Culture

One of the top four crops grown worldwide, soybean has been an integral part of Chinese agriculture for a long time, having been domesticated more than 6000 years ago. During the domestication process, certain traits are selected that make plants easier to cultivate and cook and other traits can be lost. Wild ancestors of domesticated crops can be important reservoirs of agronomic traits that have been lost. This is especially important when it comes to disease resistance.

A group of scientists in China began a study of wild soybeans to find genetic regions involved with interacting with beneficial microbes that have been lost in domesticated soybeans. This group cultivated soybean lines that included small regions of DNA from their wild ancestors and found that some lines responded differently to different strains of the beneficial bacteria known as Sinorhizobium fredii.

These different responses, the scientists found, were related to whether or not the bacterial strains had fully functional type 3 secretion systems (T3SS), which are used by bacteria to inject protein effectors into plant cells. They followed a dirigent protein named DRR1 and found that it interacted genetically with the bacterial T3SS system to alter the number of nodules a root system forms.

This new genetic approach will help scientists access some of the genetic diversity of soybean ancestors to improve biological nitrogen fixation, an important part of sustainable agriculture, in modern soybean cultivars. For more information, read "RNA Sequencing-Associated Study Identifies GmDRR1 as Positively Regulating the Establishment of Symbiosis in Soybean," published May 28, 2020 in the MPMI journal.

CORVALLIS, Ore. - A new Oregon State University study suggests that firefighters are more likely to be exposed to potentially harmful chemicals while on duty compared to off duty.

The on-duty firefighters in the Kansas City, Missouri, area experienced higher exposures of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, which are a family of chemicals that are known to have the potential to cause cancer. They were also exposed to 18 PAHs that have not been previously reported as firefighting exposures in earlier research.

The study, funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is published in the journal Environment International.

The results are important because previous studies have shown that firefighters have an increased risk of developing cancer and other damaging health effects, said study lead Kim Anderson, an environmental chemist and Extension specialist in OSU's College of Agricultural Sciences.

PAHs are a large group of chemical compounds that contain carbon and other elements. They form naturally after almost any type of combustion, both natural and human-created. In addition to burning wood, plants and tobacco, PAHs are also in fossil fuels.

"We don't have enough data to profile the source of the PAHs, but we know PAHs appear from combustion, and obviously combustion is their work," Anderson said. "They are also putting on a heavy load of protective gear that has PAHs, and they use cleaning products that have PAHs."

The firefighters in the study wore personal passive samplers in the shape of a military-style dog tag made of silicone on an elastic necklace. The tags are made of the same material as OSU's patented silicone wristbands that Anderson's lab has been using for several years to study chemical exposure in humans and cats.

This study demonstrates that the dog tags, which absorb chemicals from the air and skin, appear to be a reliable sampling technology necessary for assessing chemical exposures in firefighters, Anderson said.

"I'm quite confident those exposures existed but if you don't have something to help you find them you don't know for sure," Anderson said. "Certainly, we found that it's a lot more than what people had thought."

For their study, the researchers sampled individual firefighters' exposures at two departments - the Raytown Fire Protection District and Southern Platte Fire Protection District. They defined the Raytown department as a "high call volume" department, with a historic average of 12 fire calls per month, and the Southern Platte department as "low call volume," with less than two calls per month historically.

After completing a survey on demographics, occupational history, and suspected current exposures, the recruited firefighters wore a dog tag during the next 30 on- and off-shift days. During fire calls, tags were worn over clothing but underneath their gear. The firefighters were instructed to wear the dog tags continuously during all regular activities, including eating, showering and sleeping. Sampling occurred from November 2018 to April 2019.

When they analyzed the dog tags that were returned to Anderson's lab at Oregon State, 45 unique PAHs, of which 18 have not been previously reported as firefighting exposures, were detected. PAH exposures increased as the number of fires a participant responded to increased. PAH concentrations were not only higher when on-duty compared to off-duty, but also higher from the high call volume department compared to the low call volume department.

Each of the participating firefighters has been provided a report on their basic health information and chemical exposure, Anderson said. The participants also received a fact sheet about firefighters and cancer risk. The fact sheet includes some simple steps firefighters can take to reduce their exposure to harmful chemicals, such as always wearing their personal protective equipment, taking a shower after each fire and before ending their shift, and cleaning their gear after every fire.

Over the course of the coronavirus epidemic, COVID-19 outbreaks have hit communities across the United States. As clusters of infection shift over time, local officials are forced into a whack-a-mole approach to allocating resources and enacting public health policies. In a new study led by the University of Utah, geographers published the first effort to conduct daily surveillance of emerging COVID-19 hotspots for every county in the contiguous U.S. The researchers hope that timely, localized data will help inform future decisions.

Using innovative space-time statistics, the researchers detected geographic areas where the population had an elevated risk of contracting the virus. They ran the analysis every day using daily COVID-19 case counts from Jan. 22 to June 5, 2020 to establish regional clusters, defined as a collection of disease cases closely grouped in time and space. For the first month, the clusters were very large, especially in the Midwest. Starting on April 25, the clusters become smaller and more numerous, a trend that persists until the end of the study.

The article published online on June 27, 2020, in the journal Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology. The study builds on the team’s previous work by evaluating the characteristics of each cluster and how the characteristics change as the pandemic unfolds.

“We applied a clustering method that identifies areas of concern, and also tracks characteristics of the clusters—are they growing or shrinking, what is the population density like, is relative risk increasing or not?” said Alexander Hohl, lead author and assistant professor at the Department of Geography at the U. “We hope this can offer insights into the best strategies for controlling the spread of COVID-19, and to potentially predict future hotspots.”

