamond deposits in Canada's North is critical in Canada continuing to host a $2.5-billion-per-year diamond mining industry.

So, on a hunch, Pearson used the last of his Canada Excellence Research Chair funding that brought him to the U of A, along with funding from the Metal Earth Project and the National Science Foundation, and--accompanied by post-doctoral diamond researcher Adrien Vizinet and former U of A grad student Jesse Reimink, now a professor at Penn State University--travelled to Nunavut.

Once at the site, the group--with the assistance of Silver Range Resources, whose CEO Mike Power is also a U of A alumnus--bashed off a modest 15 kilograms of the conglomerate and dated these rocks using the state-of-the-art mass spectrometry equipment at the U of A, which established their deposition to be about three billion years ago.

The group promptly delivered their samples to the Saskatchewan Research Council, the world leader in quantifying how many diamonds are in a rock.

Pearson remembers the precise moment about a year later, when the council's Cristiana Mircea, who visits Edmonton to teach Diamond Exploration Research Training School (DERTS) students about diamond indicator mineral identification, matter-of-factly told him the sample produced three diamonds.

"My jaw hit the floor," said Pearson. "Normally people would take hundreds of kilograms, if not tons of samples, to try and find that many diamonds. We managed to find diamonds in 15 kilos of rock that we sampled with a sledgehammer on a surface outcrop."

Though the diamonds found are quite small--less than a millimetre in diameter--he said the geologic implications are immense.

First, Pearson said there must have been kimberlite or rock like kimberlite present to carry diamonds to the Earth's surface in the ancient Earth--a notion many people have doubted.

Kimberlite pipes are the passageways that allow magma to erupt diamonds and other rocks and minerals from the mantle through the crust and onto the Earth's surface.

It also helps us understand under what conditions these peculiar kimberlite rocks can form.

Pearson said an Italian collaborator, Fabrizio Nestola from the University of Padua, managed to find an inclusion--a non-diamond mineral--in one of the diamond samples. From that, Suzette Timmerman, a researcher in the Canadian Centre for Isotopic Microanalysis and a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship recipient, began building a theory that the diamonds had to be derived from a small, deep but cool lithospheric root, which is the thickest part of the continental plate.

"This is something completely unexpected from what we think conditions were like three billion years ago on Earth," said Pearson.

He explained that stable diamonds exist only in cool parts of the mantle, so it suggests there must have been very deep, perhaps 200-kilometre-thick cold roots beneath parts of the continent very early in Earth's history.

Pearson said despite the U of A's expertise in dating diamonds around the world, there's always an argument about the relationship between the inclusion and the diamond deposit.

"Here, there's no argument because we know when those rocks were eroded onto the Earth's surface," he said.

"It tells us there's an older source, a primary source of diamonds that must have been eroded to form this diamond-plus-gold deposit," he said.

This also means mining diamonds in the area would not necessarily require very deep mines, if more economic outcrops of these rocks can be found.

"We went up there on a float plane, bashed a piece of rock off with a sledgehammer and found three diamonds," he said. "That's actually one of the most astounding parts of this discovery."

He added that the provincial government, through Alberta Innovates, clearly realized universities can help a lot in expanding and diversifying Alberta's economy into the mining sector.

"The government's investment enables us to chase hunches that might otherwise be difficult for industry to go and look at."

Pearson pointed to the Collaborative Research and Training Experience grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, which almost instantly turned the U of A into the world's leading diamond research institution thanks to the formation of DERTS.

"Alberta has several potential diamond deposits and areas ripe for further exploration," he said. "I believe the University of Alberta can play a key role in helping to find and establish diamond and other mineral mines in Alberta."

Pearson said more research is continuing on similar nearby outcrops being developed by Silver Range Resources in collaboration with the Metal Earth Project, the Nunavut government and Penn State University, to establish the extent of the diamonds and gold in these rocks, and the possible primary sources of these minerals.

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have built a squid-like robot that can swim untethered, propelling itself by generating jets of water. The robot carries its own power source inside its body. It can also carry a sensor, such as a camera, for underwater exploration.

The researchers detail their work in a recent issue of Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.

"Essentially, we recreated all the key features that squids use for high-speed swimming," said Michael T. Tolley, one of the paper's senior authors and a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego. "This is the first untethered robot that can generate jet pulses for rapid locomotion like the squid and can achieve these jet pulses by changing its body shape, which improves swimming efficiency."

This squid robot is made mostly from soft materials such as acrylic polymer, with a few rigid, 3D printed and laser cut parts. Using soft robots in underwater exploration is important to protect fish and coral, which could be damaged by rigid robots. But soft robots tend to move slowly and have difficulty maneuvering.

The research team, which includes roboticists and experts in computer simulations as well as experimental fluid dynamics, turned to cephalopods as a good model to solve some of these issues. Squid, for example, can reach the fastest speeds of any aquatic invertebrates thanks to a jet propulsion mechanism.

Their robot takes a volume of water into its body while storing elastic energy in its skin and flexible ribs. It then releases this energy by compressing its body and generates a jet of water to propel itself.

At rest, the squid robot is shaped roughly like a paper lantern, and has flexible ribs, which act like springs, along its sides. The ribs are connected to two circular plates at each end of the robot. One of them is connected to a nozzle that both takes in water and ejects it when the robot's body contracts. The other plate can carry a water-proof camera or a different type of sensor.

Engineers first tested the robot in a water testbed in the lab of Professor Geno Pawlak, in the UC San Diego Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Then they took it out for a swim in one of the tanks at the UC San Diego Birch Aquarium at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

They demonstrated that the robot could steer by adjusting the direction of the nozzle. As with any underwater robot, waterproofing was a key concern for electrical components such as the battery and camera.They clocked the robot's speed at about 18 to 32 centimeters per second (roughly half a mile per hour), which is faster than most other soft robots.

