Culture

"This particular work not only gives information about stimulating aquathermolysis in the process of steam injection, but also is a theoretical insight into chemical reactions taking places in oil reservoirs under high temperatures," says co-author Yuan Chengdong, Senior Research Associate of the Rheological and Thermochemical Research Lab.

So far, the KFU team has proven copper compounds are the most effective in producing catalysts for heavy oil extraction.

"To that end, we took a model component of a certain type of petroleum and modeled its decomposition into simpler components with the use of different catalysts. We have created a table of catalyst effectiveness, where copper is currently the best, followed by cobalt and nickel," says Head of Petroleum Research, Chair of the Department of Heavy Hydrocarbons Mikhail Varfolomeev.

The work used methods of quantum chemistry, which required joint efforts from geologists, chemists, and mathematicians.

In this paper, cyclohexyl phenyl sulfide (CPS) was selected as a model compound of sulfur-containing oil components, and, for the first time, a catalytic effect of transition metals on the thermochemistry and kinetics of its aquathermolysis was investigated by the density functional theory (DFT) methods with the use of the Becke three-parameter Lee-Yang-Parr (B3LYP), ωB97X-D, and M06-2X functionals. Calculation results show that the hydrolysis of CPS is characterized by fairly high energy barriers in comparison with other possible reaction routes leading to the cleavage of C-S bonds, while the heterolysis of C-S bonds in the presence of protons has a substantially lower kinetic barrier. According to the theoretical analysis, transition-metal ions significantly reduce the kinetic barrier of heterolysis. The Cu2+ ion outperforms the other investigated metal ions and the hydrogen ion in the calculated rate constant by 5-6 (depending on the metal) and 7 orders of magnitude, respectively. The catalytic activity of the investigated transition-metal ions is arranged in the following sequence, depending on the used DFT functional: Cu2+ ? Co2+ ? Ni2+ > Fe2+. It is theoretically confirmed that transition-metal ions, especially Cu2+, can serve as effective catalysts in aquathermolysis reactions. The proposed quantum-chemical approach for studying the catalytic aquathermolysis provides a new supplementary theoretical tool that can be used in the development of catalysts for different chemical transformations of heavy oil components in reservoirs due to hydrothermal treatment.

Cells send signals through enzyme cascades, where one enzyme passes the signal to the next. In such cascades, it is crucial that the enzyme recognizes the right substrates to ensure that, for example, a hormone activates the right cellular activities. Protein kinases, the enzymes in such cascades, are usually not sufficiently specific on their own, and therefore they rely on other proteins to physically connect them to the right substrates.

"Currently, we describe signalling enzymes with equations developed for metabolic enzymes," Magnus Kjærgaard explains. "Metabolic enzymes that make energy for our bodies, for example, need to process many substrates per minute. In contrast, signalling enzymes act as switches, and often only need to convert a single substrate to have an effect. Therefore, the equations developed to describe metabolic enzymes are less relevant for signalling enzymes."

For more than a hundred years, biochemists have described the activity of enzymes using the Michaelis-Menten equation, which describes how activity increases with increased substrate equation. When the enzyme is connected to its substrate, it does not matter how much substrate is present. Instead, the speed of the reaction depends on how the enzyme is connected to the substrate and thus on the connector molecule. Until now, we have not had any description of how the structure of such molecules affected enzymatic reactions.

"Normally, the question you are trying to answer is what graph shape describes the enzyme activity. We had a much more fundamental problem," says first-author Mateusz Dyla. "What should we put on the X-axis instead of concentration?"

Connector molecules control cellular signalling

The authors made a model system where they could change the connection between the enzyme and the substrate. They used this to measure how the length of a flexible connector affects the first round of catalysis by the enzyme, which took place in milliseconds. Finally, they ended up with an equation that describes how the speed of the enzyme depends on the connection between enzyme and substrate. This equation suggested that connector molecules play an overlooked role in controlling cellular signalling.

The connection between enzyme and substrate also affects which substrates the enzyme prefers. Substrates that look similar can be very different when the enzyme only processes a single connected substrate.

"It is like the difference between how long it takes me to eat a single hotdog, and how many hotdogs I can eat over a whole week," Magnus explains. "Over the course of a week, I will be limited by how fast I can digest the hotdogs. This is irrelevant to the time it takes to eat the first hotdog. Therefore, the two types of measurements give different results. If you want to understand kinase switches, you have to focus on the first round of catalysis."

In the long-term, this may have implications for the development of drugs targeting kinases in, for example, cancer. Mateusz explains: "We hope that one day it will be possible to make drugs that not only target the enzyme, but also target how it is connected to its substrate."

The results have been published in the international journal PNAS.

As Web services, cloud storage, and big-data services continue expanding and finding their way into our lives, the gigantic hardware infrastructures they rely on--known as data centers--need to be improved to keep up with the current demand. One promising solution for improving the performance and reducing the energy load associated with reading and writing large amounts of data is to confer storage devices with some computational capabilities and offload part of the data read/write process from CPUs.

In a recent study presented at the 2020 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, researchers from Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST), Korea, describe a new way of implementing a key-value store in solid state drives (SSDs), which offers many advantages over a more widely used method.

A key-value store (also known as key-value database) is a way of storing, managing, and retrieving data in the form of key-value pairs. The most common way to implement one is through the use of a hash function, an algorithm that can quickly match a given key with its associated stored data to achieve fast read/write access.

One of the main problems of implementing a hash-based key-value store is that the random nature of the hash function occasionally leads to long delays (latency) in read/write operations. To solve this problem, the researchers from DGIST implemented a different paradigm, called "log-structured merge-tree (LSM)." This approach relies on ordering the data hierarchically, therefore putting an upper bound on the maximum latency.