The research team, including Michael Desjardins of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Spatial Science for Public Health Center and Eric Delmelle and Yu Lan of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, have created a web application of the clusters that the public can check daily at COVID19scan.net. The app is just a start, Hohl warned. State officials would need to do smaller scale analysis to identify specific locations for intervention.

“The app is meant to show where officials should prioritize efforts—it’s not telling you where you will or will not contract the virus,” Hohl said. “I see this more as an inspiration, rather than a concrete tool, to guide authorities to prevent or respond to outbreaks. It also gives the public a way to see what we’re doing.”

The researchers used daily case counts reported in the COVID-19 Data Repository from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, which lists cases at the county level in the contiguous U.S. They used the U.S. Census website’s 2018 five-year population estimates within each county.

To establish the clusters, they ran a space-time scan statistic that takes into account the observed number of cases and the underlying population within a given geographic area and timespan. Using SatScan, a widely used software, they identified areas of significantly elevated risk of COVID-19. Due to the large variation between counties, evaluating risk is tricky. Rural areas and small, single counties may not have large populations, therefore just a handful of cases would make risk go up significantly.

This study is the third of the research group’s iteration using the statistical method for detecting and monitoring COVID-19 clusters in the U.S. Back in May, the group published their first geographical study to use the tracking method, which was also of the first paper published by geographers analyzing COVID-19. In June, they published an update.

“May seems like an eternity ago because the pandemic is changing so rapidly,” Hohl said. “We continue to get feedback from the research community and are always trying to make the method better. This is just one method to zero in on communities that are at risk.”

A big limitation of the analysis is the data itself. COVID-19 reporting is different for each state. There’s no uniform way that information flows from the labs that confirm the diagnoses, to the state health agencies to the COVID-19 Data Repository from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, where the study gets its data. Also, the testing efforts are quite different between states, and the team is working to adjust the number of observed cases to reflect a state’s efforts. Hohl is also working with other U researchers to look at the relationship between social media and COVID-19 to predict the future trajectory of outbreaks.

“We’ve been working on this since COVID-19 first started and the field is moving incredibly fast,” said Hohl. “It’s so important to get the word out and react to what else is being published so we can take the next step in the project.”

The statistics are sobering. More than 14 million American adults suffer from some form of alcohol use disorder (AUD), a chronic inability to stop or control alcohol use despite the negative consequences. This is according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, a part of the National Institutes of Health.

The causes of AUD are complex and can include a mix of genetic, environmental, and social factors, including a family history of alcoholism. This familial effect, however, may be more complicated than first assumed.

New research published in the journal Psychological Science has uncovered a previously unrecognized family connection to AUD: the drinking habits of a person's in-laws. This study suggests that marriage to a spouse who as a child was exposed to parental alcohol misuse increases that person's likelihood of developing AUD, even if the spouse does not have a drinking disorder.

"Our goal here was to examine whether a spouse's genetic makeup influences risk for AUD," said Jessica Salvatore, an assistant professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, and lead author on the paper. "In a somewhat surprising twist, we found that it wasn't the spouse's genetic makeup that influenced AUD risk. Rather, it was whether the spouse was raised by an AUD-affected parent."

The researchers analyzed marital information on more than 300,000 couples in Swedish national population registries, finding that marriage to a spouse with a predisposition toward alcohol use disorder increased risk for developing AUD. This increased risk was not explained by socioeconomic status, the spouse's AUD status, nor contact with the spouse's parents. Instead, the researchers found that, rather than genetics, this increased risk reflected the psychological consequences of the spouse having grown up with an AUD-affected parent.

"Growing up with an AUD-affected parent might teach people to act in ways that reinforce a spouse's drinking problem," said Salvatore. "For example, taking care of a spouse when they have a hangover."

The study's findings underscore the pernicious and long-lasting impact of growing up with a parent with AUD, extending even to the spouses of their adult children.

"It demonstrates the long reach that parental alcohol problems have on the next generation," Salvatore said. "It's not just the offspring of affected parents who are at risk, it's the people those offspring end up marrying, too."

The findings are consistent with evidence from other research labs, she said, which suggests that those who grow up with a parent with an alcohol use disorder may be at particularly high risk of using alcohol as a "tool" to improve their marital interactions.

"These kinds of processes may inadvertently lead a spouse down the path of alcohol misuse," she said. "To be clear, my guess is that these processes are out of people's conscious control. No one wants to 'give' their spouse an alcohol problem."

The study's findings are an important contribution to a burgeoning area of research on social genetic effects, or the effects of a social partner's genetic makeup, Salvatore said. Conclusions from previous studies of social genetic effects were limited by the fact that people's genotypes were correlated with their rearing environments. In other words, in prior studies it was difficult to say whether effects were attributable to the partner's genes versus how they were raised because their parents provided both their genes and their home lives.

"What we were able to do in our study was tease apart the effects of the social partner (spouse's) genes and the rearing environment," she said. "And when we did that, what we found surprised us: It's something about the spouse being raised by a parent with a drinking problem, rather than the spouse's genetic makeup, that influences a person's risk for developing an alcohol problem."

The study's findings could prove valuable when it comes to treating couples struggling with alcohol. The findings reinforce the idea that interventions for substance-use disorders should be administered at the level of a couple or the family (for those who have a partner) rather than at the individual level, Salvatore said.

