Earth

As the general election nears amid a historic season of hurricanes, wildfires, and heat waves, a new survey finds that majorities of Americans are supportive of climate change mitigation measures. This suggests that policymakers can introduce legislation that would enjoy public approval—including a green stimulus package to help deal with the economic downturn associated with COVID-19.

The new report of results from the survey, Climate Insights 2020: Policies and Politics, is the third report in the 2020 series by researchers at Stanford University, Resources for the Future, and ReconMR. The installment offers the public and policymakers an opportunity to consider American appetite for proposed climate policies, as well as the perceived effects those policies may have on Americans’ livelihoods and the wellbeing of the nation.

“Large majorities of Americans support federal efforts to reduce emissions,” Jon Krosnick, Stanford University professor and report coauthor, said. “Our new results identify some climate mitigation policies that legislators can pursue in the future with widespread—and bipartisan—public support.”

Topline Findings

An overwhelming majority of Americans favor government efforts to shift electricity generation toward renewable sources through tax breaks (83%) and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants (81%).
More than three-quarters of Americans favor the government requiring or giving tax breaks to companies to construct more energy-efficient buildings (75%), cars (71%), and appliances (71%).
Increased consumer taxes on electricity and gasoline to incentivize people to use less are the least popular policy options surveyed (favored by 28% and 43%, respectively).
Two-thirds of Americans (66%) believe that future federal stimulus packages should include efforts to create new jobs and technologies to combat climate change.
Majorities of Americans favor policies implemented by the Obama administration but rolled back by the Trump Administration. In particular, more than three-quarters of Americans support the Paris Accord (81%) and the Clean Power Plan (77%).
A majority of Americans are more likely to vote for a candidate that makes “green” statements (64%) and less likely to vote for a candidate that makes “anti-green” statements (67%).

“As we head into the first presidential debate, it’s tempting to think of climate change as a partisan, polarized issue,” Krosnick said. “Our research shows that for many mitigation policies, sizable majorities—and sometimes vast majorities—favor them.”

“The findings in this report highlight significant opportunities for leaders to pursue policies that will resonate with Americans—the legislation and the platforms that could enjoy bipartisan support and buy-in from American constituents,” he said.

To learn more about these findings, read the policies and politics installment of Climate Insights 2020 by Jon Krosnick, social psychologist at Stanford University and RFF university fellow, and Bo MacInnis, lecturer at Stanford University and PhD economist. You can also try out our interactive data tool, which allows users to explore the data in greater depth.

Future installments of reports in this series will focus on political dynamics, opinions in the states, and electric vehicles. Previous installments of reports focus on overall trends and natural disasters.

KINGSTON, R.I. - Sept.23, 2020 - Evidence continues to accumulate about human and wildlife exposure to chemical compounds called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, collectively referred to as PFAS, and their deleterious effects on the environment. The latest study, by a University of Rhode Island graduate student, found high levels of the compounds in seabirds from offshore Massachusetts and coastal Rhode Island and North Carolina.

Chief among the findings was the discovery that one type of PFAS, perfluorooctanesulfonic acid or PFOS, which has not been produced since the early 2000s, is the most dominant PFAS compound in the birds from all three sites, further illustrating how these chemicals do not breakdown in the environment and can remain in animal tissues for many years.

"Wildlife is being inundated with PFAS," said Anna Robuck, a doctoral student at the URI Graduate School of Oceanography, who has been studying PFAS with Professor Rainer Lohmann since 2016. "We don't really understand what that means for wildlife health overall, since scientists are just catching up with what PFAS means for human health. What we do know is that we're seeing significant concentrations that laboratory studies tell us are concerning."

Her research was published this month in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

The concentrations of PFAS Robuck found in seabird livers are comparable to levels found in other bird studies that suggested that the compounds may be causing negative reproductive health outcomes.

"This speaks to the incredible persistence of these compounds," she said. "Once in the environment, it's there in perpetuity for it to be accumulated by wildlife. And even though we no longer produce PFOS, we still produce a series of related compounds that, once in the environment, readily transform into PFOS."

Robuck, a native of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, measured the levels of PFAS in the livers of herring gulls from Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, great shearwaters in the offshore waters of Massachusetts Bay, and royal and sandwich terns from Cape Fear, North Carolina. All of the birds were juveniles found dead near their breeding or feeding grounds. The three sites were chosen to represent birds from an urban area where PFAS exposure is common (Narragansett Bay), an offshore area of birds that seldom approach land (Massachusetts Bay), and an area downstream of a major PFAS producer (Cape Fear).

"We studied their livers because there is a specific protein in the liver that PFAS love to bind to," Robuck said. "We also know that in humans, PFAS exposure leads to liver damage and impairment of function."

Among her other findings, Robuck discovered that the North Carolina birds that hatched downstream from a PFAS production site contained several novel PFAS compounds that have been created in recent years to replace those that have been phased out.

