Earth

Estimating the motion of a moving camera is a ubiquitous problem in the field of computer vision. With technology such as self-driving cars and autonomous drones becoming more popular, fast and efficient algorithms enabling on-board video processing are needed to return timely and accurate information at a low computational cost. This estimation of camera movement, or 'pose estimation', is also a crucial component of target tracking aboard moving vehicles or platforms.

Researchers at Brigham Young University, who have published their results in IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica, a joint publication by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. They have found a way to greatly reduce the computation time and complexity of pose estimation by cleverly 'seeding' an algorithm already in use in the computer vision industry.

Pose estimation algorithms utilize frames of a video feed from a moving camera to generate hypotheses for how the camera has moved over the course of each consecutive frame. Until now, algorithms used for pose estimation required the generation of up to five to ten hypotheses for how the camera was moving given the data in the video feed. These hypotheses were then scored by how well they fit the data, with the highest scoring hypothesis being chosen as the best pose estimate. Unfortunately, the generation of multiple hypotheses is computationally expensive and results in slower return time for robust pose estimation.

Researchers have found a way to seed, or give hints to, an already used algorithm in computer vision by feeding it information in between each frame, thus greatly reducing the need for generating many hypotheses. "At each iteration, we use the current best hypothesis to seed the algorithm." The reduction of required hypotheses directly results in reduced computation time and complexity; "we show that this approach significantly reduces the number of hypotheses that must be generated and scored to estimate the pose, thus allowing real-time execution of the algorithm."

The team then compared their seeding method to other state of the art pose estimation algorithms to classify how reducing the number of hypotheses affected the accuracy of the computation. "After 100 iterations, error for the seeding methods that use prior information is comparable to the OpenCV five-point polynomial solver, despite the fact that only one hypothesis is generated per iteration instead of an average of about four hypotheses." Furthermore, when the two algorithms were examined in time, the teams' algorithm significantly outperformed other state of the art methods. In most cases, the new algorithm was ten times faster.

The group then modified their algorithm to enable target tracking and tested it on a multi-rotor UAV. The algorithm successfully tracked multiple targets at 640 x 480 resolution. The results were consistent with their earlier analysis. "The complete algorithm takes 29 milliseconds to run per frame, which means it is capable of running in real-time at 34 frames per second (FPS)." As for what's next, the team plans on applications to 3D scene reconstruction and more complex tracking methods.

New research has shown some of our least favourite vegetables could be the most beneficial when it comes to preventing advanced blood vessel disease.

Published in the British Journal of Nutrition the research has found higher consumption of cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli, Brussels sprouts and cabbage, is associated with less extensive blood vessel disease in older women.

Using data from a cohort of 684 older Western Australian women recruited in 1998, researchers from ECU's School of Medical and Health Sciences and The University of Western Australia found those with a diet comprising more cruciferous vegetables had a lower chance of having extensive build-up of calcium on their aorta, a key marker for structural blood vessel disease.

Blood vessel disease is a condition that affects our blood vessels (arteries and veins) and can reduce the flow of blood circulating around the body. This reduction in blood flow can be due to the build-up of fatty, calcium deposits on the inner walls of our blood vessels, such as the aorta. This build-up of fatty, calcium deposits is the leading cause of having a heart attack or stroke.

Broccoli and Brussels sprouts a cut above

Lead researcher Dr Lauren Blekkenhorst said there was something intriguing about cruciferous vegetables which this study has shed more light on.

"In our previous studies, we identified those with a higher intake of these vegetables had a reduced risk of having a clinical cardiovascular disease event, such as a heart attack or stroke, but we weren't sure why," she said.

"Our findings from this new study provides insight into the potential mechanisms involved."

"We have now found that older women consuming higher amounts of cruciferous vegetables every day have lower odds of having extensive calcification on their aorta," she said.

"One particular constituent found abundantly in cruciferous vegetables is vitamin K which may be involved in inhibiting the calcification process that occurs in our blood vessels."

Eat an extra serve of greens every day

Dr Blekkenhorst said women in this study who consumed more than 45g of cruciferous vegetables every day (e.g. ¼ cup of steamed broccoli or ½ cup of raw cabbage) were 46 percent less likely to have extensive build-up of calcium on their aorta in comparison to those consuming little to no cruciferous vegetables every day.

"That's not to say the only vegetables we should be eating are broccoli, cabbage and Brussels sprouts. We should be eating a wide variety of vegetables every day for overall good health and wellbeing."

Dr Blekkenhorst said it was important to note the study team were very grateful to these Western Australian women, without whom these important findings would not be available for others. While observational in nature this study design is central to progressing human health.

Research welcomed by the Heart Foundation

Heart Foundation Manager, Food and Nutrition, Beth Meertens said the findings were promising and the Heart Foundation would like to see more research in this area.

"This study provides valuable insights into how this group of vegetables might contribute to the health of our arteries and ultimately our heart," Ms Meertens said.

"Heart disease is the single leading cause of death in Australia and poor diet is responsible for the largest proportion of the burden of heart disease, accounting for 65.5 percent of the total burden of heart disease.

"The Heart Foundation recommends that Australians try to include at least five serves of vegetables in their daily diets, along with fruit, seafood, lean meats, dairy and healthy oils found in nuts and seeds. Unfortunately, over 90 percent of Australian adults don't eat this recommended daily intake of vegetables."

A new study from The University of Texas at Austin is helping scientists piece together the ancient climate of Mars by revealing how much rainfall and snowmelt filled its lake beds and river valleys 3.5 billion to 4 billion years ago.

The study, published in Geology, represents the first time that researchers have quantified the precipitation that must have been present across the planet, and it comes out as the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover is making its way to the red planet to land in one of the lake beds crucial to this new research.

The ancient climate of Mars is something of an enigma to scientists. To geologists, the existence of riverbeds and paleolakes -- eons-old lake basins -- paints a picture of a planet with significant rainfall or snowmelt. But scientists who specialize in computer climate models of the planet have been unable to reproduce an ancient climate with large amounts of liquid water present for long enough to account for the observed geology.