In their implementation, nicknamed "PinK," they addressed the most serious limitations of LSM-based key-value stores for SSDs. With its optimized memory use, guaranteed maximum delays, and hardware accelerators for offloading certain sorting tasks from the CPU, PinK represents a novel and effective take on data storage for SSDs in data centers. Professor Sungjin Lee, who led the study, remarks: "Key-value store is a widely used fundamental infrastructure for various applications, including Web services, artificial intelligence applications, and cloud systems. We believe that PinK could greatly improve the user-perceived performance of such services."

So far, experimental results confirm the performance gains offered by this new implementation and highlight the potential of letting storage devices compute some operations by themselves. "We believe that our study gives a good direction of how computational storage devices should be designed and built and what technical issues we should address for efficient in-storage computing," Prof Lee concludes.

School-based dementia education could deliver much needed empathy and understanding for older generations as new research from the University of South Australia shows it can significantly improve dementia knowledge and awareness among younger generations.

It's an important and timely finding, particularly given the world's ageing population and the prevalence of dementia among older people.

Globally, around 50 million people have dementia. By 2030 this figure is expected to reach 82 million, and by 2050, it could exceed 152 million.

Lead researcher, and cognitive ageing expert, UniSA's Dr Ashleigh Smith, says the findings show how intergenerational dementia education can transform the way we treat older people to encourage a much-needed age-friendly world.

"Children are our future leaders, they're our local shop keepers, bankers, and neighbours. If we're to improve dementia understanding, we need to invest in the education of our children," Dr Smith says.

"Children generally don't know much about people living with dementia - unless they have a family member of family friend that has the condition.

"When children are in primary school, their minds and health beliefs are still malleable; this is when they're open to learning about new ideas. So, it's an ideal time to educate them about challenging topics, like dementia.

"Recent findings from the Lancet commission (into dementia prevention, intervention and care) suggests that a low level of education is the number one risk factor in early life that contributes to later life dementia.

"By teaching children about dementia, we're not only improving their knowledge and fostering positive attitudes towards dementia now, but maybe even reducing their own future risk of dementia as an adult - it's exciting stuff."

The intergenerational dementia education program (entitled Forget me not ) was developed in partnership with the City of Unley, Unley Primary School and aged-care provider ECH.

The program brought together 90 Year four and five students who, over an eight-week period learned about dementia and interacted with older adults, many of whom had a cognitive impairment or dementia diagnosis. Through co-operative activities such as arts and crafts, gardening and playing pool, the older adults took on the role of teachers, mentors and coaches, while the children developed lifelong skills in communication and empathy.

After completing the program, children showed significant increases in dementia knowledge and attitudes, with observed improvements in communication, empathy and understanding, inclusivity and personhood (viewing a someone with dementia as a valued individual and person).

The older people also enjoyed the interaction, felt engaged with community and that they were valued members of society.

"Dementia education is a critical step for building empathetic, insightful and caring communities," Dr Smith says.

"You only need to look at the current state of Australia's aged care system to see the acute need for better education in this area.

"We know this type of education works; the next step is to find ways to upscale this more broadly."

Orange, Calif. - Research from Chapman University provides new insight into the characteristics of crucial proteins within the ciliary membrane that play vital roles in human genetic diseases and cardiovascular functions.

Recently, primary cilium, an organelle that exist on the surface of almost every cell type in the body, is shown to have membrane swelling. This is referred to as ciliary bulbs, and their structure and physiological relevance remains unknown.

Ashraf Mohieldin, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at the Chapman University School of Pharmacy and principal investigator of the study, led a team to examine and analyze the structure of primary cilia to better comprehend ciliary bulbs and its significance. Using a single-cell, single-cilium imaging technique and proteomic identification, they discovered that a ciliary bulb has extracellular vesicle (EV)-like characteristics.

Extracellular vesicles are known to facilitate information within cardiovascular cells. Mohieldin's team found that ciliary extracellular-like vesicles (cELV) share similarities with EV, and that it plays a specific role in ciliary signaling, cellular functions and maintaining cardiovascular homeostasis. Primary cilia's membrane contains these sensory proteins that detect signals from other cells and in the nearby environment. Serving as the cellular compartments that regulate essential signaling pathways, the protein's signal detection activates the cell's response and behavior. Evaluating from a database of 172 cELV proteins, the researchers also identified that cELV has a unique and dynamic movement and the ability to be released by mechanical fluid force.

Defects in the primary cilia has been associated with a wide range of genetic disorders called ciliopathies, which includes Joubert syndrome, Bardet-Biedl syndrome, polycystic kidney disease and Meckel-Gruber syndrome. Ciliopathies are often chronically disabling and life-threatening conditions that affects multiple organ systems.

"Our findings reveal for the first time crucial ciliary proteins that are implicated in ciliopathy disorders," said Mohieldin. "We hope that our research will rejuvenate our understanding and current approach to investigate human genetic diseases."

To screen abnormal cELV function and the protein's role in cardiovascular systems, Dr. Mohieldin's laboratory worked with zebrafish and mice. The researchers observed randomized heart looping, hydrocephalus, and cystic kidney disorders in the zebrafish. In addition, they looked at compensated heart contractility in both the zebrafish and mice to validate and compare the data. Through this, they saw that low circulation of cELV results in hypotension with compensated heart function, left ventricular hypertrophy, cardiac fibrosis and arrhythmogenic characteristics, which result in a high mortality rate in mice. Furthermore, the overall ejection fraction, stroke volume, and cardiac output are significantly decreased in mice lacking cELV. No previous research found cELV's physiological roles in zebrafish and mouse models prior to this.

With this finding of the strong link between cELV and ciliopathies and cardiovascular function, the hope is that future research will focus on these proteins to help discern a viable treatment for disorders associated with cilia dysfunction.

"Targeting these proteins can help scientists to clearly understand the mechanism of these disorders and ultimately lead the path to potential treatments for ciliopathies," said Mohieldin.

