Culture

Researchers from Peter the Great St.Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU) developed a new mathematical model to predict economic performance of crops. It can assist the breeders to obtain the plants with the highest possible quality. The research results were presented at the fifth "Plant genetics, genomics, bioinformatics, and biotechnology" (PlantGen2019) conference as well as published in BMC Genetics and supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project 18-29-13033.

"We have developed a new mathematical model for predicting crop phenotypic traits as a function genotype," notes Maria Samsonova, head of the Laboratory of Mathematical Biology and Bioinformatics at SPbPU. She added, that such models in agriculture are called genomic selection models. It is very difficult to create a new variety of plants, it usually takes 10-12 years. Using genomic selection models, this process can be accelerated several times. "Our mathematical model, based on machine learning methods, performs better than modern analogs as it contains a significantly smaller number of parameters.

Scientists applied the model to predict phenotypic traits of an important crop, soybean. Among the traits, they analyzed plant height, number of seeds per plant, yield, protein and oil content in seeds.

"For breeders, it is very important to select parental plants able to produce offspring of high quality," says Anna Igolkina, engineer of the Laboratory of Mathematical Biology and Bioinformatics at SPbPU. "Due to the small number of parameters in our model, we can rank breeding pairs according to offspring quality and selected advanced parental pairs representing new potentially interesting donors of desired traits."

Scientists from the Department of Cell Biology of the University of Malaga (UMA) and the Andalusian Centre for Nanomedicine and Biotechnology (BIONAND) have made progress in finding new rapid implementation therapies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, identifying a new drug that could prevent or mitigate the consequences derived from SARS-CoV-2 infection.

In the coming year, a team led by the researchers of the UMA Iván Durán and Fabiana Csukasi will study how 4-Phenylbutiric acid (4-PBA) treatment modulates the inflammatory response produced in severe cases of COVID-19. The project has been financed by the COVID-19 Fund of the Government of Andalusia, with an initial endowment of EUR 90,000 and the possibility of a three-year renewal. First results have already been published in the scientific journal Cytokine and Growth Factors Review.

The inflammatory process identified in severe cases of coronavirus causes an uncontrolled and excessive release of cytokines -molecules in charge of organizing the body's defenses- which could even trigger vascular hyperpermeability and multiorgan failure. Controlling such cytokine "storm", through those controlling them, that is, the infected cells, is precisely what these researchers of the UMA propose.

"When cells are stressed by infection, they call the cytokines, and the more stressed they are, the more persistent they become, provoking this uncontrolled inflammation. Hence, one possible treatment for COVID-19 is to reduce cellular stress", explains Durán.

According to the researcher, repurposing the 4-PBA anti-stress drug, approved for clinical use against other diseases and, hence, easy to apply clinically, could modulate such cellular stress, which is also present in pathologies like diabetes, aging or carcinogenesis, which, in turn, are classified as risk factors for COVID-19.

Identifying risk groups

"Our preliminary results conducted on animal models have demonstrated that 4-PBA fully curbs mortality caused by respiratory failure derived from cellular stress", says the professor of the UMA, who further explains that these first studies have also identified the endoplasmic reticulum resident protein "BiP" (Binding Immunoglobulin Protein) -a stress blood marker- as indicator of cellular stress situations, likely to be explored and measured in affected patients.

This way, as Durán points out, BiP levels, apart from determining the efficacy of 4-PBA treatment, could serve as early indicators of COVID-19 risk groups, establishing a correlation between high levels and the inflammatory severity after the viral infection.

"There are people already suffering from diseases that cause cellular stress, and when they become infected with coronavirus, they are more likely to fall ill or die. Therefore, if we know that the patient suffers from cellular stress, we can kill two birds with one stone: we can detect susceptibility before infection occurs and know how to treat it in due time", remarks the scientist of the UMA.
In order to confirm the effectiveness and security of 4-PBA treatment through in vitro and in vivo studies of cytokine storm and SARS-CoV-2 infection, the scientists Csukasi and Durán work at the Biomedical Research Institute of Malaga (IBIMA) in collaboration with Dr. José María Reguera and Dr. Javier Sánchez from the Regional University Hospital of Malaga and Virgen de la Victoria University Hospital, respectively, and Deborah Krakow, researcher of the University of California, Los Angeles, as well as the researchers Manuel Mari-Beffa, Gustavo Rico, José Miguel Tejeiro, Rick Visser and David Bagllieto, members of the Bioengineering and Tissue Regeneration Laboratory (LABRET), directed by Professor José Becerra, who are also members of the Cellular Therapy Network, CIBER-BBN and CIBER-NED.