"This is extremely important because 3.5 to 4 billion years ago Mars was covered with water. It had lots of rain or snowmelt to fill those channels and lakes," said lead author Gaia Stucky de Quay, a postdoctoral fellow at UT's Jackson School of Geosciences. "Now it's completely dry. We're trying to understand how much water was there and where did it all go."

Although scientists have found large amounts of frozen water on Mars, no significant amount of liquid water currently exists.

In the study, researchers found that precipitation must have been between 13 and 520 feet (4 to 159 meters) in a single episode to fill the lakes and, in some cases, provide enough water to overflow and breach the lake basins. Although the range is large, it can be used to help understand which climate models are accurate, Stucky de Quay said.

"It's a huge cognitive dissonance," she said. "Climate models have trouble accounting for that amount of liquid water at that time. It's like, liquid water is not possible, but it happened. This is the knowledge gap that our work is trying to fill in."

The scientists looked at 96 open-basin and closed-basin lakes and their watersheds, all thought to have formed between 3.5 billion and 4 billion years ago. Open lakes are those that have ruptured by overflowing water; closed ones, on the other hand, are intact. Using satellite images and topography, they measured lake and watershed areas, and lake volumes, and accounted for potential evaporation to figure out how much water was needed to fill the lakes.

By looking at ancient closed and open lakes, and the river valleys that fed them, the team was able to determine a minimum and maximum precipitation. The closed lakes offer a glimpse at the maximum amount of water that could have fallen in a single event without breaching the side of the lake basin. The open lakes show the minimum amount of water required to overtop the lake basin, causing the water to rupture a side and rush out.

In 13 cases, researchers discovered coupled basins -- containing one closed and one open basin that were fed by the same river valleys -- which offered key evidence of both maximum and minimum precipitation in one single event.

Another great unknown is how long the rainfall or snowmelt episode must have lasted: days, years or thousands of years. That's the next step of the research, Stucky de Quay said.

As this research is published, NASA recently launched Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover to visit Jezero crater, which contains one of the open lake beds used in the study. Co-author Tim Goudge, an assistant professor in the UT Jackson School Department of Geological Sciences, was the lead scientific advocate for the landing site. He said the data collected by the crater could be significant for determining how much water was on Mars and whether there are signs of past life.

"Gaia's study takes previously identified closed and open lake basins, but applies a clever new approach to constrain how much precipitation these lakes experienced," Goudge said. "Not only do these results help us to refine our understanding of the ancient Mars climate, but they also will be a great resource for putting results from the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover into a more global context."

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- While many academic institutions are searching for ways to prevent sexual assault and sexual coercion among their faculty members, staff and students, they are failing to address the most common forms of gender-based harassment, say experts who study harassment and discrimination at work and in academic and health care settings.

In an opinion published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the experts focus on behaviors that communicate derision, disgust or disrespect for members of one sex or gender group.

"By far the most prevalent form of sexual harassment is the put-down, or what social scientists call gender harassment: comments, cartoons, jokes, gestures and other insults," the researchers wrote. "Sometimes the put-downs are sexually degrading and crude, and other times they are contemptuous without sexual content."

"Gender-based harassment is insidious because it's not always distinguishable from criticism or rudeness," said Kathryn Clancy, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the first author of the report. "How do you report that someone told you that you have a 'mommy brain'? Or that you are hard to listen to with your high-pitched voice?"

Over time, these kinds of harassment cause targets to doubt themselves and their worth, making them withdraw from work or even leave, said Clancy, who wrote the report with Lilia Cortina, a professor of psychology and of women's studies at the University of Michigan; and Anna Kirkland, a professor of women's studies and of health management and policy at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health.

Unfortunately, many institutions choose to look for quick fixes or procedures that reduce their legal liability, Clancy said.

"It's easy to think that complying with the law means you are doing what you need to do to eliminate sexual harassment on your campus," she said. "But 30 years of research suggests the opposite. An over-focus on legal compliance leaves victims behind and can harm entire communities who are not served by conservative interpretations of the law and formal reporting processes."

Clancy and her colleagues make several recommendations to academic institutions hoping to address the problem. Many of the recommendations are drawn from a 2018 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. One suggested approach involves working to change the culture of problematic departments by including information about how individuals behave toward others in weighing decisions about hiring, promotions, the giving of awards and special appointments.

"Courageous leaders deal directly with problematic faculty or staff, rather than abdicating responsibility to a formal reporting process that is unlikely to lead to a finding," Clancy said. "They need to initiate conversations early and often, and if instigators are unwilling to change, leaders should consider graded consequences for their actions."

Deans, directors and department heads can "withhold perks from those who are relentlessly rude," the experts wrote. "No more corner offices, primo parking spaces or appointments to important committees."

Academic institutions should not invest in quick fixes like packaged video or online trainings created by outside consultants with little expertise in sexual victimization. Instead, they suggest that such training be grounded in research, conducted by a live instructor, interactively involve participants and last longer than four hours.

The most important thing institutions can do to reduce the kind of harassment that, unfortunately, is all-too-common in academia is to change the character, quality and diversity of their leadership, Clancy said.

"Academia has the second-highest rate of sexual harassment, after the military," she said. "We condone and even reward selfishness, rudeness and unhealthy forms of competition. We need brave leaders who are willing to change incentive structures and cherish their brave whistleblowers, caring mentors and collegial staff and faculty."

Scientists from the ESRF, together with teams from CEA and CNRS/Sorbonne Université, have found the proof for a liquid-to-liquid transition in sulfur and of a new kind of critical point ending this transition. Their work is published in Nature.

Everywhere in the environment phase transitions occur constantly. The best-known examples of phase transitions are when water changes state from solid to liquid or gas to liquid at 0°C and 100°C, respectively, at atmospheric pressure. Despite the prevalence of these events in nature, scientists still do not fully understand how these transitions take place at the microscopic level.

Among the many cases of phase transitions, those that involve a latent heat and a discontinuous change of density are termed as first-order. First-order transitions are very common in the solid state, and include for example the one from graphite to diamond, and the semiconductor to metal transition in silicon.

