Culture

A recent study has shown that readers' eye gaze behaviors are strong indicators of words that are unexpected, new, or difficult to understand. The study by Rain Bosworth, an assistant professor and researcher in the Center for Sensory, Perceptual, and Cognitive Ecology (SPaCE Center) at Rochester Institute of Technology's National Technical Institute for the Deaf, explores the unknown qualities of gaze behavior for "sign watching" and how these are affected by a user's language expertise and intelligibility of the sign input.

According to Bosworth's study, published in the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, with NTID graduate Adam Stone, gaze behaviors can provide an index of cognitive effort and knowledge in signers. This study provides the first evidence that novice and fluent signers have different eye gaze behaviors.

Bosworth and her team recorded gaze behaviors in 52 deaf and hearing adults while they watched signed narratives. Highly fluent signers primarily kept a steady gaze on the face and used peripheral vision to perceive the signers' moving hands. The researchers then showed the participants videos of signed stories played backwards. Bosworth said that people who learned American Sign Language earlier in life are better equipped to understand difficult video-reversed narratives. Fluent signers tended to focus strongly on the face when sign watching, even for low intelligibility conditions.

"These low intelligibility conditions simulate what happens in real-world settings when trying to watch live signers on phones with small displays or with weak internet signals," explained Bosworth.

Novice signers, who scored lower on measures of story comprehension, showed a very different gaze pattern.

"Gaze behavior is more scattered for people who recently learned sign language, and this scatter increased for low-intelligibility conditions, probably because observers are looking directly at the moving hands," Bosworth said. "This fits with what we know about research that shows that signers have very good peripheral vision, especially from the lower visual field. Expert signers look at the face and utilize their peripheral vision for catching the fine details of moving handshapes."

But, there is some good news for non-signers. According to Bosworth, it doesn't take long for signers to develop "expert-like" gaze patterns during sign comprehension. Hearing signers who have been signing for at least five years often show steady gaze behavior on the face just like fluent deaf signers.

DURHAM, N.C. -- You know the type: Loud. Swaggering. Pushy. The alpha male clearly runs the show. Female alphas are often less conspicuous than their puffed up male counterparts, but holding the top spot still has its perks.

Wearing the crown means privileged access, like never having to wait your turn. And now, a study of female baboons points to another upside to being No. 1: less stress.

In a Duke University-led study, researchers describe how, after 18 years of collecting fecal samples from 237 female baboons in Amboseli National Park in Kenya, they found that alpha females have significantly lower levels of glucocorticoids, hormones produced in response to stress.

Baboon females are a very orderly group, with one reigning alpha who gets her way over everyone else, a second-in-command who dominates all but the alpha, and so on down to the bottom-ranked female, who gets pushed around by most everyone.

Dominance gives baboons a lot of advantages in life. Higher-ranking females get preferential treatment in grooming bouts and first dibs at feeding time. As a result, their babies grow faster and are more likely to survive to adulthood.

Considering all these perks, the researchers say it came as no surprise that higher status means lower glucocorticoids. They found that the larger a female's share of subordinates, the lower her glucocorticoid levels.

But what puzzled the team was why the top-ranking females stood out so much from the rest. Their stress hormone levels were 8% lower than everyone else in their group.

The findings were surprising because baboons aren't like some other species with clear-cut "queens," said first author Emily Levy, a biology Ph.D. student in Susan Alberts' lab at Duke.

Top-ranking baboon females don't claim exclusive rights to reproduction, as in some other species.

"You don't usually look at an alpha female baboon and see a bully," Levy said.

The researchers aren't sure what drives the disparity between leaders and non-leaders in baboon females, but suggest two possible explanations.

It could be that alpha females experience less stress because they hold their position longer than other females, Levy said.

A baboon matriarch rules in a society in which power is handed down from mother to daughter. All but the top-ranking female eventually cede their spot to their daughters as they get older. But once ensconced in power, alphas have been known to rule for eight years or more.

Take Pindua, an alpha female who ruled unchallenged until she died in 1989. Only then did her daughter assume the throne, recalls Alberts, who has spent 30 years studying wild baboons as part of the Amboseli Baboon Research Project.

"She was definitely a Grand Dame -- very calm and non-reactive, but unambiguous about her power," Alberts said.

There's another reason why the alpha female may be different from the others on measures of stress hormones, Alberts said. It's that there's no female above her to push her around.

The alpha female only has herself to answer to, Alberts said. She goes where she pleases. "Nobody's going to mess with her."

Previous research by Alberts and colleagues at Princeton University found the opposite pattern for alpha male baboons. Top-ranked males have the highest levels of stress hormones, presumably because instead of inheriting their status, as females do, males have to fight to stay on top.

"In male baboons you can just watch the alpha for a day and say, wow, that individual is kicking everybody's butt," Levy said. "For females it's a little more nuanced."

East Hanover, NJ. September 9, 2020. A team of U.S. researchers published the results of a multi-center, single-arm trial of the ReWalk ReStore™ for gait training in individuals undergoing post-stroke rehabilitation. They found the device safe and reliable during treadmill and overground walking under the supervision of physical therapists. The article, "The ReWalk ReStore soft robotic exosuit: a multisite clinical trial of the safety, reliability, and feasibility of exosuit-augmented post-stroke gait rehabilitation," was published open access in the Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation on June 18, 2020 (doi: 10.1186/s12984-020-00702-5).