This study is part of Salvatore's larger body of research that seeks to understand "how the people we love shape the way we drink."

"In the best-case scenario, spouses can be one of our first defenses against poor health--they bug us to schedule our annual exams, and they're among the first to notice if we're feeling blue or tipping too many drinks back. But spouses can also be a liability for poor health," she said. "The results from this study underscore how a spouse's experiences in his/her family of origin can be a risk factor for the development of alcohol problems."

Variations in a gene called CD38, which is involved in attachment behaviour in non-human animals, may be associated with human romantic relationship dynamics in daily life, according to a study published in Scientific Reports.

Jennifer Bartz, Gentina Sadikaj, and colleagues examined data on 111 heterosexual couples (222 individuals) who reported their social behaviour - which included smiling and laughing with others, making sarcastic comments, asking others to do something or giving in - their perception of their partner's behavior, and their feelings during their interactions with one another over a 20-day period. Out of the 222 individuals 118 (65 women and 53 men) also provided genetic information.

The authors found that a variation of the CD38 gene - CD38.rs3796863 - was associated with an individual's communal behavior, such as the expression of affection, in daily interactions with their romantic partner. CD38.rs3796863 has two variants (alleles): A and C. The gene can therefore be present as three combinations, or genotypes: AA, CC and AC. The authors found that individuals with the CC genotype reported higher communal behavior than individuals with AA or AC genotypes. Those with the CC genotype were also more likely to see their partner as behaving communally and they experienced fewer negative feelings, such as worry, frustration or anger than AA or AC genotypes. Those with the CC genotype also reported higher levels of relationship adjustment, including perceptions of relationship quality and support.

The authors also observed a pattern in couples: participants' own behavior, their perception of their partner's behavior and their experience of negative feelings and relationship adjustment were equally related to their partner's genotype as to their own genotype.

The findings suggest that variations in CD38 may play a key role in behaviours and perceptions that support bonding in humans.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 20, 2020 -- The construction industry is currently facing two major challenges: the demand for sustainable infrastructure and the need to repair deteriorating buildings, bridges and roads. While concrete is the material of choice for many construction projects, it has a large carbon footprint, resulting in high waste and energy expenditure. Today, researchers report progress toward a sustainable building material made from local soil, using a 3D printer to create a load-bearing structure.

The researchers will present their results today at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Fall 2020 Virtual Meeting & Expo. ACS is holding the meeting through Thursday. It features more than 6,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics.

"The environmental impact of the construction industry is an issue of growing concern," says Sarbajit Banerjee, Ph.D., the project's principal investigator. "Some researchers have turned to additive manufacturing, or building structures layer by layer, which is often done with a 3D printer. That advance has begun to transform this sector in terms of reducing waste, but the materials used in the process need to be sustainable as well."

For example, construction projects using extruded layers of concrete have highlighted the potential of additive manufacturing for building structures quickly and cheaply. However, concrete manufacturing is responsible for approximately 7% of carbon dioxide emissions according to the International Energy Agency, and cannot be recycled.

"Historically, humans used to build with locally sourced materials, such as adobe, but the move to concrete has raised many environmental issues," says Aayushi Bajpayee, a graduate student in Banerjee's lab at Texas A&M University. She is presenting the work at the meeting. "Our thought was to turn the clock back and find a way to adapt materials from our own backyards as a potential replacement for concrete."

An advantage to using local soil in construction is that the materials would not need to be manufactured and transported to the building site, reducing both costs and environmental damage. Banerjee and Bajpayee also say that additive manufacturing with soil could one day be used beyond Earth, to create settlements on the moon or even Mars.

Soil is typically classified by the layers of materials it comprises, beginning with the top organic layer where plants grow and ending at the hard bedrock of the earth's crust. Beneath the initial organic layer is clay, which gives soil its plastic, moldable character that the researchers capitalized on in their project.

The researchers began by collecting soil samples from a colleague's backyard and tailoring the material with a new environmentally friendly additive so that it would bind together and be easily extruded through the 3D printer. Because soils vary greatly by location, their aim was to have a chemistry "toolkit" that could transform any type of soil into printable building material. From there Bajpayee built small-scale test structures, cubes measuring two inches on each side, to see how the material performed when extruded into stacked layers.

The next step was to ensure that the mixture is load bearing, meaning that it will stand up to the weight of the layers but also other materials used in construction such as rebar and insulation. To help with this, the researchers strengthened the clay mixture by "zippering" the microscopic layers on its surface to prevent it from absorbing water and expanding, which would compromise the printed structure. With this method, the researchers showed that the material could hold twice as much weight as the unmodified clay mixture.

Next, the team plans to improve the soil's load-bearing capabilities in order to scale up their test structures and get as close to a replacement for concrete as possible. In addition, they are gathering data to see whether these 3D printed structures are as environmentally friendly as they envision, especially in terms of carbon footprint and recycling potential. Once they have a better picture of the chemistry, functionality and feasibility of building with local soils, they plan to further explore how this technology can be used beyond our own planet.

When paleontologists digging in a quarry in southwestern China uncovered the nearly complete skeleton of a giant, dolphin-like marine reptile known as an ichthyosaur, they didn't expect to find another fossil in its stomach. This second skeleton belonged to a four-meter-long, lizard-like aquatic reptile known as a thalattosaur and is one of the longest fossils ever found in the stomach of a prehistoric marine reptile. While the researchers can't say for sure whether the thalattosaur was scavenged or preyed upon, their work could be the oldest direct evidence that Triassic marine reptiles like ichthyosaurs--previously thought to be cephalopod feeders--were apex megapredators. The findings appear August 20th in the journal iScience.