However, for years no one thought there could be any kind of first order transition separating two liquid phases of the same pure and isotropic substance. With the new millennia, things changed. A Nature paper in the year 2000 by Y. Katayama et al., from the Japanese synchrotron Spring-8, gave evidence of a liquid-to-liquid transition undergone in phosphorus. "It was a real breakthrough, as it changed the way the liquid state was perceived by the scientific community", explains Mohamed Mezouar, scientist in charge of beamline ID27 at the ESRF and corresponding author of the new publication. "Today we show the second direct evidence of such a transition in liquid sulfur", adds Mezouar. "We chose sulfur because sulfur and phosphorus exhibit important similarities when subjected to high pressures and temperatures", he explains. "Besides, I knew it was a good candidate as it already showed an interesting variety of solid forms, either molecular or polymeric, crystalline or amorphous". Sulfur is also one of the most important elements, being used in many applications such as rubber tyres, sulfuric acid, fertilizers, etc.

If scientists have not been able to find proof of other liquid-liquid transition in any other pure and stable liquid since 2000, it is because this type of transformation is scarce and poorly understood yet. Calculations have predicted transitions to occur in liquid hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide but at very high pressure and temperature conditions, still difficult to probe. The experiments of the current publication took place on ID27, where the ESRF team, together with scientists from the CEA and the CNRS/Sorbonne Université in Paris, applied pressure to liquid sulfur and observed in situ how it evolved at temperatures up to 1000 degrees Celsius and pressures up to 20 kilobars. "The experiments were challenging because we had to confine liquid sulfur and perform in situ quantitative X-ray measurements of high accuracy", explains Laura Henry, PhD student at the time and first author.

First evidence of a liquid-liquid critical point: the singularity of the transition

After finding the evidence for the liquid-liquid transition, the team were in for a surprise. Fréderic Datchi, CNRS research director at "Sorbonne Université" recalls: "Completely unexpectedly, there it was, we found what we know as a 'critical point', a singularity where physical properties change drastically". At the critical point, the change in density between the two liquids vanishes, thus one may go continuously from one phase to the other. However close to it, the system "hesitates" between the two states, producing large density fluctuations, a phenomenon known as critical opalescence. Supercritical liquids, that is liquids pressurized and heated above the "normal" liquid-gas critical point are heavily used in the chemical industry because they are very good solvents. On the other hand, the critical point terminating a liquid-liquid transition was to date only a theoretical object. Its existence in liquid water was conjectured to explain its many physical anomalies, and actively searched for in experiments since the 1990's, so far without success.

This thus constitutes the first experimental evidence of the existence of a liquid-liquid critical point in any system so far. As it is located in a pressure-temperature domain accessible by experiment, it provides a unique opportunity for the study of critical phenomena associated to LLTs and has thus a general value beyond the specific sulfur system.

EBS: taking phase transitions to the next level

With the Extremely Brilliant Source, the new generation of synchrotron machine of the ESRF, experiments on liquid-liquid transition will go into more depth: the increase in photon flux and coherence will allow scientists to track very rapid phenomena, and hence observe the fluctuations around the critical point.

"In the larger sense, this research can open doors to understanding the complexity of the liquid state of other important systems such as water", concludes Mezouar.

"Spinocerebellar ataxias" are diseases of the nervous system associated with a loss of motor coordination. A European research alliance headed by the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) and the University of Bonn has now registered whether and how symptoms of ataxia developed over the years in around 250 persons at risk, who initially did not show symptoms. This is the first study worldwide to investigate the onset of spinocerebellar ataxia directly and in a large group of individuals. The results published in the journal The Lancet Neurology provide valuable data for prevention studies.

The term "ataxia" - which is derived from the Greek expression for "lack of order" - describes a series of nervous diseases in which the interplay between different muscle groups and, as a result, movement coordination is impaired. "Ataxia manifests as motor disorders such as gait insecurity and a tendency to fall. Handwriting becomes blurred and gripping and holding, for example cutlery, gets difficult. Also, speech can become unclear and blurred," explained Prof. Thomas Klockgether, Director of the Department of Neurology at the University Hospital Bonn and Director of Clinical Research at the DZNE.

Slow development

Ataxias are among the "rare diseases" and are estimated to affect around 16,000 people in Germany. Various causes are known for the associated damage to the cerebellum and spinal cord. So far, however, it is only possible to alleviate disease symptoms. "Many ataxias are caused by genetic defects. Other forms of ataxia are acquired and may be triggered, for example, by immune processes or vitamin deficiencies," said Klockgether.

In general, ataxias develop slowly, over years. In the subgroup of "spinocerebellar ataxias", which belong to the hereditary ataxias, marked symptoms usually do not appear until adult age. "During the presymptomatic phase, nerve damage is still slight. It is assumed that during this period the chances of influencing the later course of the disease and possibly slowing it down, that is acting preventively, are best," Klockgether continued. "In addition to better early diagnosis, the development of therapies also requires a more precise understanding of the progression of the disease. This allows identifying time windows in which a treatment has a chance of success."

Largest study so far

Significant findings in this regard are now provided by the largest study to date on the onset of spinocerebellar ataxias. The data were collected by a research network coordinated by Thomas Klockgether, which includes 14 scientific institutions from seven European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Spain). In total, the researchers studied 252 adults - all of them children or siblings of people with spinocerebellar ataxia and therefore persons at risk - to determine how their movement coordination developed over a period of several years. The study, which started enrolling volunteers in 2008, covers the four most common types of spinocerebellar ataxia: These are designated SCA1, SCA2, SCA3 and SCA6 according to international nomenclature.

At the beginning of the study, none of the participants showed ataxia. However, about half of them were "mutation carriers", i.e. they had ataxia triggering gene variants. These genetic findings were anonymised in order not to influence data analysis. About half of the mutation carriers actually developed symptoms of the disease during the study period. "For the remaining mutation carriers, this is also expected. We will continue to monitor the health development of all study participants," said Klockgether.

