Culture

Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica whose melting rates are rapidly increasing have raised the global sea level by 1.8cm since the 1990s, and are matching the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's worst-case climate warming scenarios.

According to a new study from the University of Leeds and the Danish Meteorological Institute, if these rates continue, the ice sheets are expected to raise sea levels by a further 17cm and expose an additional 16 million people to annual coastal flooding by the end of the century.

Since the ice sheets were first monitored by satellite in the 1990s, melting from Antarctica has pushed global sea levels up by 7.2mm, while Greenland has contributed 10.6mm. And the latest measurements show that the world's oceans are now rising by 4mm each year.

"Although we anticipated the ice sheets would lose increasing amounts of ice in response to the warming of the oceans and atmosphere, the rate at which they are melting has accelerated faster than we could have imagined," said Dr Tom Slater, lead author of the study and climate researcher at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds.

"The melting is overtaking the climate models we use to guide us, and we are in danger of being unprepared for the risks posed by sea level rise."

The results are published today in a study in the journal Nature Climate Change. It compares the latest results from satellite surveys from the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise (IMBIE) with calculations from climate models. The authors warn that the ice sheets are losing ice at a rate predicted by the worst-case climate warming scenarios in the last large IPCC report.

Dr Anna Hogg, study co-author and climate researcher in the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds, said: "If ice sheet losses continue to track our worst-case climate warming scenarios we should expect an additional 17cm of sea level rise from the ice sheets alone. That's enough to double the frequency of storm-surge flooding in many of the world's largest coastal cities."

So far, global sea levels have increased in the most part through a mechanism called thermal expansion, which means that volume of seawater expands as it gets warmer. But in the last five years, ice melt from the ice sheets and mountain glaciers has overtaken global warming as the main cause of rising sea levels.

Dr Ruth Mottram, study co-author and climate researcher at the Danish Meteorological Institute, said: "It is not only Antarctica and Greenland that are causing the water to rise. In recent years, thousands of smaller glaciers have begun to melt or disappear altogether, as we saw with the glacier Ok in Iceland, which was declared "dead" in 2014. This means that melting of ice has now taken over as the main contributor of sea level rise. "

Radio astronomers have detected jets of hot gas blasted out by a black hole in the galaxy at the heart of the Phoenix Galaxy Cluster, located 5.9 billion light-years away in the constellation Phoenix. This is an important result for understanding the coevolution of galaxies, gas, and black holes in galaxy clusters.

Galaxies are not distributed randomly in space. Through mutual gravitational attraction, galaxies gather together to form collections known as clusters. The space between galaxies is not entirely empty. There is very dilute gas throughout a cluster which can be detected by X-ray observations.

If this intra-cluster gas cooled, it would condense under its own gravity to form stars at the center of the cluster. However, cooled gas and stars are not usually observed in the hearts of nearby clusters, indicating that some mechanism must be heating the intra-cluster gas and preventing star formation. One potential candidate for the heat source is jets of high-speed gas accelerated by a super-massive black hole in the central galaxy.

The Phoenix Cluster is unusual in that it does show signs of dense cooled gas and massive star formation around the central galaxy. This raises the question, "does the central galaxy have black hole jets as well?"

A team led by Takaya Akahori at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan used the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) to search for black hole jets in the Phoenix Galaxy Cluster with the highest resolution to date. They detected matching structures extending out from opposite sides of the central galaxy. Comparing with observations of the region taken from the Chandra X-ray Observatory archive data shows that the structures detected by ATCA correspond to cavities of less dense gas, indicating that they are a pair of bipolar jets emitted by a black hole in the galaxy. Therefore, the team discovered the first example, in which intra-cluster gas cooling and black hole jets coexist, in the distant Universe.

Further details of the galaxy and jets could be elucidated through higher-resolution observations with next generation observational facilities, such as the Square Kilometre Array scheduled to start observations in the late 2020s.

An international team of scientists has succeeded in using the signature whistles of individual bottlenose dolphins off the coast of Namibia to estimate the size of the population and track their movement.

The research, led by Stellenbosch University and the University of Plymouth, marks the first time that acoustic monitoring has been used in place of photographs to generate abundance estimates of dolphin populations.

Writing in the Journal of Mammalogy, researchers say they are excited by the positive results yielded by the method, as the number of dolphins estimated was almost exactly the same as estimated through the more traditional photographic mark-recapture method.

They are now working to refine the technique, in the hope it can be used to track other species - with a current focus on endangered species such as humpback dolphins.

Quicker information processing and advances in statistical analysis mean in the future that automated detection of individually distinctive calls could be possible. This can generate important information on individual animals and would be particularly useful for small, threatened populations where every individual counts.

"The capture-recapture of individually distinctive signature whistles has not been attempted before," says the paper's senior author Dr Tess Gridley, Co-Director of Sea Search and the Namibian Dolphin Project and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Botany and Zoology at SU. "The dolphins use these sounds throughout life and each has its own unique whistle. Therefore, by recording signature whistles over time and in different places we can calculate where animals are moving to and how many animals there are in a population."