"After we were able to optimize the design of the robot so that it would swim in a tank in the lab, it was especially exciting to see that the robot was able to successfully swim in a large aquarium among coral and fish, demonstrating its feasibility for real-world applications," said Caleb Christianson, who led the study as part of his Ph.D. work in Tolley's research group. He is now a senior medical devices engineering at San Diego-based Dexcom.

Researchers conducted several experiments to find the optimal size and shape for the nozzle that would propel the robot. This in turn helped them increase the robot's efficiency and its ability to maneuver and go faster. This was done mostly by simulating this kind of jet propulsion, work that was led by Professor Qiang Zhu and his team in the Department of Structural Engineering at UC San Diego. The team also learned more about how energy can be stored in the elastic component of the robot's body and skin, which is later released to generate a jet.

With its dazzling system of icy rings, Saturn has been a subject of fascination since ancient times. Even now the sixth planet from the sun holds many mysteries, partly because its distance away makes direct observation difficult and partly because this gas giant (which is multiple times the size of our planet) has a composition and atmosphere, mostly hydrogen and helium, so unlike that of Earth. Learning more about it could yield some insights into the creation of the solar system itself.

One of Saturn's mysteries involves the massive storm in the shape of a hexagon at its north pole. The six-sided vortex is an atmospheric phenomenon that has been fascinating planetary scientists since its discovery in the 1980s by the American Voyager program, and the subsequent visit in 2006 by the U.S.-European Cassini-Huygens mission. The storm is about 20,000 miles in diameter and is bordered by bands of winds blowing up to 300 miles per hour. A hurricane like it doesn't exist on any other known planet or moon.

Two of the many scientists-turned-interplanetary-storm-chasers working to uncover the secrets of this marvel are Jeremy Bloxham, the Mallinckrodt Professor of Geophysics, and research associate Rakesh K. Yadav, who works in Bloxham's lab in Harvard's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. In a recently published paper in PNAS, the researchers began to wrap their heads around how the vortex came to be.

"We see storms on Earth regularly and they are always spiraling, sometimes circular, but never something with hexagon segments or polygons with edges," Yadav said. "That is really striking and completely unexpected. [The question on Saturn is] how did such a large system form and how can such a large system stay unchanged on this large planet?"

By creating a 3D simulation model of Saturn's atmosphere, Yadev and Bloxham believe are they closing in on an answer.

In their paper, the scientists say that the unnatural-looking hurricane occurs when atmospheric flows deep within Saturn create large and small vortices (aka cyclones) that surround a larger horizontal jet stream blowing east near the planet's north pole that also has a number of storms within it. The smaller storms interact with the larger system and as a result effectively pinch the eastern jet and confine it to the top of the planet. The pinching process warps the stream into a hexagon.

"This jet is going around and around the planet, and it has to coexist with these localized [smaller] storms," said Yadav, the study's lead author. Think of it like this: "Imagine we have a rubber band and we place a bunch of smaller rubber bands around it and then we just squeeze the entire thing from the outside. That central ring is going to be compressed by some inches and form some weird shape with a certain number of edges. That's basically the physics of what's happening. We have these smaller storms and they're basically pinching the larger storms at the polar region and since they have to coexist, they have to somehow find a space to basically house each system. By doing that, they end up making this polygonal shape."

The model the researchers created suggests the storm is thousands of kilometers deep, well beneath Saturn's cloud tops. The simulation imitates the planet's outer layer and covers only about 10 percent of its radius. In a monthlong experiment the scientists ran, the computer simulation showed that a phenomenon called deep thermal convection -- which happens when heat is transferred from one place to another by the movement of fluids or gases -- can unexpectedly give rise to atmospheric flows that create large polar cyclones and a high-latitude eastward jet pattern. When these mix at the top it forms the unexpected shape, and because the storms form deep within the planet, the scientists said it makes the hexagon furious and persistent.

Convection is the same force that causes tornadoes and hurricanes on Earth. It's similar to boiling a pot of water: The heat from the bottom transfers up to the colder surface, causing the top to bubble. This is what is believed to cause many of the storms on Saturn, which, as a gas giant, doesn't have a solid surface like Earth's.

"The hexagonal flow pattern on Saturn is a striking example of turbulent self-organization," the researchers wrote in the June paper. "Our model simultaneously and self-consistently produces alternating zonal jets, the polar cyclone, and hexagon-like polygonal structures similar to those observed on Saturn."

What the model didn't produce, however, was a hexagon. Instead, the shape the researchers saw was a nine-side polygon that moved faster than Saturn's storm. Still, the shape serves as proof of concept for the overall thesis on how the majestic shape is formed and why it has been relatively unchanged for almost 40 years.

Interest in Saturn's hexagon storm goes back to 1988, when astronomer David A. Godfrey analyzed flyby data from the Voyager spacecraft's 1980 and 1981 Saturn passes and reported the discovery. Decades later, from 2004 to 2017, NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured some of the clearest and best-known images of the anomaly before plunging into the planet.

Relatively little is known about the storm because the planet takes 30 years to orbit the sun, leaving either pole in darkness for that time. Cassini, for instance, only took thermal images of the storm when it first arrived in 2004. Even when the sun shines on Saturn's northern pole, the clouds are so thick that light doesn't penetrate deep into the planet.

Regardless, many hypotheses exist on how the storm formed. Most center on two schools of thought: One suggests that the hexagon is shallow and only extends hundreds of kilometers deep; the other suggests the zonal jets are thousands of kilometers deep.