Better biomarkers needed

The now available results provide precise data on the progression from the presymptomatic phase to the emergence of disease symptoms. "Our study now shows that with the established tests of movement coordination, ataxia can actually not be detected until the disease is relatively advanced. This would be too late for early intervention. Thus, there is an urgent need for additional biomarkers that are indicative even before the onset of clinical symptoms," said Dr. Heike Jacobi, a physician at the University Hospital of Heidelberg, who shares the first authorship of the current publication with a French colleague. Ideally, readings derived from a simple blood sample would be the best option. Brain scans could also possibly provide valuable clues, according to Jacobi. "Some of our study participants were examined by magnetic resonance imaging. We tend to see that in some forms of ataxia certain regions of the brain shrink even before symptoms of ataxia manifest. However, since our sample of MRI scans was relatively small, this effect should be checked in larger study groups."

Bases for the development of therapies

For prevention studies, the current results provide valuable information. Such studies are planned in detail. "For this, it is important to estimate how large a study group needs to be in order to be able to establish within a certain period of time whether a new drug is effective. Our findings now provide for the first time data that allow such a calculation," said Klockgether. About 170 to 270 mutation carriers should be included in such studies in order to be able to expect a statistically significant delay in the onset of the disease over a trial period of two years. The exact size of the study group depends on the type of ataxia. "For the treatment of spinocerebellar ataxia experimental approaches exist that aim to reduce the effect of the disease-causing gene mutations. The pharmaceutical industry is planning clinical studies on this. Our results provide important bases for the design of such trials," said Klockgether.

Associate Professor Scott Bryan, who has been studying the impact of pumice rafts for nearly 20 years, was part of an international team that earlier this year used underwater robots with cameras and sampling gear to collect material from the volcano near Tonga that produced the raft that at one stage was twice the size of Manhattan.

The unnamed volcano, which is known only as Volcano F or 0403-091, became the centre of international headlines last year when Shannon Lenz's video footage of the giant pumice raft, and the first-hand accounts of Australian sailors Michael Hoult and Larissa Brill, went viral.

Pumice, a lightweight bubble-rich rock that can float in water, forms when frothy magma cools rapidly.

Professor Bryan said the pumice had started arriving on Australia's shoreline by April, and had spread out along an area from about Townsville to northern New South Wales.

"Pumice rafts alone won't help mitigate directly the effects of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef," Professor Bryan said.

"This is about a boost of new recruits, of new corals and other reef-building organisms, that happens every five years or so. It's almost like a vitamin shot for the Great Barrier Reef."

Professor Bryan published world-first research in 2004 of a previous eruption from the same volcano and last month published research in the journal Frontiers in Earth Science examining pumice rafts following the 2012 eruption of the Havre volcano.

Professor Bryan described the process of the pumice raft boosting the Great Barrier Reef as part of a "very ancient process" in which oceans and volcanoes have likely combined to transfer marine life around the Earth for hundreds of millions of years.

"This shows that the Great Barrier Reef has connections to coral reefs that are thousands of kilometres further east," he said.

"In terms of the health of the Great Barrier Reef, it's also important that these distant reefs are taken care of."

Earlier this year, Professor Bryan was part of an international research team, including Professor Matt Dunbabin from QUT's Centre for Robotics, which received funding from the National Environment Research Council UK (https://nerc.ukri.org/funding/available/researchgrants/urgency/) to explore the underwater volcano and examine the eruption site.

"It was really our first chance to go and explore the summit of this underwater volcano," Professor Bryan said.

"We were able to send underwater robots down with cameras and sampling gear to collect material from the actual volcano that produced this pumice raft last year.

"It's allowed us to see what these volcanoes look like underwater.

"It's a volcano that's getting close to breaching the surface and will become an island in years to come.

"We've been able to see how life has come back to the summit of this volcano after this eruption, and see that restoration of life," he said.

"One of the advantages of our trip to Tonga is that for the first time we've been able to collect samples from the vent, from the seafloor so soon after the eruption."

Professor Bryan now has four groups of pumice from the August eruption to study and compare: the pumice collected from the sea by the Australian sailors shortly after the eruption; the pumice that sunk directly at the eruption site; pumice that washed up in Fiji a month later, and the pumice that has travelled more than 3000 km to land on Australia's coastline.

"We don't understand why some pumice sinks during the eruption at the location and others can float for many months and years on the world's oceans," Professor Bryan said.

"This will help us understand the mechanisms and dynamics of these explosive eruptions and understand better why these eruptions produce potentially hazardous pumice rafts."

Professor Bryan published world-first research in 2004 of a previous eruption from the same volcano. The research shows how pumice waves from the south-west Pacific could not only be something that helps the Great Barrier Reef but also supported earlier ideas on how the reef was formed in the first place.

Professor Bryan has been collecting pieces of pumice from the eruption as they arrive on the beaches in south-east Queensland, and is examining the marine organisms to determine when in the journey they latched on for the ride.

"Overall, we've identified more than one hundred different species attached to the pumice - a tremendous diversity of plants and animals," Professor Bryan said.

"Anything that is looking for a home out in the ocean tends to find a home on this pumice.

"Each piece of pumice has its own little community that has been transported across the world's oceans - and we have had trillions of pieces of this pumice floating out there following the eruption.

"Each piece of pumice is a home, and a vehicle for an organism, and it's just tremendous. The sheer numbers of individuals and this diversity of species is being transported thousands of kilometres in only a matter of months is really quite phenomenal."

Professor Bryan said the tools to track pumice rafts had changed dramatically since he began exploring this area of research.

"How I got into this was walking along a beach in 2002 and seeing a line of pumice that had washed up on the shore thinking this had come from an eruption but I don't know where," he said.

With this most recent eruption, unlike in 2002, he was able to work with QUT spatial scientist Dr Andrew Fletcher to use high-resolution daily satellite images to follow the pumice raft for weeks after the eruption.

Part of the research project ahead will be to examine the chemical composition of the pumice from the 2019 eruption, and compare it to the pumice produced in the 2001 eruption.