Leipzig/New Delhi. The airborne transmission of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 via aerosol particles in indoor environment seems to be strongly influenced by relative humidity. This is the conclusion drawn by researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) in Leipzig and the CSIR National Physical Laboratory in New Delhi from the analysis of 10 most relevant international studies on the subject. Therefore, they recommend controlling the indoor air in addition to the usual measures such as social distancing and masks. A relative humidity of 40 to 60 percent could reduce the spread of the viruses and their absorption through the nasal mucous membrane. To contain the COVID-19 pandemic, it is therefore extremely important to implement standards for indoor air humidity in rooms with many people, such as hospitals, open-plan offices or public transport, writes the research team in the scientific journal Aerosol and Air Quality Research.

According to the WHO, the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has led to at least 21 million infected persons and over 750,000 deaths worldwide in over half a year. The health and economic effects of the pandemic pose major social challenges for practically all countries. Worldwide, therefore, ways are being sought to stem the spread of the virus in order to avoid drastic measures such as lockdowns and contact restrictions. For a long time, the main transmission route of viral droplets was considered to be direct human-to-human contact, because of infected people sneezing or coughing and secreting the virus. Because these drops are relatively large and heavy, they fall very quickly to the ground and can only cover very short distances in the air. The recommendation to keep a minimum distance of 1.5m to 2m (social distancing) is based on this assumption. Recently, however, COVID-19 outbreaks have also been recorded, which seem to be due to the simultaneous presence of many people in one room (choir rehearsals, slaughterhouses, etc.). A safety distance of 1.5m is apparently not sufficient when infected and healthy people are together in one room for a long time. For example, Dutch researchers have now been able to prove that tiny drops of 5 micrometres in diameter, such as those produced when speaking, can float in the air for up to 9 minutes. In July, 239 scientists from 32 countries - including the chemist Prof. Hartmut Herrmann from TROPOS - therefore appealed to the World Health Organization (WHO) to focus more closely on the long-lived infectious particles suspended in the air. In order to contain the spread via the aerosol particles floating in the air, the researchers recommend not only continuing to wear masks but also, and above all, good indoor ventilation.

An Indo-German research team is now pointing out another aspect that has received little attention so far and could become particularly important in the next flu season: Indoor humidity. Physicists at the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) in Leipzig and the CSIR National Physical Laboratory in New Delhi have been studying the physical properties of aerosol particles for years in order to better estimate their effects on air quality or cloud formation. "In aerosol research, it has long been known that air humidity plays a major role: The more humid the air is, the more water adheres to the particles and so they can grow faster. So, we were curious: what studies have already been conducted on this," explains Dr. Ajit Ahlawat from TROPOS.

Therefore, they evaluated a total of 10 most relevant international studies between 2007 and 2020 by other researchers who investigated the influence of humidity on survival, spread and infection with the pathogens of influenza and the corona viruses SARS-CoV-1, MERS and SARS-CoV-2. Result: Air humidity influences the spread of corona viruses indoors in three different ways: (a) the behaviour of microorganisms within the virus droplets, (b) the survival or inactivation of the virus on the surfaces, and (c) the role of dry indoor air in the airborne transmission of viruses. Although, low humidity causes the droplets containing viruses to dry out more quickly, the survivability of the viruses still seems to remain high. The team concludes that other processes are more important for infection: "If the relative humidity of indoor air is below 40 percent, the particles emitted by infected people absorb less water, remain lighter, fly further through the room and are more likely to be inhaled by healthy people. In addition, dry air also makes the mucous membranes in our noses dry and more permeable to viruses," summarizes Dr. Ajit Ahlawat.

The new findings are particularly important for the upcoming winter season in the northern hemisphere, when millions of people will be staying in heated rooms. "Heating the fresh air also ensures that it dries. In cold and temperate climate zones, therefore, the indoor climate is usually very dry during the heating season. This could encourage the spread of corona viruses," warns Prof. Alfred Wiedensohler of TROPOS. The air humidity determines how much water a particle can bind. At higher air humidity, the surface of the particles changes considerably: a kind of water bubble forms - a miniature ecosystem with chemical reactions. The liquid water content of aerosols plays an important role in many processes in the atmosphere, as it influences the optical properties, leading for example to haze or altered effects of aerosols on the climate.

At a higher humidity, the droplets grow faster, fall to the ground earlier and can be inhaled less by healthy people. "A humidity level of at least 40 percent in public buildings and local transport would therefore not only reduce the effects of COVID-19, but also of other viral diseases such as seasonal flu. Authorities should include the humidity factor in future indoor guidelines," demands Dr. Sumit Kumar Mishra of CSIR - National Physical Laboratory in New Delhi. For countries in cool climates, the researchers recommend a minimum indoor humidity. Countries in tropical and hot climates, on the other hand, should take care that indoor rooms are not extremely undercooled by air conditioning systems. When air is extremely cooled, it dries out the air and the particles in it, making people inside the room feel comfortable. But the dry particles will remain in the air for longer duration.

From a researchers' point of view, more attention should be paid to indoor air to prevent future outbreaks of viral disease. The moisture content of indoor air is an important aspect but not the only one. Fresh air from outside can also reduce the risk of transmission. And of course, the measures already known and practised: Keep social distancing, having as few people per room volume as possible, and wearing masks. The lowest risk of infection still where there are no viruses in the air. Tilo Arnhold

It is no secret that people underlie social influences. For example, at the lunch counter of a new company, when we are unsure which dish would taste good, we monitor other peoples' choices to obtain some guidance for our own menu selection. This phenomenon, which is referred to as social influence, was demonstrated experimentally starting in the 1950s by social psychologist Solomon Asch.

In the new study, researchers from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) in Germany placed groups of five volunteers in the same computer-based decision-making experiment, where each of them was presented with two abstract symbols. Their objective was to find out which symbol would lead to more monetary rewards in the long run. In each round of the experiment, every person first made a choice between the two symbols, and then they observed which symbols the other four people had selected; next, every person could decide to stick with their initial choice or switch to the alternative symbol. Finally, a monetary outcome, either a win or a loss, was delivered to every one according to their second decision. "This way, we enable real-time interactions among the volunteers, which greatly enhances ecological validity, " says study leader Lei Zhang, then at the UKE and now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna.