Working with Dr Simon Elwen of Stellenbosch University, the Namibian Dolphin Project has been researching Namibia's resident bottlenose dolphins for the past 12 years, and built up a catalogue of more than 55 signature whistles dating back to 2009.

This particular study was led by Emma Longden, who began the project during her BSc (Hons) Marine Biology degree at the University of Plymouth. As an undergraduate, Emma completed an internship with the Namibia Dolphin Project for a month in 2016, and returned again in 2018 to complete work on the mark-recapture project.

She analysed more than 4000 hours of acoustic data from four hydrophones positioned along the coast south and north of Walvis Bay, Namibia, during the first six months of 2016.

All in all, they identified 204 acoustic encounters, 50 of which contained signature whistle types. From these encounters, 53 signature whistle types were identified; 40 were in an existing catalogue developed in 2014 for the Walvis Bay bottlenose dolphin population, and 13 were newly identified.

Of the 53 signature whistle types identified, 43% were captured only once, whereas the majority (57%) were recaptured twice or more.

"One of the great things about bioacoustics is that you can leave a hydrophone in the water for weeks at a time and collect so much data without interfering with the lives of the animals you are studying," says Emma, whose work on the project was also supervised by Dr Clare Embling, Associate Professor of Marine Ecology at the University of Plymouth.

Future research includes the work undertaken by PhD student Sasha Dines from Stellenbosch University to further refine the technique to better understand the population of endangered humpback dolphins in South Africa. Another PhD student, Jack Fearey from the University of Cape Town, is continuing to conduct research along the Namibian Coast.

For editors

* The article was authored by Emma G. Longden, Simon H. Elwen, Barry McGovern, Bridget S. James, Clare B Embling and Tess Gridley and is available online at https://academic.oup.com/jmammal/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jmammal/gyaa081/5893454?guestAccessKey=af719cb6-c7ca-4463-9e1f-453768da4f6a

More about bottlenose dolphins' use of sound

From the day they are born, bottlenose dolphins produce high frequency whistles. During learning and practice in the first year of life, these whistles develop into individually distinct signature whistles and each animal has its own unique call throughout life. Once learned, signature whistles act like a name and are used to help animals stay in contact and to address each other when communicating under the water.

These signature whistles help animals keep in contact if they become separated, they are exchanged before groups meet (as a kind of greeting) and they can copy each other's whistles to address each other (in the same way humans use names). They are therefore friendly sounds and used between animals that are well acquainted - such as group members and mothers to their calves.

"The high level of approval of the measures indicates that the population is still aware of the risks posed by the virus," comments BfR President Professor Dr. Dr. Andreas Hensel on the current results.

https://www.bfr.bund.de/cm/349/200818-bfr-corona-monitor-en.pdf

The most common protective measures seem to have already become a matter of routine to many people. At least 90 percent of respondents said they wear masks, wash their hands more thoroughly and keep their distance from others. As in the weeks before, in the current survey about one third of the participants state that they use the app of the German government.

In contrast, there is a clear change in the perceived informedness of the respondents. Since June, just over 60 percent of the respondents had stated that they felt well informed about what is happening around the new coronavirus. In the current survey, this figure fell to 52 percent. The information channels used and the evaluation of media coverage remained relatively unchanged: around two-thirds still consider the media coverage to be appropriate, while 29 percent consider the reporting to be exaggerated.

Throughout the summer months, public concern about the impact of the novel coronavirus on different areas of life developed in different patterns: While worries about social relationships as well as physical and mental health have increased slightly, concerns about one' s own economic situation remained comparatively stable.

The BfR continually adapts its FAQs on the topic of coronavirus to the current state of science:

https://www.bfr.bund.de/en/can_the_new_type_of_coronavirus_be_transmitted_via_food_and_objects_-244090.html

A team with the participation of researchers from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) has designed new hydrogels that allow the culture of T-cells or T-lymphocytes, cells of the immune system that are used in cancer immunotherapy since they have the capacity to destroy tumor cells. These hydrogels can mimic lymph nodes, where T-cells reproduce and, therefore, provide high rates of cell proliferation. Scientists hope to be able to bring this new technology, for which a patent has already been filed at the European Patent Office, to hospitals soon, and whose first details are published in the journal Biomaterials. Scientists have started a project that aims to print these new hydrogels in 3D and thus accelerate their transfer to the market.

The 3D hydrogels are made of polyethylene glycol (PEG), a biocompatible polymer widely used in biomedicine, and heparin, an anticoagulant agent. In this case, the polymer provides the structure and mechanical properties necessary for T-cells to grow, while heparin is used to anchor different biomolecules of interest, such as cytokine CCL21, a protein present in the lymph nodes and which has a major role in cell migration and proliferation.

Adoptive Cell Therapy

Cancer immunotherapy is based on using and strengthening the patients' immune system so that it recognizes and fights tumor cells, without damaging healthy tissues. One of the possible treatments, the so-called adoptive cell therapy, consists of extracting the T-cells from the patients, modifying them to make them more active, making numerous copies of them and injecting them back into patients.