"If you look across all the similar marine reptiles that lived in the age of dinosaurs, we've actually never found something articulated like this in the stomach," says co-author Ryosuke Motani, a professor of paleobiology at the University of California, Davis. "Our ichthyosaur's stomach contents weren't etched by stomach acid, so it must have died quite soon after ingesting this food item. At first, we just didn't believe it, but after spending several years visiting the dig site and looking at the same specimens, we finally were able to swallow what we were seeing."

Because stomach contents are rarely found in marine fossils, researchers rely on tooth and jaw shapes to learn what prehistoric species may have eaten. While prehistoric apex predators are typically thought to have large teeth with sharp cutting edges, some modern predatory species like crocodiles use blunt teeth to consume large prey items with grasping force instead of cutting. Ichthyosaurs share these blunter teeth, but with no direct evidence of large prey consumption in these prehistoric marine reptiles, scientists believed that they fed on small prey like cephalopods.

However, the discovery of the giant thalattosaur in the stomach of the ichthyosaur found by Motani, Da-Yong Jiang, a paleontologist at Peking University in China, and their team suggests that this was not the case. "Now, we can seriously consider that they were eating big animals, even when they had grasping teeth," says Motani. "It's been suggested before that maybe a cutting edge was not crucial, and our discovery really supports that. It's pretty clear that this animal could process this large food item using blunt teeth."

While the researchers now know that the ichthyosaur could eat animals as large as the thalattosaur, they don't know if it killed this individual, or simply scavenged it. "Nobody was there filming it," says Motani. However, there is reason to believe this was not a case of scavenging: modern marine decomposition studies suggest that if left to decay, the thalattosaur's limbs would disintegrate and detach before the tail. Instead, the researchers found the opposite in these fossils. The thalattosaur's limbs were at least partially attached to its body in the stomach, while a disconnected tail was found many yards away, leading the researchers to believe it was ripped off and left behind by a predator like the ichthyosaur.

Whether or not the ichthyosaur killed its last meal, the fossil provides the oldest direct evidence that these giant marine reptiles consumed animals larger than humans. "We now have a really solid articulated fossil in the stomach of a marine reptile for the first time," Motani says. "Before, we guessed that they must have eaten these big things, but now, we can say for sure that they did eat large animals. This also suggests that megapredation was probably more common than we previously thought."

The team is still excavating the site where the pair of fossils were found, which has now been turned into a museum. "We've been digging in that particular quarry for more than ten years now, and still, new things are coming out," says Motani. "At this point, it's beyond our initial expectations, and we'll just have to see what we'll discover next."

Some 240 million years ago, a dolphin-like ichthyosaur ripped to pieces and swallowed another marine reptile only a little smaller than itself. Then it almost immediately died and was fossilized, preserving the first evidence of megapredation, or a large animal preying on another large animal. The fossil, discovered in 2010 in southwestern China, is described in a paper published Aug. 20 in the journal iScience.

The ichthyosaurs were a group of marine reptiles that appeared in the oceans after the Permian mass extinction, about 250 million years ago. They had fish-like bodies similar to modern tuna, but breathed air like dolphins and whales. Like modern orca or great white sharks, they may have been apex predators of their ecosystems, but until recently there has been little direct evidence of this.

When a specimen of the ichthyosaur Guizhouichthyosaurus was discovered in Guizhou province, China in 2010, researchers noticed a large bulge of other bones within the animal's abdomen. On examination, they identified the smaller bones as belonging to another marine reptile, Xinpusaurus xingyiensis, which belonged to a group called thalattosaurs. Xinpusaurus was more lizard-like in appearance than an ichthyosaur, with four paddling limbs.

"We have never found articulated remains of a large reptile in the stomach of gigantic predators from the age of dinosaurs, such as marine reptiles and dinosaurs," said Ryosuke Motani, professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Davis, and coauthor on the paper. "We always guessed from tooth shape and jaw design that these predators must have fed on large prey but now we have direct evidence that they did."

The Guizhouichthyosaurus was almost five meters (15 feet) long, while the researchers calculate its prey was about four meters (12 feet) long, although thalattosaurs had skinnier bodies than ichythyosaurs. The predator's last meal appears to be the middle section of the thalattosaur, from its front to back limbs. Interestingly, a fossil of what appears to be the tail section of the animal was found nearby.

Predators that feed on large animals are often assumed to have large teeth adapted for slicing up prey. Guizhouichthyosaurus had relatively small, peg-like teeth, which were thought to be adapted for grasping soft prey such as the squid-like animals abundant in the oceans at the time. However, it's clear that you don't need slicing teeth to be a megapredator, Motani said. Guizhouichthyosaurus probably used its teeth to grip the prey, perhaps breaking the spine with the force of its bite, then ripped or tore the prey apart. Modern apex predators such as orca, leopard seals and crocodiles use a similar strategy.

Scientists studying leaves from a 23-million-year-old forest have for the first time linked high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide with increased plant growth, and the hot climate off the time. The finding adds to the understanding of how rising CO2 heats the earth, and how the dynamics of plant life could shift within decades, when CO2 levels may closely mirror those of the distant past.

Scientists retrieved the leaves from a unique onetime New Zealand lake bed that holds the remains of plants, algae, spiders, beetle, flies, fungi and other living things from a warm period known as the early Miocene. Scientists have long postulated that CO2 was high then, and some plants could harvest it more efficiently for photosynthesis. This is the first study to show that those things actually happened in tandem. The findings were published this week in the journal Climate of the Past.