The authors are the principal investigators of each of the five testing sites: Louis N. Awad, PT, DPT, PhD, of Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, Boston, MA, Alberto Esquenazi, MD, of MossRehab Stroke and Neurological Disease Center, Elkins Park, PA, Gerard E. Francisco, MD, of TIRR Memorial Hermann, Houston, TX, Karen J, Nolan, PhD, of Kessler Foundation, West Orange, NJ, and lead investigator Arun Jayaramam, PT, PhD, of the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, Chicago, IL.

Open Access link: https://jneuroengrehab.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12984-020-00702-5

The ReStore™ exosuit (ReWalk Robotics, Ltd) is the first soft robotic exosuit cleared by the FDA for use in stroke survivors with mobility deficits. The device is indicated for individuals with hemiplegia undergoing stroke rehabilitation under the care of licensed physical therapists. Hemiplegia causes weakness of the ankle, limiting the ability to clear the ground during stepping and hindering forward movement. This leads to compensatory walking patterns that increase effort and decrease stability.

ReStore is designed to augment ankle plantarflexion and dorsiflexion, allowing a more normal gait pattern. Motors mounted on a waist belt transmit power through cables to attachment points on an insole and the patient's calf. Sensors clipped to the patient's shoes transmit data to a handheld smartphone controller used by a trained therapist to adjust levels of assistance and monitor and record key metrics of gait training.

The trial enrolled 44 participants with post stroke hemiparesis who were able to walk unassisted for 5 feet. The protocol consisted of 5 days of 20-minute sessions of treadmill and overground training under the supervision of licensed physical therapists. To assess the therapeutic potential for ReStore in rehabilitation, the researchers also explored the effects of the device on maximum walking speed, measuring participants' walking speed in and out of the device using the 10-m walk test, before and after the five training visits. For safety purposes, some participants were allowed to use an AFO or cane during walking sessions.

The trial determined the safety, reliability, and feasibility of the device in this stroke population. "We found that the ReStore provided targeted assistance for plantarflexion and dorsiflexion of the paretic ankle, improving the gait pattern," explained Dr. Nolan, senior research scientist in the Center for Mobility and Rehabilitation Engineering Research at Kessler Foundation. "This is an important first step toward expanding options for rehabilitative care for the millions of individuals with mobility impairments caused by ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke."

The trial's exploratory data indicated positive effects of the training on the walking speed of participants during exosuit-assisted walking and unassisted walking (walking without the device). More than one third of participants achieved a significant increase in unassisted walking speed, indicating that further research is warranted.

Dr. Nolan emphasized that the trial was not designed to measure the device's efficacy: "Controlled trials are needed to determine the efficacy of ReStore for improving mobility outcomes of stroke rehabilitation."

ARLINGTON, Va.--How can the Department of the Navy (DoN) best harness the power and potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to address everything from operating efficiency at sea to corporate excellence?

These questions will be discussed by leaders from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) during two panel sessions at the Department of Defense (DoD) Artificial Intelligence Symposium and Exposition, held Sept. 9-10, 2020.

The two-day virtual event is sponsored by the DoD's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC). It will bring together government, business and academic experts to focus on delivering AI-enabled solutions to benefit warfighters; strengthen national security; and improve the effectiveness, affordability and speed of military operations.

On Thursday, Sept. 10, at 2:30 p.m., Chief of Naval Research Rear Adm. Lorin C. Selby will participate in a session titled "Rigging for AI," which will discuss how to best position the sea services for accelerated AI development and adoption.

Later that day, at 3:15 p.m., ONR will preside over another session showcasing the AVENGER Naval AI Grand Challenge--an initiative intended to maximize military-civilian AI partnerships, and promote greater innovation within AI development processes.

"In naming the challenge AVENGER, we took inspiration from the Battle of Midway," said Navy Chief AI Officer Brett Vaughan, who is part of the team overseeing AVENGER. "Midway was a pivotal momentum shift in World War II and saw the debut of the Avenger torpedo bomber, an aircraft that revolutionized naval operations.

"Much like the role the Avenger aircraft played in Midway, our expectation is that the AVENGER Naval AI Challenge will catalyze a tide-turning effort in the campaign to accelerate AI development and adoption," continued Vaughan, who also is ONR's AI portfolio manager.

The AVENGER Naval AI Grand Challenge is a collaboration involving the Navy Chief AI Officer; ONR; the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Warfighting Development (OPNAV N7); the NavalX Agility Cell; the Navy's Digital Transformation Office; JAIC; and various naval laboratories and warfare centers.

The challenge connects Navy and Marine Corps AI developers with experts in industry, academia and the government to address problems ranging from knowledge management and data maintenance to base security and small-unit maneuvers. The goal is to develop fleet-tested solutions within a year and scaled capabilities within 18 months.

Vaughan said a primary objective of AVENGER is to evaluate the effectiveness of the current naval innovation pipeline to remove barriers to AI adoption and create best practices for getting technology solutions to the fleet faster.

People who were children when their parents were divorced showed lower levels of oxytocin -- the so-called "love hormone" -- when they were adults than those whose parents remained married, according to a study led by Baylor University. That lower level may play a role in having trouble forming attachments when they are grown.