Yadev and Bloxham's findings build on the latter theory, but need to include more atmospheric data from Saturn and further refine their model to create a more accurate picture of what's happening with the storm. Overall, the duo hope their findings can help paint a portrait of activity on Saturn in general.

"From a scientific point of view, the atmosphere is really important in determining how quickly a planet cools. All these things you see on the surface, they're basically manifestations of the planet cooling down and the planet cooling down tells us a lot about what's happening inside of the planet," Yadav said. "The scientific motivation is basically understanding how Saturn came to be and how it evolves over time."

Challenging a 75-year-old notion about how and when reptiles evolved during the past 300 million-plus years involves a lot of camerawork, loads of CT scanning, and, most of all, thousands of miles of travel. Just check the stamps in Tiago R. Simões ' passport.

Simões is the Alexander Agassiz Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab of Harvard paleontologist Stephanie Pierce. From 2013 to 2018, he traveled to more than 20 countries and more than 50 different museums to take CT scans and photos of nearly 1,000 reptilian fossils, some hundreds of millions of years old. It amounted to about 400 days of active collection, helping form what is believed to be the largest available timeline on the evolution of major living and extinct reptile groups.

Now, a statistical analysis of that vast database is helping scientists better understand the evolution of these cold-blooded vertebrates by contradicting a widely held theory that major transitions in evolution always happened in big, quick (geologically speaking) bursts, triggered by major environmental shifts. The findings are described in a recently published paper in Nature Communications.

In it, researchers show that the evolution of extinct lineages of reptiles from more than 250 million years ago took place through many small bursts of morphological changes, such as developing armored body plans or wings for gliding, over a period of 50 million years instead of during a single major evolutionary event, as previously thought. They also show that the early evolution of most lizard lineages was a continuously slower and more incremental process than previously understood.

"It wasn't a sudden jump that kind of established the wide diversity that we see today in reptiles," Simões said. "There was an initial jump, but relatively small, and then a sustained increase over time of those rates [of evolution] and different diversity values."

Evidence of this has been seen in other types of animals, but this is the first time it's been seen in reptiles -- one of the most diverse animals on the planet, with more than 10,000 different species and a dizzying variety of abilities and traits. Consider how some lizard species can freeze solid overnight then thaw the next morning, or how turtles grow protective armor.

The findings run contrary to the evolutionary theory of adaptive radiation that Harvard paleontologist George G. Simpson popularized in the 1940s, which sought to explain the origins of the planet's biological diversity. Adaptive radiation has been the focus of intense investigation for decades, but wasn't until recent years that the technology, methods, and data have existed to precisely measure rapid rates of evolution in the fossil record in terms of different animal species, morphologies, and at the molecular level using DNA.

Researchers of this study also included Pierce, the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology; Oksana Vernygora, a graduate student from the University of Alberta in Canada; and Professor Michael Wayne Caldwell at Alberta.

Simões traveled to almost all of the world's major natural history museums to collect the data for the study, including the national natural history museums in London, Paris, Berlin, Ottawa, Beijing, and Tokyo. In the U.S., he visited the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology.

The scientists believe that by understanding how animals evolve over longer periods of time, they can glean a number of lessons on ecology and how organisms are affected by environmental changes. Using the database, researchers can determine when major reptile lineages or morphologies originated, see how those changes affected reptile DNA, and learn important lessons about how species were impacted by historical events.

Reptiles, for instance, have survived three major mass extinction events. The biggest was the Permian-Triassic mass extinction about 250 million years ago that killed about 90 percent of the planet's species, earning it the moniker the Great Dying. It's believed to have been caused by a buildup of natural greenhouse gases.

The timeline researchers created found that the rates at which reptiles were evolving and the anatomical differences among them before the Great Dying were nearly as high as after the event. However, it was only much after the Great Dying that reptiles became dominant in many ecosystems and extremely diverse in terms of the number of different species.

That finding cemented that fast rates of anatomical change don't need to coincide with genetic diversity or an abundance of species (called taxonomic diversity), and further rebutted adaptive radiation as the only explanation for the origin of new animal groups and body plans. The researchers also note that it took reptiles almost 10 million years to recover to previous levels of anatomical diversity.

"That kind of tells you on the broad scheme of things and on a global scale how much impact, throughout the history of life, sudden environmental changes may have," Simões said.

Further evidence that contradicted adaptive radiation included similar but surprising findings on the origins of snakes, which achieved the major aspects of their skinny, elongated body plans early in their evolution about 170 million years ago (but didn't fully lose their limbs for another 105 million years). They also underwent rapid changes to their skulls about 170 to 165 million years ago that led to such powerful and flexible mouths that today they can swallow whole prey many times their size. But while snakes experienced the fastest rates of anatomical change in the history of reptile evolution, these changes did not coincide with increases in taxonomic diversity or high rates of molecular evolution as predicted by adaptive radiations, the researchers said.

The scientists weren't able to pinpoint why this mismatch happens, and suggested more research is needed. In particular they want to understand how body plans evolve and how changes in DNA relate to it.

"We can see better now what are the big changes in the history of life and especially in the history of reptile life on Earth," Simões said. "We will keep digging."

AURORA, Colo. -- Olfactory sensory neurons are nasal neurons that make use of hundreds of different types of odorant receptors to analyze odorous chemicals in our external world and send that information to our brain. These neurons have the unusual ability to undergo turnover throughout life - a process understood to happen due to the special vulnerability of these neurons to environmental insults, such as viruses.

The paper, out today from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and published in Cell Reports, explores whether this process has a function beyond just replacement. After lessening odors though one side of the nose, researchers examined the birth rates of different subtypes of olfactory sensory neurons in mice to determine how odor stimulation can affect the regeneration process. Results show that diminished odor stimulation reduces the number of newly-generated neurons that express particular odorant receptors, indicating a selective alteration in the neurogenesis of these neuron subtypes.