In March 2020, Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic, and governments around the world imposed restrictions to reduce the spread of the Coronavirus. Some countries chose stricter measures than others. But what effect does social distancing and similar measures have on our mental health? How do we adapt?

Researchers at UiT have compared corona restrictions in six countries, and looked at psychological reactions among the population, their confidence in the restrictions and belief that the government is in control over Covid-19 in their countries.

They found that those who were satisfied with how the country fought the outbreak had better well-being and a lower perceived risk of getting Coronavirus.

Dissatisfaction created fear

- We found that those who were dissatisfied with the country's Covid-19 response saw the risk of getting the virus as greater, were more concerned and expressed reduced faith in the possibility of controlling the outbreak, says professor at the Department of Psychology, Gerit Pfuhl.
Together with colleague Martin Mækelæ, and international research colleagues, Dr. Phuhl now present the recent results of the study in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

- Dissatisfaction with the government's reactions to Covid-19 led to increased stress levels and psychological reactions, Pfuhl says about the results.

- Regardless of which country they lived in, those who were dissatisfied with the measures were more tense and perceived the risk of getting Covid-19 over the next two months as higher than those who were satisfied with how the country fought the outbreak, the researcher says.

Pfuhl explains that if you experience that your country is not doing enough, then you have more fear, if you think your country is doing enough to fight the outbreak, then you are more relaxed about it and have less fear.

These new research results provide important insights for decision-makers on how to take care of the well - being of their population during a global crisis.

Large survey

The researchers sent out questionnaires via social media in Norway, Germany, Israel, Colombia, Brazil and the USA, countries that had varying degrees of strict and mild restrictions. 2285 people are included in the analysis. The survey was voluntary, and the participants were asked questions about restrictions and reactions, psychological factors, fear and knowledge, and general demographics.

Gerit Pfuhl emphasizes that this study has looked at the measures that were used early in the pandemic, namely 12-31 March.

- At that time Colombia and Israel, with a full lockdown, that had the strictest measures. The mildest, in comparison with the other five countries we examined, was the USA, says Dr. Pfuhl.

Most people coped well

So how did ordinary people cope with the situation that arose in March?

- Most people coped well. Older people better than younger people. And in Norway better than other countries, says Gerit Pfuhl.

- Among the countries we compared, Norway did very well in many areas. We had little problems with mental health, and we had confidence in that our own actions and the actions of the authorities were effective, says Martin Mækelæ who is a psychology student that has worked in the project.

He says that a large proportion of Norwegians expressed that they were satisfied with how the authorities handled the situation.

- There were very few in Norway who were very scared. But we should not ignore those few, says the Dr. Pfuhl. Some people wrote to us by email, or used an open response field in the survey to express their anxiety. Among other things, some were afraid that their partner would die of Covid-19 due to for instance heart disease, says Pfuhl.

She thinks it agrees well with what other researchers have found out, i.e. that a few are very scared but most coped quite well with the situation.

Trust in society is good for health

- The vast majority reported that they believed that infection control measures were effective, says Mækelæ.

- It's nice to see that we adapt. This means that despite the fact that the closure of society has changed the way of life, most people stayed calm and collected, and especially those who believe that their country will succeed in fighting the outbreak.

In other words, the more trust you have in society, the government, fellow citizens, and your own self-efficacy, the better it is for your own mental health.

- More than 90 percent of the population, perform infection-reducing actions, and most have self-efficacy, says Pfuhl.

When asked which restrictions are the most effective and which affect mental health the least, Pfuhl answers:

- Measures that prevent physical gatherings of people indoors are very effective. That is, fewer meetings or digital meetings - because this only creates physical distance but not social distance.

Important to communicate well

If we experienced the start of the pandemic again, and if you were part of the Norwegian government, would you do something different?

- It is hard to say. On the one hand, Norway reacted late, as did the whole of Europe, Pfuhl believes.

- On the other hand, Norway was quite good at communicating about the pandemic. The authorities were honest about the uncertainty about how serious it was.

- The government communicated well, but it could always have been better, given that the number of deaths is in itself not very informative.

She believes one must look relatively at such figures.

- That is, how many of those who tested positive died, and whether they died with or because of Coronavirus. This can reduce the fear that it is a very serious, deadly disease, the researcher concludes.

The BioScience Talks podcast features discussions of topical issues related to the biological sciences.