Oxytocin -- secreted in the brain and released during bonding experiences such as delivery of a baby or sexual interaction or nursing, even being hugged by a romantic partner -- has been shown in previous research to be important for social behavior and emotional attachments in early life. The oxytocin system also has been linked to parenting, attachment and anxiety.

The new study, published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, delves into an area that has not been well researched -- a link between oxytocin, early experience and adult outcomes.

"Since the rates of divorce in our society began to increase, there has been concern about the effects of divorce on the children," said lead author Maria Boccia, Ph.D., professor of child and family studies at Baylor University in the Robbins College of Health and Human Sciences. "Most research has focused on short-term effects, like academic performance, or longer-term outcomes like the impact on relationships. How divorce causes these effects, however, is unknown.

"Oxytocin is a neurohormone that is important in regulating these behaviors and is also sensitive to the impact of stressful life events in early life," she said. "This is a first step towards understanding what mechanisms might be involved."

Previous studies of children whose parents were divorced have found that the experience was associated with mood disorders and substance abuse -- behaviors found to be related to oxytocin, Boccia said. Additionally, such childhood experiences as divorce or death of a parent are associated with depression and anxiety in adolescents and adults, as well as with poorer parenting in adulthood, less parental sensitivity and warmth, overreaction and increased use of punishment.

Researchers in the Baylor study examined the effect of the experience of parental divorce in childhood on later adult oxytocin levels. They also asked participants to complete a set of questionnaires on attachment style and other measures.

"What we found was that oxytocin was substantially lower in people who experienced parental divorce compared to those who did not and correlated with responses on several measures of attachment," Boccia said. "These results suggest that oxytocin levels are adversely affected by parental divorce and may be related to other effects that have been documented in people who experience parental divorce."

Animal studies also suggest that one mechanism contributing to the negative effects of early parental separation may be suppression of oxytocin activity.

For the latest study, researchers recruited 128 individuals ages 18 to 62 at two institutions of higher learning in the Southeast United States. Of those, 27.3% indicated their parents were divorced. The average age for participants when their parents divorced was 9 years.

Upon arriving at the study site, participants were asked to empty their bladders, then given a 16-ounce bottle of water to drink before filling out questionnaires about their parents and peers during childhood, as well as their current social functioning. The questions addressed their parents' style, including affection, protection, indifference, over-control and abuse; and their own levels of confidence, discomfort with closeness, need for approval and their styles of relationships and caregiving.

After participants completed the questionnaires, urine samples were collected, and researchers analyzed oxytocin concentrations. The levels were substantially lower in individuals whose childhood experience included their parents' divorce.

Further analysis showed that those individuals rated their parents as less caring and more indifferent. They also rated their fathers as more abusive. Those who experienced parental divorce during childhood were less confident, more uncomfortable with closeness and less secure in relationships. They rated their own caregiving style as less sensitive and close than did the participants whose parents had not divorced.

"One of the first questions I am asked when presenting this research to other scientists is 'does how old the child is when the divorce occurs matter?' That is the most pressing question that we need to explore," Boccia said.

ITHACA, N.Y.- Using publicly available tourist photos of world landmarks such as the Trevi Fountain in Rome or Top of the Rock in New York City, Cornell University researchers have developed a method to create maneuverable 3D images that show changes in appearance over time.

The method, which employs deep learning to ingest and synthesize tens of thousands of mostly untagged and undated photos, solves a problem that has eluded experts in computer vision for six decades.

"It's a new way of modeling scenes that not only allows you to move your head and see, say, the fountain from different viewpoints, but also gives you controls for changing the time," said Noah Snavely, associate professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and senior author of "Crowdsampling the Plenoptic Function," presented at the European Conference on Computer Vision, held virtually Aug. 23-28.

"If you really went to the Trevi Fountain on your vacation, the way it would look would depend on what time you went - at night, it would be lit up by floodlights from the bottom. In the afternoon, it would be sunlit, unless you went on a cloudy day," Snavely said. "We learned the whole range of appearances, based on time of day and weather, from these unorganized photo collections, such that you can explore the whole range and simultaneously move around the scene."

Representing a place in a photorealistic way is challenging for traditional computer vision, partly because of the sheer number of textures to be reproduced. "The real world is so diverse in its appearance and has different kinds of materials - shiny things, water, thin structures," Snavely said.

Another problem is the inconsistency of the available data. Describing how something looks from every possible viewpoint in space and time - known as the plenoptic function - would be a manageable task with hundreds of webcams affixed around a scene, recording data day and night. But since this isn't practical, the researchers had to develop a way to compensate.

"There may not be a photo taken at 4 p.m. from this exact viewpoint in the data set. So we have to learn from a photo taken at 9 p.m. at one location, and a photo taken at 4:03 from another location," Snavely said. "And we don't know the granularity of when these photos were taken. But using deep learning allows us to infer what the scene would have looked like at any given time and place."

The researchers introduced a new scene representation called Deep Multiplane Images to interpolate appearance in four dimensions - 3D, plus changes over time. Their method is inspired in part on a classic animation technique developed by the Walt Disney Company in the 1930s, which uses layers of transparencies to create a 3D effect without redrawing every aspect of a scene.