"Given the volcano erupted 18 years ago, we want to know whether this is left-over magma from 2001 that has erupted now, or is it a totally new batch of magma that has arrived at the volcano causing the eruption," Professor Bryan said. "This can then give us insights into how volcanoes work and what the triggers are for eruption."

Toddlers with high daily touchscreen use are faster to find targets that stood out during visual search compared to toddlers with no or low touchscreen use - according to new research.

The research team, co-led by Dr Rachael Bedford of the University of Bath's Department of Psychology, say the findings are important for the growing debate around the impact of screen time on toddlers and their development.

Lead researcher Professor Tim Smith, from Birkbeck's Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, said: "The use of smartphones and tablets by babies and toddlers has accelerated rapidly in recent years. The first few years of life are critical for children to develop the ability to focus their attention on relevant information and ignore distraction, early skills that are known to be important for later academic achievement. There has been growing concern that toddler touchscreen use may negatively impact their developing attention but this fear is not based on empirical evidence."

To provide such evidence, Professor Smith's TABLET Project, at Birkbeck's Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, recruited 12-month-old infants who had different levels of touchscreen usage.

The study followed them over the next 2.5 years, bringing them into the lab at 18 months and 3.5 years. At the 18-month and 3.5-year visits, toddlers took part in a computer task in which they were trained to search for a red apple amongst a varying number of either blue apples (easy search), or blue apples and red apple slices (difficult search). An eye tracker monitored their gaze and visually rewarded the child when they found the red apple, allowing them to perform the task even though they were too young to verbally describe what they were doing.

Co-investigator Dr Bedford commented: "We found that at both 18 months and 3.5 years the high touchscreen users were faster than the low users to find the red apple when it stood out amongst blue apples. There was no difference between the user groups when the apple was harder to find. What we need to know next is whether this attention difference is advantageous or detrimental to their everyday life. It is important we understand how to use this modern technology in a way that maximizes benefits and minimizes any negative consequences."

Dr Ana Maria Portugal, main researcher on the project points out "We are currently unable to conclude that the touchscreen use caused the differences in attention as it may also be that children who are generally more attracted to bright, colourful features seek out touchscreen devices more than those who are not."

BUFFALO, N.Y. - Researchers for years have understood how attitudes held with certainty might predict behavior, but a series of new studies led by a University at Buffalo psychologist suggest there may be a more general disposition at work that predicts the certainty of newly formed evaluations, just as they do for pre-existing opinions.

The findings, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, could help polling researchers and others interested in studying attitudes gain insights on a variety of matters -- including those they aren't directly measuring.

Attitudes are our personal evaluations -- of anything. It might be a political issue, other people, food, movies, cars, climate or even yourself. Each example is a different target that people can evaluate. But these evaluations aren't the whole story. Attitude certainty -- the extent to which people have a clear idea of, trust in, or belief that their attitudes are correct -- is also important.

Attitudes that people are certain of are more likely to predict behavior and are more stable than attitudes people doubt.

"If I'm positive toward a candidate, but am not very certain of that attitude, I'm not as likely to vote for her as I would be if I were just as positive, but were higher in my certainty," says Kenneth DeMarree, an associate professor of psychology in UB's College of Arts and Sciences and the paper's lead author.

"Most of the past research studying the origins of certainty has focused on how people engage with each issue," he says. "If an issue is personally important to someone, if they think carefully about it, if it is linked to their morals, they're likely to be more certain of their opinion on that issue."

What this new research shows is that some people tend to be certain -- and others uncertain -- across a wide range of their attitudes, something which hasn't previously been explored.

Where past research has examined how people think about and relate to individual issues, the new work suggests that there are general patterns about how people think about and relate to nearly any issue they consider.

"The general tendency to be certain of one's attitudes, what we've labeled dispositional attitude certainty, is correlated with traits like how much people enjoy thinking or their self-esteem," says DeMarree. "There are likely a range of other aspects of the person that may relate to the tendency to be certain of one's attitudes in general, and some of our follow-up work is seeking to explore this by targeting different reasons people might be certain."

"Ours is the first study to show that certainty in an attitude, including an attitude that has not been formed yet, is generally related to one's certainty in other attitudes," DeMarree adds.

Is someone certain about the quality of the soup special at the corner diner? Those most certain about that attitude may be more certain about all items on that restaurant's menu, according to DeMarree. They may also be more likely to act on those attitudes.

"For others that might not feel as certain in their attitudes of the soup over the pizza, their attitudes won't as strongly predict the choices they'll make," he says.

In addition to the study predicting attitude certainty for novel objects and issues, DeMarree and his co-authors -- Richard E. Petty, distinguished professor at The Ohio State University, Pablo Briñol, a professor at Autonomous University of Madrid, and Ji Xia, a UB graduate student -- also examined how likely participants would be to rely on their attitudes.

And, as certainty in an individual attitude predicts whether a person is likely to act on it, dispositional attitude certainty predicts people's likelihood of acting on their attitudes in general.

"People higher in dispositional attitude certainty seem to be relying more on their attitudes across every domain we examined," DeMarree says, adding that this effect was not found for everyone, and future research will explore which people are easiest to predict.

Newly published research in Science Advances by University of Chicago researcher Luis Bettencourt proposes a new perspective and models on several known paradoxes of cities. Namely, if cities are engines of economic growth, why do poverty and inequality persist? If cities thrive on faster activity and more diversity, why are so many things so hard to change? And if growth and innovation are so important, how can urban planners and economists get away with describing cities with Groundhog Day-style models of equilibrium?

Developing improved collective actions and policies, and creating more equitable, prosperous and environmentally sustainable pathways requires transcending these apparent paradoxes. The paper finds it critical that societies embrace and utilize the natural tensions of cities revealed by urban science in order to advance more holistic solutions.

"To understand how cities can be simultaneously fast and slow, rich and poor, innovative and unstable, requires reframing our fundamental understanding of what cities are and how they work," says Bettencourt. "There is plenty of room in cities to embody all this complexity, but to harness natural urban processes for good requires that we modify current thinking and action to include different scales and diverse kinds of people in interaction."

