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Vaping is linked to a substantially increased risk of COVID-19 among teenagers and young adults, according to a new study led by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The study, which will be published online Aug. 11 in the Journal of Adolescent Health, is the first to examine connections between youth vaping and COVID-19 using U.S. population-based data collected during the pandemic.

Among young people who were tested for the virus that causes COVID-19, the research found that those who vaped were five to seven times more likely to be infected than those who did not use e-cigarettes.

"Teens and young adults need to know that if you use e-cigarettes, you are likely at immediate risk of COVID-19 because you are damaging your lungs," said the study's senior author, Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, PhD, professor of pediatrics.

'Not just a small increase in risk'

"Young people may believe their age protects them from contracting the virus or that they will not experience symptoms of COVID-19, but the data show this isn't true among those who vape," said the study's lead author, postdoctoral scholar Shivani Mathur Gaiha, PhD.

"This study tells us pretty clearly that youth who are using vapes or are dual-using [e-cigarettes and cigarettes] are at elevated risk, and it's not just a small increase in risk; it's a big one," Gaiha said.

Data were collected via online surveys conducted in May. Surveys were completed by 4,351 participants ages 13 to 24 who lived in all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and three U.S. territories. The researchers recruited a sample of participants that was evenly divided between those who had used e-cigarettes and those who had never used nicotine products. The sample also included approximately equal numbers of people in different age groups (adolescent, young adult and adult), races and genders.

Participants answered questions about whether they had ever used vaping devices or combustible cigarettes, as well as whether they had vaped or smoked in the past 30 days. They were asked if they had experienced COVID-19 symptoms, received a test for COVID-19 or received a positive diagnosis of COVID-19 after being tested.

Results adjusted for confounding factors

The results were adjusted for confounding factors such as age, sex, LGBTQ status, race/ethnicity, mother's level of education, body mass index, compliance with shelter-in-place orders, rate of COVID-19 diagnosis in the states where the participants were residing, and state and regional trends in e-cigarette use.

Young people who had used both cigarettes and e-cigarettes in the previous 30 days were almost five times as likely to experience COVID-19 symptoms, such as coughing, fever, tiredness and difficulty breathing as those who never smoked or vaped. This may explain why they were also more likely to receive COVID-19 testing, said Halpern-Felsher, especially given that in May, many regions limited COVID-19 testing to people with symptoms. Depending on which nicotine products they used and how recently they had used them, young people who vaped or smoked, or both, were 2.6 to nine times more likely to receive COVID-19 tests than nonusers.

Among the participants who were tested for COVID-19, those who had ever used e-cigarettes were five times more likely to be diagnosed with COVID-19 than nonusers. Those who had used both e-cigarettes and conventional cigarettes in the previous 30 days were 6.8 times more likely to be diagnosed with the disease. The researchers did not find a connection between COVID-19 diagnosis and smoking conventional cigarettes alone, perhaps because the prevalent pattern among youth is to use both vaping devices and traditional cigarettes. Other research has shown that nearly all nicotine-using youth vape, and some also smoke cigarettes, but very few use cigarettes only, Halpern-Felsher said.

'Now is the time'

In line with other recent COVID-19 research, the study found that lower socioeconomic status and Hispanic or multiracial ethnicity were linked to a higher risk of being diagnosed with the disease.

In addition to warning teenagers and young adults about the dangers of vaping, the researchers hope their findings will prompt the Food and Drug Administration to further tighten regulations governing how vaping products are sold to young people.

"Now is the time," Halpern-Felsher said. "We need the FDA to hurry up and regulate these products. And we need to tell everyone: If you are a vaper, you are putting yourself at risk for COVID-19 and other lung disease."

WASHINGTON, August 11, 2020 -- Scientists used computational fluid dynamics to determine the effect of temperature on root canal cleaning efficiency. Higher temperatures can, to a point, improve cleansing, but this benefit falls off if the temperature gets too high.

In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, scientists from China and the U.S. report calculations with a model of the conical-shaped root canal inside a tooth. This cavity is usually filled with pulp. When the pulp becomes inflamed or infected, an endodontist removes the infected pulp, and then cleans, shapes and fills the canal. The apex is then sealed.