"This is surprising because when a new neuron is born, the receptor that it chooses, and thus its subtype, is thought to be random" said Stephen Santoro, PhD, University of Colorado School of Medicine assistant professor and lead author. "Our results show that the birth of some neurons depends on odor stimulation. These findings challenge the current model that the subtype identities of new neurons are random. We think this paper provides evidence that what is currently understood about how olfactory sensory neurons develop is incomplete. It also provides hints that life-long olfactory sensory neurogenesis may have an important adaptive function in addition to simple repair."

The discovery of stimulation-dependent neurogenesis may also have implications for understanding how our sense of smell changes as we age. "One of the reasons we're interested in better understanding how olfactory sensory neurogenesis is controlled is because, as we age, the rate of olfactory neurogenesis slows down, resulting in a phenomenon known as age-related olfactory dysfunction in a large percentage of people," says Santoro. "An impaired sense of smell is a big problem in terms nutrition and safety. Smell is important for stimulating appetite; and without it, people can't discriminate foods that may be harmful. This problem is recognized as a significant quality-of-life issue."

NOAA/NASA's Suomi NPP satellite captured another startling image of the August Complex of fires that has grown to over 1,000,000 acres burned (1,006,140 acres total) and because of that grim milestone the complex has been dubbed a "gigafire." The August Complex is only 58% contained. Inciweb reports that: "In the northeast zone, active behavior continues. Structures in Hidden Valley, Trinity Pines/Post Mountain, Wildwood and Platina are threatened by fire spread. Short range spotting and fire spread toward Hidden Valley has increased potential for impact to structures."

Another view that can be captured by Suomi NPP satellite is a false-color image. The false-color image is collected by the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) instrument suite using corrected reflectance bands. Burned areas or fire-affected areas are characterized by deposits of charcoal and ash, removal of vegetation and/or the alteration of vegetation structure. When bare soil becomes exposed, the brightness in Band 1 may increase, but that may be offset by the presence of black carbon residue; the near infrared (Band 2) will become darker, and Band 7 becomes more reflective. When assigned to red/brown in the image, Band 7 will show burn scars as deep or bright reddish brown depending on the type of vegetation burned, the amount of residue, or the completeness of the burn. It is hard to see clearly due to the massive amounts of smoke covering the landscape.

Inciweb reports the following weather concerns for this fires: "Hot and dry conditions persist. Smoke remains very thick in the lower valleys with visibility reduced under a mile. Temperatures will be 88-93 in the valleys and 75 to 80 in the higher elevations. The humidity will be 10-15% with 4-8 mph wind."

A new report suggests that lingering "brain fog" and other neurological symptoms after COVID -19 recovery may be due to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an effect observed in past human coronavirus outbreaks such as SARS and MERS.

People who have recovered from COVID-19 sometimes experience lingering difficulties in concentration, as well as headaches, anxiety, fatigue or sleep disruptions. Patients may fear that the infection has permanently damaged their brains, but researchers say that's not necessarily the case.

A paper co-authored by clinical professor and neuropsychologist Andrew Levine, MD, of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and graduate student Erin Kaseda, of Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, in Chicago, explores the historical data on survivors of previous coronaviruses, which caused severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS).

The paper was published in The Clinical Neuropsychologist.

"The idea is to raise awareness among neuropsychologists that PTSD is something you might want to consider when evaluating persistent cognitive and emotional difficulties among COVID-
19 survivors," said Dr. Levine.

"When we see someone for neuropsychological testing, we expect them to be at their best, relatively speaking," Dr. Levine said. "If we identify a psychiatric illness during our evaluation, and if we believe that condition's symptoms are interfering with their ability to perform at their best, we would want that treated first, and then retest them once it's under control."

If the symptoms are due, even partially, to a psychiatric condition such as PTSD, treatment will help manage those symptoms, and provide a clearer view of any underlying brain issues.

"Once they have treatment, and hopefully have some remission of their psychiatric symptoms, if the cognitive complaints and the deficits on neuropsychological tests are still there, then that's more evidence that something else is going on," Kaseda said. "It's going to be important for clinicians across the board to be keeping up with the literature that's coming out, to make sure they have the most up to date information as these survivors are starting to present for neuropsychological testing."

Kaseda began pursuing this question based on her experience working with patients with mild traumatic brain injury, such as concussion. "When these symptoms persist for months or years after the original injury, it's much more likely to be due to the presence of a psychiatric disorder," she said.

A review of data from the SARS and MERS outbreaks showed that those survivors had heightened risk for PTSD.
In the case of COVID-19, the symptoms of PTSD may arise in response to the invasive measures needed to treat the patients, including intubation and ventilation, which can be traumatic for fearful patients. Other times, delirium causes patients with COVID-19 to suffer hallucinations, and the memory of these terrifying sensations continues to plague the recovered patient.

In addition to patients who have been hospitalized, frontline health-care providers can be similarly affected due to the constant stress and fear they face at work. And for some people, the anxiety of living through a pandemic, being isolated from friends, and battling the constant fear of an invisible threat can deliver a similar blow to thinking and memory skills.

While a PTSD diagnosis might not sound like good news, there are many available treatments for the disorder, including psychotherapy and medications. By comparison, researchers are still working to understand the direct neurological effects of COVID-19. "Treatment options (for COVID) are still quite a way's out, because it's still an evolving situation," Kaseda said.

"We don't actually know anything yet from survivors of COVID-19," Kaseda said. "Until we have that data, it's very hard to say what actual percentage of patients are going to have cognitive complaints because of direct effects of the virus, because of medical intervention, or because of psychiatric concerns."