In fact, which symbol was related to more reward was always changing. At the beginning of the experiment, one of the two symbols returned monetary rewards in 70% of the time, and after a few rounds, it provided rewards in only 30% of the time. These changes took place multiple times throughout the experiment. "This so-called reversal learning paradigm will create uncertainty for volunteers so that they will always need to learn and relearn to gain more outcomes. In particular, when the reversal just happened, some people in the group may pick it faster than the others, and if so, the others could combine this social information into their own decision-making processes, " explains Jan Gläscher, who leads a research group on valuation and social decision-making at the UKE.

Expectedly, the volunteers switched more often when they were confronted with opposing choices from the others, but interestingly, the second choice (after considering social information) reflected the reward structure better than the first choice. How to explain this finding? The researchers used sophisticated models to quantify volunteers' behavior, and they unveiled separate computational strategies for direct learning and social learning. "At the beginning of each round, the volunteers were combining their own direct learning experience and social learning experience to guide their choice," Zhang says, "whereby direct learning follows a simple reinforcement learning algorithm, and social learning is instantiated by tracking the others' reward history."

Within each group, the researchers scanned one of the volunteers' brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which allowed them to measure when and where the brain carries out both direct learning and social learning, and to characterize whether the two types of learning actually are associated with different neural signatures. The brain scans showed that direct learning is represented in the area called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, whereas social learning is represented in the area called the anterior cingulate cortex. These two areas also interact with an area in the middle of the brain called the striatum, "which computes both reward prediction error and social prediction error, quantifying trial-and-error learning to inform behavior" says Gläscher. "These indicate an integrated brain network supporting social influence in human decision-making."

These findings suggest that two unique types of learning signals are computed in distinct but interacting regions in the human brain, and represent separate computational strategies for decision-making in social contexts. "Direct learning is efficient in stable situations," explains Gläscher, "and when situations are changing and uncertain, social learning may play an important role together with direct learning to adapt to novel situations, such as deciding on the lunch menu at a new company."

"There has been a lot of research on direct learning but relatively little on social learning and how they interact, " Zhang says. What is next? "An important area for further research will be to disrupt part of the identified network using non-invasive brain stimulation techniques, and to determine how behaviors and computation strategies are altered in social decision-making, " Gläscher says. "And in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, there is no way individuals and governments learn from mistakes all by themselves, and instead, a global and collective human society is needed to address all these challenges."

Imagine that the size of a bacterium is measured from a distance of about 4500 light-years. This would be an incredible measurement, considering that a bacterium is so small that a microscope is required to see it, and what an enormous distance light can travel in 4500 years, given that it can round the Earth more than seven times in just one second. But a small deformation of the size of a bacterium, that is an extra height of a few micrometres in one direction, has now been inferred for a neutron star at a distance of about 4500 light-years, from a research by Prof. Sudip Bhattacharyya of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), India. This research is published in a new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Neutron stars are incredibly dense cosmic objects. They are about the size of a city, but contain more material than in the Sun, and a handful of stellar stuff would outweigh a mountain on the Earth. Some of them are observed to spin several hundred times in a second, and we call them millisecond pulsars. A slight asymmetry or deformation around the spin axis of such a star would cause the emission of gravitational waves continuously.

Gravitational waves, which are ripples in spacetime, have recently provided a new window to the universe. But so far they have been found as transient phenomena of mergers of black holes and neutron stars. Continuous gravitational waves, for example from a slightly deformed and spinning neutron star, have so far not been detected. The current instruments may not have the capability to detect these waves, if the deformation is too small.

However, a way to indirectly infer such waves and to measure this deformation is to estimate the contribution of the waves to the spin-down rate of the pulsar, which was not possible till now. PSR J1023+0038 is a unique cosmic source for this purpose, because it is the only millisecond pulsar for which two spin-down rates, in the phase of mass transfer from the companion star and in the phase when there is no mass transfer, were measured. Using these values, and primarily a fundamental principle of physics, that is the conservation of angular momentum, Bhattacharyya has inferred continuous gravitational waves and has estimated the neutron star's microscopic deformation.

Losing your balance and falling does not just happen during icy Boston winters. The slip resistance of your shoes can determine how well you walk on different surfaces without losing balance. Shoe grips increase friction by engaging with the walking surface, helping to increase stability. In a recently published study, investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) presented a bioinspired assistive shoe grip based on kirigami, the Japanese art of paper cutting. Kirigami can be used to create highly flexible surfaces that buckle from a flat sheet to a three-dimensional textured surface. The new kirigami-based shoe sole is intended to reduce the risks of slips and falls by adjusting as a person steps, increasing friction with pop-up spikes as necessary. In Nature Biomedical Engineering, the team reports the results of friction testing on a range of surfaces, including ice, finding that the kirigami shoe soles increased friction with the ground to get a better grip on slippery surfaces.

"What we developed is a dynamic shoe sole that can give you grip when you need it, which is when you are actually walking and moving," said co-corresponding author Giovanni Traverso, MB, BChir, PhD, a gastroenterologist and biomedical engineer in the Division of Gastroenterology at the Brigham and MIT. "The key is that it is dynamic and has the capacity to tune friction as you take a step. Current solutions like cleats have spikes that are always present, so a dynamic shoe grip that could adjust itself with movement would be a more ideal way to mitigate falling."

To learn more about dynamic ways of modulating friction, the researchers looked to nature for inspiration, examining how animals have scales or claws that selectively increase friction in certain situations. They recognized that by applying change in the shape of the sole, they could control the popping up of the spikes and modulate friction with the surface due to the flexible, buckling nature of kirigami. To identify the set of shapes that would best accomplish this, the team modeled each shape's performance on how it popped up under certain strains.