"The amazing thing is that these leaves are basically mummified, so we have their original chemical compositions, and can see all their fine features under a microscope," said lead author Tammo Reichgelt, an adjunct scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and assistant professor of geosciences at the University of Connecticut. "Evidence has been building that CO2 was high then, but there have been paradoxes."

The so-called "carbon fertilization effect" has vast implications. Lab and field experiments have shown that when CO2 levels rise, many plants increase their rate of photosynthesis, because they can more efficiently remove carbon from the air, and conserve water while doing so. Indeed, a 2016 study based on NASA satellite data shows a "global greening" effect mainly due to rising levels of manmade CO2 over recent decades; a quarter to a half of the planet's vegetated lands have seen increases in leaf volume on trees and plants since about 1980. The effect is expected to continue as CO2 levels rise.

This might seem like good news, but the reality is more complex. Increased CO2 absorption will not come close to compensating for what humans are pouring into the air. Not all plants can take advantage, and among those who do, the results can vary depending on temperature and availability of water or nutrients. And, there is evidence that when some major crops photosynthesize more rapidly, they absorb relatively less calcium, iron, zinc and other minerals vital for human nutrition. Because much of today's plant life evolved in a temperate, low-CO2 world, some natural and agricultural ecosystems could be upended by higher CO2 levels, along with the rising temperatures and shifts in precipitation they bring. "How it plays out is anyone's guess," said Reichgelt. "It's another layer of stress for plants. It might be great for some, and horrible for others."

The deposit is located in a small, long-extinct volcanic crater now located on a farm near the southern New Zealand city of Dunedin. The crater, about a kilometer across, once held an isolated lake where successive layers of sediments built up from the surrounding environment. The feature was recognized only within about the last 15 years; scientists dubbed it Foulden Maar. Recognizing it as a scientific gold mine, they have been studying it ever since. Some have also been fighting an actual mining company that wants to strip the deposit for livestock feed.

In the new study, the researchers took samples from a 2009 drill core that penetrated 100 meters to near the bottom of the now-dry lake bed. Larded in between whitish annual layers of silica-rich algae that bloomed each spring for 120,000 years are alternating blackish layers of organic matter that fell in during other seasons. These include countless leaves from a subtropical evergreen forest. They are preserved so perfectly that scientists can see microscopic veins and stomata, the pores by which leaves take in air and concurrently release water during photosynthesis. Unlike most fossils, the leaves also retain their original chemical compositions. It is the only such known deposit in the Southern Hemisphere, and far better preserved than the few similar ones known from the north.

The Miocene has long been a source of confusion for paleoclimate researchers. Average global temperatures are thought to have been 3 to 7 degrees C hotter than today, and ice largely disappeared at the poles. Yet many proxies, mainly derived from marine organisms, have suggested CO2 levels were only about 300 parts per million-similar to those of preindustrial human times, and not enough to account for such warming. With evidence of high CO2 elusive, scientists have speculated that previous proxy measurements must be off.

Based on the new study and a related previous one also at Foulden Maar, the researchers were able to get at this conundrum. They analyzed the carbon isotopes within leaves from a half-dozen tree species found at various levels in the deposit. This helped them zero in on the carbon content of the atmosphere at the time. They also analyzed the geometry of the leaves' stomata and other anatomical features, and compared these with modern leaves. By combining all the data into a model, they found that atmospheric CO2 was not 300ppm, but about 450-a good match for the temperature data. Second, they showed that the trees were super-efficient at sucking in carbon through the stomata, without leaking much water through the same route-a factor that all plants must account for. This allowed them to grow in marginal areas that otherwise would have been too dry for forests. The researchers say this higher efficiency was very likely mirrored in forests across the northern temperate latitudes, with their far greater landmasses.

Human emissions have now pushed CO2 levels to about 415 parts per million, and they will almost certainly reach 450 by about 2040-identical to those experienced by the Foulden Maar forest. Estimates of the resulting temperature increases over decades and centuries vary, but the new study suggests that most are in the ballpark.

"It all fits together, it all makes sense," said study coauthor William D'Andrea, a paleoclimate scientist at Lamont-Doherty. In addition to showing how plants might react directly to CO2, "this should give us more confidence about how temperatures will change with CO2 levels," he said.

Study coauthor Daphne Lee, a paleontologist at New Zealand's University of Otago, led the charge to study Foulden Maar's rich ecosystem after it came to light. More recently, she became an unexpected defender of the maar, when a company with owners in Malaysia and the United Kingdom announced plans to strip-mine the deposit for use as a feed additive for for pigs, ducks and other intensively farmed animals. With many more discoveries probably to be made, scientists were horrified, and allied themselves with locals who feared noise and dust. The Dunedin city council is now looking into buying the land to protect it.

Analysis of three mummified animals - a cat, a bird and a snake - from Ancient Egypt using advanced 3D X-ray imaging is described in a paper published in Scientific Reports. The technique provides insights into the conditions in which the animals were kept, their complex mummification process and their possible causes of death, without causing damage to the specimens.

Richard Johnston and colleagues used non-invasive X-ray microCT imaging to reveal the skull of the cat to be around half the size of the external mummified wrappings. Its morphology suggests that the remains likely belong to an Egyptian domestic cat. Analysis of images of the teeth and skeleton indicate that the cat was less than five months old and may have purposefully had its neck broken at the time of death or during the mummification process to keep the head in an upright position.