"We use the same idea invented for creating 3D effects in 2D animation to create 3D effects in real-world scenes, to create this deep multilayer image by fitting it to all these disparate measurements from the tourists' photos," Snavely said. "It's interesting that it kind of stems from this very old, classic technique used in animation."

In the study, they showed that this model could be trained to create a scene using around 50,000 publicly available images found on sites such as Flickr and Instagram. The method has implications for computer vision research, as well as virtual tourism - particularly useful at a time when few can travel in person.

"You can get the sense of really being there," Snavely said. "It works surprisingly well for a range of scenes."

ST. LOUIS - A team of researchers led by Kenton Johnston, Ph.D., an associate professor of health management and policy at Saint Louis University's College for Public Health and Social Justice, conducted a study investigating the association between health system affiliations of clinicians and their performance scores and payments under Medicare value-based reimbursement.

Their findings, "Association of Clinician Health System Affiliation with Outpatient Performance Ratings in the Medicare Merit-based Incentive Payment System," were published online Sept. 8 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The researchers found that clinicians who were affiliated with health systems had better performance scores and received fewer payment penalties and more payment bonuses under the Medicare Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) than clinicians not affiliated with health systems.

"Physicians need to take the MIPS seriously. More and more of outpatient physicians' payments from Medicare will be tied to their performance under the MIPS," Johnston said. "Payment penalties and bonuses will hit 9 percent of physicians' total Medicare reimbursement by 2022. There are things physician practices can do to maximize their success on the MIPS. But this requires the management, administration and technological infrastructure to report performance measures to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services."

The study used 2019 MIPS data to examine 636,552 clinicians' performance and found that clinicians affiliated with health systems achieved mean performance scores of 79 versus 60 for unaffiliated clinicians, on a scale of 0 to 100. Physicians affiliated with health systems were 99 percent less likely to receive payment penalties and 29 percent more likely to receive exceptional performance bonus payments than physicians not affiliated with health systems.

Clinicians who affiliate with health systems appear to do substantially better under Medicare value-based payment. However, clinicians could self-select the performance measures they were evaluated on, so it is unclear whether findings represent real differences in patient quality of care or other factors. That is an area for future research.

Because the MIPS is a zero-sum game, Johnston said, the financial consequences are that system-affiliated clinicians are recipients of greater Medicare payment resources at the expense of clinicians not affiliated with health systems.

This is likely to amplify the existing trend toward clinician consolidation within health systems as clinicians seek sophisticated analytics, informatics, and administrative help to maximize performance and reimbursement under value-based payment programs.

MIPS, which is authorized under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, is a mandatory pay-for-performance program for clinicians participating in Medicare in the outpatient setting. Clinician performance under MIPS looks at quality of care, meaningful use of electronic health records, improvement activities for patient care processes and cost.

Many complex systems have underlying networks: they have nodes which represent units of the system and their edges indicate connections between the units. In some contexts, the connections are symmetric, but in many they are directed, for example, indicating flows from one unit to another or which units affect which other units.

A prime example of this is a food web, in which the nodes represent species and there is a directed edge from each species to those which eat it. In a directed network, the ecological concept of 'trophic level' allows one to assign a height to each node in such a way that on average the height goes up by one along each edge.

The trophic levels can help to associate function to nodes, for example, plant, herbivore, carnivore in a food web. The concept was reinvented in economics, where it is called 'upstreamness', though it can be traced back to Leontief and the 'output multiplier'. It is also an ingredient in the construction of SinkRank, a measure of contribution to systemic risk.

Alongside 'trophic level', there is also 'trophic incoherence'; this is the standard deviation of the distribution of height differences along edges and it gives a measure of the extent to which the directed edges fail to line up. The trophic incoherence is an indicator of network structure that has been related to stability, percolation, cycles, normality and various other system properties.

Trophic level and incoherence are limited in various ways, however: they require the network to have basal nodes (ones with no incoming edges), the basal nodes are given too much emphasis, and if there is more than one they do not give a stable way to determine levels and incoherence for a piece of a network, and they do not give a natural notion of maximal incoherence.

In the paper, 'How directed is a directed network?', published today, the 9th September in the journal Royal Society Open Science, researchers from the University of Warwick and the University of Birmingham reveal a new method for analysing hierarchies in complex networks and illustrate it by applications to economics, language and gene expression.

The researchers introduce improved notions of trophic level and trophic coherence, which do not require basal or top nodes, are as easy to compute as the old notions, and are connected in the same way with network properties such as normality, cycles and spectral radius. They expect this to be a valuable tool in domains from ecology and biochemistry to economics, social science and humanities.

Professor Robert MacKay, from the Mathematics Institute at the University of Warwick comments:

"Our method makes hierarchical structure apparent in directed networks and quantifies the extent to which the edges do not line up. We expect it to be useful in disparate contexts, such as determining the extent of influence in a social network or organisational management, assessing the situation of the UK in the face of Brexit trade talks, illuminating how biochemical reaction networks function, and understanding how the brain works."