A crucial step in this common dental procedure is irrigation, or rinsing, of the root canal cavity with an antibacterial solution, such as sodium hypochlorite. Efficient cleaning and successful destruction of any bacteria or other microbes in the cavity depend on the penetration and cleaning ability of the irrigation fluid.

The computational investigation used a structured mesh as a model of the conical root canal cavity. More than 1 million cells in the mesh completely and accurately described both the root canal and the side-vented needle through which the hypochlorite solution is injected. Fluid dynamics equations were used to model flow of the hypochlorite solution.

The scientists varied the fluid velocity, temperature and input power to determine the most efficient cleansing technique. As expected, higher fluid velocities lead to better cleansing. Perhaps counterintuitively, cleansing efficiency is higher on the wall behind the needle vent.

"The effective area on the root canal wall, in which the shear stress exceeds the critical value to clean the wall, is usually larger behind the needle outlet than in front of it," said author Hanhui Jin.

The maximum shear stress also usually occurs on the wall behind the needle outlet, Jin explained.

The investigators also looked at the effect of temperature on cleansing. They considered four different temperatures: 22 Celsius, which is room temperature; 37 C, which is body temperature; and two higher temperatures of 45 C and 60 C. Temperatures above 60 C are painful for the patient and tend to cause root canal damage.

Increasing the temperature to 45 C, while holding the fluid velocity fixed, improved the depth of cleansing and the cleansing span across the canal's width, but further increases in temperature beyond 45 C actually decreased the cleansing efficiency.

The investigators considered the effect of power consumption by the irrigation device. If the power consumption is held at a fixed value, the effect of temperature on cleansing efficiency is much more pronounced.

"The fluid circulation within the canal is clearly enlarged when the temperature is increased," said Jin. Therefore, careful control of both power consumption and temperature leads to increased cleaning efficiency.

Immunotherapy has revolutionized cancer treatment by stimulating the patient's own immune system to attack cancer cells, yielding remarkably quick and complete remission in some cases. But such drugs work for less than a quarter of patients because tumors are notoriously adept at evading immune assault.

A new study in mice by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has shown that the effects of a standard immunotherapy drug can be enhanced by blocking the protein TREM2, resulting in complete elimination of tumors. The findings, which are published Aug. 11 in the journal Cell, point to a potential new way to unlock the power of immunotherapy for more cancer patients.

"Essentially, we have found a new tool to enhance tumor immunotherapy," said senior author Marco Colonna, MD, the Robert Rock Belliveau, MD, Professor of Pathology. "An antibody against TREM2 alone reduces the growth of certain tumors, and when we combine it with an immunotherapy drug, we see total rejection of the tumor. The nice thing is that some anti-TREM2 antibodies are already in clinical trials for another disease. We have to do more work in animal models to verify these results, but if those work, we'd be able to move into clinical trials fairly easily because there are already a number of antibodies available."

T cells, a kind of immune cell, have the ability to detect and destroy tumor cells. To survive, tumors create a suppressive immune environment in and around themselves that keeps T cells subdued. A type of immunotherapy known as checkpoint inhibition wakes T cells from their quiescence so they can begin attacking the tumor. But if the tumor environment is still immunosuppressive, checkpoint inhibition alone may not be enough to eliminate the tumor.

An expert on the immune system, Colonna has long studied a protein called TREM2 in the context of Alzheimer's disease, where it is associated with underperforming immune cells in the brain. Colonna and first author Martina Molgora, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher, realized that the same kind of immune cells, known as macrophages, also were found in tumors, where they produce TREM2 and promote an environment that suppresses the activity of T cells.

"When we looked at where TREM2 is found in the body, we found that it is expressed at high levels inside the tumor and not outside of the tumor," Colonna said. "So it's actually an ideal target, because if you engage TREM2, you'll have little effect on peripheral tissue."

Colonna and Molgora -- along with colleagues Robert D. Schreiber, PhD, the Andrew M. and Jane M. Bursky Distinguished Professor; and William Vermi, MD, an immunologist at the University of Brescia -- set out to determine whether inhibiting TREM2 could reduce immunosuppression and boost the tumor-killing powers of T cells.

