Culture

The Earth is the only planet known to have liquid water on its surface, a fundamental characteristic when it comes to explaining the emergence of life. However, was this water always present in the rocks that made up our planet? Alternatively, was it delivered later by asteroids and comets that bombarded the Earth? Or did the Earth's water originate from a combination of both sources? In the journal Science dated 28 August 2020, scientists from the Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques in Nancy (CNRS/Université de Lorraine) contribute to this debate by showing that most of the water present on the Earth today has probably been there right from the very beginning. And yet the Earth was formed in a region of the Solar System where temperatures were too high for water to condense and clump together with other solids as ice, long supporting the hypothesis of a late addition of water. However, the amount of water present in the rocks that made up the Earth had never been accurately estimated. The scientists focused on meteorites with a composition similar to that of the Earth, called enstatite chondrites (1), and more specifically on a small number of these that underwent little heating over the course of their lifetime and thus still exhibit a primitive composition. Using two complementary techniques, they measured their content in hydrogen and determined precisely where part of this was located. Their results show that the Earth's primitive rocks probably contained enough water to provide at least three times the amount of water in the Earth's oceans, and possibly much more. In addition, the hydrogen in these meteorites has the same isotopic composition (2) as that of the water stored in the Earth's mantle, while the isotopic composition of the oceans is consistent with a mixture containing 95% of water from the enstatite chondrites and a mere 5% of water delivered by comets or water-rich asteroids. The Earth therefore appears to have obtained the overwhelming majority of its water from its constituent materials.

Over the past few months, a number of drugs have been under investigation to treat COVID-19 without well-established safety or data to support these claims. However, some of these unproven therapies may have underlying genetic reasons for not being effective and resulting in fatal adverse effects as found with hydroxychloroquine.

University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy faculty Pamala Jacobson and Melanie Nicol, and Pediatric Hematology/Oncology Fellow Takuto Takahashi recently published a peer-reviewed study in Nature Genomic Medicine about how individualization with pharmacogenomics — the study of how genes affect a person's response to drugs — may improve the efficiency and safety of these drugs.

“The application of pharmacogenomic tests can help eliminate fatal hypersensitivity for patients prescribed certain drugs,” said Jacobson. “We asked the question if selecting a COVID-19 medication or the dose using an individual's genetic information could improve effectiveness or safety.”

“One of the biggest success stories of using pharmacogenomics is with the HIV treatment abacavir,” said Nicol. “Which is now a standard test for potential treatment for those living with HIV and has virtually eliminated fatal hypersensitivity associated with that drug.”

The study looked at a variety of literature for drug therapies for COVID-19 — including hydroxychloroquine, remedesivier, tocilizumab and steroids — on PubMed. The researchers found that:

there are several gene variants that alter how an individual’s body metabolizes and processes COVID-19 therapies and may increase the risk of adverse effects;
that the risk of taking these therapies is complex since patients with COVID-19 are usually taking multiple other medications and have underlying conditions that affect the drug;
and the data for the pharmacogenomics on COVID-19 is limited due to the early stages of the clinical trials investigating treatments.

“While we did not find direct evidence to support use of pharmacogenomic testing for COVID-19, we did identify many actionable genetic markers that may have promise to improve efficacy and safety,” said Jacobson. “Clinical studies in patients with COVID-19 are needed before routine testing can be recommended.”

August 27, 2020 - COVID-19 has upended essentially every sector of the economy, and none more so than healthcare. Healthcare leaders from across the United States share their experiences with disruption and innovation in responding to the COVID-19 crisis in the Fall 2020 issue of Frontiers of Health Services Management, a publication of the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE). This journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

Leaders at Montefiore Health System in the Bronx, New York, describe a process of "creative destruction" leading to accelerated innovation - especially in terms of rapidly ramping up digital health capabilities. "In this new reality, digital innovation is fundamental for healthcare organizations as they make their transition into recovery," according to the article by Montefiore vice president and chief of staff Jeffrey B. Short and associate vice president and patient access transformation officer Adrin Mammen, FACHE. The theme for the new issue of Frontiers is "Response and Recovery: Healthcare Navigates the COVID-19 Pandemic."

COVID-19 'Can Serve as the Catalyst for Digital Innovation' in Healthcare

As New York saw its first cases of COVID-19, Montefiore leadership realized they would soon face an exponential growth rate, leading to shortages of hospital and ICU beds. Citing the classic theory of market disruption and resulting innovations, Mr. Short and Ms. Mammen write, "In this state of uncertainty, the invisible hands of the changing market economy drove Montefiore to pursue creative destruction and accelerate innovation."

"Driven by the virus, we quickly put new ideas into practice," the authors write. Leadership established an incident command structure, providing agility to make decisions and react to challenges. Resources were placed under central command; spaces throughout the Montefiore system were swiftly converted for inpatient use, doubling physical capacity.