Researchers from the Severinov Lab at Skoltech have looked at how a poorly studied type of CRISPR-Cas defense system from a bacterium living at extremely high temperature gets to know its enemy by selecting snippets of bacteriophage's genetic information for a genetic "database" it uses to ward off subsequent infections. Understanding of this mechanism opens new ways for further genomic manipulation of both the bacterial host and its virus. The paper was published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research.

CRISPR-Cas are powerful defense systems that most prokaryotes use to recognize and destroy invading genetic material such as bacteriophages. Each system is essentially a set of nucleic acid-cleaving Cas proteins armed with fragments of foreign sequences stored in CRISPR arrays, special databases located in the chromosome of the cell. Much like a police unit receiving a suspect profile, Cas proteins form complexes with short CRISPR RNAs containing information about the genetic invader, search for nucleic acids that are complementary to the CRISPR RNAs, and then recognize and destroy them.

Depending on the kind of Cas proteins, scientists distinguish six types of CRISPR-Cas systems. Type III is the least studied and the most complex. "Type III systems stand out from all others. First, they recognize foreign RNA, rather than DNA recognized by other systems. Second, in a bizarre twist, upon recognizing target RNA the Type III systems destroy the DNA from which this RNA is transcribed," explains the lead author Konstantin Severinov.

Severinov and his colleagues studied the Type III system in a hyperthermophilic bacterium Thermus thermophilus that inhabits hot springs around the world. They were interested in how the bacterium acquires spacers, or the "entries" for its CRISPR "database". Spacers are bits of foreign DNA in the CRISPR array that serve as printing plates for CRISPR RNAs that are used to recognize subsequent infections.

"Being a thermophilic bacterium, i.e. living at 65C and above, Thermus is a good model organism for biochemical and especially structural work, because its proteins are very robust. However, the downside of this is that most people never study Thermus as a microbe, but rather as a source of sturdy proteins," says Severinov. "Spacer acquisition is the least understood part of CRISPR immunity that in many respects operates through a Lamarckian rather than Darwinian mode. In the case of Type III CRISPR systems, the situation becomes especially complex, as only spacers acquired in a certain orientation will be able to target foreign RNA. This is not true for CRISPR-Cas systems of other types. So it was of high interest to determine how a Type III system ensures efficient acquisition of spacers capable of providing defense to the host."

The researchers cultivated T. thermophilus cells in the laboratory, infected them with bacteriophage they isolated earlier from a hot spring in Kamchatka, and observed how the attacked bacteria expanded their Type III CRISPR arrays. Among other things, the researchers were able to show that new spacers came from a tiny region of the phage genome that is first injected in the infected bacterial cell. The bias is likely due to the fact that recognizing the enemy early on allows infected cells to clear the infection and survive rather than due to any intrinsic properties of the Type III machinery, which presumably selects spacers randomly, meaning that 50% of acquired spacers are inserted in a wrong orientation and thus do not provide any defense. The researchers hypothesize that the region of the phage genome from which spacers are acquired may encode anti-CRISPR proteins, and thus it is crucial for the cell to deploy its defense before it is disabled.

The team also showed that some phages escaped the Type III CRISPR-Cas defense by losing small bits of their DNA from targeted regions.

"The observation that we can select "escaper" phages that deleted regions recognized by defensive CRISPR RNAs means that we can easily engineer mutant phages by targeting them with engineered CRISPR RNAs recognizing genomic regions of interest," says Severinov, "given how little we know about viruses infecting thermophilic bacteria, our finding opens a way to probe these viruses by designer CRISPR RNAs and determine the functions on individual viral genes."

Plant science research has tremendous potential to address pressing global issues including climate change, food insecurity and sustainability. However, without sustained investment in plant science, the necessary research to generate innovative discoveries that solve these urgent problems is at risk.

On September 1, the Plant Science Research Network (PSRN) released its Plant Science Decadal Vision 2020-2030: Reimagining the Potential of Plants for a Healthy and Sustainable Future, a report that outlines bold, innovative solutions to guide investments and research in plant science over the next 10 years.

The PSRN calls on its community to unite around the Decadal Vision's priorities and to inspire their government representatives and fellow community members.

"The Decadal Vision is a community-wide vision that is a powerful tool for communication and advocacy," said David Stern, President of the Boyce Thompson Institute and corresponding author. "After all, the public should be the ultimate beneficiary of the vision."

The Decadal Vision grew out of Plant Summit 2019, a conference held February 10-13, 2019, at Biosphere 2 in Arizona.

"Fifty diverse participants - including scientists, industry representatives, educators and advocates - discussed the future of research, training and infrastructure," says Stern, who is also an adjunct professor of plant biology in Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. "From that meeting, the writing team developed the Decadal Vision as a rallying cry for all plant scientists to unite around a common vision, inspire new collaborations to pursue interdisciplinary research goals, and implement new paradigms for professional development that will catalyze a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable future."

The Decadal Vision recognizes the intersection of human and scientific elements and demands integrated implementation of strategies to advance research, people and technology. The vision is presented through eight specific and interdisciplinary goals, each with an accompanying action plan.

Four research goals are presented: Harness plants for planetary resilience; Advance technology for diversity-driven sustainable plant production systems; Develop 21st-century applications of plant science to improve nutrition, health, and well-being; and Launch the "Transparent Plant", an interactive tool to discern mechanisms and solve urgent and vexing problems.