"This personalized therapy, although still very novel, seems to have more lasting effects than current oncological therapies, thanks to some T-lymphocytes that are capable of conferring immunity over time," points out one of the creators of this technology, researcher Judith Guasch, from the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB-CSIC). "Its application is limited by the current cell culture media, since they are not effective enough for the proliferation and growth of a relevant amount of therapeutic T-cells in a short time and in an economically viable way", adds Guasch.

Transfer to the market

To continue the study and encourage the transfer of this technology to the market, researchers Judith Guasch, from the ICMAB, and Elisabeth Engel, professor at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) at the Institute of Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), have recently been awarded a project from the Call for Transfer and Valorization Projects of the Biomedical Research Networking Center - Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine (CIBER-BBN) 2020, aimed at carrying out projects for CIBER-BBN groups with the interest and support of companies.

The aim of the project is to print large 3D hydrogels compatible with clinical bioreactors, in order to expand T-cells in a more efficient way. The researchers will develop the prototype in the laboratory and make the first experiments for the validation in the clinical phase. Currently, the project is looking for industrial partners, mainly biomedical and pharmaceutical companies, and investors interested in creating a spin-off company to transfer this technology and make it available in hospitals.

The project led by Guasch and Engel has the collaboration of Joaquín Arribas, from the Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO), and Miguel A. Mateos, from the International University of Catalonia (UIC).

INDIANAPOLIS -- With global food demands rising at an alarming rate, a study led by IUPUI scientists has found new evidence that a previously overlooked insect shows promise as alternative protein source: the yellow mealworm.

The research is based upon a new analysis of the genome of the mealworm species Tenebrio molitor led by Christine Picard, associate professor of biology and director in Forensic and Investigative Sciences program at the School of Science at IUPUI.

The work was published in the Journal of Insects as Food and Feed on Aug. 31.

"Human populations are continuing to increase and the stress on protein production is increasing at an unsustainable rate, not even considering climate change," said Picard, whose lab focuses on the use of insects to address global food demand.

The research, conducted in partnership with Beta Hatch Inc., has found the yellow mealworm -- historically a pest -- can provide benefit in a wide range of agriculture applications. Not only can it can be used as an alternative source of protein for animals including fish, but its waste is also ideal as organic fertilizer.

Picard and her team sequenced the yellow mealworm's genome using 10X Chromium linked-read technology. The results will help those who now wish to utilize the DNA and optimize the yellow mealworm for mass production and consumption. This new technology integrates the best of two sequencing methods to produce a reliable genome sequence.

"Insect genomes are challenging, and the longer sequence of DNA you can generate, the better genome you can assemble," said Picard.

Picard added the mealworm has -- and will have -- a wide variety uses.

"Mealworms, being insects, are a part of the natural diet of many organisms," said Picard. "Fish enjoy mealworms, for example. They could also be really useful in the pet food industry as an alternative protein source, chickens like insects -- and maybe one day humans, too, because it's an alternative source of protein."

Next, Picard said the researchers plan to look at what governs some of the biological processes of yellow mealworms in order to harness information useful for the commercialization of these insects.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- Elephant trails may lead the way to better conservation approaches.

"Think of elephants as engineers of the forests," said Melissa J. Remis, professor and head of anthropology at Purdue University, who is best known for her work in ecology and behavior of western gorillas and their ecosystems. "Elephants shape the landscape in many ways that benefit humans. We're talking thousands of miles of trails. If we think about the loss of elephants over time, then we will see the forest structure change and human activities also would shift."

These massive creatures trample thick vegetation through dense forests in the Central African Republic's Congo Basin as they move from the forests' fruit trees to more open water sources where they hydrate, bathe and socialize. African forest elephants, highly sociable animals, travel in small family groups to meet others at these muddy water sources, which are full of rich minerals that they can't find in the forests. By clearing routes to these destinations, elephants have created a very complex network of roads that residents, tourists, scientists and loggers still use today. If elephant populations decline, the forest grows over the trails.

"The fabric and way of life of local communities, and even for the industries and conservation organizations that exist in African forests, have largely been shaped by elephant landscape design," said Carolyn A. Jost Robinson, a former Purdue doctoral student and current visiting scholar who also is director of sociocultural research and engagement at the nonprofit Chengeta Wildlife. "People rely on these elephant highways, and they also are invaluable at understanding and explaining the networks."

Remis and Jost Robinson focus on these massive trail networks and the ecosystem and local foraging community, called the BaAka, as they evaluate how biological anthropology plays a role in conservation. Their research is specific to the elephant trails leading to Dzanga Saline, a famous forest clearing with a large water source in the Congo area. Their findings are published online in American Anthropologist.

"Anthropologists are very famous for critiquing conservation but not always for coming up with effective solutions," Remis said. "The area of conservation is dominated by biological sciences, and you can't make change just tending to ecosystems. Conservation messages focus on flagship species, like elephants, and rarely do they consider the knowledge or needs of people relying on or living with those species. Attention on both could help further conservation and human rights issues."