This is the goal of a new paper entitled "Urban Growth and the Emergent Statistics of Cities," by Luis Bettencourt, the Inaugural Director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. In the paper, Bettencourt develops a new set of mathematical models to describe cities along a sliding scale of processes of change, starting with individuals and deriving emergent properties of cities and nations as urban systems.

At the heart of these models is a balancing act: humans must struggle to balance their budgets over time, including incomes and costs in units of money or energy. For most people, incomes and costs vary over time in unpredictable ways that are out of their full control. In cities--where we are all part of complicated webs of interdependence for jobs, services and many forms of collective action--these challenges gain new dimensions that require both individual and collective action. Accounting for these dynamics allows us to see how meaningful change at the levels of cities and nations can emerge from the aggregate daily hustle of millions of people, but also how all this struggle can fail to add up to much.

The paper shows that relative changes in the status of cities are exceedingly slow, tied to variations in their growth rates, which are now very small in high-income nations such as the U.S. This leads to the problem that the effects of innovation across cities are barely observable, taking place on the time scale of several decades--much slower than any mayoral term, which blunts the ability to judge positive from harmful policies.

Of especial importance is the negative effect of uncertainty--which tends to befall people in poverty but also everyone during the current pandemic--on processes of innovation and growth. Another challenge are policies that optimize for aggregate growth (such as GDP), which the paper shows typically promotes increasing inequality and social instability. In the paper, these ideas are tested using a long time series for 382 U.S. metropolitan areas over nearly five decades.

"Growth and change accumulate through the compounding of many small changes in how we lead our daily lives, allocate our time and effort, and interact with each other, especially in cities. Helping more people be creative and gain agency, in part by reducing crippling uncertainties, is predicted to make all the difference between a society that can face difficulties and thrive or one that becomes caught up in endless struggles and eventually decay," says Bettencourt.

Philadelphia, August 19, 2020 - A new study appearing in The American Journal of Medicine, published by Elsevier, calculates the lifetime risk of death from firearms and drug overdoses in the United States. The lifetime risk of death from firearms is about one percent, meaning that approximately one out of every 100 children will die from firearms if current death rates continue. The lifetime risk of death from drug overdoses is 1.5 percent, meaning that one out of every 70 children will die from an overdose.

The lifetime risks vary depending on who you are and where you live. The lifetime risk of firearm death is highest among black boys: one out of every 40 will die from a gunshot. The lifetime risk of overdose death is highest in West Virginia where one out of every 30 children will die from overdoses.

News media and politicians frequently discuss the high toll of deaths from firearms and drug overdoses. They usually mention the numbers of deaths, citing figures like 40,000 firearm deaths last year or death rates such as 20 overdose deaths per 100,000 population. However, for most people, it's hard to grasp the real meaning of both the large absolute numbers and the small annual rates.

Ashwini Sehgal, MD, a physician at MetroHealth Medical Center and a Professor of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA, used official death certificate data to calculate the likelihood that an American child will die from a gunshot or a drug overdose over the course of a lifetime. He commented, "While absolute numbers of deaths and annual death rates describe mortality over a short period of time, lifetime risk tells us more about long-term consequences."

Dr. Sehgal said that he was thinking about the study findings when he recently toured a new elementary school in his community in Ohio. "I had a hard time concentrating on the gleaming whiteboards, the new computers, or the cheerfully decorated walls. I realized that one child on every floor of the school would likely die from firearms and another one from a drug overdose in the years ahead. If I were across the border in West Virginia, then one child per classroom will have their life ended by an overdose."

The study stated that presenting information on lifetime risks may be a practical way to educate the public and policy makers about the impact of firearm and overdose deaths. Dr. Sehgal recommends that lifetime risk should be included in news stories and government reports and contrasted with lifetime risk of other causes of death and with figures from other countries. For example, the lifetime risk of dying from an overdose is similar to the lifetime risk of dying from colon cancer. Moreover, firearm deaths in our country are six times more common than in Canada and 50 times more common than in the United Kingdom, two countries that are culturally similar to the US. Examining changes over time is also enlightening; American drug overdose deaths have quadrupled over the last two decades.

There are a number of things that policy makers can do to reduce our exposure to and the consequences of firearms and potentially lethal drugs. Examples include background checks and waiting periods for gun purchases and improving access to substance use treatment and needle exchange programs.

Health providers can also advocate for measures likely to reduce deaths. They can ask patients about the presence of firearms in the home, review safe storage practices, and screen for depression or a previous history of violence. They can also limit or avoid prescribing drugs with overdose potential and carefully monitor patients on such drugs.

Dr. Sehgal concluded that lifetime risk calculations are based on the assumption that future death rates will match current ones. "But it doesn't have to be that way. The big differences in firearm and overdose deaths by race, gender, state, and country, and the sizeable changes over time indicate that high levels of firearm and overdose deaths are not inevitable. Let's take sensible steps now to help our children avoid the preventable tragedies of firearm and overdose deaths."

The rapid pace that invasive shrubs infiltrate forests in the northeastern United States makes scientists suspect they have a consistent advantage over native shrubs, and the first region-wide study of leaf timing, conducted by Penn State researchers, supports those suspicions.

With the help of citizen scientists spread over more than 150 sites in more than 20 states, researchers collected thousands of observations over four years of exactly when both invasive and native shrubs leaf out in the spring and lose their leaves in the fall. The study area was expansive, stretching from southern Maine to central Minnesota south to southern Missouri, to North Carolina.

"Eastern North America is the recipient of more invasive shrub species into natural areas than any other geographic region of the world," said lead researcher Erynn Maynard-Bean, postdoctoral researcher in the College of Agricultural Sciences, working under the guidance of Margot Kaye, associate professor of forest ecology. "Invasive shrubs are growing in both abundance and in the number of species established at the expense of many types of native species."