In the latest installment of the journal BioScience's In Their Own Words oral history series, acclaimed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson shared insights on a number of topics, including Mars exploration, the COVID-19 pandemic, and numerous themes discussed in the most recent season of his show COSMOS: Possible Worlds.
Over the course of the career-spanning interview, the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and renowned science communicator also weighed in on the numerous challenges presently facing humanity. "Every disaster movie ends with important people ignoring scientists," said Tyson, who also highlighted the cyclical nature of history, comparing the current political climate with that preceding the Second World War.
In the interview, which is also published in the pages of BioScience, Tyson shed light on his views on space exploration and the role of commercial enterprise therein. While broadly endorsing public-private partnership, he underscored the continued importance of NASA in pressing the frontiers of human discovery: "The private relationship to the moving frontier of space is historically a second-wave phenomenon," he said, because "the first wave is hugely expensive."

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

A group of scientists from Russia studied the trends in the evolution of amino acid sequences of proteins in vertebrates and insects and traced the factors influencing the process of evolution. The research results are published in the Nature Communications.

Proteins provide for the majority of the most crucial functions of the body. Hence, changes in the amino acid sequences of proteins are a real mirror of evolution, in which scientists can track evolutionary changes and their implications for the body.

The evolution of protein sequences can occur under the influence of two factors. The first one is external (for example, changes in the environment or the impact of pathogens), and it is the classic engine of evolution. The second factor is related to the changes within the genome, usually in this case, they mean epistasis, the interaction between different genes.

A group of scientists from Skoltech, the Institute for Information Transmission Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow State University, and the Institute of Epidemiology under the leadership of Georgii Bazykin, Professor of the Skoltech Life Sciences Center, showed that these two forces lead to opposite patterns of sequence evolution. Thus, looking at these patterns, it is possible to estimate the contribution of the external environment and epistasis to the evolution of proteins.

"Patterns are such that due to external changes, the variant of the gene currently entrenched in the course of evolution will become less profitable over time. On the contrary, under the influence of epistasis, coevolution occurs, the interacting regions of the genome "adjust" to each other. As a result, their successful combination becomes more and more evolutionarily advantageous," says the first author of the study, Skoltech graduate student Anastasia Stolyarova.

Using bioinformatics analysis of protein sequences from the genomes of vertebrates and insects, scientists were able to describe new universal evolutionary patterns. External factors can be considered as a reason for positive selection affecting certain genomic positions and serve as an essential aspect for the rapid evolution of these positions. But the effect of epistasis is manifested in positions under negative selection, as a result of which substitutions from one option to another occur less often in them - they evolve more slowly.

Why does the mouse sleep five times longer than the elephant? Why do babies sleep longer than adults? If these sound like riddles, that's because they have been. Sleep, in spite of its ubiquity, holds mysteries that have perplexed scientists for decades.

Now, using data from humans and other mammals, a team of scientists including researchers from the Santa Fe Institute has developed one of the first quantitative models that explains why sleep times across species and during development decrease as brains get bigger. Crucially, the model identifies a sharp transition at around 2.4 years of age, where sleep patterns change in humans as the primary purpose of sleep shifts from reorganization to repair.

"By looking at sleep, and looking how it changes, you get insight into something truly fundamental about brain development," says Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist who is Shannan Distinguished Professor and a past president of SFI.

Previous work done by West and Van Savage, a physicist and biologist who is a professor at UCLA and an external professor at SFI, looked at differences in sleep times among mammals. The new research in Science Advances ties phylogeny -- the evolutionary relationships between species -- and ontogeny -- the development of an organism as it ages -- into a unified framework.

Although experts have proposed many possible reasons for sleep, the two most prominent are neural reorganization, which is essentially learning, and repair. During waking hours, the brain experiences wear and tear from blood flow and the everyday production of harmful chemicals; sleep cleans this up. The brain reorganizes and repairs mainly when asleep - - West likens it to subway repairs that take place at night to avoid disrupting normal traffic.

Time asleep can roughly be divided into REM (random eye movement) and NREM (non-REM). Colloquially, REM sleep is often known as "deep sleep," but its purpose has remained an open question.

To answer questions about REM and NREM, the new model reduces the brain to a series of simple equations that capture how the brain uses energy to process information (which it must then reorganize). Then the authors input data from a variety of studies that looked at sleep time, metabolic rate, and brain size for dozens of participants who ranged from infants to adolescents.

By determining the ratios of REM and NREM to total sleeping time -- among other factors like brain size -- the researchers were able to use the model to predict their respective purposes. It turns out REM sleep is primarily responsible for reorganization/learning that dominates early development, while NREM handles the everyday repair that occurs throughout life.