"The nesting colonies where we got the Cape Fear birds from are 90 miles from the production facility," she said. "This is the first detection of these compounds in liver tissue and the furthest distance from the known industrial source.

"Surprisingly, we also found those same novel PFAS in birds that have no connection to Cape Fear - in one gull from Narragansett Bay and two shearwaters in Massachusetts Bay," she added. "It suggests that these replacement compounds are highly persistent and capable of migrating further in the environment than we were aware of. There also may be more sources of the compounds than we know about."

Of particular note, Robuck also found that as PFAS levels increased in the birds, the phospholipid levels in their liver decreased, a finding that is especially concerning.

"That's a really big deal because fats are important for reproductive health, migration, raising their young successfully, and other elements of their life cycle," Robuck said. "The fact that there is an observable relationship between PFAS and fats deserves a lot more investigation to see what it could be doing to wildlife populations."

In addition, Robuck detected the same PFAS levels in the offshore birds as those from inshore Rhode Island.

"They didn't have the same kind of PFAS, but they had the same total level," she said. "I expected offshore birds to be a lot lower, since those birds never come to land. It suggests that even our most remote and most pristine habitats are facing exposure to these compounds."

Robuck's next study will analyze the PFAS concentrations in other tissues from the same birds. She hopes the resulting data will be included in future government assessments of the impact of PFAS in wildlife and the environment.

New knowledge on the cellular makeup and growth of teeth can expedite developments in regenerative dentistry - a biological therapy for damaged teeth - as well as the treatment of tooth sensitivity. The study, which was conducted by researchers at Karolinska Institutet, is published in Nature Communications.

Teeth develop through a complex process in which soft tissue, with connective tissue, nerves and blood vessels, are bonded with three different types of hard tissue into a functional body part. As an explanatory model for this process, scientists often use the mouse incisor, which grows continuously and is renewed throughout the animal's life.

Despite the fact that the mouse incisor has often been studied in a developmental context, many fundamental questions about the various tooth cells, stem cells and their differentiation and cellular dynamics remain to be answered.

Using a single-cell RNA sequencing method and genetic tracing, researchers at Karolinska Institutet, the Medical University of Vienna in Austria and Harvard University in the USA have now identified and characterised all cell populations in mouse teeth and in the young growing and adult human teeth.

"From stem cells to the completely differentiated adult cells we were able to decipher the differentiation pathways of odontoblasts, which give rise to dentine - the hard tissue closest to the pulp - and ameloblasts, which give rise to the enamel," say the study's last author Igor Adameyko at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Karolinska Institutet, and co-author Kaj Fried at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet. "We also discovered new cell types and cell layers in teeth that can have a part to play in tooth sensitivity."

Some of the finds can also explain certain complicated aspects of the immune system in teeth, and others shed new light on the formation of tooth enamel, the hardest tissue in our bodies.

"We hope and believe that our work can form the basis of new approaches to tomorrow's dentistry. Specifically, it can expedite the fast expanding field of regenerative dentistry, a biological therapy for replacing damaged or lost tissue."

The results have been made publicly accessible in the form of searchable interactive user-friendly atlases of mouse and human teeth. The researchers believe that they should prove a useful resource not only for dental biologists but also for researchers interested in development and regenerative biology in general.

Fast imaging is of great interest in microscopy, computer vision, and laser machining. For example, in neuroscience, high-speed volumetric imaging is essential to monitor dynamic biological processes, including membrane voltage activity (with dynamics on the time scale of 1 ms or less) or cerebral blood flow. How fast one can image is tightly connected to how fast one can change the position of the focus of the imaging system, particularly in the third dimension.

Traditional ways to refocus do so by either mechanically moving the microscope objective or the sample, which both leads to low scanning speed in the third dimension as the speed of moving physical objects is limited by inertia. A potential way to alleviate this problem is through remote focusing, which realizes refocusing by changing the wavefront of the optical system. However, most of the existing technologies face the tradeoff between resolution and speed. As such, there remains a need for a 3D scan technology capable of reaching multi-kHz rates while avoiding aberrations that would lower its resolution.

In a manuscript published in Light Science & Application, a team of scientists, led by Professor Reto Fiolka from the Department of Cell Biology and Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics, at UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA., and co-workers have developed a novel optical design to overcome these challenges. They employed well-established lateral scan technologies and transformed the lateral scan motion into refocusing in the third dimension to realize high-speed volumetric imaging. They took the concept of aberration-free remote focusing, and instead of moving a corresponding remote mirror in the third dimension, they scanned a laser spot laterally with a high-speed galvanometer over a stationary mirror. If the distance between the stationary mirror and the objective lens is not constant along the scan direction, a defocus will be introduced as is necessary for remote refocusing. Furthermore, on the return path, the lateral scan component is perfectly compensated, such that a pure scan motion in the third dimension is obtained. Thereby, the researchers were able to harness high-speed lateral scan technologies to rapidly move a high-resolution laser focus in the third dimension.