Faced with disruption of normal care, leaders rapidly implemented a digital innovation program. An artificial intelligence (AI)-based, coronavirus-specific chatbot was introduced, leading to more than 18,000 engagements within 30 days. Within weeks, the chatbot was extended to inquiries other than COVID-19. "Amid this new sense of urgency, innovations that would typically have taken many years to operationalize at Montefiore have been completed in a matter of days," Mr. Short and Ms. Mammen write.

Responding to plummeting in-person visits, leaders designed and implemented a new telehealth solution. This became especially valuable as it was apparent that patients remained hesitant to make appointments, even after in-person visits resumed. Before the pandemic, Montefiore had no telehealth program; by April, more than 80 percent of visits had shifted to telehealth.

These lessons in accelerated innovation have important implications for the "new normal" in a post-pandemic world. Montefiore leaders have established a new tele-ICU command center, inpatient consultations via telehealth, real-time performance management, and extension of AI as an essential decision-making tool. "As the barriers of the past come down, Montefiore is embracing creative destruction," Mr. Short and Ms. Mammen conclude. "As a result, the excitement of digital innovation permeates the entire organization."

The COVID-19 pandemic "continues to demonstrate healthcare's vulnerabilities and is a force with such strength that it affects all aspects of care," according to an introduction by Frontiers editor Trudy Land, FACHE. She adds: "It is imperative for organizations to move forward from a precarious state and develop stronger systems for their communities."

The COVID-19-themed issue presents reports from leaders at nine healthcare organizations across the United States - from large healthcare systems like Montefiore serving a population of millions in New York City, to a regional healthcare corporation serving three Native American tribes across 6,000 square miles in Arizona. Ms. Land writes, "[The authors] share how they are responding to the coronavirus and navigating toward recovery, implementing changes and discovering innovations along the way."

Changes to water masses which are stored on the continents can be detected with the help of satellites. The data sets on the Earth's gravitational field which are required for this, stem from the GRACE and GRACE-FO satellite missions. As these data sets only include the typical large-scale mass anomalies, no conclusions about small scale structures, such as the actual distribution of water masses in rivers and river branches, are possible. Using the South American continent as an example, the Earth system modellers at the German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ, have developed a new Deep-Learning-Method, which quantifies small as well as large-scale changes to the water storage with the help of satellite data. This new method cleverly combines Deep-Learning, hydrological models and Earth observations from gravimetry and altimetry.

So far it is not precisely known, how much water a continent really stores. The continental water masses are also constantly changing, thus affecting the Earth's rotation and acting as a link in the water cycle between atmosphere and ocean. Amazon tributaries in Peru, for example, carry huge amounts of water in some years, but only a fraction of it in others. In addition to the water masses of rivers and other bodies of fresh water, considerable amounts of water are also found in soil, snow and underground reservoirs, which are difficult to quantify directly.

Now the research team around primary author Christopher Irrgang developed a new method in order to draw conclusions on the stored water quantities of the South American continent from the coarsely-resolved satellite data. "For the so called down-scaling, we are using a convolutional neural network, in short CNN, in connection with a newly developed training method", Irrgang says. "CNNs are particularly well suited for processing spatial Earth observations, because they can reliably extract recurrent patterns such as lines, edges or more complex shapes and characteristics."

In order to learn the connection between continental water storage and the respective satellite observations, the CNN was trained with simulation data of a numerical hydrological model over the period from 2003 until 2018. Additionally, data from the satellite altimetry in the Amazon region was used for validation. What is extraordinary, is that this CNN continuously self-corrects and self-validates in order to make the most accurate statements possible about the distribution of the water storage. "This CNN therefore combines the advantages of numerical modelling with high-precision Earth observation" according to Irrgang.

The researchers' study shows that the new Deep-Learning-Method is particularly reliable for the tropical regions north of the -20° latitude on the South American continent, where rain forests, vast surface waters and also large groundwater basins are located. Same as for the groundwater-rich, western part of South America's southern tip. The down-scaling works less well in dry and desert regions. This can be explained by the comparably low variability of the already low water storage there, which therefore only have a marginal effect on the training of the neural network. However, for the Amazon region, the researchers were able to show that the forecast of the validated CNN was more accurate than the numerical model used.

In future, large-scale as well as regional analysis and forecasts of the global continental water storage will be urgently needed. Further development of numerical models and the combination with innovative Deep-Learning-Methods will take up a more important role in this, in order to gain comprehensive insight into continental hydrology. Aside from purely geophysical investigations, there are many other possible applications, such as studying the impact of climate change on continental hydrology, the identification of stress factors for ecosystems such as droughts or floods, and the development of water management strategies for agricultural and urban regions.

In a year defined by obstacles, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign student rocket team persevered. Working together across five time zones, they successfully designed a hybrid rocket engine that uses paraffin and a novel nitrous oxide-oxygen mixture called Nytrox. The team has its sights set on launching a rocket with the new engine at the 2021 Intercollegiate Rocketry and Engineering Competition.