Around 2.4 years old, the researchers observed a sudden change, where the majority of sleep shifts from REM to NREM -- a phase shift from sleeping to reorganize to sleeping to repair. In other words, humans sleep less in part because they no longer need to form as many new neural connections. This transition point has not been pinpointed before, but it could have important implications for development, according to Savage.

"The brain is doing something really amazing and very different during that period," he says. "What are the consequences of that, in terms of our ability to learn languages or adapt our brains to different situations?"

Preliminary measurements of other animals in development (rabbits, rats, and guinea pigs) show similarities to human sleep, but it's too soon to say if all mammal babies follow the same sharp transition.

"I'm very interested to see if our framework also can be extended to other mammals," says Junyu Cao, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and the paper's lead author.

The research was initiated at SFI in 2007, when Savage was a postdoctoral fellow working with West. It has since evolved through a series of workshops and working groups as part of the Institute's ongoing research on biological scaling laws and complex time.

Prolonged sleep deprivation can lead to severe health problems in humans and other animals. But why is sleep so vital to our health? A UCLA-led team of scientists has answered this question and shown for the first time that a dramatic change in the purpose of sleep occurs at the age of about 2-and-a-half.

Before that age, the brain grows very rapidly. During REM sleep, when vivid dreams occur, the young brain is busy building and strengthening synapses -- the structures that connect neurons to one another and allow them to communicate.

"Don't wake babies up during REM sleep -- important work is being done in their brains as they sleep," said senior study author Gina Poe, a UCLA professor of integrative biology and physiology who has conducted sleep research for more than 30 years.

After 2-and-a-half years, however, sleep's primary purpose switches from brain building to brain maintenance and repair, a role it maintains for the rest of our lives, the scientists report Sept. 18 in the journal Science Advances. This transition, the researchers say, corresponds to changes in brain development.

All animals naturally experience a certain amount of neurological damage during waking hours, and the resulting debris, including damaged genes and proteins within neurons, can build up and cause brain disease. Sleep helps repair this damage and clear the debris -- essentially decluttering the brain and taking out the trash that can lead to serious illness.

Nearly all of this brain repair occurs during sleep, according to senior author Van Savage, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and of computational medicine, and his colleagues.

"I was shocked how huge a change this is over a short period of time, and that this switch occurs when we're so young," Savage said. "It's a transition that is analogous to when water freezes to ice."

The research team, which included scientists with expertise in neuroscience, biology, mathematics and statistics, conducted the most comprehensive statistical analysis of sleep to date, using data from more than 60 sleep studies involving humans and other mammals. They examined data on sleep throughout development -- including total sleep time, REM sleep time, brain size and body size -- and built and tested a mathematical model to explain how sleep changes with brain and body size.

The data were remarkably consistent: All species experienced a dramatic decline in REM sleep when they reached the human developmental equivalent of about 2-and-half years of age. The fraction of time spent in REM sleep before and after that point was roughly the same, whether the researchers studied rabbits, rats, pigs or humans.

REM sleep decreases with the growth in brain size throughout development, the scientists found. While newborns spend about 50% of their sleep time in REM sleep, that falls to about 25% by the age of 10 and continues to decrease with age. Adults older than 50 spend approximately 15% of their time asleep in REM. The significant dropoff in REM sleep at about 2-and-a-half happens just as the major change in the function of sleep occurs, Poe said.

"Sleep is as important as food," Poe said. "And it's miraculous how well sleep matches the needs of our nervous system. From jellyfish to birds to whales, everyone sleeps. While we sleep, our brains are not resting."

A chronic lack of sleep likely contributes to long-term health problems such as dementia and other cognitive disorders, diabetes, and obesity, to name a few, Poe said. When you start to feel tired, she said, don't fight it -- go to bed.

"I fought sleep and pulled all-nighters when I was in college, and now think that was a mistake," Savage said. "I would have been better off with a good night's sleep. Now when I feel tired, I don't have any guilt about sleeping."

For most adults, a regular seven-and-a-half hours of sleep a night is normal -- and time lying awake doesn't count, Poe says. While children need more sleep, babies need much more, roughly twice as much as adults. The large percentage of REM sleep in babies is in stark contrast to the amount of REM sleep observed in adult mammals across an enormous range of brain sizes and body sizes. Adult humans have five REM cycles during a full night of sleep and can have a few dreams in each cycle.

A good night's sleep is excellent medicine, Poe says. And it's free.

The removal of one gene renders poxviruses - a lethal family of viral infections that are known to spread from animals to humans - harmless, a new study in the journal Science Advances reports.