Framing the big picture

More than 30 years ago, Purdue University's Melissa Remis visited the Dzanga-Sangha Protected Areas for the first time as a biological anthropologist to study gorillas. She became known as the gorilla lady as she visited the site dozens of times. Her fieldwork showed her that to know and study the gorillas, she had to learn about the forest and other wildlife from the local residents who share the land for food, shelter and medicines. Now Remis' work focuses on the big picture - how the effects of conservation affect people, and what role biological anthropology can play.

"We're broadening the conversation about conservation," said Jost Robinson, who became known as the child of the gorilla lady by local residents at their African research site. "When you see a picture in a magazine story about ivory trafficking and elephant hunting, it is unlikely that the article will capture the entire experience of the community, as well as tourists, researchers and companies with local interests. As part of this change - whether you want to talk about climate change, forest access or wildlife protection - these relationships have evolved and taken on new shapes. We looked back on years of data and stories and realized there was a story to tell."

By focusing on the local BaAka community, especially the hunters known as tuma, the scientists capture information from local residents about interaction and living with elephants that is usually not a part of conservation plans.

"We want this to be a model for showing how to get additional insights when addressing how to conserve forests in better collaboration with those people who rely on them for cultural and material sustenance," Remis said. "Being able to tell their stories and share their deep knowledge about the area, and what closing off an elephant trail or part of the forest can due to cut off access to food, medicines or social networks, is usually not part of the conservation approach. We need to hear the BaAka in their own words."

Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology together with their international collaborators developed a novel quantitative method to quantify the effects of plastic on marine animals. This method successfully shows that plastic ingestion by sea turtles might be causing population declines, despite a lack of strong effects on individual turtles.

Plastic debris in marine ecosystems is a serious global issue and is the research focus of leading scientists across the globe. Annually, around 10 million tons of waste, mostly plastic, finds its way into the world's oceans. Plastic debris in the open and coastal seas can jeopardize the health of marine wildlife, affecting human health and economy both directly and indirectly.

Almost 700 marine species have been documented to interact with plastic, most commonly by ingesting smaller pieces and becoming entangled in larger pieces. Among the most affected species are sea turtles. All seven known species of sea turtles have been seriously impacted by the presence of plastic waste in marine ecosystems. Ingestion of plastic waste is often not lethal for sea turtles, but it does reduce their ability to feed and can cause negative toxic effects. Scientists have been warning for over a decade about the negative non-lethal effects of ingested plastics, noting that these effects are "particularly difficult to quantify."

Now, in a new study, an international research group, comprising Asst. Prof. Marko Jusup (Tokyo Institute of Technology [Tokyo Tech], Japan), Dr. Nina Marn and Dr. Tin Klanjšček (Ruder Boškovic Institute, Croatia), and Prof. S.A.L.M. Kooijman (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands), presented the first mechanistic model for quantifying the effects of ingested plastics on individuals and populations of sea turtles. Their findings are published in the high-ranking scientific journal Ecology Letters .

The study achieved exactly what previous research has struggled to accomplish: a new method to assess and quantify the effects of plastics ingestion on growth, reproduction, and survival of individuals and consequently populations.

Asst. Prof. Jusup, who co-led the study with Dr. Marn, explains, "In this research, we focused on a well-known and globally distributed protected species of sea turtles--the loggerhead. Our aim was to quantify the effects of ingested plastics on individual animals and subsequently on whole populations. Differentiating between the individual and population breaking points is important because individuals can look healthy and even reproduce, but this may not be sufficient to offset the loss of individuals due to mortality. More extreme cases of plastics ingestion reported in the scientific literature cause the population ecological breaking point to be reached. This is why it is crucial to decisively act now, before it is too late."

Dr. Marn, co-leading author of this study, spent several months at Tokyo Tech working with Asst. Prof. Jusup. She explains her motivation, "Over the past few years, there have been frequent discussions about a large amount of plastic ending up in the oceans, but gathering reliable data on the direct effects of plastic on animal health is still a challenge for the scientific community. One of the main motivations of my doctoral research was therefore to link plastic in the oceans to effects on marine wildlife, particularly on the already endangered sea turtles."

Understanding the link between the amount of ingested plastic waste and reduction in feeding of marine wildlife is crucial to mitigate the negative effects of plastic on marine organisms.

An added value of this model is its wide applicability--not only to other sea turtles but also any of the over 2,000 animal species characterized in the online database called "Add-my-Pet." The database is a brainchild of Prof. Kooijman, another co-author of the study, and is maintained and updated by a collaborative scientific effort in which Dr. Marn participates.

Dr. Klanjšček, a corresponding author of this study, concludes, "The effects of plastics ingestion that we are focusing on are not the only non-lethal effects of ingested plastics; for example, there is also a toxicological aspect of (micro)plastics, which is something we do not characterize at this point. However, our model is a crucial step that brings us closer to a more complete understanding of the effects of plastics on marine organisms. A general approach such as this, combined with an extensive database, enables straightforward applications of our model to other organisms such as sea birds and sea mammals."

Indeed, this new model represents an important step towards conservation of the marine ecosystem, which is--no doubt--the need of the hour.

A team led by the University of Colorado Boulder is pioneering a new solution to the problem of spring cleaning on the moon: Why not zap away the grime using a beam of electrons?