"Hybrid propulsion powers Virgin Galactic's suborbital tourist spacecraft and the development of that engine has been challenging. Our students are now experiencing those challenges first hand and learning how to overcome them," said faculty adviser to the team Michael Lembeck.

Last year the team witnessed a number of catastrophic failures with hybrid engines utilizing nitrous oxide. The propellant frequently overheated in the New Mexico desert, where the IREC competition is held. Lembeck said this motivated the team to find an alternative fuel that could remain stable at temperature. Nytrox surfaced as the solution to the problem.

As the team began working on the engine this past spring semester, excitement to conduct hydrostatic testing of the ground oxidizer tank vessel quickly turned to frustration as the team lacked a safe test location.

Team leader Vignesh Sella said, "We planned to conduct the test at the U of I's Willard airport retired jet engine testing facility. But the Department of Aerospace Engineering halted all testing until safety requirements could be met."

Sella said they were disheartened at first, but rallied by creating a safety review meeting along with another student rocket group to examine their options.

"As a result of that meeting, we came up with a plan to move the project forward. The hybrid team rigorously evaluated our safety procedures, and had our work reviewed by Dr. Dassou Nagassou, the Aerodynamics Research Lab manager. He became a great resource for us, and a very helpful mentor."

Sella and Andrew Larkey also approached Purdue University to draw from their extensive experience in the realm of rocket propulsion. They connected with Chris Nielson who is a graduate student and lab manager at Purdue. They did preliminary over-the-phone design reviews and were eventually invited to conduct their hydrostatic and cold-flow testing at Purdue's Zucrow Laboratories, a facility dedicated to testing rocket propulsion with several experts in the field on-site.

"We sent a few of the members there to scout the location and take notes before bringing the whole team there for a test," Sella said. "These meetings, relationships, and advances, although they may sound smooth and easy to establish, were arduous and difficult to attain. It was a great relief to us to have the support from the department, a pressure vessel expert as our mentor, and Zucrow Laboratories available to our team."

The extended abstract, which the team had submitted much earlier to the AIAA Propulsion and Energy conference, assumed the engine would have been assembled and tested before the documentation process began. Team leader Vignesh Sella said they wanted to document hard test data but had to switch tactics in March. The campus move to online-only classes also curtailed all in-person activities, including those of registered student organizations like ISS.

"As the disruptions caused by COVID-19 required us to work remotely, we pivoted the paper by focusing on documenting the design processes and decisions we made for the engine. This allowed us to work remotely and complete a paper that wasn't too far from the original abstract. Our members, some of whom are international, met on Zoom and Discord to work on the paper together virtually, over five time zones," Sella said.

Sella said he and the entire team are proud of what they have accomplished and are "returning this fall with a vengeance."

The Illinois Space Society is a technical, professional, and educational outreach student organization at the U of I in the Department of Aerospace Engineering. The society consists of 150 active members. The hybrid rocket engine team consisted of 20 members and is one of the five technical projects within ISS. The project began in 2013 with the goal of constructing a subscale hybrid rocket engine before transitioning to a full-scale engine. The subscale hybrid rocket engine was successfully constructed and hot fired in the summer of 2018, yielding the positive test results necessary to move onto designing and manufacturing a full-scale engine.

"After the engine completes its testing, the next task will be integrating the engine into the rocket vehicle," said Sella "This will require fitting key flight hardware components within the geometric constraints of a rocket body tube and structurally securing the engine to the vehicle."

In June 2021, the rocket will be transported to Spaceport America in Truth or Consequences for its first launch.

While high greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss are often associated with rapid land-use change in Indonesia, impacts on local water cycles have been largely overlooked. Researchers from the University of Göttingen, IPB University in Bogor and BMKG in Jakarta have now published a new study on this issue. They show that the expansion of monocultures, such as oil palm and rubber plantations, leads to more frequent and more severe flooding. The multidisciplinary team explains this increase in flooding with a complex interplay of ecohydrological and social processes, including soil degradation in monocultures, the expansion of oil palm plantations into wetlands, and the construction of flood protection dams. The results have been published in the journal Ecology & Society.

For the study, the authors conducted almost 100 interviews with Indonesian smallholders, people from the village and decision-makers in the Jambi province of Sumatra. They then compared and supplemented their analyses of these results with scientific measurements of precipitation, river and groundwater levels, soil properties as well as land use mapping from the region. "Many studies on the relationship between land use changes and flooding are only based on analyses by individual disciplines and thus provide only fragmentary insights into the underlying processes," says lead author Jennifer Merten, Department of Human Geography at the University of Göttingen. "It was therefore important for us to use the widest possible range of data from different disciplines and also to include observations from the local population."