During this ground-breaking study, scientists from the Spanish National Research Council and the University of Surrey investigated the immune response of cells to poxviruses. Poxviruses, such as cowpox and monkeypox, can spread to humans from infected animals, causing skin lesions, fever, swollen lymph nodes and even death.

Viruses contain genetic material which helps them outsmart host cells, enabling replication and the spread of the infection. Cells in the body are comprised of molecules that sense the presence of viruses, sometimes via the recognition of their genetic material, and alert the immune system of an upcoming infection. Poxviruses, unlike other viruses, are highly unusual in that they have large DNA genomes that are replicated exclusively in the cell cytosol, an area of the cell full of sensors. How poxviruses manage to stay undetectable has remained unknown.

Resembling human smallpox, scientists in this study used ectromelia virus (ECTV), a member of the poxvirus family that causes mousepox. ECTV spreads through the lymphatic system of mice to vital organs, where massive replication of the virus takes place, resulting in the rapid death of the animal.

During their investigations, scientists identified a gene, viral Schlafen (vSLFN), which was found to block the cell response to the virus genome making the infection silent to the immune system. Remarkably, disabling this one gene made the infection detectable, triggering a potent immune response that protected animals against doses one million times higher than the regular lethal quantity.

Following the removal of vSLFN, it was found that animals with the modified virus were protected from subcutaneous, respiratory and intravenous infection and all survived. Scientists also found that the protection was mediated by interferon, a known molecule with powerful anti-viral properties, and natural killer cells, which play a major role in the host-rejection of virally infected cells.

Researchers believe that these findings will shed light into how we combat microbial infections and will improve the efficacy and safety of vaccines, anti-cancer agents and gene therapies that are based on poxviruses.

Dr Carlos Maluquer de Motes, Senior Lecturer in Molecular Virology at the University of Surrey, said: "Viruses, although minuscule, are very complex agents with very sophisticated strategies contained in their genetic material. But it is also this same genetic material that makes them vulnerable to cell recognition. The removal of vSLFN gene protected animal against mousepox, and we believe that that we may see the same results for other poxviruses.

"Our findings reveal the importance of activating the molecules responsible for the detection of the genetic material of microbes in the fight against viruses. In addition, they also suggest that mimicking the action of vSLFN may be a valid strategy to prevent auto inflammatory and autoimmune diseases that are caused when the genetic material of cells is sensed by the immune system, promoting a reaction."

Dr Antonio Alcami from the Spanish National Research Council, said: "Viral inhibition of DNA sensing prevents the induction of the type I IFN response and complements another viral mechanism to sequester type I IFN through the secretion of soluble IFN decoy receptors. This highlights the importance of the type I IFN response in the control of immunity."

East Hanover, NJ. September 18, 2020. Researchers at Kessler Foundation authored a new article, "Employment after spinal cord injury," (DOI: 10.1007/s40141-020-00266-4), published by Current Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Reports on May 24, 2020. Authored by John O'Neill, PhD, and Trevor Dyson-Hudson, MD, the article highlights evidence-based practices in vocational rehabilitation. It is featured in SpringerLink's Collection on Topics in Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation.

Link to abstract: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40141-020-00266-4

Despite the challenges, people strive to work after spinal cord injury. Research shows that employment has meaning, value, and benefits for people with spinal cord injury. In addition to the evident economic benefits, people value their identity as members of the workforce, and the social status that accompanies inclusion in society.

Work is an important part of all of our lives and that should be no different for people with spinal cord injury. In fact, studies show that people who work after spinal cord injury have better quality of life and less depression, as well as better health and longevity, according to Dr. Dyson-Hudson, director of the Center for Spinal Cord Injury Research at Kessler Foundation.

"Achieving success in the workplace after spinal cord injury is more likely when individuals have access to transportation and assistive technology," he said, "and when secondary medical complications are minimized. Education clearly correlates with success," he continued, "and studies show that post injury educational attainment can be particularly beneficial for individuals with spinal cord injury."

The authors detail advances in vocational rehabilitation research that are increasing the numbers of individuals with spinal cord injury transitioning to competitive employment. Integrating employment services into spinal cord injury rehabilitation supports the feasibility of returning to work, and focuses the efforts of the team on the individual's goal of returning to work.

Evidence-based practices that are raising post-injury employment rates include the individualized placement support (IPS) model of supported employment (SE), and vocational resource facilitation (VRF), an early intervention model, according to Dr. O'Neill, director of the Center for Employment and Disability Research at Kessler Foundation. Dr. O'Neill described the results achieved with IPS-SE in veterans with spinal cord injury: "Studies conducted in the Veterans Administration Hospital system showed employment rates of 26% with IPS-SE versus 11% with traditional vocational rehabilitation services."