Two implementations using a step mirror and a tilted planar mirror, were adopted to realize this concept. The former allows arbitrarily large axial step sizes over a finite number of steps, and the latter allows for an arbitrary number and size of axial steps and is capable of continuous scanning in the third dimension, albeit over a more limited scan range. With the two implementations, the scientists introduce applications of this technology:

"Our first practical demonstration on microscopic imaging was accelerating axially swept light-sheet microscopy (ASLM), which has been criticized for its slow acquisition speed (around 10 Hz framerate in high-resolution implementations, previously). Our new scan technology allows one order of magnitude acceleration while keeping the high spatial resolving power of this emerging imaging technology. In a second application, we implemented our scanning technology in a 2-photon raster scanning microscope and performed high-resolution volumetric imaging with a scan rate in the third dimension of 12 kHz. Indeed, at this spatial resolution, our approach is 6-fold faster than previously reported aberration-free focusing technologies. We then demonstrated the potential of our technology for intravital microscopy by imaging the beating heart of a zebrafish embryo. We believe that this opens up major applications for intravital imaging, especially in the neurosciences."

"Both the discrete and continuous scan technologies may find many applications to image different layers of the brain nearly simultaneously or to rapidly acquire whole volumes to measure neuronal firing patterns or cerebral blood flow. Importantly and unlike previous technologies, our approach is fully compatible with acousto-optical deflectors and thus theoretically capable of scanning on the sub-microsecond timescale (e.g., > 1 MHz) in the third dimension. Thus, using resonant Lissajous scanning patterns, we foresee the possibility for volumetric imaging at kHz rates." the scientists forecast.

A father's involvement in the parenting of an infant is associated to a lower risk of experiencing paternal depressive symptoms during the first year of the child's life, according to a study published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychiatry. The investigators in the larger study conducted home interviews with 881 low-income ethnically and racially diverse fathers from 5 different sites in the US, one month after the birth of a child and controlling for social and demographic variables, they examined the three parenting indicators: father time spent with the infant, parenting self-efficacy and material support for the infant. They also assessed paternal depressive symptoms at regular intervals (1, 6 and 12 months after birth) using the Edinburgh Postpartum Depression Scale.

The authors found that all three indicators - greater amount of time fathers spent with their new born, parenting self-efficacy and ability to provide material support - predicted lower rates of depressive symptoms in the fathers during the following year. The authors also found that only parenting self-efficacy was associated to a higher risk of clinical depression, with the percentage of fathers with symptoms indicating clinical depression being 10% after 1 month, 15% after 6 months and 12% after 12 months.

"We found that fathers who were more involved with their infants shortly after their birth were less likely to be depressed a year later," says Dr Olajide N. Bamishigbin Jr., Assistant Professor of Psychology at California State University, Long Beach, USA, and first author of the paper. "In our paper, we suggest a few reasons that greater father involvement in parenting would lead to less depression in fathers. For example, fathers who are more involved during infancy may feel more competent as parents and be more satisfied in their role as parents over time, and this could contribute to lower depressive symptoms."

The present study is one of the first to focus on a larger community sample of low-income fathers from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds and is paving the way for more research into specifically paternal well-being after the birth of a child. While previous research has focused on paternal involvement as an outcome or a predictor of mother- and child focused outcomes, this is the first study to examine the link between early paternal involvement with the infant and later paternal depressive symptoms during the first year after a child is born.

"Family researchers are recognizing, more and more, the vital roles fathers play in the lives of their children and the functioning of the entire family unit," said Bamishigbin. "As researchers who care deeply about paternal health, we are excited to be a part of this growing field."

The findings of this study have important implications for future research on the contributors to father involvement, the effects of early involvement, the link between parental self-efficacy and depression and the relationship between paternal and maternal depression. The authors emphasise that a deeper understanding of these and related variables might be helpful in designing interventions for expecting fathers and shaping public policies.

"In our study, greater early involvement was related to less depression later on. This is very important because, it suggests that, if fathers are involved with their infants early and often, their mental health, and the health of the entire family unit, may fare better," said Bamishigbin. "This is why we suggest that paid paternal leave policies which can allow fathers the opportunity to be more involved with their kids and gain confidence as a parent early on in their lives, without having to worry about their economic security, and may help allow fathers more opportunities to be involved with their kids and be part of shaping healthier and thriving future generations. In turn, this may improve the well-being of the entire family."

A recent study found that survivors of childhood cancer have a similar risk of having suicidal thoughts compared with other individuals, and they have lower risk of suicidal behaviors and suicidal death.

The analysis was published in CANCER, a journal of the American Cancer Society, and included medical information and survey responses from 3,096 childhood cancer survivors and 429 individuals in the general population.

Among survivors, depression, anxiety, and financial stress were linked with a higher likelihood of having suicidal thoughts.