The researchers reported in Biological Invasions that invasive shrubs can maintain leaves 77 days longer than native shrubs within a growing season at the southern end of the area studied. The difference decreases to about 30 days at the northern end of the study area. At the southern end of the study area, the time when invasive shrubs have leaves and native shrubs do not is equally distributed between spring and fall; in the northern reaches of the study area, two-thirds of the difference between native and invasive growing seasons occur in fall.

The longer period with leaves gives invasive plants an advantage in acquiring more energy from sunlight and their leaves create shade in early spring and late fall that may limit growth of native species, such as forest ephemeral wildflowers, Maynard-Bean explained. "This helps explain their negative impact on native tree regeneration, plant diversity and abundance," she said. "But invasive shrubs also have a negative impact on communities of animal species sensitive to light and temperature, such as bees, butterflies and amphibians."

Small, local studies in Northeast forests have shown that invasive shrubs have leaves longer than native shrubs. However, because the phenomenon -- known as extended leaf phenology -- varies geographically, the degree to which it benefits invasive shrubs across the region had previously been unknown.

The difference between native plants and invasive plants having leaves is not consistent, Maynard-Bean noted. It varies, depending on latitude, species studied and weather for the study period.

"But with the help of citizen scientists with USA National Phenology Network watching plants with us from around the eastern U.S., we found a pattern of greater extended leaf phenology as you move south," she said. "This provides a unified framework for connecting local-scale research results from different parts of the eastern U.S. that had previously not agreed with one another."

With the goal of understanding on-the-ground implications for eastern deciduous forest ecosystems, the researchers chose common, widespread species that co-occur in forest understories. Native shrubs followed in the study included alternate-leaf dogwood, flowering dogwood, gray dogwood, spicebush, mapleleaf viburnum, southern arrowwood, hobble-bush and black haw. Invasive shrubs native to Europe or Asia followed in the study included Japanese barberry, burning bush, multiflora rose and several species of honeysuckles and privet.

About 800 citizen scientists collected more than 8,000 observations of leaf timing for 804 shrubs at 384 sites, from 2015 through 2018. In addition, Maynard-Bean made observations at three sites in Pennsylvania.

The patterns of extended leaf phenology for invasive shrubs compared to native shrubs found in this study have important implications for policy and management, according to Kaye, whose research group has been evaluating invasive shrubs in Northeast forests for more than a decade. She pointed out that invasives included in this study are still commonly used for horticultural purposes in some states but are banned in others.

"The presence of this phenomenon may serve as a predictive trait for the invasion potential of new horticultural specimens," Maynard-Bean said. "From a management perspective, extended leaf phenology makes invasive shrubs an easier 'green target' in the spring and fall for detection, removal and treatment, which can protect dormant, non-target native species."

AMHERST, Mass. - In a new paper this week, geographer Forrest Bowlick at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and colleagues at Texas A&M offer first-hand accounts of what is required for GIS instructors and IT administrators to set up virtual computing specifically for providing state-of-the-art geographic information systems (GIS) instruction.

Bowlick says, "Our research is very applicable in the current remote learning era that we're working through, because it provides expertly driven insight into how to set up a virtual computing environment in different modes: with hardware and with software in the cloud. While tailored to those needing GIS support, it is also very applicable for other high-performance software needs."

"By capturing the experiences of both setting up the system and of students using the system, we provide an important resource for others needing to make this investment of time, equipment and energy," he adds. Such technical practice is becoming required for GIS and other instruction, he points out.

Writing in the Journal of Geography in Higher Education, the authors compare an onsite server set-up and a virtualized cloud set-up scenario and report some student feedback on using a course taught this way. The growing need for fast computers, they point out, has made it harder for everyone to build the machines they need. "Our work talks about how to build fast computers in different ways and shares what we know about making fast computers for digital geography," Bowlick notes.

He says, "UMass is just one of several programs nationally, but regionally it's very attractive, especially at the graduate level, because there are not that many in New England. Ours certainly started at the right time, too. With the turn toward using more computational skills and GIS practices, how to use different computer constructs and programming language are become more fundamental needs in education."

Bowlick has directed a one-year M.S. geography degree program with an emphasis in GIS at UMass Amherst since 2017. He says there may be 10 or 15 students from every college on campus with different majors in the introductory course in a given semester. They need to gain fundamentals of spatial thinking, operating software and problem solving applicable to the diverse interests that students bring to the course.

Generally, these applications involve how to think through spatial problems on such topics as political geography, for example, which might ask who is voting and where, or on gerrymandering and how to discover it. Others are creating COVID-19 virus maps and spatial data to show its prevalence for spatial epidemiology and health geography, while others are modeling ecosystems for fish and wildlife.

Bowlick explains that geographic information science is "a bridging science" - a suite of technologies, a way of thinking and a way to store spatial data including satellite systems for navigation. GIS handles imagery, computer mapping, spatial planning, modeling land cover over time, even helping businesses decide where to open their next location.

GIS was first developed in the late 60s when the Canada Land Inventory needed ways to store, manage and analyze land resource maps over huge areas using new computer technology, Bowlick says. His two co-authors at Texas A&M, both experienced GIS instructors, are Dan Goldberg, an associate professor in geography, and Paul Stine, an IT system administrator for geography.

The authors describe the setup, organization and execution of teaching an introductory WebGIS course while considering student experiences in such a course.

The paper also defines an operational set of resource metrics needed to support the computing needs of students using virtual machines for server-based CyberGIS classes, as well as comparing costs and components needed to build and support an on-premise private cloud teaching environment for a WebGIS course in an on-premise private cloud teaching environment vs. a comparable cloud-based service provider.

In many ways, our childhood lays the foundation of our health in adult life. It is central to our physical and cognitive development. If this development is disturbed, it may have long-term consequences for our physical and mental health later in life.

In a new study, researchers from the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen show that adversity in childhood increases the risk of premature death in early adulthood (16-36 years of age).

The researchers have recorded social and stressful adversity* in childhood among one million Danish children.

'We divided the children into five groups depending on the degree of adversity experienced in childhood. The more stressful experiences they have experienced during childhood, the higher the mortality rate in early adulthood. For the most vulnerable children, the mortality rate is surprisingly 4.5 times higher', says Professor Naja Hulvej Rod from the Department of Public Health.