Dr. O'Neill also pointed to the gains seen with the implementation of VRF for newly injured individuals in a project funded by Craig H. Neilsen Foundation. "Of the patients recruited during inpatient rehabilitation at Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation, 43% have returned to work, significantly exceeding national one-year post injury benchmarks ranging from 12% to 21%."

The authors concluded that employment outcomes after spinal cord injury can be improved by providing necessary supports, minimizing secondary medical complications, and implementing effective employment interventions.

Research has found a proposal to regulate mining of Indigenous lands in Brazil's Amazon rainforest could affect more than 863,000 square kilometres of forest and harm the nation's economy.

Led by University of Queensland visiting PhD student Juliana Siqueira-Gay, an international collaboration has warned that President Jair Bolsonaro's 2020 bill to mine inside recognised Indigenous Lands would come at a cost.

"Brazil's Indigenous Lands are unbelievably valuable - socially, ecologically and economically," Ms Siqueira-Gay said.

"They're a unique category of protected area, covering 1.2 million square kilometres - or 23 per cent - of what is legally recognised as the Amazon.

"The Brazilian government wants to capitalise on this value, by bolstering the economy through extending mining.

"But we've calculated that this proposed policy - introduced in February this year - could lead to millions, if not billions, of dollars in losses each year.

"The loss would be primarily due to effects on rubber, timber and Brazil nut production, increased damage to greenhouse gas mitigation ecosystem services and other vital ecosystem services.

"It's a portfolio of ecological assets currently providing Brazil an estimated $7 billion AUD - it simply makes no financial sense to destroy something so valuable."

The researchers, based in both Brazil and Australia, crunched existing data and reviewed potential mining locations, quantifying threats from mining to forests and their ecosystems.

"The figures were astonishing - it's clear that much of the Amazon is at threat from this proposed policy, including extremely rare ecosystems conservation and incredibly diverse Indigenous groups and their culture" Ms Siqueira-Gay said.

"If the 4,600 known mineral deposits existing outside currently protected areas were to be developed, you're looking at 698-thousand square kilometres of forests to be potentially affected.

"But, with the approval of this proposed policy, that affected area could increase by 20 per cent, up to 863-thousand square kilometres.

"This increase alone is roughly the same size as Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark and Israel combined."

Study collaborator, Dr Laura Sonter, said she had real concerns for these forests and their supported communities, and hoped the research was heeded by the international community.

"If President Bolsonaro's bill is approved by Brazil's congress, there'll be a cascade of negative effects, both domestically in Brazil and internationally," Dr Sonter said.

"These lands are home to 222 Indigenous groups, with more than 644 thousand families living in traditional communities and speaking 160 languages.

"So, beyond economic costs to the nation, the lives of Indigenous communities will be permanently altered, and there will be significant environmental impacts.

"We hope this data can help the Brazilian government, and people, make smart decisions and protect these precious lands."

Global maps of places where people and forests coexist show that an estimated 1.6 billion people live within 5 kilometers of a forest. The assessment, based on data from 2000 and 2012 and published September 18 in the journal One Earth, showed that of these 1.6 billion "forest-proximate people," 64.5 percent were located in tropical countries, and 71.3 percent lived in countries classified as low or middle income by the World Bank.

"There were no data at all on how many people live in and around forests globally," says first author Peter Newton, an Assistant Professor in Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. "The exercise was an initial step of trying to quantify the potential target population for projects that look at people's livelihoods in a forest environment."

People who rely on forest resources for subsistence or income are commonly known as forest-dependent people. Although the number of forest-proximate people coincidently matches the 1.6 billion forest-dependent people from a widely cited estimation from the World Bank, living near the forest doesn't necessarily mean one relies on the forest for livelihood. Newton says that while "forest-dependent people" widely refers to people who derive some benefits from forests, the term "forest-proximate people" merely captures the spatial relationship between people and forests.

"Large numbers of people do live in and around forests, so that makes forests an important habitat and biome for thinking about sustainable development as well as about conservation," says Newton. "The programs, projects, and policies that affect forests also affect large numbers of people."

To map out the spatial relationship between people and forests globally, Newton and his colleagues combined forest cover and human population density data for the year 2000 and 2012. They counted the number of people who lived within 5 km (3.1 miles) from the border of forests, which they defined as any area with more than 50 percent tree cover over 2 hectares (5 acres). But they excluded urban areas with a population above 1,500 people per square kilometer (0.4 square miles).