Measurements taken using 3D scans of the mummified bird of prey suggest that the remains most closely resemble the Eurasian kestrel and that the animal did not appear to have died from injuries to the neck. Imaging of the tightly coiled snake suggests that the remains belong to a juvenile cobra, which may have been killed by spinal fracture, consistent with tail capture and whipping methods commonly used to kill snakes. The high-resolution imaging enabled the authors to identify structures found within the mouth of the mummified snake as hardened resin. The precise placement at the opening of the glottis possibly provides evidence for complex ritualistic behaviour, similar to the Opening of the Mouth procedure.

An improved understanding of animal mummification through scientific imaging may inform future conservation work and shed light on past human-animal relationships.

Three mummified animals from ancient Egypt have been digitally unwrapped and dissected by researchers, using high-resolution 3D scans that give unprecedented detail about the animals' lives - and deaths - over 2000 years ago.

The three animals - a snake, a bird and a cat - are from the collection held by the Egypt Centre at Swansea University. Previous investigations had identified which animals they were, but very little else was known about what lay inside the mummies.

Now, thanks to X-ray micro CT scanning, which generates 3D images with a resolution 100 times greater than a medical CT scan, the animals' remains can be analysed in extraordinary detail, right down to their smallest bones and teeth.

The team, led by Professor Richard Johnston of Swansea University, included experts from the Egypt Centre and from Cardiff and Leicester universities.

The ancient Egyptians mummified animals as well as humans, including cats, ibis, hawks, snakes, crocodiles and dogs. Sometimes they were buried with their owner or as a food supply for the afterlife.

But the most common animal mummies were votive offerings, bought by visitors to temples to offer to the gods, to act as a means of communication with them. Animals were bred or captured by keepers and then killed and embalmed by temple priests. It is believed that as many as 70 million animal mummies were created in this way.

Although other methods of scanning ancient artefacts without damaging them are available, they have limitations. Standard X-rays only give 2-dimensional images. Medical CT scans give 3D images, but the resolution is low.

Micro CT, in contrast, gives researchers high resolution 3D images. Used extensively within materials science to image internal structures on the micro-scale, the method involves building a 3D volume (or 'tomogram') from many individual projections or radiographs. The 3D shape can then be 3D printed or placed into virtual reality, allowing further analysis.

The team, using micro CT equipment at the Advanced Imaging of Materials (AIM) facility, Swansea University College of Engineering, found:

The cat was a kitten of less than 5 months, according to evidence of unerupted teeth hidden within the jaw bone.

Separation of vertebrae indicate that it had possibly been strangled

The bird most closely resembles a Eurasian kestrel; micro CT scanning enables virtual bone measurement, making accurate species identification possible

The snake was identified as a mummified juvenile Egyptian Cobra (Naja haje).

Evidence of kidney damage showed it was probably deprived of water during its life, developing a form of gout.

Analysis of bone fractures shows it was ultimately killed by a whipping action, prior to possibly undergoing an 'opening of the mouth' procedure during mummification; if true this demonstrates the first evidence for complex ritualistic behaviour applied to a snake.

Professor Richard Johnston of Swansea University College of Engineering, who led the research, said:

"Using micro CT we can effectively carry out a post-mortem on these animals, more than 2000 years after they died in ancient Egypt.

With a resolution up to 100 times higher than a medical CT scan, we were able to piece together new evidence of how they lived and died, revealing the conditions they were kept in, and possible causes of death.

These are the very latest scientific imaging techniques. Our work shows how the hi-tech tools of today can shed new light on the distant past."

Dr Carolyn Graves-Brown from the Egypt Centre at Swansea University said:

"This collaboration between engineers, archaeologists, biologists, and Egyptologists shows the value of researchers from different subjects working together.

Our findings have uncovered new insights into animal mummification, religion and human-animal relationships in ancient Egypt."

What The Study Did: An estimate of the number of African American students who would have graduated from historically Black medical schools that were closed during the period surrounding the 1910 Flexner report was the main outcome of this study.

Authors: Kendall M. Campbell, M.D., of East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, is the corresponding author.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.15220)

Editor's Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

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COVID-19 is now the third leading cause of death in the United States. The U.S. accounts for about 25 percent of COVID-19 cases (4.4 million) and deaths (170,000) in the world today while comprising less than 5 percent of the population.

In a commentary published ahead of print in The American Journal of Medicine, researchers from Florida Atlantic University's Schmidt College of Medicine and a collaborator, compare responses to the pandemic from two democratic republics: South Korea and the U.S., demonstrating stark differences in public health strategies, which have led to alarming differences in cases and deaths from COVID-19. After adjusting for the 6.5 fold differences in populations, the U.S. has suffered 47 times more cases and 79 times more deaths than South Korea.

At the beginning of the pandemic, South Korea had more COVID-19 cases than anywhere else in the world outside of China. Today, they have approximately 14,269 cases and 300 deaths. Ironically, the public health methods they employed closely followed those developed and introduced by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which formerly served as a scientific beacon for such activities worldwide. South Korea instituted effective containment and mitigation strategies, which they maintained in place until new cases and deaths were practically nonexistent.

In contrast to South Korea, the U.S. government mounted a delayed and fragmented response, which they maintained only until a "flattening of the curve," according to the researchers. Further, containment and mitigation strategies were piecemeal and resulted from individual responses of individual states. Ironically, following the 2013 prediction of an impending pandemic by the Gates Foundation, it was the U.S. government that created a Pandemic Emergency Response Task Force, placing the U.S. as No. 1 worldwide by the World Health Organization (WHO) in their ability to contain and mitigate any future pandemics. This task force was disbanded in 2017, and today the U.S. in the No. 1 spot worldwide in COVID-19 cases and deaths.