Cancer driver genes are those with mutations that are essential for tumour development and spread. Led by ICREA researcher Patrick Aloy, scientists from the Structural Bioinformatics and Network Biology (SBNB) Laboratory at IRB Barcelona have developed a computational pipeline that predicts tumour response to different cancer treatments. This system is based on the identification of complex response markers derived from the patterns of co-occurrence between cancer driver genes carrying mutations. It has been tested experimentally and with data from breast cancer patients and has achieved 66% accuracy in the prediction of these responses.

Given their key role in tumour development, cancer driver genes have been widely studied in recent decades. Knowledge of which of these genes are affected in a specific tumour can help to identify the most appropriate therapeutic strategy for that patient, in an approach known as precision medicine. For the first time, researchers from the SBNB Lab propose the co-occurrence (or lack thereof) of alterations in two or more cancer driver genes as a key factor in predicting the response to a certain treatment.

"The sum of two or more cancer driver genes affected by mutations leads to the formation of a complex network of biomarkers, alters the molecular profile of the tumour and affects its response to treatments," says Aloy. "Through this work, we see that studying cancer driver genes as a whole, analysing the different combinations, can bring about a great advance towards precision medicine," he adds.

From bioinformatics to experimental and clinical analysis.

Although there are a lot of data on cancer genomes, less information is available on the outcome of therapeutic interventions in patients. The researchers started from a public database that collects information on the effect of multiple treatments on the growth of human tumours that have been implanted in a mouse model. Based on these data, they selected 53 treatments (or combinations of treatments) and compared the molecular profiles of tumours that responded to each treatment and those that did not.

"After developing our computational model, we validated it experimentally in human tumours implanted in mice," says Lídia Mateo, postdoctoral researcher at the SBNB Lab and first author of the study. "We were able to predict the outcome of the therapy in 12 of the 14 case studies, well above the power of approved biomarkers to predict drug response," she adds. The researchers also validated the algorithm with treatment response data from patients with breast cancer.

The work, which has been published in Genome Medicine, was carried out in collaboration with the Vall d'Hebron Oncology Institute (VHIO) and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), thereby allowing the predictive system to be applied to the analysis of clinical trial results.

By far the most important process in cell development is how cells divide and then enlarge in order to multiply. A research team headed by Freiburg medical scientist Prof. Dr. Robert Grosse has now discovered that bundled fibers of actin within a cell nucleus play an important part in how they enlarge after division. Fibers of the structural protein actin stabilize the outer form of the cell and transport substances into a cell. The mechanisms that influence the growth of the cell nucleus after division were less well known by scientists. The researchers have published their results in the journal 'EMBO reports'.

After dividing, cell nuclei have to grow in order to reorganize and unpack the genetic information in chromatin, the basic genetic material, and so process and read it. With this work the scientists show that bundled fibers of actin - which are normally responsible for exercising force - work within the cell to expand the nucleus. Using a video microscope the researchers have measured in living cells how cell nuclei enlarge immediately after division. In order to observe the fibers of actin and skeletal structures in the cell nucleus, they also used a high-resolution super-resolution microscope.

In the future Grosse and his team want to clarify whether mechanical forces work within the cell nucleus to re-organize them to sort the genetic information. If so, this process could for example be disrupted or changed in tumor cells or play a part in stem cells.

The matter between the stars in a galaxy - called the interstellar medium - consists not only of gas, but also of a great deal of dust. At some point in time, stars and planets originated in such an environment, because the dust particles can clump together and merge into celestial bodies. Important chemical processes also take place on these particles, from which complex organic - possibly even prebiotic - molecules emerge. However, for these processes to be possible, there has to be water. In particularly cold cosmic environments, water occurs in the form of ice. Until now, however, the connection between ice and dust in these regions of space was unclear. A research team from Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has now proven that the dust particles and the ice are mixed. They report their findings in the current issue of the research journal Nature Astronomy.

Better modelling of physico-chemical processes in space

"Until now, we didn't know whether ice is physically separated from the dust or mixed with individual dust moieties," explains Dr Alexey Potapov of the University of Jena. "We compared the spectra of laboratory-made silicates, water ice and their mixtures with astronomical spectra of protostellar envelopes and protoplanetary disks. We established that the spectra are congruent if silicate dust and water ice are mixed in these environments."

Astrophysicists can gain valuable information from this data. "We need to understand different physical conditions in different astronomical environments, in order to improve the modelling of physico-chemical processes in space," says Potapov. This result would enable researchers to better estimate the amount of material and to make more accurate statements about the temperatures in different regions of the interstellar and circumstellar media.

Water trapped in dust

Through experiments and comparisons, scientists at the University of Jena also observed what happens with water when the temperatures increase and the ice leaves the solid body to which it is bound and passes into the gas phase at about 180 Kelvin (-93 degrees Celsius).

"Some water molecules are so strongly bound to the silicate that they remain on the surface or inside dust particles," says Potapov. "We suspect that such 'trapped water' also exists on or in dust particles in space. At least that is what is suggested by the comparison between the spectra obtained from the laboratory experiments and those in what is called the diffuse interstellar medium. We found clear indications that trapped water molecules exist there."