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, most universities across the United States transitioned from face-to-face classes to remote learning, closed campuses and sent students home this past spring. Such changes, coupled with social distancing guidelines, have altered social interactions and limited our access to fitness facilities, parks and gymnasiums. This is concerning as positive social interaction and access to exercise facilities both promote physical activity. Recently, a group of Kent State University researchers sought to examine the impact of these pandemic-related changes upon physical activity and sedentary behavior, specifically sitting, across the university population.

Kent State's College of Education, Health and Human Services professors Jacob Barkley, Ph.D., Andrew Lepp, Ph.D., and Ellen Glickman, Ph.D., along with current and former Kent State doctoral students Greg Farnell, Ph.D., Jake Beiting, Ryan Wiet and Bryan Dowdell, Ph.D., assessed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on physical activity and sedentary behavior. More than 400 college students, faculty, staff and administrators reported their typical physical activity and sedentary behavior before the COVID-19 pandemic and after the transition to remote learning and the closure of campus.

In this before-and-after comparison, participants reported nearly eight hours more sitting per week after transitioning from face-to-face classes to remote learning. Changes in physical activity were not so straightforward. Those participants who were not highly active before the pandemic actually increased physical activity after the closure of campus and the transition to remote learning, while participants who were highly active before the pandemic experienced a decrease in overall physical during the pandemic.

"It appears that the participants who were most physically active before the pandemic may have been the most negatively affected," Barkley said. "This makes sense as these active individuals are more likely to utilize the fitness facilities that were closed when the pandemic hit. However, the increases in physical activity in participants who were less active before the pandemic were surprising. Perhaps the elimination of a daily commute left them with more time for physical activity. Or perhaps, they started walking just to get out of the house for a bit. Independent of the changes in physical activity, the sample-wide increase in sitting by over an hour per day is concerning as excess sitting is associated with a variety of negative health outcomes, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and even a greater risk of dying earlier."

The authors suggest that while many, like those on university campuses, experienced and may continue to experience challenging, pandemic-related changes to their daily routines, it is important that we all work to maintain positive health behaviors despite these challenges. The Kent State researchers recommend the following:

Try to minimize sitting for extended periods of time, and when possible, add in some exercise at home or outside.

For those who are still working or taking classes remotely, try to incorporate a standing desk into your routine and/or plan breaks where you get up and move away from your computer. During those breaks, try to do some light activity, like taking a walk.

Breaking up your sedentary activity by adding some physical activity will not only benefit your physical health; it can improve cognition, productivity and reduce stress.

"There are likely lots of us that could use some stress relief right now," Barkley said. "Getting up and moving can provide just that."

HERSHEY, Pa. -- Researchers at Penn State College of Medicine now better understand the role of a protein, interleukin-21 (IL-21), in the immune system response to infections in the nervous system. The results of their recent study support further investigation into using IL-21 as a therapeutic agent for persistent central nervous system infections.

CD4 T cells in the immune system produce IL-21, which is critical for the development of CD8 tissue-resident-memory (TRM) cells during persistent viral infections of the central nervous system with polyomavirus.

Dr. Aron Lukacher, professor and chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, said the results, published in Science Immunology, demonstrate that IL-21 is an important factor in the development of effective immune responses to chronic infections in the central nervous system including neurodegenerative HIV-AIDS and progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML), a fatal brain infection caused by JC polyomavirus. PML starts with symptoms including clumsiness, weakness or difficulty speaking or thinking. As it progresses, patients may develop dementia, have vision problems and become unable to speak.

Lukacher's lab created an animal model of JC polyomavirus in mice, called mouse polyomavirus (MuPyV). Their research focuses on strategies to reduce the harmful effects of MuPyV, with the goal of developing translational approaches to improving outcomes for patients with PML and other immunocompromising conditions.

Prior research demonstrated that IL-21 is a key part of immune responses in the body, but the present study investigated the specific mechanisms and role IL-21 plays in the immune response to infection with MuPyV.

The research team, including medical scientist training program student Heather Ren, studied mice that were unable to produce sufficient CD4 T-cells and had similar defects in gene expression related to the development of CD8 TRM cells. They found that injecting IL-21 into cerebrospinal fluid reduced those deficiencies.

"The use of IL-21 as a therapeutic agent for persistent central nervous system infections needs further investigation," Lukacher, a researcher at Penn State Cancer Institute, said. "Whether it needs to be administered directly into the central nervous system or given peripherally, such as intravenous infusion, will require further testing in our model."

Lukacher said future studies will examine whether giving IL-21 to mice with persistent MuPyV infection, both under immunocompetent and CD4 T-cell-deficient conditions, may bolster protective antiviral CD8 T cell responses and keep the viral infection in check.

In the United States, where food is relatively easy to come by for most of the population, roughly $165 billion worth of it is wasted every year. That's enough to fill 730 college football stadiums. And of the food that is wasted, the majority of it is at the household level.

"In a consumer-based culture, food can become easily devalued, especially when it's relatively cheap, as it is in the U.S., for the most part. And that ends up being a driver for food waste," said Chris Wharton, assistant dean of innovation and strategic initiatives at Arizona State University's College of Health Solutions.

"But if you can show people how much they're wasting and what that means in terms of dollars and cents or lost opportunities for their kids to eat nutritious fruits and vegetables, then you have put value back in the food, and that could potentially drive down food waste."

Wharton and colleagues recently published a study on the subject in the journal Resources, Conservation and Recycling that employed a values-based intervention in an attempt to reduce household food waste in 53 families in the Phoenix area. The study was funded by a $100,000 grant from Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions in partnership with the city of Phoenix.