In their study, the scientists of the German-Indonesian Collaborative Research Centre EFForTS (Ecological and Socio-Economic Functions of Tropical Lowland Rainforest Transformation Systems) show that the current expansion of oil palm and rubber plantations has a significant impact on local water cycles. "The large-scale land-use change leads to a compaction of the soil, so that less rain is absorbed by the soil and the water quickly runs off at the surface," explains co-author Christian Stiegler, Bioclimatology Group at the University of Göttingen. "In particular, the advancing destruction of floodplains plays an important role in this process." From the perspective of the village population, the construction of flood dams and drainage channels also contributes to a change in local patterns of flooding. As oil palm plantations in particular are increasingly cultivated in wetlands such as river floodplains or peatlands, larger plantation owners are trying to control flooding on their land by means of such constructions. "However, such dams often lead to increased flooding on neighbouring smallholder plantations," Merten reports following her experiences from the area. This means that the observed increase in flooding also leads to new social tensions and conflicts.

In order to reduce the impact of land use change on the water cycle, soil protection and improved land use planning, especially in floodplains and wetlands, can play an important role. "Yet, it is just as important to regulate and control landscape interventions for flood protection and drainage more closely," says Merten. "Otherwise it might happen that the effects of increasing flooding will affect above all the poorest in society, because larger companies simply pass on the water."

In a landmark study, scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have mapped the immense envelope of gas, called a halo, surrounding the Andromeda galaxy, our nearest large galactic neighbor. Scientists were surprised to find that this tenuous, nearly invisible halo of diffuse plasma extends 1.3 million light-years from the galaxy--about halfway to our Milky Way--and as far as 2 million light-years in some directions. This means that Andromeda's halo is already bumping into the halo of our own galaxy.

They also found that the halo has a layered structure, with two main nested and distinct shells of gas. This is the most comprehensive study of a halo surrounding a galaxy.

"Understanding the huge halos of gas surrounding galaxies is immensely important," explained co-investigator Samantha Berek of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. "This reservoir of gas contains fuel for future star formation within the galaxy, as well as outflows from events such as supernovae. It's full of clues regarding the past and future evolution of the galaxy, and we're finally able to study it in great detail in our closest galactic neighbor."

"We find the inner shell that extends to about a half million light-years is far more complex and dynamic," explained study leader Nicolas Lehner of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. "The outer shell is smoother and hotter. This difference is a likely result from the impact of supernova activity in the galaxy's disk more directly affecting the inner halo."

A signature of this activity is the team's discovery of a large amount of heavy elements in the gaseous halo of Andromeda. Heavier elements are cooked up in the interiors of stars and then ejected into space--sometimes violently as a star dies. The halo is then contaminated with this material from stellar explosions.

The Andromeda galaxy, also known as M31, is a majestic spiral of perhaps as many as 1 trillion stars and comparable in size to our Milky Way. At a distance of 2.5 million light-years, it is so close to us that the galaxy appears as a cigar-shaped smudge of light high in the autumn sky. If its gaseous halo could be viewed with the naked eye, it would be about three times the width of the Big Dipper. This would easily be the biggest feature on the nighttime sky.

Through a program called Project AMIGA (Absorption Map of Ionized Gas in Andromeda), the study examined the light from 43 quasars--the very distant, brilliant cores of active galaxies powered by black holes--located far beyond Andromeda. The quasars are scattered behind the halo, allowing scientists to probe multiple regions. Looking through the halo at the quasars' light, the team observed how this light is absorbed by the Andromeda halo and how that absorption changes in different regions. The immense Andromeda halo is made of very rarified and ionized gas that doesn't emit radiation that is easily detectable. Therefore, tracing the absorption of light coming from a background source is a better way to probe this material.

The researchers used the unique capability of Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) to study the ultraviolet light from the quasars. Ultraviolet light is absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, which makes it impossible to observe with ground-based telescopes. The team used COS to detect ionized gas from carbon, silicon, and oxygen. An atom becomes ionized when radiation strips one or more electrons from it.

Andromeda's halo has been probed before by Lehner's team. In 2015, they discovered that the Andromeda halo is large and massive. But there was little hint of its complexity; now, it's mapped out in more detail, leading to its size and mass being far more accurately determined.

"Previously, there was very little information--only six quasars--within 1 million light-years of the galaxy. This new program provides much more information on this inner region of Andromeda's halo," explained co-investigator J. Christopher Howk, also of Notre Dame. "Probing gas within this radius is important, as it represents something of a gravitational sphere of influence for Andromeda."

Because we live inside the Milky Way, scientists cannot easily interpret the signature of our own galaxy's halo. However, they believe the halos of Andromeda and the Milky Way must be very similar since these two galaxies are quite similar. The two galaxies are on a collision course, and will merge to form a giant elliptical galaxy beginning about 4 billion years from now.