The existence of such solid-state water suggests that complex molecules may also be present on the dust particles in the diffuse interstellar medium. If water is present on such particles, it is not a very long way to complex organic molecules, for example. This is because the dust particles usually consist of carbon, among other things, which, in combination with water and under the influence of ultraviolet radiation such as that found in the environment, promotes the formation of methanol, for example. Organic compounds have already been observed in these regions of the interstellar medium, but until now it has not been known where they originated.

The presence of solid-state water can also answer questions about another element: although we know the amount of oxygen in the interstellar medium, we previously had no information about where exactly around a third of it is located. The new research results suggest that the solid-state water in silicates is a hidden reservoir of oxygen.

Does solid-state water help in the formation of planets?

In addition, the "trapped water" can help in understanding how the dust accumulates, as it could promote the sticking together of smaller particles to form larger particles. This effect may even work in planet formation. "If we succeed in proving that 'trapped water' existed - or could exist - in building blocks of the Earth, there might possibly even be new answers to the question of how water came to Earth," says Alexey Potapov. But as yet, these are only suppositions that the Jena researchers want to pursue in the future.

A research project headed by the Technical University of Denmark, DTU, has come up with the formula for a freeze-dried starter culture that African camel milk farmers can use to make safe, fermented milk products.

The majority of the world’s camels are located in East Africa, where they are a common dairy animal. Camel milk constitutes upwards of 9% of the total milk production of Africa. The farmers, who milk the animals, sell much of the milk as a fermented product in local markets or roadside stalls.

The fermentation process occurs spontaneously as the farmers have no cooling facilities. Given that the level of hygiene is often poor, the milk often also contains disease-causing microorganisms such as E.coli and salmonella, which have the opportunity to multiply in the lukewarm milk.

”New” bacteria ferment the milk and increase safety

In a research project, researchers from the National Food Institute, Technical University of Denmark, have managed to find a way of making the milk safer. The research was conducted in partnership with the University of Copenhagen, food ingredient producer Chr. Hansen and Haramaya University in Ethiopia. It was partly funded by Denmark’s development cooperation programme, DANIDA.

The researchers have isolated new strains of lactic acid bacteria from raw camel milk, which can be used in a starter culture that both acidifies the milk and kills off even very large amounts of various disease-causing microorganisms in the milk. To the researchers’ knowledge, this is the first time research has shown that these bacteria can be used to make camel milk products safer to consume.

Research relay race

The research in the five-year project was conducted partly with the help of a number of students at both the Technical University of Denmark and Haramaya University, who—over time—have passed on the baton. In total, ten students from the National Food Institute have spent a semester in Ethiopia, including three Bachelor of Engineering in Food Safety and Quality, who have found the formula for a freeze-dried, quality controlled starter culture based on the bacteria.

The trio's experiments have shown that five liters of milk can make enough starter culture to produce half a million liters of safe, fermented camel milk. However, the researchers responsible for the camel milk project recommend that farmers heat-treat the milk to reduce the amount of disease-causing microorganisms in the milk as much as possible before adding the starter culture.

The three students–Line Kongeskov Frimann, Laura Pontoppidan and Louise Marie Matzen–found it to be an exciting and stimulating challenge to conduct a project of engineering relevance in a cooperation between two such different universities.

Foodborne diseases kill more often in Africa

Countries like Denmark have an effective health system that can quickly help people who are unfortunate enough to get sick from something they eat or drink. However, in Africa, the health care system is less robust. A foodborne illness that causes diarrhea and vomiting can quickly make a patient dehydrated, and without access to medical care, the illness can be fatal.

African researchers estimate that food poisoning kills 137,000 people on the continent annually. For Haramaya University, the project is an important element in the university's work to develop sustainable solutions and increase food safety in Ethiopia.

Read more

The work on isolating the strains from the camel milk is described in further detail in a scientific article in the International Dairy Journal: Antimicrobial activity of novel Lactococcus lactis strains against Salmonella Typhimurium DT12, Escherichia coli O157:H7 VT− and Klebsiella pneumoniae in raw and pasteurised camel milk.

First author Esben Bragason wrote the article during the last semester of his Masters course, while the research laboratories at the DTU were closed down during the spring of 2020—along with much of the rest of Denmark. The article is based on his research, which documents the bacteria strains’ antimicrobial effect.

The project has received approximately 1.1 million Euro in funding from DANIDA. It also received funding from e.g. Laurits Andersen’s Fund. Read about the project in DTU’s research database, DTU Orbit.

Journal

International Dairy Journal

DOI

10.1016/j.idairyj.2020.104832

Philadelphia, September 22, 2020 - Researchers from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have shown there may be key genetic differences in the causes of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) between African Americans and people of European ancestry, which may play an important part in how patients of different ethnic backgrounds respond to treatments for this condition. The findings were published online by the journal Scientific Reports.