The buckling-induced kirigami patches were constructed using steel and attached to shoe soles, enabling the dynamic tuning of the walking surface's frictional properties. Traverso and colleagues tested the soles by creating flat or popped-up versions and measured the friction on different surfaces including ice, vinyl and hardwood to identify the optimal conformation. They initially tested the pop-up designs in the form of a sheet that was dragged across different surfaces. Then the team tested the designs on three human subjects by placing the sheets on shoe soles and having the subjects walk on a block of ice that was placed on a surface that measured the amount of force. By having the subjects walk on the ice both with and without the soles, the team could get a sense of the mechanics behind the design.

The results showed that the kirigami shoe grips were able to enhance the frictional properties between the soles and the walking surface, mitigating slips and falls. The team reports that use of the kirigami shoe grip could achieve a greater friction than that observed with standard winter boots by two- to three-fold. Although the initial designs were constructed using stainless steel for proof of concept, the researchers are now applying the concept to other materials that are more commonly used today. They are also focusing on creating prototypes where the grip is already built into the shoe as opposed to being added on.

"We are now working towards applying and incorporating the grips into different shoes," said Traverso. "The grips could be useful in the sporting shoe industry, in standard shoes used in day-to-day settings, and in occupational health situations where there might be an increased risk of slippage."

New research from The Business School (formerly Cass) has shed light on how Mirandola, a small town in the North East of Italy, became a major hub for the production of medical devices and sets a roadmap for the origins of industrialisation in small, quiet communities.

The study, led by Professor Simone Ferriani, Professor in Management, looked into the story of Mario Veronesi with a view to framing how anchor entrepreneurship - an individual's generative role in galvanising economic change - can act as a catalyst for rapid development.

As recently as the 1960s Mirandola was a town without any significant tourist attraction, with poor access and transport to major cities. Through a combination of one man's intuition, a slice of fortune and the entrepreneurial spirit of its community, it quickly became home to one in five medical device manufacturers in Italy, generating 30 per cent of the country's medical equipment revenues.

Mario Veronesi began manufacturing simple medical kits with disposable plastic tubing for blood tests and transfusions from his parents' garage, after learning about the risks of applying disinfectant to reusable tubing. He harnessed the skills of friends and built networks, encouraging people in the community to diversify from their normal trade activities to scale manufacturing. He also leveraged competitive advantages such as loyal residents who were reluctant to leave the town for bigger cities, and lower-than-average salary levels.

The authors outlined three stages of anchor entrepreneurship by conducting interviews with Veronesi, his friends and key figures in the local community. They also gathered evidence from journal articles and local press clippings.

The three stages are described as:

Genesis: ideas and formulae are conceived, but a lack of resources means taking more chances and increased 'bricolage' - or 'making do'. Veronesi harnessed his network of scientists and a small team of skilled workers, training them to diversify their line of work. For example, he taught electricians and telecommunications experts how to apply their trades specifically to the production of medical machinery.

Expansion: a shift from individual-level to organisational-level outcomes. In bringing together groups of people to apply their skills to an industry, Veronesi inspired partners and collaborators to form their own independent companies or take senior positions in multinational firms that were by now acquiring his companies. This led to subsequent expansion as they in turn inspired others, creating a virtuous cycle of productivity and economic stimulus.

Attraction: as operations exponentially expand, regions gain an international reputation for proficiency in their field - the manufacturing and distribution of medical devices, in Mirandola's case - and alerts multinationals, customers and entrepreneurs as an attractive hub for investment. The output of superior, in-demand products coupled with a skilled labour force made Mirandola an attractive proposition for global medical machinery providers to set up headquarters and subsidiaries.

Professor Ferriani said the growth of Mirandola proved the existence and impact of the anchor entrepreneur.

"Mario Veronesi himself was not a specialist in the medical field but he had a vision, and he knew how to persuade others to buy into this vision," he said.

"He plugged gaps in his own medical knowledge by developing relationships with medical specialists and encouraged tradesmen to leverage their skills towards the production of medical equipment. He also taught and inspired a generation of entrepreneurs.

"This knowledge transfer across firms set in place a rapid economic expansion of Mirandola which remains prevalent today.

"The story of Veronesi and Mirandola shows us how charismatic leadership and a strong sense of community can revitalise entire regions.

"Although Mario Veronesi is no longer with us, his legacy has put a small rural town on the map as an industrial hotbed for medical supplies. He has done this by simply recognising the raw potential of an idea and the talents of residents, using every resource at his disposal to get this idea off the ground."

Chronic constipation (CC) remains a serious medical and social problem because the complexity of diagnosis, the lack of a single approach to treatment, and unsatisfactory treatment results. The causes of constipation are varied - from the abnormal anatomical structure of the large intestine and its location in the abdominal cavity to impaired neurohumoral regulation of its motility, endocrine pathology, psychogenic factors, poor nutrition, as well as a combination of these factors. The mechanism of the formation of the constipation syndrome, while remaining largely unclear, is of great interest as an object of research. Understanding the pathophysiological processes in constipation syndrome can be the key to improving the methods of conservative and surgical treatment. In particular, the Republican Clinical Hospital of Tatarstan has accumulated 20 years of experience in the treatment of refractory constipation.

The paper is a joint effort by Guzel Sitdikova (Chair, Department of Human and Animal Physiology, Kazan Federal University), Dina Yarullina (Associate Professor, Department of Microbiology, Kazan Federal University), Oleg Karpukhin (Professor, Department of Surgical Diseases, Kazan State Medical University), and Republican Clinical Hospital of Tatarstan.