The research, published recently in the journal Acta Astronautica, marks the latest to explore a persistent, and perhaps surprising, hiccup in humanity's dreams of colonizing the moon: dust. Astronauts walking or driving over the lunar surface kick up huge quantities of this fine material, also called regolith.

"It's really annoying," said Xu Wang, a research associate in the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at CU Boulder. "Lunar dust sticks to all kinds of surfaces--spacesuits, solar panels, helmets--and it can damage equipment."

So he and his colleagues developed a possible fix--one that makes use of an electron beam, a device that shoots out a concentrated (and safe) stream of negatively-charged, low-energy particles. In the new study, the team aimed such a tool at a range of dirty surfaces inside of a vacuum chamber. And, they discovered, the dust just flew away.

"It literally jumps off," said lead author Benjamin Farr, who completed the work as an undergraduate student in physics at CU Boulder.

The researchers still have a long way to go before real-life astronauts will be able to use the technology to do their daily tidying up. But, Farr said, the team's early findings suggest that electron-beam dustbusters could be a fixture of moon bases in the not-too-distant future.

Spent gunpowder

The news may be music to the ears of many Apollo-era astronauts. Several of these space pioneers complained about moon dust, which often resists attempts at cleaning even after vigorous brushing. Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, who visited the moon as a member of Apollo 17 in 1972, developed an allergic reaction to the material and has said that it smelled like "spent gunpowder."

The problem with lunar dust, Wang explained, is that it isn't anything like the stuff that builds up on bookshelves on Earth. Moon dust is constantly bathed in radiation from the sun, a bombardment that gives the material an electric charge. That charge, in turn, makes the dust extra sticky, almost like a sock that's just come out of the drier. It also has a distinct structure.

"Lunar dust is very jagged and abrasive, like broken shards of glass," Wang said.

The question facing his group was then: How do you unstick this naturally clingy substance?

Electron beams offered a promising solution. According to a theory developed from recent scientific studies of how dust naturally lofts on the lunar surface, such a device could turn the electric charges on particles of dust into a weapon against them. If you hit a layer dust with a stream of electrons, Wang said, that dusty surface will collect additional negative charges. Pack enough charges into the spaces in between the particles, and they may begin to push each other away--much like magnets do when the wrong ends are forced together.

"The charges become so large that they repel each other, and then dust ejects off of the surface," Wang said.

Electron showers

To test the idea, he and his colleagues loaded a vacuum chamber with various materials coated in a NASA-manufactured "lunar simulant" designed to resemble moon dust.

And sure enough, after aiming an electron beam at those particles, the dust poured off, usually in just a few minutes. The trick worked on a wide range of surfaces, too, including spacesuit fabric and glass. This new technology aims at cleaning the finest dust particles, which are difficult to remove using brushes, Wang said. The method was able to clean dusty surfaces by an average of about 75-85%.

"It worked pretty well, but not well enough that we're done," Farr said.

The researchers are currently experimenting with new ways to increase the cleaning power of their electron beam.

But study coauthor Mihály Horányi, a professor in LASP and the Department of Physics at CU Boulder, said that the technology has real potential. NASA has experimented with other strategies for shedding lunar dust, such as by embedding networks of electrodes into spacesuits. An electron beam, however, might be a lot cheaper and easier to roll out.

Horányi imagines that one day, lunar astronauts could simply leave their spacesuits hanging up in a special room, or even outside their habitats, and clean them after spending a long day kicking up dust outside. The electrons would do the rest.

"You could just walk into an electron beam shower to remove fine dust," he said.

Researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, have developed a molecule that absorbs energy from sunlight and stores it in chemical bonds. A possible long-term use of the molecule is to capture solar energy efficiently and store it for later consumption. The current results have been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, JACS.

The Earth receives many times more energy from the sun than we humans can use. This energy is absorbed by solar energy facilities, but one of the challenges of solar energy is to store it efficiently, such that the energy is available when the sun is not shining. This led scientists at Linköping University to investigate the possibility of capturing and storing solar energy in a new molecule.

"Our molecule can take on two different forms: a parent form that can absorb energy from sunlight, and an alternative form in which the structure of the parent form has been changed and become much more energy-rich, while remaining stable. This makes it possible to store the energy in sunlight in the molecule efficiently", says Bo Durbeej, professor of computational physics in the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology at Linköping University, and leader of the study.

The molecule belongs to a group known as "molecular photoswitches". These are always available in two different forms, isomers, that differ in their chemical structures. The two forms have different properties, and in the case of the molecule developed by LiU researchers, this difference is in the energy content. The chemical structures of all photoswitches are influenced by light energy. This means that the structure, and thus the properties, of a photoswitch can be changed by illuminating it. One possible area of application for photoswitches is molecular electronics, in which the two forms of the molecule have different electrical conductivities. Another area is photopharmacology, in which one form of the molecule is pharmacologically active and can bind to a specific target protein in the body, while the other form is inactive.