Over the course of five weeks, the families that participated in the study were given instructions to read and view different educational material each week that focused on such topics as proper food storage and how to decipher expiration dates. Along with each week's topic, the educational material also highlighted three values commonly associated with food: cost, health and environmental impact.

"Food waste is as much about the knowledge and the skills needed to reduce it as it is about the values we associate with the food that we buy," Wharton said.

At the end of each week, participants weighed and logged how much food waste they had accumulated using a clear plastic bin to store the waste and a food-grade scale to weigh it.

"That was one of the novelties of the study, because that type of objective measurement hasn't really been employed before," Wharton said. "Food waste -- like so many other things that we throw out every day, like plastic -- it just goes into this magic bucket, the trash can, and it just disappears. But if you can see it, then it starts to tell you something about what it means for that to accumulate, day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year."

In fact, in qualitative data obtained from participants' exit interviews following the study, several families reported that watching their food waste build up in the clear bin acted as a sort of feedback mechanism that prompted them, and even their kids, to want to waste less.

The results of the study showed that the intervention was successful in reducing the families' food waste by an average of 28%. And in a follow-up measurement taken two weeks after the intervention, researchers noted a slight increase in food waste from the families' postintervention percentage, but still an overall significantly lower percentage of food waste than their baseline amount, measured before the intervention.

While those results are statistically significant, the study only scratched the surface of understanding the values we associate with food and how they influence food waste behavior. Going forward, Wharton and his colleagues want to learn more about that in order to develop a predictive model to improve future interventions.

"The approach to revaluate food by trying to attach it to concerns about the environment or health or finances played out interestingly, because different participants found different things more or less important, so it's not totally clear yet what all the drivers of food waste are amongst individuals," he said.

"There's some sense (according to research) that the elderly may waste a little bit less than younger generations or that wealthier families waste a little bit more than less wealthy families. But there's just not any real consensus in the literature on what predisposes people to waste more or less. There are lots of factors that I think could be really important, like culture, emotions and habitation. And if we can figure out what those are, we can develop better interventions."

Wharton encourages any families interested in reducing their own food waste to visit the website where the same educational materials used by study participants are accessible to the general public.

"Certainly any family can do this," he said. "It just takes a little initiative."

Technology that helps to quickly extract and analyse genetic material could be used for cheap, accurate and mobile COVID-19 testing, including at airports and remote testing centres.

'Dipstick' technology, developed by the University of Queensland's Professor Jimmy Botella and Dr Michael Mason, allows genetic material to be extracted in as little as 30 seconds, with a full molecular diagnosis in 40 minutes.

"That process is currently achieved using large and expensive commercial set-ups that require multistep procedures and specialised laboratory equipment," Professor Botella said.

"In contrast, our dipstick tech is incredibly cheap and can be used virtually anywhere, without the need for specialised equipment or a laboratory.

"Our tech enables the purification of DNA and RNA nucleic acids from patient samples - a critical step in COVID-19 diagnosis.

"Combined with a portable diagnostic machine we've developed - which fits in your hand and can be powered by a car's cigarette lighter connection - we could enable faster identification and isolation of positive patients, helping to reduce the spread of the disease.

"We're hoping it will be used to expand COVID-19 diagnostic testing to non-laboratory environments such as airports, remote testing centres and GP clinics."

The process can be used to extract genetic material from most living organisms, including people, livestock, bacteria and viruses.

Dr Michael Mason said the team had already applied the technology in other areas, primarily to fight plant pathogens.

"We've successfully used the dipsticks to identify diseases associated with fresh produce and important crops that are critical for feeding some of the world's poorest people," Dr Mason said.

"Even in remote locations, such as isolated plantations in Papua New Guinea, we've successfully used the technology to identify a pathogen killing coconut trees."

"Really, this technology could be used to detect almost any disease, anywhere."

The researchers said their dipsticks can be produced quickly, cheaply and in bulk using a household pasta maker.

"It was quite a surprise, in a year full of surprises," Professor Botella said.

"Using a low-cost pasta maker, wax and filter paper, we are able to rapidly make hundreds of dipsticks, ready to be used, in only a few minutes.

"The simplicity of the manufacturing process and the low-cost and accessibility of the required materials is a significant advantage of this technology.

"It means it can benefit users in modern research laboratories as well as low-resource facilities in developing countries, high schools and small university teaching labs.

"It's faster, cheaper and mobile, so let's put it to work."

Invasive alien plant species can pose a serious threat to native biodiversity and to human well-being. Identifying the factors that contribute towards invasion success is therefore crucial. Previous studies on biological invasions have focused mainly on interactions between one alien and one native species, attributing invasion success to the superior competitive ability of the invading aliens. Very few experiments have examined them in multi-species plant communities.

A new experiment by ecologists based at the University of Konstanz (Germany), the Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Taizhou University (both in China), the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development and the Joint Research Unit for Plant-Microorganism-Environment Interactions (France) addresses this research gap by considering competition among plants in communities comprised of several plant species, both alien and native. The results, which appear in the latest issue of Nature Ecology and Evolution, pinpoint one major reason for invasion success and subsequent invasional meltdown to soil microbes, especially fungal endophytes.

Soil microbes a major driver of invasion success

"Plants compete in different ways", explains Zhijie Zhang, first author on the study and a doctoral researcher in the University of Konstanz?s Ecology group led by Professor Mark van Kleunen. "The most intuitive way is competition for resources such as nutrients and sunlight. But competition can also occur through other trophic levels, for instance in relation to herbivores and especially in regard to soil microbes (fungi, bacteria and other small organisms that live below ground). Our study shows that fungal endophytes, which spend at least part of their life cycle inside plants, are key to explaining invasion success".