Prior studies have suggested that structural variants of the genome play an important role in ADHD. However, these studies focused mainly on coding regions, or regions of DNA or RNA that code for particular proteins, and were also primarily conducted in people of European ancestry.

"We felt as though prior studies of ADHD from a genomic level were not telling the entire story because of whom they were leaving out and what they were studying," said Hakon Hakonarson, MD, PhD, Director of the Center for Applied Genomics (CAG) at the CHOP Research Institute and senior author of the study. "Given the large number of African American individuals we have recruited into our studies, whose genomes are fundamentally more complex than those of European ancestry, we wanted to see if comparing the coding and non-coding regions of the genome in those of African American and European ancestry could help us pinpoint areas of focus for future research efforts."

The CAG team and their collaborators generated whole genome sequence data on 875 participants, including 205 patients diagnosed with ADHD and 670 non-ADHD controls. African Americans represented 116 of the 205 ADHD patients and 408 of the non-ADHD controls.

In addition to confirming several structural variants and target genes associated with ADHD identified in prior studies, the researchers also discovered 40 novel structural variants in patients with ADHD. They identified a cluster of structural variants in the non-coding region of pathways involved in neuronal brain function and highly relevant to the development of ADHD, including gene expression in specific ADHD phenotypes.

There was little overlap (around 6%) in the genes impacted by single nucleotide variants between African American and European ancestry. These differences were especially pronounced in the non-coding structural variants. These variants may also impact how patients respond to medications for ADHD.

"Whole genome sequencing appears to be a valuable discovery tool for studying the molecular mechanisms behind ADHD," Hakonarson said. "Additionally, the inclusion of African Americans, coupled with the study of non-coding regions of the genome, identified several structural variants that warrant further study, as they may impact both susceptibility to ADHD and how patients respond differently to therapeutic intervention."

NASA's Aqua satellite analyzed Tropical Storm Beta in infrared imagery to determine where the strongest parts of the storm were located. Beta is expected to stall inland over Texas today, Sept. 21, and heavy rains will continue over portions of the middle and upper Texas coast.

Beta's center has continued to move farther inland since making landfall on the southern end of the Matagorda Peninsula around 11 p.m. EDT on Sept. 21.

One of the ways NASA researches tropical cyclones is by using infrared data that provides temperature information. The AIRS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a look at those temperatures in Beta and gave insight into the size of the storm and its rainfall potential.

Infrared Data Shows Storms with Greatest Rainfall Potential

Cloud top temperatures provide information to forecasters about where the strongest storms are located within a tropical cyclone. Tropical cyclones do not always have uniform strength, and some sides are stronger than others. The stronger the storms, the higher they extend into the troposphere, and the colder the cloud top temperatures. NASA provides that data to forecasters at NOAA's National Hurricane Center or NHC so they can incorporate into their forecasting.

The heavy rains that have been occurring over the Texas coast were found in infrared imagery from NASA. On Sept. 21 at 3:29 p.m. EDT (1929 UTC) NASA's Aqua satellite analyzed Tropical Storm Beta using the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument. AIRS found coldest cloud top temperatures as cold as or colder than minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius) around the center and in a thick band of storms southeast of Beta's center. Those storms were just offshore from southeastern Louisiana and over the northern Gulf of Mexico. NASA research has shown that cloud top temperatures that cold indicate strong storms that have the capability to create heavy rain.

This snapshot of the storms that have the greatest rainfall potential help forecasters determine what areas are more subject to flooding. NOAA's GOES-East satellite stays in a fixed position over the eastern U.S. and provides continuous infrared imagery that enables forecasters to see the movement of the areas of strongest storms.

Warnings and Watches on Sept. 21

NOAA's National Hurricane Center issued a Storm Surge Warning on Sept. 21 from Sargent, Texas to Sabine Pass including Galveston Bay. A Tropical Storm Warning is in effect from Port Aransas, Texas to Sabine Pass.

Beta's Status of Sept. 10

By 8 a.m. EDT CDT (1200 UTC), the center of Tropical Storm Beta was located by surface observations and NOAA Doppler radars near latitude 28.8 degrees north and longitude 96.8 degrees west. That is about 10 miles (15 km) east-southeast of Victoria and about 35 miles (55 km) west of Palacios, Texas.

Beta is moving toward the northwest near 3 mph (6 kph). Maximum sustained winds are near 40 mph (65 km/h) with higher gusts. Beta is likely to begin weakening later today. The estimated minimum central pressure is 999 millibars.

Beta's Forecast

NHC expects Beta to stall inland over Texas today but will then begin to move slowly toward the east-northeast tonight.  An east-northeast to northeast motion with increasing forward speed is expected Wednesday through Friday. On the forecast track, the center of Beta will move inland over southeastern Texas through Wednesday and then over Louisiana and Mississippi Wednesday night through Friday (Sept. 25).