The work provides a sketch to which other researchers and decision-makers could add on different layers of data, such as social, economic, or cultural details to paint a more complete picture. However, many of these datasets aren't available at a global level.

"What other researchers or we could do in the future is home in on a particular region where we did have data," says Newton. From local data, scientists could infer how many of those forest-proximate people were also forest dependent or living in poverty to help decision-makers implement spatial targeting and impact assessment.

New Haven, Conn. -- Doctors at Yale New Haven Hospital used a more aggressive selection process to more than quadruple the number of heart transplants performed there while maintaining positive patient outcomes, according to a new study.

The findings suggest that a more inclusive approach to selecting donor hearts and transplant recipients can enable hospitals to successfully treat more patients in need of transplants. The study appears online Sept. 18 in the journal JAMA Network Open.

The study looked at short-term patient outcomes for two groups: 49 patients who received heart transplants from 2014 to 2018, and 58 patients who had their heart transplants in the year after the hospital adopted a more aggressive selection process for donor recipients (2018-2019).

The more aggressive selection process significantly shortened the waiting period for heart patients, from 242 days to 41 days, the researchers said. Importantly, patients' survival rate at 180 days after the transplant remained nearly unchanged.

The expansion of heart transplant procedures at the hospital, in September 2018, coincided with the implementation of the new United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) donor heart allocation system in the United States.

"I think this is the takeaway for other centers -- that such a change in the approach could create opportunities for patients in need while maintaining outcomes in the short term," said Makoto Mori, M.D., a surgical resident at Yale and first author of the study.

The senior author of the study was Harlan Krumholz, M.D., the Harold H. Hines Jr. Professor of Medicine (cardiology) and director of Yale's Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation.

In practical terms, the expansion of heart transplant procedures at Yale New Haven Hospital meant accepting hearts from older donors with additional medical conditions, as well as accepting transplant recipients with more severe illnesses.

Yale New Haven Hospital also changed the surgical leadership of its advanced heart failure program, hired a dedicated procurement surgeon and an additional transplant coordinator, and increased the involvement of surgical attending physicians.

The researchers noted that Yale's increase in heart transplant cases was significantly larger than the volume change seen at other heart transplant centers in the same region during the same period, including Hartford Hospital, Tufts Medical Center, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital.

"We used a multidisciplinary approach and made strategic changes in donor and recipient selection, which allowed us to increase the number of heart transplants performed and therefore help more patients with advanced heart failure in a safe and an effective manner," said co-author Arnar Geirsson, M.D., chief of cardiac surgery at Yale New Haven Hospital.

Co-authors of the study were Lynn Wilson, Tariq Ahmad, Muhammad Anwer, and Daniel Jacoby, all of Yale; and Ayyaz Ali of Hartford Hospital.

What The Editorial Says: Authors of this editorial review the evidence for the management of patients with the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) that may apply to patients with severe COVID-19, what has been learned about treatment of these patients, and the gaps in knowledge that remain.

Authors: Carolyn S. Calfee, M.D., M.A.S., of the University of California, San Francisco, 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/jamainternmed.2020.6047)

Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest 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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Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) have made the first direct geometric measurement of the distance to a magnetar within our Milky Way Galaxy -- a measurement that could help determine if magnetars are the sources of the long-mysterious Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs).

Magnetars are a variety of neutron stars -- the superdense remains of massive stars that exploded as supernovae -- with extremely strong magnetic fields. A typical magnetar magnetic field is a trillion times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field, making magnetars the most magnetic objects in the Universe. They can emit strong bursts of X-rays and gamma rays, and recently have become a leading candidate for the sources of FRBs.

A magnetar called XTE J1810-197, discovered in 2003, was the first of only six such objects found to emit radio pulses. It did so from 2003 to 2008, then ceased for a decade. In December of 2018, it resumed emitting bright radio pulses.

A team of astronomers used the VLBA to regularly observe XTE J1810-197 from January to November of 2019, then again during March and April of 2020. By viewing the magnetar from opposite sides of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, they were able to detect a slight shift in its apparent position with respect to background objects much more distant. This effect, called parallax, allows astronomers to use geometry to directly calculate the object's distance.

"This is the first parallax measurement for a magnetar, and shows that it is among the closest magnetars known -- at about 8100 light-years -- making it a prime target for future study," said Hao Ding, a graduate student at the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.

On April 28, a different magnetar, called SGR 1935+2154, emitted a brief radio burst that was the strongest ever recorded from within the Milky Way. While not as strong as FRBs coming from other galaxies, this burst suggested to astronomers that magnetars could generate FRBs.