Scientists have studied gaseous halos of more distant galaxies, but those galaxies are much smaller on the sky, meaning the number of bright enough background quasars to probe their halo is usually only one per galaxy. Spatial information is therefore essentially lost. With its close proximity to Earth, the gaseous halo of Andromeda looms large on the sky, allowing for a far more extensive sampling.

"This is truly a unique experiment because only with Andromeda do we have information on its halo along not only one or two sightlines, but over 40," explained Lehner. "This is groundbreaking for capturing the complexity of a galaxy halo beyond our own Milky Way."

In fact, Andromeda is the only galaxy in the universe for which this experiment can be done now, and only with Hubble. Only with an ultraviolet-sensitive future space telescope will scientists be able to routinely undertake this type of experiment beyond the approximately 30 galaxies comprising the Local Group.

"So Project AMIGA has also given us a glimpse of the future," said Lehner.

August 27, 2020 (Seattle, Wash.)--Discoveries from the Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason (BRI) have identified a new cellular protection pathway that targets a common vulnerability in several different pandemic viruses, and collaborators at Case Western Reserve University, Boston University School of Medicine and MRIGlobal have shown that this pathway can protect cells from infection by Ebola virus and coronaviruses, like SARS-CoV-2. Published today in Science, these new findings provide a better understanding of cellular mechanisms involved in viral resistance that can inform future treatments and therapies for viral infectious diseases.

The research illuminates a completely new role for the two genes identified and a unique approach to inhibiting virus fusion and entry into human cells--getting us one step closer to the next generation of antiviral therapies. Researchers used a transposon-mediated gene-activation screen to search for new genes that can prevent infection by Ebola virus. This new screening strategy--that serves as a blueprint for uncovering resistance mechanism against other dangerous pathogens-- found that the gene MHC class II transactivator (CIITA) induces resistance in human cell lines by activating the expression of a second gene, CD74. One form of CD74, known as p41, disrupts the processing of proteins on the coat of the Ebola virus protein by cellular proteases called Cathepsins. This prevents entry of the virus into the cell and infection. CD74 p41 also blocked the Cathepsin-dependent entry pathway of coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2.

"Uncovering these new cellular protection pathways is incredibly important for understanding how we disrupt or change the virus infection cycle to illicit better protection against viruses like Ebola or SARS-CoV-2." said Adam Lacy-Hulbert, Ph.D., Principal Investigator, BRI and lead author on the study. "And our new strategy helps us find mechanisms that have eluded conventional genetic screens."

The findings illustrate a new role for genes previously thought to be involved in more conventional T cell and B cell mediated immune responses. For example, CIITA was understood as important for communication between immune cells, but it had not previously been seen as a way for cells to defend themselves against viruses.

"As a virologist, I am excited not just about what this means for Ebola virus, but about the broader implications for other viruses," said Anna Bruchez, Ph.D., Instructor in Pathology, Case Western Reserve University and co-author on the study. "Many viruses, including coronaviruses, use cathepsin proteases to help them infect cells. Fortunately, when SARS-CoV-2 emerged, I had recently moved to Case Western, and was able to use their specialized BSL3 laboratories to show the CD74 pathway also blocked endosomal entry by this virus. Thus, this anti-viral mechanism has evolved to work against many different viruses."

"We really don't understand the cellular mechanisms that block viral infections which has limited our ability to effectively respond to pandemics, including this year's coronavirus," said Lynda M. Stuart, M.D., Ph.D., Deputy Director, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, BRI Affiliate Investigator and co-author on the study. "We really need therapies that can block all viruses, including unknown future pathogens. To do that we need to find common pathways that viruses target and then develop approaches to block those vulnerabilities. Our work demonstrates one way in which cells can be modified to do this, and we hope that our insights will open up new avenues for scientists developing therapies and interventions to treat viral infectious diseases that impact millions of lives around the world."

The COVID-19 pandemic has dominated the news cycle for the better part of 2020. As guidelines are continually updated to reflect changes in our understanding of how the virus spreads, it is critical people receive accurate, credible information that encourages prevention. Understanding the factors that influence these messages' effectiveness is crucial.

A group of researchers published a paper in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine reporting their findings from a study funded by the Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention and Policy (InCHIP) at the University of Connecticut on how the source of a COVID-19 prevention message affects its perceived effectiveness.

This multi-institution project brought together the varied expertise of UConn Health's Howard Tennen, a professor of public health sciences in the School of Medicine, Marcella Boynton '05 (MA) '09 (PhD), an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Joseph Lee, an associate professor from East Carolina University, and Ross O'Hara, a former UConn Health postdoctoral fellow and independent researcher from Michigan.

The team conducted an experiment with a diverse group of nearly 1,000 American adults to test the effectiveness of different messages encouraging coronavirus safety measures such as wearing a mask or social distancing. Messages systematically varied in several ways, including who was attributed as the source of the message. Participants were told messages came from President Donald Trump, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Trump and the CDC, a local or state health agency, or no source.