NHC Key Messages

The National Hurricane Center issued three Key Messages about Beta:

Significant flash and urban flooding is occurring and will continue for the middle and upper Texas coast today. The slow motion of Beta will continue to produce a long duration rainfall event from the middle Texas coast to southern Louisiana. Flash, urban, and minor river flooding is likely. Periods of rainfall will continue into the ArkLaTex region and spread east into the Lower Mississippi Valley and portions of the Southeast through the end of the week. Flash, urban, and isolated minor river flooding is possible.
Storm surge flooding will continue throughout the morning, around the times of high tide along portions of the Texas coast within the storm surge warning areas. Residents in these areas should continue to follow advice of local officials.
Tropical-storm-force winds will continue near portions of the Texas coast within the warning area today.

NASA Researches Tropical Cyclones

Hurricanes/tropical cyclones are the most powerful weather events on Earth. NASA's expertise in space and scientific exploration contributes to essential services provided to the American people by other federal agencies, such as hurricane weather forecasting.

The AIRS instrument is one of six instruments flying on board NASA's Aqua satellite, launched on May 4, 2002.

For more than five decades, NASA has used the vantage point of space to understand and explore our home planet, improve lives and safeguard our future. NASA brings together technology, science, and unique global Earth observations to provide societal benefits and strengthen our nation. Advancing knowledge of our home planet contributes directly to America's leadership in space and scientific exploration.

For updated forecasts, visit: http://www.hurricanes.gov

By Rob Gutro
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Cheating mitochondria may take advantage of cellular mechanisms for coping with food scarcity in a simple worm to persist, even though this can reduce the worm's wellbeing.

These findings, published today in eLife, may help shed light on the evolution of cheating and cooperative behaviours within different organisms.

Mitochondria are energy-producing units within cells that likely evolved from bacteria. They have their own DNA, take in resources from cells, and in exchange provide the cell with energy. But some so-called 'cheater mitochondria' have harmful DNA mutations that may reduce their energy output and harm the organism. Why these cheater mitochondria persist despite their harm to the larger organism is not currently clear.

"Cooperation and cheating are widespread evolutionary strategies," says lead author Bryan Gitschlag, a PhD student at the Department of Biological Sciences, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. "While cheating confers an advantage to individual entities within a group, competition between groups favours cooperation."

Gitschlag and his colleagues studied the roundworm Caenorhabiditis elegans to see how competing evolutionary pressures within its cells and in its environment might enable the cheater mitochondria to persist.

They measured the levels of cheater and typical mitochondria in the worm's cells. They found that, within the cells, a protein called DAF-16, which helps cells to survive stress, is necessary for cheater mitochondria to multiply. When the worms face food shortages, cheater mitochondria become more harmful to their hosts, but only in those lacking DAF-16. "This shows that food scarcity can strengthen evolutionary selection against worms carrying cheater mitochondria, but DAF-16 protects them from it," Gitschlag explains.

The results suggest that competing selection pressures within an organism and in its environment may shed light on why selfishness and cooperation often exist side-by-side among populations.

"The ability to cope with scarcity can promote group-level tolerance to cheating, inadvertently prolonging cheater persistence," says senior author Maulik Patel, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences at Vanderbilt University.

"As selfish mitochondrial genomes are implicated in numerous disorders, and cheating is a widespread evolutionary strategy, it will be interesting to apply our methods to study a broader collection of cheating variants and host species. This could allow us to better understand the development of mitochondrial disorders or the evolutionary principles underlying cooperation and cheating," Patel concludes.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Mushroom-munching bonobos in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have introduced scientists to a new species of truffle.

Commonly used by Congolese communities to bait traps for small mammals, Hysterangium bonobo is also savored by bonobos, an endangered species of great ape. Scientists say the truffle hints at vast reserves of undescribed fungal diversity in the region.

"Truffles aren't just for gourmet chefs - they're also for our closest relatives," said Matthew Smith, an associate professor in the University of Florida department of plant pathology and curator of the UF fungal herbarium. "There's so much to learn about this system, and we're just scratching the surface."

Edible mushrooms widely prized for their aromas, truffles are often ecosystem linchpins, and H. bonobo is no exception. Although it looks like a homely potato, it plays a key role in enabling trees to absorb nutrients from the soil and supports the diets of animals. Its irregularly shaped outer layer is also lined with microscopic crystal-encrusted filaments, possibly used for defense or aroma diffusion.

Although previous studies have reported bonobos eating truffles, this is the first such species identified.

H. bonobo may be a new species to science, but it's well known to local communities as "simbokilo," a Bantu name linked to a longer phrase roughly translated as "Don't let your brother-in-law leave because traps baited with this will bring in plenty of food."

"Kokolopori people have celebrated their interdependence with bonobos for generations," said Albert Lotana Lokasola, a graduate student at the University of Kisangani in northern Congo and a study co-author. "Our traditional knowledge of the diets of animals such as bonobos, duikers and rodents that includes food items new to science should be valued, preserved and protected."