The objective of this particular research was to gain an insight into the role of contractility and microbiota in the etiology of CC. To this end, the scientists studied spontaneous and evoked contractile activity of descending colon segments from patients that had undergone surgery for refractory forms of CC. The juxta-mucosal microbiota of these colon samples were characterized with culture-based and 16S rRNA sequencing techniques. In patients with CC, the spontaneous colonic motility remained unchanged compared to the control group without dysfunctions of intestinal motility. Moreover, contractions induced by potassium chloride and carbachol were increased in both circular and longitudinal colonic muscle strips, thus indicating preservation of contractile apparatus and increased sensitivity to cholinergic nerve stimulation in the constipated intestine. Based on the previous data, it can be suggested that smooth muscle cells develop a compensatory response to the abnormality in cholinergic stimulation. In the test group, the gut microbiota composition was assessed as being typically human, with four dominant bacterial phyla, namely Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes, Proteobacteria, and Actinobacteria, as well as usual representation of the most prevalent gut bacterial genera. Yet, significant inter-individual differences were revealed. The phylogenetic diversity of gut microbiota was not affected by age, sex, or colonic anatomy (dolichocolon or megacolon). The abundance of butyrate-producing genera Roseburia, Coprococcus, and Faecalibacterium was low, whereas conventional probiotic genera Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria were not decreased in the gut microbiomes of the constipated patients. As evidenced by the study, specific microbial biomarkers for constipation state are absent. The results point to a probable role played by the overall gut microbiota at the functional level. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first comprehensive characterization of CC pathogenesis, finding lack of disruption of motor activity of colonic smooth muscle cells and insufficiency of particular members of gut microbiota usually implicated in CC.

Treatment of patients with any pathology becomes effective if it is etiopathogenetically justified, that is, it is aimed at eliminating the etiological factors of the disease and blocking the mechanisms of the development of the disease. This pilot study of the mechanisms of the formation of CC syndrome in various anatomical anomalies of the structure and location of the colon not only expands the understanding of this complex process, but is also of clinical interest. The obtained results can contribute to the choice of the optimal variant of drug stimulation of colon motility during constipation, substantiation of radical approaches to treatment, clarification of indications for the use of probiotics or intestinal microbiota transplantation. However, for a better understanding of the pathophysiological and microbiological processes in the colon in CC syndrome with subsequent clinical use of the obtained results, additional studies are needed.

Due to the small number of observations, the results of physiological and microbiological studies do not allow generalized conclusions to be drawn about specific processes in the intestine in CC syndrome, but only reflect the specifics of refractory constipation in a group of patients with a mechanical obstacle to the movement of the chyme against the background of an abnormal anatomical structure or location of the intestine. The results indicate the preservation of the molecular mechanisms of muscle tissue contraction in patients with chronic coprostasis and its increased sensitivity to cholinergic stimulation. We consider the study of other links in the regulation of motility - the enteric and central nervous systems, Cajal cells, as well as the influence of metabolites of the intestinal microbiota on the contractile activity of smooth muscle cells - as potential directions for further research. It is also advisable to study the contractile activity of the smooth muscle of the large intestine in different age groups of patients with constipation, with congenital anomalies of the autonomic innervation of the intestine and in patients with decompensation of the motor-evacuation function of the intestine against the background of prolonged use of laxatives.

According to the study, the structure of the microbial community of the large intestine of patients mainly corresponds to the normal microflora of the human intestine. Individual members of the intestinal microbiota have been identified that are capable of influencing the motor-evacuation function of the intestine due to the produced metabolites, which confirms the presence of a functional relationship between chronic constipation and the composition of the intestinal microbiota. Nevertheless, according to modern concepts, the development of coprostasis is promoted not by individual taxa, but by the entire microbial ensemble as a whole. More observations are also needed to confirm this assumption.

Contract tracing apps used to reduce the spread of COVID-19 are unlikely to be effective without proper uptake and support from concurrent control measures, finds a new study by UCL researchers.

The systematic review*, published in Lancet Digital Health, shows that evidence around the effectiveness of automated contact tracing systems is currently very limited, and large-scale manual contact tracing alongside other public health control measures - such as physical distancing and closure of indoor spaces such as pubs - is likely to be required in conjunction with automated approaches.

The team found 15 relevant studies by reviewing more than 4,000 papers on automated and partially-automated contact tracing, and analysed these to understand the potential impact these tools could have in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lead author Dr Isobel Braithwaite (UCL Institute of Health Informatics) said: "Across a number of modelling studies, we found a consistent picture that although automated contact tracing could support manual contact tracing, the systems will require large-scale uptake by the population and strict adherence to quarantine advice by contacts notified to have a significant impact on reducing transmission."

The authors suggest that even under optimistic assumptions - where 75-80% of UK smartphone owners are using a contact tracing app, and 90-100% of identified potential close contacts initially adhere to quarantine advice - automated contact tracing methods would still need to be used within an integrated public health response to prevent exponential growth of the epidemic.

In total, 4,033 papers published between 1 Jan 2000 and 14 April 2020 were reviewed, which allowed researchers to identify 15 papers with useful data. The seven studies that addressed automated contact tracing directly were modelling studies that all focused on COVID-19. Five studies of partially-automated contact tracing were descriptive observational studies or case studies, and three studies of automated contact detection looked at a similar disease context to COVID-19, but did not include subsequent tracing or contact notification.

Partially-automated systems may have some automated processes, for instance in determining the duration of follow-up of contacts required, but do not use proximity of smartphones as a proxy for contact with an infected person.

Analysis of automated contact tracing apps generally suggested that high population uptake of relevant apps is required alongside other control measures, while partially-automated systems often had better follow-up and slightly more timely intervention.

Dr Braithwaite said: "Although automated contact tracing shows some promise in helping reduce transmission of COVID-19 within communities, our research highlighted the urgent need for further evaluation of these apps within public health practice, as none of the studies we found provided real-world evidence of their effectiveness, and to improve our understanding of how they could support manual contact tracing systems."

The review shows that, at present, there is insufficient evidence to justify reliance on automated contact tracing approaches without additional extensive public health control measures.