The team found when Trump's name was associated with the message, the effectiveness of those messages decreased, not just compared to other sources, but even when there was no source at all.

"Asking the public to restrict their behavior and social ties in such a big way is a difficult sell," Tennen says. "For these prevention messages to be believed, they have to come from a trusted source. We are in uncharted waters when it comes to effectively persuading people to wear masks and socially distance, and that's why we thought conducting this study was so important."

After receiving a postcard encouraging citizens to engage in social distancing and other prevention behaviors with Trump's name prominently featured, Boynton wondered whether this unusual messaging strategy was more effective compared to the traditional approach of citing a public health agency or organization as the message source.

Interestingly, the researchers found even participants who said they trust Trump did not find messages from him more effective compared to other message sources. However, those who said they do not trust the president found the messages significantly less effective when associated with Trump.

"Linking President Trump to prevention messages seems to work to the detriment of what those messages were trying to do," Boynton, who remains affiliated with InCHIP, says.

Boynton has a background in health behavior research and, with funding from the National Cancer Institute and Food and Drug Administration, had previously studied how to effectively communicate the health risks of tobacco use. She thought the current public health crisis called for the same kind of research methods to identify the best way to get credible, evidence-based prevention messages to the public.

These findings are important as various agencies and news outlets are trying to determine the best strategies to ensure these health messages are as effective as possible.

"A lot of the current prevention messaging efforts are just people's best guesses at what might work," Boynton says.

The team hopes to complete a follow up study examining how these types of messages affect people's engagement in prevention behaviors such as wearing a mask.

"I think behavioral science has a lot to contribute to stopping COVID-19, but so far, its potential has been underrealized and underutilized," Boynton says. "Until we have better treatments or a vaccine, a big part of stopping the spread of this disease is going to be about changing behavior."

The African baobab tree (Adansonia digitata) is called the tree of life. Baobab trees can live for more than a thousand years and provide food, livestock fodder, medicinal compounds, and raw materials. Baobab trees are incredibly significant. However, there are growing conservation concerns and until now, a lack of genetic information.

The African baobab tree has 168 chromosomes - critical knowledge for further genetic studies, conservation, and improvement for agricultural purposes. The findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports. Previous studies estimated that the tree has between 96 and 166 chromosomes.

"We were able to unequivocally count the chromosomes," says Nurul Faridi, a USDA Forest Service research geneticist who co-led the study with Hamidou Sakhanokho, a USDA Agricultural Research Service research geneticist.

The researchers used fluorescent probes to see the genetic components of individual chromosomes within the cells - which glow like jewels.

The analysis also revealed that the tree has a massive nucleolus organizer region (NOR). Relative to the main chromosome body, this region appears larger than that of any other plant species. During certain stages of the cell cycle, nucleoli form at the NORs. The nucleoli are essential for ribosome assembly and protein synthesis in eukaryotes and are an important feature that differentiates eukaryotes from prokaryotes.

"These genetic findings are foundational and will make genetic conservation of the African baobab tree more efficient and effective," says Dana Nelson, a coauthor and project leader of the Southern Research Station's genetic unit. "This research is also a precursor for tree breeding programs seeking to improve baobab for silvicultural applications."

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - A new COVID-19 mouse model developed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill captures many of the features of human disease and has helped advance a COVID-19 vaccine candidate to clinical trial.

Researchers, among them virologists and microbiologists at UNC-Chapel Hill's Gillings School of Global Public Health, describe the mouse-adapted SARS-CoV-2 model in a paper fast-tracked and published Aug. 27 in Nature.

Small animal models that replicate SARS-CoV-2 are desperately needed to rapidly evaluate medical countermeasures. The mouse model developed in the laboratory of virologist Ralph Baric has already been used to accelerate the development of Operation Warp Speed vaccines such as those by Moderna.

The model is expected to have a positive impact on the development of antivirals, vaccines and antibodies for the fight against COVID-19, which has risen to 5.7 million cases in the U.S. and continues to be widespread in some communities.

In January, as scientists began gearing up to research the dangerous new illness, all eyes were on ACE2, a protein that sits on the surface of many types of cells in the human body including the heart, gut, lungs and inside the nose. SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, latches on to ACE2 receptor and uses it to enter cells and begin growing, leading to infection.

But it was discovered that SARS-CoV-2 cannot use the mouse version of the viral receptor ACE2. The Baric laboratory has a history of generating mouse models of other coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, so the team used their expertise to adapt SARS-CoV2 to use the mouse receptor.

They changed two amino acid positions in the viral genome to generate a mouse-adapted virus capable of infecting standard laboratory mice.

It worked, said study co-author Sarah R. Leist, a research associate at UNC-Chapel Hill, "generating mild symptoms in young mice and in old mice, we saw more severe disease in line with what has been reported in the human population."