The higher mortality rate mainly manifests itself in suicide and accidents, but the study also shows a higher risk of dying from cancer in this group.

Poverty in Childhood Does Not Rhyme with Welfare State

According to the researchers, the results of the study stress the critical importance of broad structural public-health initiatives to reduce stressful adversity in childhood. For example, prevention of childhood poverty and other adversity in childhood. With time, it may help reduce social inequality in health.

'It is striking to see such a strong connection between adversity in childhood and mortality in the Danish welfare state, which among other things aims to promote financial stability among families with young children and to minimise social adversity. From an international perspective, you may worry that these associations are even stronger in a less extensive welfare system', says Naja Hulvej Rod.

The study is the first of its kind on a global basis. The size of the study has made it possible for the researchers to study the associations between incidents of social and stressful adversity throughout childhood and how it affects mortality rates among young adults.

*In the study, social adversity is defined as financial poverty or long-term unemployment in the family, while stressful adversity includes e.g. death of a parent, divorce or alcohol/drug abuse among the parents.

Group 1: 54 % of the children experienced no or only very few isolated incidents of adversity in childhood.

Groups 2-4: 43 % of the children experienced isolated incidents of adversity in childhood, mainly related to poverty or illness in the family. Here the researchers found a mortality rate in early adulthood that is 1.3-1.8 times higher than in Group 1.

Group 5: 3 % experienced great social and stressful adversity throughout childhood. In this group, the mortality rate is 4.5 times higher than in Group 1.

Through their basic research, physicians at the Heart Center of the University Hospital Bonn have discovered how the communication between individual cells can be influenced with the help of a specific protein. These findings are an important approach to improving the treatment of diseases such as arteriosclerosis (calcified blood vessels), which causes heart attacks. The study was published online in advance in the Journal of Extracellular Vesicles, the printed version will be published shortly.

The human body consists of an inconceivably large number of cells. Current scientific studies assume around 40 trillion cells, depending on the weight and size of the person. Most cells come together to perform their function in the body in the best possible way. Collectively they form tissue, organs and muscles. The most important requirement for good cellular interaction is for the cells to communicate with each other as effectively as possible.

"In order for cells to communicate effectively with each other, they need a postman to carry information from one cell to the next," explains Dr. Andreas Zietzer, cardiologist at the Heart Center of Bonn University Hospital. "This is precisely the role played by extracellular vesicles." For a long time, these vesicles were considered to have little biological significance. It was assumed that the vesicles were only used to get rid of excess proteins and other molecules, making them a kind of cellular garbage disposal. However, it is now known that vesicles play a key role in intercellular communication.

Vesicles serve as postmen between the cells

The principle of the vesicles can be explained quite simply: They are released as extremely small membrane bubbles - only about two thousandths of a millimeter in size - by cells in our body and can then be taken up and utilized by other cells. Zietzer describes the crucial function of the vesicles "as postmen, they transport various contents and thereby enable the exchange of information between cells."

In addition to proteins and lipids, this communication process also involves transporting ribonucleic acids (RNAs). These RNAs are copies of the genetic information and are required for carrying out its function. The physicians at the University of Bonn concentrated their research primarily on so-called microRNAs, which are responsible for fine tuning the switching on and off of genes.

"Because microRNAs have considerable influence on the biology of the cells, vesicles can influence the function of recipient cells depending on their specific cargo," says Zietzer. This is because, depending on which microRNA is enriched in the vesicles, the information transported by the vesicles also changes and with it the effect on the recipient cells that take up the vesicles and their cargo.

"It would be a breakthrough for researchers and physicians if they could control which information is transported between cells and which is not," says Zietzer, looking to the future. "However, precisely this kind of manipulation of cell-to-cell communication has so far been barely investigated."

The research group, led by Dr. Andreas Zietzer, Dr. Rabiul Hosen and Dr. Felix Jansen (head of the research group), at the Heart Center of the University Hospital Bonn has now succeeded in using a new mechanism on human cells to clarify how the sorting of specific RNAs within the vesicles works. To this end, the researchers used a mass spectrometer to identify more than 3,000 proteins and 300 microRNAs that were found to be enclosed in the vesicles and ready for transport to other cells.

An RNA-binding protein holds back the mail

The three researchers were able to show that a specific RNA-binding protein (hnRNPU for short) retains the microRNAs in the donor cell like a sponge, thereby preventing them from being packed into vesicles and transported to another cell. The exact opposite is true when this particular protein is switched off: In this case there is an elevated release of the microRNAs, which are then increasingly packed into the vesicles.

"The RNA-binding protein hnRNPU therefore assumes the role of a gatekeeper, deciding which and how many microRNAs are released from the donor cell for transport to the recipient cell," Andreas Zietzer summarizes the research results. This function enables the protein hnRNPU to significantly influence the communication between cells.

These observations hold great therapeutic potential; Zietzer, Hosen and Jansen were able to show that the transfer of certain microRNAs via the vesicles can be controlled by increasing or reducing the amount of hnRNPU in the donor cells. "This enables a targeted release, or retention, of microRNAs that promote regeneration and thereby positively or negatively influence the regenerative ability of diseased vascular cells," comments Zietzer on the potential intervention in cellular communication. Medically, this is of high importance, as the regenerative ability of the vascular cells in calcified vessels (arteriosclerosis) is already limited in the early stages of the disease.

Zietzer, Hosen, and Jansen now hope to apply their findings on intercellular communication using extracellular vesicles: "It is, for instance, conceivable that the targeted local activation or deactivation of the protein hnRNPU in healthy parts of the vascular system might lead to a 'swarm' of regeneration-promoting vesicles to be dispatched, which could then be taken up by already damaged vascular areas and accelerate regeneration there. In critical situations, such as after a heart attack, this could promote the healing process of patients," says Zietzer about the concrete benefit of this basic research.

Further applicability studies are in progress. The current research results suggest that this mechanism is also of great importance in the progression of heart and kidney diseases.