It's common in research that experiments are done first and theoretical work subsequently confirms the experimental results, but in this case the procedure was reversed. Bo Durbeej and his group work in theoretical chemistry, and conduct calculations and simulations of chemical reactions. This involves advanced computer simulations, which are performed on supercomputers at the National Supercomputer Centre, NSC, in Linköping. The calculations showed that the molecule the researchers had developed would undergo the chemical reaction they required, and that it would take place extremely fast, within 200 femtoseconds. Their colleagues at the Research Centre for Natural Sciences in Hungary were then able to build the molecule, and perform experiments that confirmed the theoretical prediction.

In order to store large amounts of solar energy in the molecule, the researchers have attempted to make the energy difference between the two isomers as large as possible. The parent form of their molecule is extremely stable, a property that within organic chemistry is denoted by saying that the molecule is "aromatic". The basic molecule consists of three rings, each of which is aromatic. When it absorbs light, however, the aromaticity is lost, such that the molecule becomes much more energy-rich. The LiU researchers show in their study, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, that the concept of switching between aromatic and non-aromatic states of a molecule has a major potential in the field of molecular photoswitches.

"Most chemical reactions start in a condition where a molecule has high energy and subsequently passes to one with a low energy. Here, we do the opposite - a molecule that has low energy becomes one with high energy. We would expect this to be difficult, but we have shown that it is possible for such a reaction to take place both rapidly and efficiently", says Bo Durbeej.

The researchers will now examine how the stored energy can be released from the energy-rich form of the molecule in the best way.

In a major public health success, the introduction of pneumococcal conjugate vaccine PCV13, or Prevnar 13, in 2010 in the United States is associated with reduction in socioeconomic disparities and the near elimination of Black-white-based racial disparities for invasive pneumococcal disease.

That's according to an upcoming study in the Journal of Infectious Diseases by Rameela Raman, PhD, Helen Keipp Talbot, MD, MPH, and colleagues at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. According to the authors, this is the first study to examine the effect of PCV13 on socioeconomic health disparities.

"Our data show that PCV13 is associated with a large decrease in the overall incidence of invasive pneumococcal disease and that race-based pneumococcal disease disparities are markedly reduced," said Raman, associate professor of Biostatistics. "There's reason to think that the 20 Tennessee counties we were able to study are representative of the state and the region."

The bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae, or pneumococcus, is the main cause of community acquired pneumonia and meningitis in children and the elderly; other invasive pneumococcal diseases include infections of the heart, brain, bloodstream, bones and inner lining of the abdomen.

The team linked neighborhood-level socioeconomic information to individual-level data collected from 20 Tennessee counties participating in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bacterial surveillance system. These counties represent approximately 55% of Tennessee's total population.

Under a previous, less broad-spectrum pneumococcal vaccine, PCV7, from 2001 to 2009 the incidence of invasive pneumococcal disease was 17.9 cases per year per 100,000 population. Following the introduction of PCV13, for the years 2011-16 the incidence dropped to 12.8.

Under the previous vaccine, the incidence of pneumococcal disease among blacks was approximately 1.5 times the incidence among whites: 24.7 and 16.4, respectively. Post-PCV13, the incidence among blacks was around 1.15 times the incidence among whites: 15 and 13.1, respectively. Post-PCV13, the incidence among blacks of pneumococcal disease with serotypes addressed by PCV13 was around 0.8 times the incidence among whites: 2.2 and 2.7, respectively.

Prior to the introduction in 2000 of PCV7, the incidence of PCV13-serotype disease in high poverty neighborhoods was around 2.8 times the incidence in low poverty neighborhoods: 17.8 and 6.4, respectively. Post-PCV13, incidence of PCV13-serotype disease in high poverty neighborhoods was approximately 2.2 times that of low poverty neighborhoods: 3.1 and 1.4, respectively.

Other VUMC researchers contributing to the study include Danielle Ndi, MPH, Tiffanie Markus, PhD, and William Schaffner, MD. They were joined by researchers from the CDC in Atlanta and Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The study was supported in part by the CDC.

More than 13% of women and 3.6% of men on college campuses have an eating disorder of some kind, but fewer than 20% of those affected ever receive treatment due to lack of available clinicians and the stigma associated with seeking help. New research led by eating disorders experts at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis indicates a phone app may help change that.

In a study involving nearly 700 women on 27 U.S. college campuses, including Washington University in St. Louis, the researchers determined that a phone-based app that delivers a form of cognitive behavioral therapy was an effective means of intervention in addressing eating disorders. Those who used the app reported a decline over time in symptoms, including binge eating, purging, using diuretics, and concerns about weight and shape, as well as improvements in depression and anxiety, which often accompany eating disorders.

The findings are published Aug. 31 in the journal JAMA Network Open.

"College students are busy and often don't have spare time to seek the help they need, and many college counseling centers aren't equipped with clinicians who are trained in treating eating disorders, so we believe digital interventions like this one can dramatically increase access to care," said first author Ellen E. Fitzsimmons-Craft, PhD, an assistant professor of psychiatry. "In our study, this digital phone app was associated with dramatic increases in access to treatment. And in cognitive behavioral therapy, we know the app is providing a therapy that's proven to help."