By spring the laboratory was able to begin many studies involving mice.

"We have used our SARS-CoV-2 mouse adapted model to test a few medical countermeasures already," said lead study author Kenneth H. Dinnon III, a graduate research assistant in the Gillings School of Global Public Health. "We have collaborated with the National Institutes of Health Vaccine Research Center and Moderna to test their mRNA-1273 human vaccine candidate and shown that the therapy effectively protected mice from infection. We have also worked with several academic groups to test other vaccines platforms, including alphavirus replicon platforms developed in our own laboratory."

The model is helping to make inroads in another therapeutic avenue: antibodies which are designed to harness the body's ability to target and fight threats.

The team has worked with other labs to identify and test the best human monoclonal antibodies capable of binding and neutralizing SARS-CoV-2 in mice.

Experiments described in the Nature study found mice given single injections of interferon lambda-1a either before or after infection with SARS-CoV-2 protected mice from virus replication and loss of lung function.

The mouse model is the first to show that this kind of treatment works against SARS-CoV-2 in a living organism. The finding supports clinical trials ongoing at Stanford University.

Such milestones are part of the track record of researchers in the Baric lab at UNC-Chapel Hill's Gillings School of Global Public Health. Lab work at Gillings accelerated the antiviral remdesivir to clinical trial. Today, remdesivir is in demand worldwide for its ability to speed recovery among hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

"This new mouse model will be available to other researchers and will allow the greater research community a system to understand how the virus causes diseases and to test various therapies and vaccines under development around the country and world," said Baric, a professor of epidemiology and microbiology and immunology at UNC-Chapel Hill.

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - Aug. 27, 2020 - Why are men at greater risk than women for more severe symptoms and worse outcomes from COVID-19 regardless of age?

In an effort to understand why this occurs, scientists at Wake Forest School of Medicine conducted a review of published preclinical data on sex-specific hormone activity, especially estrogen. The review is published in the September online issue of the journal Current Hypertension Reports.

"We know that coronavirus affects the heart and we know that estrogen is protective against cardiovascular disease in women, so the most likely explanation seemed to be hormonal differences between the sexes," said the lead author of the review, Leanne Groban, M.D., professor of anesthesiology at Wake Forest School of Medicine, part of Wake Forest Baptist Health.

Groban's researchers said the published literature indicated that the angiotensin-converting enzyme2 (ACE2), which is attached to cell membranes in the heart, arteries, kidneys and intestines, is the cellular receptor of the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19 infections, and helps bring the virus into the cells of those organ systems.

The review, they said, also pointed to estrogen's lowering the level of ACE2 in the heart, which may modulate the severity of COVID-19 in women. Conversely, higher levels of ACE2 in tissues could account for why symptoms are worse in men than women, Groban said.

"We hope that our review regarding the role of estrogenic hormones in ACE2 expression and regulation may explain the gender differences in COVID-19 infection and outcomes, and serve as a guide for current treatment and the development of new therapies," Groban said.

MISSOULA - With climate change heating the globe, drought more frequently impacts the reproduction and survival of many animal species.

New research from the University of Montana suggests tropical songbirds in both the Old and New Worlds reduce reproduction during severe droughts, and this - somewhat surprisingly - may actually increase their survival rates.

The work was published Aug. 24 in the journal Nature Climate Change by UM research scientist Thomas Martin and doctoral student James Mouton.

"We were extremely surprised to find that not only did reductions in breeding activity mitigate costs to survival, many long-lived species actually experienced higher survival rates during the drought year than during non-drought years," said Martin, assistant unit leader of UM's Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit. "In contrast, shorter-lived species that kept breeding during droughts faced strong reductions in survival."

Martin has spent his career venturing into remote jungles and living there for months to study the lives of birds. For this work, he and Mouton studied 38 different bird species in Venezuela and Malaysia over multiple years. There was one drought year for each field site, and the authors modeled future population results for the birds using three different climate change scenarios.

They knew behavioral responses to drought might determine the relative impacts on survival and reproduction. At the jungle study sites, researchers located and monitored nests of all species over many years to examine reproductive activity prior to and during the droughts. They also banded birds with colored material and used intensive re-sighting of these birds to obtain rigorous estimates of survival.

The researchers found drought reduced reproduction an average of 36% in the 20 Malaysian species and 52% in the 18 Venezuelan species.

"The negative impacts of drought on survival are well documented," Martin said. "We therefore also expected the droughts to reduce survival, but thought that the reduced breeding activity might limit the decrease in survival."

He said they found the population impacts of droughts were largely nullified by the reproductive behavioral shifts in longer-lived species, but shorter-lived species saw less of a benefit.

"Overall, our results have several major implications," Martin said. "First, we show that understanding behavioral responses to drought are critical for predicting population responses. Behavioral responses to environmental conditions can help buffer the most sensitive vital rates for a given species and mitigate the overall effect on fitness.