When it comes to agriculture, "Increasing food production may not be the solution," explains co-author Ole Wendroth, professor of soil science at the University of Kentucky. "Food needs to be produced more sustainably, and plant science plays an important role in this for the future. Farmers that I have worked with are very willing to take this bold step as long as they can produce a safe farm income."

The two goals emphasizing our people are: Reimagine the workplace to nurture adaptive and diverse scientists; and Build capacity and interest to engage with plant science.

"What I like about the Decadal Vision is that equity and justice were part of the vision right from the beginning, and not just tacked on at the end," says co-author Madelaine Bartlett, an associate professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "Everyone should have the same opportunities that I have had, but that is simply not the case right now. It is hard work, but it can be done and it must be done."

Bartlett adds that collaborations among people from many scientific disciplines is the new normal, and the PSRN has strengthened connections between scientific societies.

"My research is in the intersection of genetics, bioinformatics, developmental biology and evolutionary biology, so I belong to four different research societies," she says. "I hope this report will help knock down those barriers and stimulate more research that integrates multiple disciplines."

The two goals focused on technology infrastructure are: Develop new technologies to revolutionize research; and Manage and realize the potential of Big Data.

Co-author Eric Lyons, associate professor in the School of Plant Sciences at the University of Arizona, says such new technologies are necessary because plant research is a diverse set of sciences that span from molecules to the entire planet.

"Addressing the most pressing questions of plant research requires an unprecedented level of coordination, collaboration, and training across many disciplines of science," says Lyons. "This Decadal Vision is essential to bring a common voice to the needs of these diverse researchers and the central role that data science plays in facilitating integrating information to make new discoveries to improve the human condition through plants and agriculture."

While the Decadal Vision makes a case for new funding, obtaining that support will require plant scientists to engage the public and advocate for needed resources.

Indeed, federal funding agencies, private philanthropies, corporations and entrepreneurs, are all necessary for plant science to have a maximum impact on enhancing human health, improving environmental quality, boosting the economy, and benefitting global equity and justice.

"Plant science gets such a small piece of the funding pie. If there are going to be solutions to surviving climate change, then plants are going to be a critical part of those solutions," says Bartlett.

Wendroth believes that funding agencies can foster plant science discoveries to address pressing global issues by calling for proposals in forward-thinking, interdisciplinary research with speculative outcomes. "This would help harness scientific creativity in a similar way that venture capital is used to invest in long-term growth potential opportunities," he says.

Widespread use of contraceptives and, to a lesser extent, girls’ education through at least age 14 have the greatest impact in bringing down a country’s fertility rate.

Education and family planning have long been tied to lower fertility trends. But new research from the University of Washington analyzes those factors to determine, what accelerates a decline in otherwise high-fertility countries.

In a paper published July 23 in Population and Development Review, Daphne Liu, a doctoral student in statistics at the UW, and Adrian Raftery, a UW professor of statistics and sociology, explore two nuanced questions: Is increasing contraceptive use or reducing demand more effective in family planning? And, is it the number of years girls attend school or the overall enrollment of children in school that makes education a factor in fertility?

“Policymakers in countries with high fertility rates are often interested in accelerating their fertility decline, since rapid population growth can lead to a number of unwanted economic, environmental and public health consequences,” said Liu. “Policies that increase access to education and family planning are generally thought to accelerate fertility decline by empowering individuals, particularly girls and women, to achieve their own desires in life. Our work aims to explore what aspects of a country’s education and family planning have the greatest impact on fertility decline.”

As the world’s population builds toward a projected 10.9 billion by 2100, much of that growth is expected to occur in high-fertility countries of Latin America, Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals note the role sustainable fertility can play in a country’s environmental, economic and population health, alongside the ways family planning can enable individuals to realize their own fertility goals.

Higher fertility rates can stretch a country’s available resources, while rates lower than the “replacement rate” of 2.1 births per woman can lead to a long-term lack of economic growth. Today’s global fertility rate of 2.5 births per woman is down from 3.2 in 1990, but is higher in parts of the world where some countries report fertility rates of at least 4 births per woman.

Liu and Raftery’s study uses UN data on fertility rates since 1970 and combines it with data on education and contraception to determine which factors have the greatest effect. All the countries in their study sample were categorized as transitioning downward, however slowly, from a period of high fertility.

Within the category of family planning, Liu and Raftery looked at two factors over time: contraceptive prevalence, which is the percentage of women using modern contraception; and unmet need, the percentage of women who say they want to delay or stop childbearing but are not using contraception. While the difference between the two metrics may appear small, Liu pointed out that unmet need can reflect hypothetical interest in family planning, whereas contraceptive prevalence reflects actual use. The study found that contraceptive prevalence had a significantly greater effect.

For example, data from El Salvador shows that the link between an increase in contraceptive use and a corresponding decline in fertility rate is especially pronounced. The country’s total fertility rate went from 5.44 births per woman in the mid-1970s — when 28% of women used birth control — to 2.72 births in the mid-2000s, when contraceptive prevalence had more than doubled.

Liu and Raftery also wanted to look at the effect of education on fertility changes. For this, they examined two different aspects of education, both tied to cultural values and economic outcomes: school enrollment and the highest level of education girls typically attain. The latter stems from the academic and professional opportunities available to women and girls, which may affect their childbearing decisions. The former has been hypothesized to affect fertility because if more children go to school, it is more expensive to bring them up, which may discourage families from having more children.