The study focused on women on college campuses via a questionnaire that evaluated whether each woman was at risk for an eating disorder, such as binge eating disorder or bulimia nervosa. It did not include women with anorexia nervosa because they are more likely to benefit from a different treatment approach.

Once a participant was determined to have or to be at risk for binge eating disorder or bulimia, she was randomly assigned to receive cognitive behavioral therapy through a mobile app, or to be referred to typically prescribed care provided through the university's counseling services. Of the 4,894 women who were screened, 914 were eligible for the study. Of those, 690 agreed to participate, with 385 randomly placed in the group using the phone app and 305 assigned to standard care.

Women who were randomly assigned to use the cognitive behavioral therapy app had access to content that was designed to help them challenge and change unhelpful ways of thinking and behaving. The app also provided participants with the support of a coach, who sent text messages to help the participants stay motivated to use the program and apply concepts they were learning through the app to their daily lives.

"One striking finding was that so many women assigned to the digital intervention actually used the phone app, and it helped to reduce their symptoms, such as marked concerns about their shape and weight, body esteem issues, and binge eating or purging," said principal investigator Denise Wilfley, PhD, the Scott Rudolph University Professor of Psychiatry, who led the study along with co-principal investigator C. Barr Taylor, MD, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University and research professor at Palo Alto University.

Study participants who were randomized into the group that used the mobile app were able to engage with the therapy on their own time, according to their own schedules, with therapy broken into a series of 40 sessions, each one about 10 minutes long. Each woman also had access to phone calls with therapy coaches at the start and conclusion of the intervention, as well as text-based communication with them throughout the program.

Part of the phone app's success in engaging participants was due to the students being more likely to use the app than to pursue and follow up with in-person counseling. Some 83% of those who were randomly selected to use the app completed at least some of the program, whereas 28% of the students assigned to usual care reported receiving any treatment at all. On average, those who used the app completed about a third (31%) of the app-based therapy sessions but still showed signs of improvement when examined during follow-up visits.

When the study began in 2014, the researchers used a more traditional, web-based intervention that involved longer sessions every week. But the researchers soon realized that relatively few of the women were completing those online therapy sessions, so they enlisted the help of a private company, Lantern, to help create the phone-based app. Then they divided up the treatment into a larger number of shorter sessions.

"Students have greater and greater expectations of their technology," said Fitzsimmons-Craft. "After a slow start with the online therapy, we found that engagement increased significantly once we switched to shorter sessions using the mobile app."

The researchers also found that women using the phone app experienced improvements in depression and anxiety that often accompany eating disorders. Such interventions may be especially important on college campuses during the COVID-19 pandemic, explained Wilfley, also a professor of medicine, of pediatrics and of psychological & brain sciences and director of the Center for Healthy Weight and Wellness.

"Students with eating disorders tend to isolate themselves socially, but now all students are charged with keeping themselves socially distant," she said. "There are data showing increases in symptoms of binge eating disorder and bulimia nervosa now that people are more isolated, with easier access to food and, obviously, unprecedented stress. We think these problems could increase in the coming months, so it's important that there be ways to reach students who are having difficulty. We believe delivering therapy with a phone-based app may be truly effective."

WINSTON-SALEM, N. C. - August 31, 2020 - Specific fungi in the gut associated with a higher risk of Alzheimer's disease and found in people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) can be altered in a beneficial manner by eating a modified Mediterranean diet, researchers at Wake Forest School of Medicine have found.

The small study is published in the current online edition of the journal EBioMedicine.

"Our study reveals that unique fungi co-living with bacteria in the gut of patients with MCI can be modulated through a Mediterranean ketogenic diet," said principal investigator Hariom Yadav, assistant professor of molecular medicine at Wake Forest School of Medicine, part of Wake Forest Baptist Health.

In the single-center, randomized, double-blind crossover pilot study, Yadav's team identified the organisms in the gut microbiome by sequencing the fungal rRNA ITS1 gene in 17 older adults (11 with diagnosed MCI and six with normal cognition) before and after a six-week intervention of a modified Mediterranean ketogenic diet or the American Heart Association Diet to determine its correlation with Alzheimer's markers in cerebrospinal fluid and gut bacteria.

"Although we do not fully understand how these fungi contribute to Alzheimer's disease, this is the first study of its kind to reveal their role in our mental health, which we hope will ignite thinking in the scientific community to develop better understanding of them in relation to Alzheimer's disease," Yadav said. "It also indicates that dietary habits such as eating a ketogenic diet can reduce harmful fungi in the gut which might help in reducing Alzheimer's disease processes in the brain."

It is usually difficult to predict how well drugs will work when they are combined. Sometimes, two antibiotics increase their effect and inhibit the growth of bacteria more efficiently than expected. In other cases, the combined effect is weaker. Since there are many different ways of combining drugs - such as antibiotics - it is important to be able to predict the effect of these drug combinations. A new study has found out that it is often possible to predict the outcomes of combining certain antibiotics by quantitatively characterizing how individual antibiotics work. That is the result of a joint study by Professor Tobias Bollenbach at the University of Cologne with Professor Gasper Tkacik and the doctoral researcher Bor Kavcic at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. The paper 'Mechanisms of drug interactions between translation-inhibiting antibiotics' has been published in Nature Communications.