Previous studies have revealed that plants modify the community of soil microbes as they grow, which affects both their own development and that of plants which later grow on this soil ("soil-legacy effect"). However, exactly how soil-legacy effects impact competitive outcomes between alien and native plants in multi-species communities had remained unclear. To address this issue, the researchers conceived a large multi-species experiment consisting of two stages. First, soil was conditioned with one of six native plant species, with one of four aliens, or, as a control, without any plant. In a second step, on these soils, ten plant species (either native or alien) were grown without competition, with competition from conspecific plants, or with competition from another species, thus mimicking different competition scenarios in nature. To assess the role of microbes, the researchers further analysed how soil-conditioning species affected the soil microbial communities and how the soil microbial communities affected later plants, taking biomass production above ground as an indication of competitive ability.

Invasional meltdown in multi-species plant communities

The study revealed several things: First, there was no evidence of superior competitive ability among the naturalised aliens if the soil they were grown on had not undergone any conditioning. In other words, aliens did not prove to be more competitive than natives in two-species communities, a finding that challenges previous theories on invasion success. Soil conditioned by aliens, however, did affect competitive outcomes between natives and aliens, with aliens producing much more biomass than native plants. "In this scenario, the aliens proved much more competitive than their native rivals, lending further credence to the invasional meltdown hypothesis", explains Zhang.

This hypothesis posits that the establishment of one alien species in a non-native habitat can facilitate the invasion of other alien species in the same environment. The study by Zhang et al. pinpoints the underlying mechanism to the soil microbiome: "Our analyses reveal that the legacy effect of soil-conditioning species on later species became less negative as their microbial communities became less similar", elaborates Zhang. Aliens were observed to share fewer fungal endophytes with other aliens than with native species, which comes with a lower chance of fungal endophytes spilling over. "The idea, which is also referred to as 'novelty', is that two species that share few fungal endophytes affect each other less negatively than two species that share many endophytes", concludes Zhang. "More research needs to be carried out, but we are positive that soil microbes are crucial to invasion success and invasional meltdown in multi-species communities".

Cyanobacteria, despite staining water green through their special pigments, are colloquially known as "blue-green algae", and convert light energy into chemical energy particularly effectively thanks to their highly active photosynthetic cells. This makes them attractive for biotechnological application, where they could be used as environmentally friendly and readily available biocatalysts for the production of new chemicals using specifically introduced enzymes.

Limited light availability

What sounds good in theory, is still facing obstacles in the practical large-scale technological implementation. A decisive limiting factor is currently the availability of light, as Robert Kourist from the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology at Graz University of Technology explains: "When cyanobacteria are densely grown, i.e. in high concentrations, only the cells located on the outside receive enough light. Inside it's pretty dark. This means that the amount of catalyst cannot be increased at will. After a cell density of a few grams per litre, the photosynthetic activity and thus the productivity of the cells decreases sharply. This is of course a considerable disadvantage for large-scale biotechnological production."

By comparison, previously established biocatalysts such as yeasts can be used with cell densities of 50 grams per litre and more. The established production organisms have the major disadvantage that they depend on agricultural products as a basis for growth and thus consume many resources. "Algae-based catalysts can be grown from water and CO2, so they are 'green' in a two-fold sense. For this reason, intensive efforts are under way to increase the catalytic performance of cyanobacteria," said Kourist.

Making better use of available light

Together with Ruhr University Bochum and the Finnish University of Turku, the algae working group at TU Graz has now succeeded in increasing precisely this catalytic performance by specifically redirecting the photosynthetic electron flow to the desired catalytic function. "For the first time, we were able to measure the supply of photosynthetic energy directly in the cells in a time-resolved manner so that we were able to identify bottlenecks in the metabolism," explains Marc Nowaczyk from the Chair of Plant Biochemistry at the Ruhr University Bochum.

"We have switched off a system in the genome of the cyanobacterium that is supposed to protect the cell from fluctuating light. This system is not necessary under controlled cultivation conditions, but consumes photosynthetic energy. Energy that we prefer to put into the target reaction," explains Hanna Büchsenschütz, doctoral student at TU Graz and first author of the study. In this way, the problem of low productivity of cyanobacteria due to high cell densities can be solved. "To put it another way, we can only use a certain amount of cells. That's why we have to make the cells go faster. We have developed a method using so-called metabolic engineering that makes cyanobacteria a great deal more mature for biotechnological application," said Kourist.

In addition to increasing the productivity of the cell itself through targeted interventions at the gene level, the Graz researchers are also working on new concepts for the algae cultivation process. One approach is to introduce light sources directly into the cell suspension, for example via mini LEDs. New geometries are also being experimented with. Thus, cyanobacteria in the form of encapsulated small spheres, so-called "beads", can absorb more light overall. Robert Kourist comments: "It is very important to develop all measures on the way to large-scale industrial application of algae-based biocatalysts in an integrated way. This is only possible with interdisciplinary research that looks at the function of an enzyme in the same way as we look at engineering in the photosynthetic cell."

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all? The answer: not the organizations led by narcissists.

A new paper by Berkeley Haas Prof. Jennifer Chatman and colleagues shows not only the profound impact narcissistic leaders have on their organizations, but also the long-lasting damage they inflict. Like carriers of a virus, narcissistic leaders "infect" the very cultures of their organizations, the researchers found, leading to dramatically lower levels of collaboration and integrity at all levels--even after they are gone.

The paper, "When 'Me' Trumps 'We': Narcissistic Leaders and the Cultures they Create," in-press and published online by The Academy of Management Discoveries. It is co-authored by Charles A. O’Reilly of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (MBA 71 and PhD 75), and former Berkeley Haas PhD student Bernadette Doerr.