Dr Robert Aldridge (UCL Institute of Health Informatics) added: "We currently do not have good evidence about whether a notification from a smartphone app is as effective in breaking chains of transmission by giving advice to isolate due to contact with a case of COVID-19 when compared to advice provided by a public health contact tracer. We urgently need to study this evidence gap and examine how automated approaches can be integrated with existing contact tracing and disease control strategies, and generate evidence on whether these new digital approaches are cost-effective and equitable."

If implemented effectively and quarantine advice is adhered to appropriately, automated contact tracing may offer benefits such as reducing reliance on human recall of close contacts, which could enable identification of additional at-risk individuals, informing potentially affected people in real-time, and saving on resources.

Dr Braithwaite added: "We should be mindful that automated approaches raise potential privacy and ethics concerns, and also rely on high smartphone ownership, so they may be of very limited value in some countries. Too much reliance on automated contact tracing apps may also increase the risk of COVID-19 for vulnerable and digitally-excluded groups such as older people and people experiencing homelessness."

If implementing automated contact tracing technology, the authors say that decision-makers should thoroughly assess available evidence around its effectiveness, privacy and equality considerations, monitoring this as the evidence base evolves.

They add that plans to properly integrate contact tracing apps within comprehensive outbreak response strategies are important, and their impacts should be evaluated rigorously. A combination of different approaches is needed to control COVID-19, and the review concludes that contact tracing apps have the potential to support that but they are not a panacea.

This study is co-authored by researchers UCL Public Health Data Science Research Group, Institute of Health Informatics, Department of Applied Health Research, and Collaborative Centre for Inclusion Health.

*A systematic review carefully identifies all the relevant published and unpublished studies, rates them for quality and synthesises the studies' findings across the studies identified.

Study limitations

As part of this systematic review, researchers did not find any epidemiological studies comparing automated to manual contact tracing systems and their effectiveness in identifying contacts. Other limitations include the lack of eligible empirical studies of fully-automated contact tracing and a paucity of evidence related to ethical concerns or cost-effectiveness.

Since COVID-19 emerged late last year, there's been an enormous amount of research produced on this novel coronavirus disease. But the content publicly available for this data and the format in which it's presented lack consistency across different countries' national public health institutes, greatly limiting its usefulness, Children's National Hospital scientists report in a new study. Their findings and suggestions, published online August 19 in Science & Diplomacy, could eventually help countries optimize their COVID-19-related data -- and data for future outbreaks of other diseases -- to help further new research, clinical decisions and policy-making around the world.

Recently, explains study senior author Emmanuèle Délot, Ph.D., research faculty at Children's National Research Institute, she and her colleagues sought data on sex differences between COVID-19 patients around the world for a new study. However, she says, when they checked the information available about different countries, they found a startling lack of consistency, not only for sex-disaggregated data, but also for any type of clinical or demographic information.

"The prospects of finding the same types of formats that would allow us to aggregate information, or even the same types of information across different sites, was pretty dismal," says Dr. Délot.

To determine how deep this problem ran, she and colleagues at Children's National, including Eric Vilain, M.D., Ph.D., the James A. Clark Distinguished Professor of Molecular Genetics and the director of the Center for Genetic Medicine Research at Children's National, and Jonathan LoTempio, a doctoral candidate in a joint program with Children's National and George Washington University, surveyed and analyzed the data on COVID-19.

The research spanned data reported by public health agencies from highly COVID-19 burdened countries, viral genome sequence data sharing efforts, and data presented in publications and preprints.

At the time of study, the 15 countries with the highest COVID-19 burden at the time included the US, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Iran, China, Russia, Brazil, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Together, these countries represented more than 75% of the reported global cases. The research team combed through COVID-19 data presented on each country's public health institute website, looking first at the dashboards many provided for a quick glimpse into key data, then did a deeper dive into other data on this disease presented in other ways.

The data content they found, says LoTempio, was extremely heterogenous. For example, while most countries kept running totals on confirmed cases and deaths, the availability of other types of data -- such as the number of tests run, clinical aspects of the disease such as comorbidities, symptoms, or admission to intensive care, or demographic information on patients, such as age or sex -- differed widely among countries.

Similarly, the format in which data was presented lacked any consistency among these institutes. Among the 15 countries, data was presented in plain text, HTML or PDF. Eleven offered an interactive web-based data dashboard, and seven had comma-separated data available for download. These formats aren't compatible with each other, LoTempio explains, and there was little to no documentation about where the data that supplies some formats -- such as continually updated web-based dashboards -- was archived.

Dr. Vilain says that a robust system is already in place to allow uniform sharing of data on flu genomes -- the World Health Organization's (WHO) Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID) -- which has been readily adapted for the virus that causes COVID-19 and has already helped advance some types of research. However, he says, countries need to work together to develop a similar system for harmonized sharing other types of data for COVID-19. The study authors recommend that COVID-19 data should be shared among countries using a standardized format and standardized content, informed by the success of GISAID and under the backing of the WHO.

In addition, the authors say, the explosion of research on COVID-19 should be curated by experts who can wade through the thousands of papers published on this disease since the pandemic began to identify research of merit and help merge clinical and basic science.

"Identifying the most useful science and sharing it in a way that's usable to most researchers, clinicians and policymakers, will not only help us emerge from COVID-19 but could help us prepare for the next pandemic," Dr. Vilain says.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota and University of Washington found a statistical relationship between the number of hospital beds (ICU and non-ICU) occupied by COVID-19 patients in a state and reported mortality. Published today in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, this research is believed to be the first to use actual, state-level data to examine this association.

“These estimates provide a better understanding of the projections of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. especially when states are monitoring economic activities, and provide important practice insights for hospitals in terms of assessment of hospital bed and ICU bed capacity and preparedness,” said study lead Pinar Karaca-Mandic, professor and academic director of the Medical Industry Leadership Institute (MILI) in the U of M’s Carlson School of Management.

Utilizing the U of M’s COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project, researchers examined data from 23 states that reported daily percentages of ICU and non-ICU-bed use by COVID-19 patients.