Smith said bonobos likely locate H. bonobo by catching its smell wafting through the air or by digging in the soil and sniffing their hands. The truffles are small enough to be swallowed whole, and their microscopic spores are kept intact by thick cell walls as they journey through a bonobo's digestive tract. Although little is known about the species, Smith said that the truffle shares a number of characteristics with those of high culinary value.

"Even though some truffles are specialized food items, they all evolved in a similar way," said Smith, who is also an affiliate associate curator in the Florida Museum of Natural History. "They smelled really good, so animals dug them up and spread the spores around."

Study co-author Alexander Georgiev, a primatologist at Bangor University in Wales, collected samples of the truffles after he observed a group of wild bonobos eating them in Congo's Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve. He hoped a collaborator could identify the species, not knowing it was undescribed.

"Why they eat these, I'm not sure," he said. "Perhaps they like the taste of them. I personally love mushrooms and have never considered what I get out of them nutritionally. They just taste amazing."

Georgiev said although he had never seen bonobos feed on truffles before, the local team of field assistants helping track them "instantly knew what was going on."

"It's important to realize that even though this paper presents a 'novel' interaction and the description of a 'new' species for the Western scientific community, in reality these are interconnected associations that have been known about for untold generations by the locals in the region," added Todd Elliott, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of New England in Australia and the study's lead author. "As foreign scientists, we must take the time to ask and learn from indigenous people and locals in areas where we work because they usually intimately know about the organisms that we think are new."

The sounds, the lights, the layout, even the smells of the Montreal Casino have all been carefully crafted to entice gamers inside, and to keep them there as long as possible.

This scenario is not unique to Montreal, of course. Casinos worldwide do the same. But a group of three researchers from Concordia’s Centre for Sensory Studies recently completed a study that looks at how all the specific techniques the local casino uses to create a “sensuous” gambling experience affect the client.

The authors argue that their ethnographic study is among the first to explore how these sensory design techniques work together to shape the atmosphere of the casino.

The paper, published in the journal The Senses and Society, is a sensory ethnography of the Montreal Casino: a field study conducted with and through the senses. It paints a vivid picture of the casino experience during its “Vegas Nights” promotional events in September and October 2019. The researchers note details as minute as the additional bounce visitors get from extra-plush carpets to the labyrinthine layout of the slots section and difficult-to-find exits.

“In recent years there has been an explosion of experiential design in casinos, where what is being offered is not just an activity but an experience that appeals to the senses,” says interdisciplinary scholar Erin Lynch, a senior fellow at the Centre for Sensory Studies and the paper’s lead author.

“We wanted to take this relational and contextual approach and look at how the senses mix and mingle within the casino environment. We also investigated how various actors such as patrons and employees co-produce that atmosphere.”

David Howes, a professor of anthropology and the co-director of the centre, and associate professor of sociology Martin French co-authored the study.

Embracing the experience

By conducting their study during the Casino’s Vegas Nights, the authors witnessed first-hand the supercharged kitsch and fun that comes when the ordinary casino experience meets drag queens, magicians, sugary Vegas-style cocktails, an abundance of deep-fried food and more. It was a “buffet of over-the-top spectacles and sensations,” they write.

“The Vegas Nights theme appeals to the bacchanalian, more-is-more aesthetic that comes from the actual Las Vegas, and it is also interesting as a theming exercise,” Lynch explains. “Vegas pretends to be somewhere else all the time — Paris, Venice, Egypt. So, when in Vegas you are being somewhere that’s pretending to be somewhere else. Vegas Nights at the Montreal Casino pushes this even further, being a copy of a copy.”

Hazard play

The researchers also passed time at the Casino’s Centre du hasard, its responsible gaming station. This government-mandated information kiosk is supposed to raise the curtains on certain aspects of gaming in order to demystify the experience and create awareness about the riskiness of gambling-related behaviour. While there are superficial similarities to the actual gaming areas, such as touchscreens and spinning wheels, the centre “feels clinical in nature,” they write.

“As a source of information competing for visitor attention in a sea of in-your-face entertainment, the sedate aesthetics of the Centre du hasard feel distinctly out of place.”

While their paper takes a critical look at some of gambling’s hazards, the researchers also argue that the fun side of the casino experience needs to be better understood.

Indeed while gambling studies have tended to focus on the pathologies of play, the “pleasurable experiences associated with gambling are under-studied,” according to French. “Industry has monopolized discourses of pleasure, and academics have abandoned this terrain. Our study, led by Erin, pulls us back into this terrain. It shows how social science can talk about pleasure in the context of gambling but also retain a critical edge.”

This study was made possible by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC).

Read the cited paper: “A touch of luck and a ‘real taste of Vegas’: a sensory ethnography of the Montreal Casino.” [free access until October 15, 2020 courtesy of the publisher]

Attend Erin Lynch’s (virtual) lecture on October 15, the fifth in the nine-part Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC)  Virtual Happenings Lecture Series on the theme of ATMOSPHERES.

Read about the work of the Concordia Centre for Sensory Studies.

Journal

The Senses and Society

DOI

10.1080/17458927.2020.1773641