Liu and Raftery found that education affected fertility mostly through the educational attainment of girls, particularly through their early teens (the “lower secondary” level of schooling). Generally considered the last stage of basic education, completing at least the lower secondary level had a greater effect on fertility decline than completing only primary schooling.

Kenya showed a substantial increase in girls’ educational attainment, from 12% reaching the lower secondary level in the mid-1970s to 59% in the mid-2010s. Contraceptive prevalence in Kenya also grew steadily, from 5% to 51%, while the total fertility rate dropped from 7.64 births per woman to 4.06.

Still, of the two factors — family planning and education — family planning played a bigger role in accelerating the transition. “It is important to know that family planning is so critical,” said Raftery. “However, both factors are important and they work together. Education gives women more opportunities as alternatives to having large families, while family planning gives them the means to achieve their goals.”

Overall, sub-Saharan Africa, where the highest-fertility countries are located, showed reductions in fertility but at a slower pace than other high-fertility regions of the world. This may be associated with economic development and cultural values around family size, as well as the quality of education. In line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, policymakers and NGOs should continue to focus on education and on availability and acceptance of contraceptives for women, the researchers said.

The study was funded by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. For more information, contact Liu at dhliu@uw.edu.

Journal

Population and Development Review

DOI

10.1111/padr.12347

When vegetable farmers harvest crops, they often rely on postharvest washing to reduce any foodborne pathogens, but a new University of Georgia study shows promise in reducing these pathogens - as well as lowering labor costs-- by applying sanitizers to produce while it is still in the fields.

Salmonella, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli and Listeria monocytogenes are major causes of foodborne diseases and of public health concern in the U.S. Tomato-associated Salmonella outbreaks reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have increased in frequency and magnitude in recent years, and fresh produce accounted for 21% of E. coli outbreaks reported to the CDC over a 20-year span.

Initially researchers were going to study the use of a nonchlorine-based sanitizer made of two food additives approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration -- levulinic acid and sodium dodecyl sulfate -- as a postharvest wash solution. However, at the suggestion of a producer involved in the study -- Bill Brim of Lewis Taylor Farms in Tifton, Georgia -- they designed the study using the solution in a preharvest spray, said Tong Zhao, associate research scientist with the Center for Food Safety on the UGA Griffin campus.

While producers commonly use chlorine-based disinfectants -- including chlorine gas, sodium hypochlorite, calcium hypochlorite and chlorine dioxide -- to treat produce postharvest, the preharvest application of bactericides is not a common practice, Zhao said.

Building on previous studies of levulinic acid and sodium dodecyl sulfate that showed the combination substantially reduces both Salmonella and E. coli on romaine lettuce without adversely affecting lettuce quality, Zhao hoped to prove the combination's effectiveness on reducing foodborne pathogens on tomato plants contaminated with Salmonella, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli and Listeria monocytogenes.

In the field studies, the spray treatment significantly reduced the total bacterial population on the surface of tomatoes, determining that this preharvest treatment is a practical, labor-cost effective and environmentally friendly approach for the control and reduction of foodborne pathogens. The study was recently published in the journal Food Control.

"This combination of chemicals had never been used for preharvest treatment," said Zhao, who studied the combination 10 years ago as an alternative to chlorine treatment as a postharvest wash. "Free chlorine is easily neutralized by organic material, which is a big problem when you are using it to reduce pathogens."

In both laboratory and field tests, tomato plants were sprayed all over with a solution containing five strains of E. coli, five strains of Salmonella and five strains of Listeria specially grown for the study in the lab.

To test the effectiveness of the chemicals in the lab as a preventative and as a treatment, tomato plants were separated into three equal groups then sprayed with the bacteria solution. The first group was treated with acidified chlorine as the positive control, the second with a treatment solution containing levulinic acid and sodium dodecyl sulfate as the test group, and the third treated with tap water only as the negative control.

For the three plots used for farm application testing, the positive and negative control groups were treated the same way, and a commercial product -- Fit-L -- was diluted according to the manufacturer's description and used as the treatment solution. Before treatment studies on the farm, two concentrations of the treatment solution were tested for safety on tomato seedlings in the greenhouse.

Results from the studies showed that the application, used either as a preventative or as a treatment, significantly reduced the populations of inoculated Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, Salmonella and L. monocytogenes on tomato plants.

"I have to express appreciation to the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Association for funding this and other research that is of benefit to agricultural producers in the state," Zhao said.

In addition to being effective and affordable, preharvest treatment with levulinic acid and sodium dodecyl sulfate to reduce pathogens also saves labor costs for producers who need workers to perform postharvest washing and drying of produce before packaging.

"This method can easily be adopted using equipment that most farms are already using," Zhao said. "Preharvest treatment is very effective, efficient and easy considering the amount of labor needed for postharvest washing."

New research from Oregon Health & Science University for the first time documents the presence of astrocytes in zebrafish, a milestone that will open new avenues of research into a star-shaped type of glial cell in the brain that is critical for nearly every aspect of brain assembly and function.