In addition, the U.S. government has removed the CDC from its decades' long functions of receiving and providing analyses of surveillance data on COVID-19. The authors note that this continues a longstanding trend of politicization of the CDC, which is producing continuing harm to its longstanding reputation of worldwide respect and admiration.

"The anticipated number of deaths from COVID-19 may become comparable to the most lethal epidemic of influenza in U.S. history, which occurred from 1918 to 1919 when approximately 675,000 Americans died," said Charles H. Hennekens, M.D., Dr.PH, senior author and the first Sir Richard Doll Professor and senior academic advisor in FAU's Schmidt College of Medicine. "In stark contrast to both the current U.S. epidemic of COVID-19 and the Spanish Flu of 1918-19, the 2018-19 flu season affected about 42.9 million Americans, of which 647,000 were hospitalized and about 61,200 died."

The authors raise the specter that, if the current numbers of cases and deaths and their trajectories in the U.S. continue, a coordinated national shutdown of sufficient duration, which was not achieved previously, may become necessary. For example, the continued exponential growth of the virus in the U.S. is reflected by the markedly decreasing number of days to achieve each million case from 97 to 44 to 28 to 15 days.

The U.S. remains the epicenter of the pandemic worldwide, due, at least in part, to the massive surge in cases in Florida, California, Arizona, and Texas. Moreover, only California and Texas have issued statewide mask mandates. The authors further state that the failure to mitigate COVID-19 in the U.S. will paralyze the healthcare delivery system as well decrease the ability to provide lifesaving measures for patients with COVID-19 or other serious conditions. They further state that it is more imperative than ever that the U.S. abandon "pandemic politics" and focus solely on effective public health strategies.

Measures such as those employed by South Korea, especially widespread, free and rapid, point-of-care testing, meticulous tracing and quarantine of all contacts as well as masking, social distancing, crowd avoidance, and frequent hand and face washing, are likely to be at least as effective as any safe vaccine that may be developed and approved for widespread use by the general public in the U.S. and worldwide.

"In the U.S., there is an urgent need for a unified national approach for the implementation of effective public health mitigation strategies including social distancing, masking, avoidance of crowds, as well as frequent hand and face washing," said Joshua Solano, M.D., first author and an assistant professor of integrated medical science and director of quality improvement and patient safety in FAU's Schmidt College of Medicine.

South Korea is not alone in serving as a model for the world for COVID-19 as similar successes have been achieved in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Germany, Iceland, the United Arab Emirates, Greece and Argentina.

Materials scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have invented a new type of surgical glue that can help join blood vessels and close wounds faster and may also serve as a platform to deliver pain relief drugs.

In a paper published in Elsevier's Biomaterials in July jointly with clinicians from Singapore General Hospital (SGH), the NTU researchers showed that their glue can bond soft tissues including muscle and blood vessels, even when their surfaces are wet.

Named CaproGlu, it is activated by a low dose of ultraviolet (UV) light that cures it in seconds, turning it from a liquid glue into a solid but flexible biorubber - a biocompatible material that can be resorbed by the tissue after a few weeks.

The team showed in animal experiments that blood vessels can be rejoined with just four stitches and a mesh wrapper dipped in CaproGlu, compared to the usual eight stitches that are required for a reliable and unobstructed join. The authors estimate that this will reduce surgery time by 25 per cent, as surgeons spend less time and effort stitching up blood vessels and tissues.

As demonstrated in animal experiments, CaproGlu can also be used to deliver local anaesthetics or pain relief medication to tissues in the body, which may be useful both during and after an operation and would reduce the need for pain relief medication to be administered afterwards.

Unlike current bio-adhesives - which need two chemicals to be mixed prior to use - the CaproGlu is a one-pot liquid gel solution that comes ready-to-use.

Lead authors of the paper, Associate Professor Terry W.J. Steele and Senior Research Fellow Dr Ivan Djordjevic, emphasised that most surgical adhesives available on the market do not work in water or wet environments as found in the human body.

"To make our light-activated glue work on wet tissues, we engineered our glue to first remove water from the surface and thus allow adhesion to the dehydrated surfaces," said Assoc Prof Steele.

"This unique advantage of being able to bond with high strength in a wet environment, as well as being biocompatible, is what makes CaproGlu so suitable to be used in surgery and medical applications."

The adhesion strength of CaproGlu was compared to other commercial bioadhesives on the market and was found to be three to seven times stronger, and is on a par with the shear strength of collagen and muscle tissue found in the human body.

Benefits of CaproGlu

Invented by Assoc Prof Steele and Dr Djordjevic from the NTU School of Materials Science and Engineering, CaproGlu combines two ingredients into a single-component formulation that does not require additives.

The first is polycaprolactone - a biodegradable polymer which has been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration for specific applications used in the human body - and the second: diazirine, a light-sensitive molecule that can form strong bonds when activated.

In their research paper which was published in the scientific journal Biomaterials, the scientists demonstrated how CaproGlu could be used as part of a new surgical method, where sutures are used in combination with a glue. Instead of the conventional eight stitches needed to join the two ends of a blood vessel in a rabbit, they used four stitches and wrapped the vessel ends with a biodegradable mesh dipped in CaproGlu and cured with a small dose of UV light which crosslinked the amino acids on the tissue's surface

As a result, the bleeding from the artery immediately after the procedure was comparable to what is observed from conventional stitches. When harvested seven days later, the artery was shown to have completely healed.