'We wanted to find out how antibiotics that inhibit protein synthesis in bacteria work when combined with each other, and predict these effects as far as possible, using mathematical models,' Bollenbach explained. As head of the research group 'Biological Physics and Systems Biology' at the University of Cologne, he explores how cells respond to drug combinations and other signals.

Bacterial ribosomes can gradually translate the DNA sequence of genes into the amino acid sequence of proteins (translation). Many antibiotics target this process and inhibit translation. Different antibiotics specifically block different steps of the translation cycle. The scientists found out that the interactions between the antibiotics are often caused by bottlenecks in the translation cycle. For example, antibiotics that inhibit the beginning and middle of the translation cycle have much weaker effects when combined.

In order to clarify the underlying mechanisms of drug interactions, the scientists created artificial translation bottlenecks that genetically mimic the effect of specific antibiotics. If such a bottleneck is located in the middle of the translation cycle, a traffic jam of ribosomes forms, which dissolves upon introducing another bottleneck at the beginning of the translation cycle. Using a combination of theoretical models from statistical physics and experiments, the scientists showed that this effect explains the drug interaction between antibiotics that block these translation steps.

Tobias Bollenbach concluded: 'A quantitative understanding of the effect of individual antibiotics allows us to predict the effect of antibiotic combinations without having to test all possible combinations by trial and error. This finding is important because the same approach can be applied to other drugs, enabling the development of new, particularly effective drug combinations in the long term.'

A team led by researchers at the University of California, Davis, has discovered a missing link in the evolution of photosynthesis and carbon fixation. Dating back more than 2.4 billion years, a newly discovered form of the plant enzyme rubisco could give new insight into plant evolution and breeding.

Rubisco is the most abundant enzyme on the planet. Present in plants, cyanobacteria (also known as blue-green algae) and other photosynthetic organisms, it's central to the process of carbon fixation and is one of Earth's oldest carbon-fixing enzymes.

"It's the primary driver for producing food, so it can take CO2 from the atmosphere and fix that into sugar for plants and other photosynthetic organisms to use. It's the primary driving enzyme for feeding carbon into life that way," said Doug Banda, a postdoctoral scholar in the lab of Patrick Shih, assistant professor of plant biology in the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences.

Form I rubisco evolved over 2.4 billion years ago before the Great Oxygenation Event, when cyanobacteria transformed the Earth's atmosphere by producing oxygen through photosynthesis. Rubisco's ties to this ancient event make it important to scientists studying the evolution of life.

In a study appearing Aug. 31 in Nature Plants, Banda and researchers from UC Davis, UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report the discovery of a previously unknown relative of form I rubisco, one that they suspect diverged from form I rubisco prior to the evolution of cyanobacteria.

The new version, called form I-prime rubisco, was found through genome sequencing of environmental samples and synthesized in the lab. Form I-prime rubisco gives researchers new insights into the structural evolution of form I rubisco, potentially providing clues as to how this enzyme changed the planet.

An invisible world

Form I rubisco is responsible for the vast majority of carbon fixation on Earth. But other forms of rubisco exist in bacteria and in the group of microorganisms called Archaea. These rubisco variants come in different shapes and sizes, and even lack small subunits. Yet they still function.

"Something intrinsic to understanding how form I rubisco evolved is knowing how the small subunit evolved," said Shih. "It's the only form of rubisco, that we know of, that makes this kind of octameric assembly of large subunits."

Study co-author Professor Jill Banfield, of UC Berkeley's earth and planetary sciences department, uncovered the new rubisco variant after performing metagenomic analyses on groundwater samples. Metagenomic analyses allow researchers to examine genes and genetic sequences from the environment without culturing microorganisms.

"We know almost nothing about what sort of microbial life exists in the world around us, and so the vast majority of diversity has been invisible," said Banfield. "The sequences that we handed to Patrick's lab actually come from organisms that were not represented in any databases."

Banda and Shih successfully expressed form I-prime rubisco in the lab using E. coli and studied its molecular structure.

Form I rubisco is built from eight core large molecular subunits with eight small subunits perched on top and bottom. Each piece of the structure is important to photosynthesis and carbon fixation. Like form I rubisco, form I-prime rubisco is built from eight large subunits. However, it does not possess the small subunits previously thought essential.

"The discovery of an octameric rubisco that forms without small subunits allows us to ask evolutionary questions about what life would've looked like without the functionality imparted by small subunits," said Banda. "Specifically, we found that form I-prime enzymes had to evolve fortified interactions in the absence of small subunits, which enabled structural stability in a time when Earth's atmosphere was rapidly changing."

According to the researchers, form I-prime rubisco represents a missing link in evolutionary history. Since form I rubisco converts inorganic carbon into plant biomass, further research on its structure and functionality could lead to innovations in agriculture production.

"Although there is significant interest in engineering a 'better' rubisco, there has been little success over decades of research," said Shih. "Thus, understanding how the enzyme has evolved over billions of years may provide key insight into future engineering efforts, which could ultimately improve photosynthetic productivity in crops."