"Second, our results provide unique support to the idea that reproduction can negatively affect survival," he said. "This idea of a 'cost of reproduction' is central to life history theory but only rarely documented in wild populations."

Finally, long-lived species are argued to be most sensitive to climate change, but the UM research suggests that many longer-lived species actually may be more resilient to drought impacts of climate change than previously expected.

"Ultimately, we hope our study can help motivate future studies into behavioral and demographic responses to shifting patterns of rainfall in more species so we can better anticipate the different impacts of climate change among species," Martin said.

A stretchable, wearable gas sensor for environmental sensing has been developed and tested by researchers at Penn State, Northeastern University and five universities in China.

The sensor combines a newly developed laser-induced graphene foam material with a unique form of molybdenum disulfide and reduced-graphene oxide nanocomposites. The researchers were interested in seeing how different morphologies, or shapes, of the gas-sensitive nanocomposites affect the sensitivity of the material to detecting nitrogen dioxide molecules at very low concentration. To change the morphology, they packed a container with very finely ground salt crystals.

Nitrogen dioxide is a noxious gas emitted by vehicles that can irritate the lungs at low concentrations and lead to disease and death at high concentrations.

When the researchers added molybdenum disulfide and reduced graphene oxide precursors to the canister, the nanocomposites formed structures in the small spaces between the salt crystals. They tried this with a variety of different salt sizes and tested the sensitivity on conventional interdigitated electrodes, as well as the newly developed laser-induced graphene platform. When the salt was removed by dissolving in water, the researchers determined that the smallest salt crystals enabled the most sensitive sensor.

"We have done the testing to 1 part per million and lower concentrations, which could be 10 times better than conventional design," says Huanyu Larry Cheng, assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics and materials science and engineering. "This is a rather modest complexity compared to the best conventional technology which requires high-resolution lithography in a cleanroom."

Ning Yi and Han Li, doctoral students at Penn State and co-authors on the paper in Materials Today Physics, added, "The paper investigated the sensing performance of the reduced graphene oxide/moly disulfide composite. More importantly, we find a way to enhance the sensitivity and signal-to-noise ratio of the gas sensor by controlling the morphology of the composite material and the configuration of the sensor-testing platform. We think the stretchable nitrogen dioxide gas sensor may find applications in real-time environmental monitoring or the healthcare industry."

Maunakea, Hawaii - A cosmic dance between two merging galaxies, each one containing a supermassive black hole that's rapidly feeding on so much material it creates a phenomenon known as a quasar, is a rare find.

Astronomers have discovered several pairs of such merging galaxies, or luminous "dual" quasars, using three Maunakea Observatories in Hawaii - Subaru Telescope, W. M. Keck Observatory, and Gemini Observatory.

These dual quasars are so rare, a research team led by the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo estimates only 0.3% of all known quasars have two supermassive black holes that are on a collision course with each other.

The study is published in the August 26, 2020 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

"In spite of their rarity, they represent an important stage in the evolution of galaxies, where the central giant is awakened, gaining mass, and potentially impacting the growth of its host galaxy," said Shenli Tang, a graduate student at the University of Tokyo and co-author of the study.

Quasars are one of the most luminous, energetic objects known in the universe, powered by supermassive black holes that are millions to billions times more massive than our Sun. As material swirls around a black hole at the center of a galaxy, it is heated to high temperatures, releasing so much light that the quasar can outshine its host galaxy.

This makes a merging pair of galaxies with quasar activity hard to detect; it is difficult to separate the light from the two quasars because they are in such close proximity to each other. Also, observing a wide enough area of the sky to catch these rare events in sufficient numbers is a challenge.

To overcome these obstacles, the team took advantage of a sensitive wide survey of the sky using the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) camera on the Subaru Telescope.

"To make our job easier, we started by looking at the 34,476 known quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey with HSC imaging to identify those having two (or more) distinct centers," said lead author John Silverman of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe. "Honestly, we didn't start out looking for dual quasars. We were examining images of these luminous quasars to determine which type of galaxies they preferred to reside in when we started to see cases with two optical sources in their centers where we only expected one."

The team identified 421 promising cases. However, there was still the chance many of these were not bona-fide dual quasars but rather chance projections such as starlight from our own galaxy. Confirmation required detailed analysis of the light from the candidates to search for definitive signs of two distinct quasars.

Using Keck Observatory's Low Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (LRIS) and Gemini Observatory's Near-Infrared Integral Field Spectrometer, Silverman and his team identified three dual quasars, two of which were previously unknown. Each object in the pair showed the signature of gas moving at thousands of kilometers per second under the influence of a supermassive black hole.

The newly-discovered dual quasars demonstrate the promise of wide-area imaging combined with high-resolution spectroscopic observations to reveal these elusive objects, which are key to better understanding the growth of galaxies and their supermassive black holes.