In a separate experiment, the surgeons inserted CaproGlu loaded with anaesthetics within rats' calves and cured them with UV light before the wound was closed with conventional stitches.

The scientists compared the activity of these rats with two other controls: rats who had received anaesthetics alone and rats who had received CaproGlu without anaesthetics. They found no discernible impediment of movement for the rats which had anaesthetics and CaproGlu loaded with anaesthetics, suggesting that CaproGlu is successful in delivering local anaesthetics over time and could be a useful way to extend local anaesthesia beyond its current limits and also to act as a drug delivery platform for medication such as anticoagulants to prevent excessive blood clotting.

The team also observed that there were no discernible side effects to the animals which had CaproGlu implanted in their skin, which suggested that it is safe and biocompatible as expected. Since the bioadhesive dissolves and resorbs within weeks, no follow up clinical visits would be required for its removal.

Stable shelf life after sterilisation

A big challenge for bioadhesives on the market today is to cope with the standard method by which surgical grade equipment and disposables are sterilised using gamma irradiation.

The gamma sterilisation process destroys proteins and activates bonding in both acrylate and epoxy adhesives.

Unlike other surgical adhesives available on the market, CaproGlu's protein-free formulation exploits new crosslinking chemistry unaffected by gamma sterilisation.

The light-activated bonding mechanism forms chain links to amino acids at the nanoscale level, even after several months of storage and gamma sterilisation, thus making CaproGlu's production and commercialisation potentially less costly than those based on proteins and acrylates.

Their biorubber glue innovation took the research team five years to develop and is the subject of a provisional patent filed through NTUitive, the university's innovation and enterprise company.

Funding and support for the project include the NTU-Surgery Academic Clinical Programme Strategic Joint Research Fund, Singapore General Hospital Research Grant, NTU-Northwestern Institute for Nanomedicine Grant, NTUitive Proof of Concept (Gap) Fund, A*Star industry Alignment Fund (Pre-Positioning) and the Ministry of Education Tier 1 & 2 research fund.

Moving forward, the joint team will be looking to conduct further animal experiments and to assess the performance of CaproGlu in other applications, such as on bone and other organic surfaces.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins Medicine, experimenting with a small number of human cell samples, report that the "hook" of cells used by SARS-CoV-2 to latch onto and infect cells is up to 700 times more prevalent in the olfactory supporting cells lining the inside of the upper part of the nose than in the lining cells of the rest of the nose and windpipe that leads to the lungs. These supporting cells are necessary for the function/development of odor-sensing cells.

The findings, from a preliminary study of cells lining both the nose and trachea, could advance the search for the best target for topical or local antiviral drugs to treat COVID-19, and offers further clues into why people with the virus sometimes lose their sense of smell.

A summary of the findings appears in a letter published Aug. 19 in the European Respiratory Journal.

"Loss of the sense of smell is associated with COVID-19, generally in the absence of other nasal symptoms, and our research may advance the search for a definitive reason for how and why that happens, and where we might best direct some treatments," says Andrew Lane, M.D., professor of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery, and director of the Division of Rhinology and Skull Base Surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Lane's medical practice focuses on people with nasal and sinus problems, who oftentimes, he says, lose their sense of smell -- a condition called anosmia.

Scientists have known that SARS-CoV-2 latches on to a biological hook on the surface of many types of human cells, called an angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 receptor (ACE2). The receptor reels in essential molecules.

In a bid to explore the ACE2 link to COVID-19 in more detail, Lane, Mengfei Chen, Ph.D., a research associate in Lane's lab at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and others on his team took a close look at ACE2 levels in nasal tissue specimens from 19 adult men and women with chronic rhinosinusitis (inflammation of nasal tissue) and in tissues from a control group of four people who had nasal surgeries for issues other than sinusitis.

The researchers also studied tissue samples of the trachea from seven people who underwent surgery for abnormal narrowing of the trachea.

Cells from children were not examined for this study, in part because they tend to have low ACE2 levels in the cells lining the nose, which may contribute to generally less severe illness among children infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. None of the study participants had been diagnosed with COVID-19.

The scientists used a high-resolution imaging technique called confocal microscopy to produce very sharp images of cells lining the nasal and tracheal airways. They used fluorescent stains to identify ACE2 receptors.

They found high levels of ACE2 among nasal cells that give structural support called sustentacular cells. These cells are located in an area called the olfactory neuroepithelium, where odor-sensing neurons are found. The researchers say this area of the nose may be particularly vulnerable to infection and might be the only infected site even when there are no symptoms. Because of this, they urge people to wear masks and wear them correctly.

For the study, depending on the biopsy sample, cells in the olfactory neuroepithelium had a 200-fold to 700-fold increase in ACE 2 proteins compared with other samples from the nose and trachea. Because the cells with high levels of ACE2 are associated with odor sensing, the researchers suggest that infection of these cells may be the reason some people with COVID-19 experience loss of smell.

Two of seven trachea specimens had low levels of ACE2 receptors, and the amount of those receptors was similar between study participants with and without chronic rhinosinusitus.

Because the cells lining the nose may prove to be a key entry point for SARS-CoV-2, Lane says there may be ways to target those particular cells with topical antiviral drugs or other therapies directly to that area.

The researchers plan to advance this research by investigating COVID-19-infected tissue from the noses of humans to confirm if the SARS-CoV-2 virus does indeed target support cells in the nose.