Fast radio bursts were first discovered in 2007. They are very energetic, and last at most a few milliseconds. Most have come from outside the Milky Way. Their origin remains unknown, but their characteristics have indicated that the extreme environment of a magnetar could generate them.

"Having a precise distance to this magnetar means that we can accurately calculate the strength of the radio pulses coming from it. If it emits something similar to an FRB, we will know how strong that pulse is," said Adam Deller, also of Swinburne University. "FRBs vary in their strength, so we would like to know if a magnetar pulse comes close or overlaps with the strength of known FRBs," he added.

"A key to answering this question will be to get more distances to magnetars, so we can expand our sample and obtain more data. The VLBA is the ideal tool for doing this," said Walter Brisken, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

In addition, "We know that pulsars, such as the one in the famous Crab Nebula, emit 'giant pulses,' much stronger than their usual ones. Determining the distances to magnetars will help us understand this phenomenon, and learn if maybe FRBs are the most extreme example of giant pulses," Ding said.

The ultimate goal is to determine the exact mechanism that produces FRBs, the scientists said.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Studies indicate that homemade masks help combat the spread of viruses like COVID-19 when combined with frequent hand-washing and physical distancing. Many of these studies focus on the transfer of tiny aerosol particles; however, researchers say that speaking, coughing and sneezing generates larger droplets that carry virus particles. Because of this, mechanical engineer Taher Saif said the established knowledge may not be enough to determine the effectiveness of some fabrics used in homemade masks.

Saif, a mechanical science and engineering professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, led a study that examined the effectiveness of common household fabrics in blocking droplets. The findings are published in the journal Extreme Mechanics Letters.

Aerosol particles are typically classified as less than 5 micrometers, and lie in the range of hundreds of nanometers. However, larger droplets – up to about 1 millimeter in diameter – can  also be expelled when an individual speaks, coughs or sneezes. These larger droplets pose a problem because, with sufficient momentum, they can squeeze through the pores of some fabrics, break into smaller droplets and become airborne.

However, for an individual to feel compelled to wear a mask, it must be comfortable and breathable, the researchers said.

“A mask made out of a low-breathability fabric is not only uncomfortable, but can also result in leakage as the exhaled air is forced out around contours of a face, defeating the purpose of the mask and providing a false sense of protection,” Saif said. “Our goal is to show that many common fabrics exploit the trade-off between breathability and efficiency of blocking droplets – large and small.”

The team tested the breathability and droplet-blocking ability of 11 common household fabrics, using a medical mask as a benchmark. The fabrics selected ranged from new and used garments, quilted cloths, bedsheets and dishcloth material. The researchers then characterized the fabrics in terms of their construction, fiber content, weight, thread count, porosity and water-absorption rate.

“Testing the breathability of these fabrics was the easy part,” Saif said. “We simply measured the rate of airflow through the fabric. Testing the droplet-blocking ability is a bit more complicated.”

In the lab, the researchers fill the nozzle of an inhaler with distilled water seeded with easy-to-find 100-nanometer diameter fluorescent particles – which happens to be the size of a novel coronavirus particle. When puffed, the inhaler forces the water through the nozzle and generates high-momentum droplets that collect on a plastic dish placed in front of the inhaler. To test the fabrics, the researchers repeat this process with the various materials placed over the collection dishes.

“We count the number of nanoparticles landing on the dish using a high-resolution confocal microscope. We can then use the ratio of the number collected with and without the fabric to give us a measure of droplet-blocking efficiency,” Saif said.

The team also measured the velocity and size of the particles expelled from the inhaler using high-speed video.

Their analyses revealed that droplets leave the inhaler at about 17 meters per second. Droplets released by speaking, coughing and sneezing have velocities within the range of 10 to 40 meters per second, the researchers said.

In terms of size, the high-speed video detected droplets with diameters in the 0.1 to 1 millimeter range, matching that of the larger-sized droplets released by speaking, coughing and sneezing.

 “We found that all of the fabrics tested are considerably effective at blocking the 100 nanometer particles carried by high-velocity droplets similar to those that may be released by speaking, coughing and sneezing, even as a single layer,” Saif said. “With two or three layers, even the more permeable fabrics, such as T-shirt cloth, achieve droplet-blocking efficiency that is similar to that of a medical mask, while still maintaining comparable or better breathability.

“Our experimental platform offers a way to test fabrics for their blocking efficiency against the small – and now – larger droplets that are released by human respiratory events.”