In previous research about toxic leaders, Chatman and her colleagues found that narcissistic CEOs have a dark side that reveals itself slowly over time. Their exploitative, self-absorbed behavior sets them apart from the charismatic, “transformational” leaders they are often confused with. They are also paid more than their non-narcissistic peers, and there’s a larger gap between their pay and those of other top executives in their companies, often because they are so good at unfairly claiming credit for other’s accomplishments. Narcissistic leaders get their companies involved in more lawsuits, as well, Chatman and her colleagues’ research has found.

Narcissistic leaders have personalities that are profoundly grandiose, overconfident, and dishonest, credit-stealing, and blame-throwing, according to Chatman. They are abusive to their subordinates, think they are superior, don’t listen to experts, create conflict, and believe the rules simply don’t apply to them. They can explode in rage at any sign of disagreement or disloyalty. There’s always an “I” in their conception of the team.

In their latest paper, Chatman and her colleagues conducted a series of five experiments on 1,862 test subjects, as well as a field study that included CEOs of major companies, to discern the impact of narcissists’ bad behavior. The results show not only that leaders high on the narcissism scale are less collaborative and ethical, but also that the cultures of the organizations they lead are less collaborative and ethical. Ultimately, the researchers revealed exactly how narcissists institutionalize less collaborative and ethical behaviors and create lasting damage on employee morale and performance.

“Narcissistic leaders affect the core elements of organizations and their impact on society,” says Chatman, the Paul J. Cortese Distinguished Professor of Management. “Companies organize because they can do something together that no individual could accomplish alone. When narcissistic leaders undermine collaboration, they by definition reduce the effectiveness of an organization. Without integrity, an organization risks its very survival.”

How narcissists affect organizations

There’s a colorful saying that the “fish rots from the head down"—employees see leaders acting like jerks, and they become jerks, too.

But it’s not a simple matter of mimicking the boss. “Narcissists don't create narcissists,” Chatman says. “It's not about doing what the leader does. It's about the leader creating a culture that induces people to act less ethically and less collaboratively than they would otherwise, whether they're narcissists or not.”

That’s because a key driver of employee behavior is their organization’s culture, not just their leader, says Chatman, a pioneering researcher in the field. “Organizational culture outlasts any leader,” she says. “Even after a leader is gone, the culture that has been cultivated has a life of its own.”

Narcissists infect the culture through the policies and practices that they directly influence, or—more often—that they fail to institute. They often choose not to put in place strong policies governing ethical behavior, conflicts of interest, and pay equity between men and women, as well as practices that promote teamwork and encourage people to treat others with civility and respect. On the flip side, they also frequently fail to sanction employees when they violate these shared norms. In effect, people get rewarded for less ethical, less collaborative behaviors, Chatman says.

Actions such as these create lasting organizational damage. When people aren’t able to collaborate, collective accomplishments become harder to attain. Employees’ ability to learn, grow, and gain new expertise withers. When they see leaders take credit for every success and blame others for every failure, employees’ morale sinks and their self-confidence wilts.

While there’s strong evidence that people who are overconfident and unethical generate lower financial performance and undergo more regulatory investigations of ethical breaches than those who are not, Chatman says the jury is still out about whether narcissistic leaders have a strong impact on long-term company performance. That's because many external and competitive variables can affect stock prices, revenues, and profitability. Even so, Chatman argues, narcissists’ penchant for becoming embroiled in lawsuits and ethical breaches, being insensitive to risk because of their overconfidence, and creating low employee motivation is a recipe for poor organizational performance.

Yet the mythology persists: Don’t bold, visionary leaders like Elon Musk of Tesla or Steve Jobs of Apple need to be a little bit narcissistic in order to have the self-confidence to launch innovative and supremely risky ventures? The answer is a definite no, says Chatman. “You can have confidence and be innovative, and not be self-involved, exploitative of others, overconfident, and risk-insensitive,” she says. “Bill Gates is a perfect countervailing example. But somehow, the lay public, especially in the U.S., has developed a view that leaders are supposed to be loud-talking and overconfident.”

How to head off narcissistic leadership

To avoid narcissistic leaders, one obvious solution is to simply not hire them, or allow them to move up. Organizations should put special measures in place to screen for these personality types, Chatman says. A common approach involves asking tough questions to uncover negative behaviors from a wide range of references, not just those a leader provides. However, narcissists are often savvy enough to recognize who is going to sing their praises and who isn't, and will provide a selective list of references. In some cases, executive search firms are enlisted to go beyond references and try to uncover information that is harder to find.

Still, wily narcissists can sometimes evade detection until they’ve been in place for a while. Using 360-degree evaluations from a wide range of employees can help surface self-absorbed leaders, Chatman notes.

Once it becomes clear that a company has a toxic leader at the top, it takes unflagging effort from the board to rein in a narcissist’s worst tendencies, Chatman says. Unfortunately, many boards of directors don’t go far enough in that direction, which is part of the reason why companies have ended up with so many CEOs who are high on the narcissism scale.

Chatman says that one of the best ways to mitigate the damage narcissistic leaders can cause is to base a significant part of their compensation and performance evaluation on the development of their people. Boards can also align a leader’s compensation to the performance of their team, and boards can devise ways to reward collaboration with peers. Measures such as these help ensure leaders cannot circumvent sharing credit and working with others.

Chatman’s findings show that after a narcissist leader gets a strong foothold, removing them is only the first step in repairing the organization. “Boards can't assume that simply by removing a leader, they will be able to change how people in the organization behave,” she says. “The culture leaders helped create will still be embedded in the policies and practices that reward people for prioritizing uncollaborative and unethical behaviors. Turning around this kind of culture will take explicit effort and likely a significant amount of time.”