The study found:

COVID-19 patients occupied nearly 20% of all ICU-bed use in all states examined and about a 5% of non-ICU bed capacity;
a 1% increase in ICU-bed use (17 beds on average) was associated with 2.84 more COVID-19 deaths over the next seven days;
a 1% increase in non-ICU bed use (130 beds on average) was associated with 17.84 more COVID-19 deaths.

“ICU and non-ICU bed use as a percentage of the bed capacity of a state were significantly associated with an increase of overall COVID-19 deaths over the next seven days," explained Anirban Basu, study co-author and a professor of Health Economics and the director of The CHOICE Institute at the University of Washington. “The intensity of association for ICU-bed use was higher than non-ICU-bed use.”

The authors found that the results held true across a variety of alternate specifications.

“Most policy interventions to address the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States have focused on ‘flattening the curve’ – an approach to spread out hospitalizations over a longer duration to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system,” said Soumya Sen, associate professor and academic director of the Management Information Systems Research Center (MISRC) in the Carlson School, who co-authored the study. “The forecasting models informing these policy decisions make assumptions about the relation between the number of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, intensive care unit (ICU) demand, and subsequent impact on mortality.”

As this study took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, some states may have been able to expand the number of hospital beds. However, the authors note that doing so for ICU beds was likely difficult due to infrastructure constraints.

Other study authors included Dr. Archelle Georgiou, chief health officer of Starkey Hearing Technologies and an executive-in-residence with MILI at the Carlson School, as well as Yi Zhu, a doctoral student at the Information Decision Sciences department in the Carlson School.

This research was funded, in part, by the University of Minnesota Office of Academic Clinical Affairs and the United Health Foundation.

Journal

Journal of General Internal Medicine

DOI

10.1007/s11606-020-06084-7

California voters will be asked to approve a return to affirmative action on Nov. 3 with Proposition 16, which would restore the right of the state's colleges and universities to consider race, ethnicity and gender in admission decisions.

Affirmative action is a contentious issue across the globe, hotly debated in countries such as India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Nigeria and Brazil, as well as in the United States. While the direct effects of affirmative action on college admissions are well known, new evidence from India shows that affirmative action has indirect benefits on the behavior of underrepresented high school students, who tend to stay in school longer when they know higher education is within reach.

In a new University of California San Diego study published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, researchers find minority students attain 0.8 additional years of education where affirmative action policies are in place. The study underscores previous theoretical work on affirmative action that shows the opportunity to be admitted to college may motivate students to graduate from high school, according to the study's author, Gaurav Khanna, assistant professor of economics at UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy.

"In the policy space, people have made claims that affirmative action lowers standards and the learning gains for underrepresented students who will 'no longer work as hard.' My research suggests the opposite," Khanna said. "Affirmative action makes going to a good college much more attainable, and actually encourages minority groups to work harder to get into such schools. Without affirmative action, many colleges may not appear attainable, and it may discourage students from even trying."

India's federal government instituted affirmative action policies in 1993, reserving 27% of government jobs that are highly sought after for Other Backward Classes (OBCs)--a collective term used by the country's government to classify castes which are educationally or socially disadvantaged. In 2006, reservations in colleges were implemented.

Other research shows how these affirmative action policies in India increased the representation of minority groups in top colleges, and how the graduates went on to perform well in college and in the subsequent labor market. However, the UC San Diego study explores if affirmative action incentivizes students to stay in school by looking at the educational attainment at pre-collegiate levels.

To answer the question, Khanna compiled a number of data sources, including the Indian National Sample Survey (NSS) to map the trends in educational attainment by birth cohort and social group. Those born before 1976 would be over the age of 18 by the time the federal government policy was implemented in 1994. Thus, he looked at education levels of minority students in this cohort and compared them to education levels attained by OBCs before the affirmative action policies were enacted.

The results show that after affirmative action policies were implemented, there was a marked increase in OBCs' educational attainment. While non-minorities were still more likely to pursue more education, wide-scale affirmative action helped bridge the education gap by about 40% over a decade and a half.

"The evidence suggests that aspirations respond to such laws and additional research also shows that if peers are seen to benefit from this policy, then a role model effect may encourage educational attainment," Khanna writes.

While affirmative action is a federal law in India, each state chooses a different level of application. This is defined by the fraction of seats reserved at universities and government job openings reserved for minorities, compared to their population in that state. For example, in the state of Karnataka the policy is stronger with more seats reserved in jobs and colleges, relative to the OBC population. Conversely, in the state of Madhya Pradesh fewer jobs and college seats are reserved for OBCs, as a fraction of their population. Khanna finds that states that had a higher intensity of affirmative action, in terms of the fraction of seats reserved per OBC, saw a sharper increase in the educational attainment of minorities.

Affirmative action: a contentious policy both at home and abroad

Today, in India these policies are an integral part of political platforms and election campaigns; the media covers the policies extensively, and any policy change is met with protests from different factions.

Similarly, in the U.S., the issue is divisive. For example, the Trump administration announced in 2018 that it was abandoning the Obama administration policies that called on universities to consider race as a factor in diversifying campuses. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos stated that "schools should continue to offer equal opportunities for all students."

Given the debate in both countries, the other question Khanna sought to answer: is this educational response from the minority groups rational in terms of the expected costs and benefits?

With education levels being important for the qualification criteria for government jobs in India, Khanna found that between 2000 and 2005, the fraction of OBCs in public sector jobs rose from 22% to 27%. These jobs are extremely lucrative, especially in rural areas, where they guarantee benefits and job security. As such, increases in the likelihood of getting such jobs can greatly influence the decision made by minority groups.

Khanna writes, "Yet even for members of the minority group who do not get government jobs, an increase in education may translate into benefits (like better health) and high wages as the estimated returns to education in developing countries are between 6% and 13%."

He concluded, "Indeed, lowering educational inequalities--and possibly wealth inequalities--may be intrinsically valuable to policymakers. In light of these results, policymakers should consider the externalities of affirmative action policies when designing them."