The research was published this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

With their transparent bodies, zebrafish larvae provide a unique opportunity to gaze into the inner workings of the central nervous system, including the brain, even in living animals. The identification of astrocytes and the generation of tools to work with them in zebrafish will enable researchers around the world to open new lines of research to advance scientific understanding of how astrocytes function.

Astrocytes, it turns out, are the most abundant and mysterious cell type in the human brain, and OHSU is becoming a hub for research into their roles in development, brain function and disease.

"There is no neurodegenerative disease that I know of where astrocytes are not profoundly affected in some way," said senior author Kelly Monk, Ph.D., professor and co-director of the Vollum Institute at OHSU. "This gives us a powerful tool to get a handle on what these cells do and how they do it."

Monk and co-author Marc Freeman, Ph.D., credit lead author Jiakun Chen, Ph.D., a post-doctoral researcher in the Monk and Freeman labs, with developing a panoply of tools, including a cell-specific approach using the gene editing tool CRISPR to label and manipulate astrocyte precursors and incisively study their development and functions.

"He was able to capture the birth of an astrocyte from a stem cell and its entire development, which has never been visualized before in a vertebrate animal," Monk said.

Freeman said the discovery will dramatically enhance the study of how glia regulate brain development and physiology.

"This opens the door to experiments that you can't do in any other organism," Freeman said. "Zebrafish is the only animal in which you can now live-image all types of vertebrate glial cells - astrocytes, microglia, oligodendrocytes and OPCs - along with any neuron in intact neural circuits, from the earliest stages of development. Zebrafish is also the only vertebrate in which you can image the entire brain in live, behaving animals to figure out how it works. Understanding the role of these cells (astrocytes) in brain development will be key to understanding devastating neurodevelopmental disorders like autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia.

"It's a major step forward and should power a lot of exciting work in the coming years."

On Sep. 07, 2020, NOAA/NASA's Suomi NPP satellite provided two different views of how fires are affecting the U.S. A true-color image of the United States shows a blanket of smoke obscuring the surface from California to Arkansas with a haze present over the East Coast as well. The Suomi NPP satellite also provided information about aerosols that were released from these fires and have traveled across the United States' landscape.

Although the OMPS suite was designed to measure ozone it also has the capability of measuring other atmospheric particles like sulfur dioxide and ash. The aerosol index (AI) value is related to both the thickness and height of the atmospheric aerosol layer. For most atmospheric events involving aerosols, the AI ranges from 0.0 to 5.0, with 5.0 indicating heavy concentrations of aerosols that could reduce visibilities or impact health. Color codes range from colorless (0.0) through yellow (.5 - 2.6), orange (2.7-3) deep red (>3 - 5.0). This image shows a significant area of deep red range which means aerosols in the area could potentially be dangerous to the health of those in that area.

The smoke released by any type of fire (forest, brush, crop, structure, tires, waste or wood burning) is a mixture of particles and chemicals produced by incomplete burning of carbon-containing materials. All smoke contains carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and particulate matter (PM or soot). Smoke can contain many different chemicals, including aldehydes, acid gases, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), benzene, toluene, styrene, metals and dioxins. The type and amount of particles and chemicals in smoke varies depending on what is burning, how much oxygen is available, and the burn temperature.

High aerosol concentrations not only can affect climate and reduce visibility, they also can impact breathing, reproduction, the cardiovascular system, and the central nervous system, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Since aerosols are able to remain suspended in the atmosphere and be carried in prevailing high-altitude wind streams, they can travel great distances away from their source as evidenced in these images and their effects can linger.

WASHINGTON, September 8, 2020 -- When looking at humanity from a macroscopic perspective, there are numerous examples of people cooperating to form societies, countries, religions, and other groupings.

Yet at the basic two-person level, people tend to betray each other, as found in social dilemma games like the prisoner's dilemma, even though people would receive a better payoff if they cooperated among themselves.

The topic of cooperation and how and when people start trusting one another has been studied by various researchers who have addressed this problem numerically. In a paper in Chaos, by AIP Publishing, researchers investigate what drives cooperation analytically.

In order to investigate what happens when an infinite number of people, instead of two people, play a game like the prisoner's dilemma, the researchers mapped the two-player game to a two-spin ID Ising model, which is a 1D line of interacting spins in the presence of an external magnetic field.

Spins can either point clockwise, which is up, or counterclockwise, which is down. The net difference between the fraction of spins pointing up to those pointing down provides the analytic result for the magnetization.

"Game magnetization is an excellent measure of how in the overall scheme of things the total number of players respond to different payoffs," said Colin Benjamin, one of the authors. "In our work, we go beyond game magnetization and look at game susceptibility, too."

An analytical result for susceptibility probes the net change in the fraction of players adopting a certain strategy for both classic and quantum social dilemmas and pinpoints the real drivers of cooperative behavior, which can vary given the situation.

The findings in this research can be applied to analytical solutions to numerous other social dilemma games, such as rock-paper-scissors, Battle of the Sexes, or Stag Hunt. The mapping to ID Ising model can help understand cooperative behavior in many other social dilemmas as well.

"One future area to explore is that of recent COVID-19 infection dynamics," said Benjamin. "A lot of numerical work has been done to explore COVID-19 infection dynamics using tools of evolutionary game theory. An analytical model, however, is lacking."