As part of this study, the researchers injected cancerous cells into mice to induce the development of a sarcoma. The mice were divided into four groups. In one group, the mice received an antibody that blocked TREM2; in another group, a checkpoint inhibitor; in the third group, both; and the fourth group, placebo. In the mice that received only placebo, the sarcomas grew steadily. In the mice that received the TREM2 antibody or the checkpoint inhibitor alone, the tumors grew more slowly and plateaued or, in a few cases, disappeared. But all of the mice that received both antibodies rejected the tumors completely. The researchers repeated the experiment using a colorectal cancer cell line with similarly impressive results.

With the help of graduate student Ekaterina Esaulova, who works in the lab of Maxim Artyomov, PhD, an associate professor of pathology and immunology, the researchers analyzed immune cells in the tumors of the mice treated with the TREM2 antibody alone. They found that suppressive macrophages were largely missing and that T cells were plentiful and active, indicating that blocking TREM2 is an effective means of boosting anti-tumor T cell activity.

Further experiments revealed that macrophages with TREM2 are found in many kinds of cancers. To assess the relationship between TREM2 expression and clinical outcomes, the researchers turned to The Cancer Genome Atlas, a publicly available database of cancer genetics jointly maintained by the National Cancer Institute and the National Human Genome Research Institute. They found that higher levels of TREM2 correlated with shorter survival in both colorectal cancer and breast cancer.

The researchers are now expanding their study of TREM2 to other kinds of cancers to see whether TREM2 inhibition is a promising strategy for a range of cancers.

"We saw that TREM2 is expressed on over 200 cases of human cancers and different subtypes, but we have only tested models of the colon, sarcoma and breast, so there are other models to test," Molgora said. "And then we also have a mouse model with a human version of TREM2."

Added Colonna: "The next step is to do the animal model using the human antibody. And then if that works, we'd be ready, I think, to go into a clinical trial."

While infant mortality rates (IMR) decreased overall from 2007 to 2015 in California, disparities in infant death rates have increased in some groups, including among obese mothers, those who smoke and African American women, according to a new study published in PLOS One.

The goal of this study was to better clarify the maternal and infant predictors of infant deaths in California. The study analyzed data from the Birth Statistical Master Files in California, compiled by the California Department of Public Health (CDPH). Files from a total of 4,503,197 single births, with 19,301 infant deaths, were reviewed.

Key findings of the study include:

Children of African American women had almost twice the risk of infant mortality when compared with children of white women.

Infants of women with bachelor's degrees or higher were 89% less likely to die, compared to women with less than a high school education.

Infants of mothers who smoked during the first and second trimester of pregnancy were 75% more likely to die than infants of nonsmokers.

Infants of women who were overweight and obese during pregnancy account for 55% of the infant mortalities in the study.

More than half of the infant deaths were to children of women with lower socioeconomic status.

Infants of mothers who participate in WIC, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, were 59% more likely to die than infants of non-WIC participants.

Infants with low birth weight and preterm birth were more than six times and almost four times more likely to die than infants who had normal births, respectively.

Infants born to mothers under the age of 20 represented 10.9% of infant deaths. Mothers over the age of 40 were associated with 5.6% of the total cases of infant deaths.

In rural San Joaquin Valley region, women were 51% more likely to experience infant deaths compared to urban women living in the San Diego area.

"Infant mortality is a widely-reported indicator of population health, which can potentially be reduced by addressing racial/ethnic and geographic disparities and morbidities of clinical significance," said Anura Ratnasiri, first author and research scientist at the State of California's Department of Health Care Services. "Our study showed that taking steps to reduce infant mortality is likely to have a spillover effect on improving the overall health of the population in generations to come."

The study speculates that the most effective health interventions may be social and public health initiatives that mitigate disparities in sociodemographic, economic and behavioral risks for mothers.

Public education focusing on maternal obesity and smoking cessation may also make a positive impact on all aspects of infant mortality. Empowering women to attain higher educational goals will likely also improve their socioeconomic status and employment opportunities, which are major indicators of health disparities.

"These results clearly show that we need to focus on the well-being of African American mothers and mothers in the San Joaquin Valley and address issues such as maternal obesity to achieve improvement in IMR," said Satyan Lakshminrusimha, a study author and physician-in-chief at UC Davis Children's Hospital.

Millions of American homes could become unsellable - or could be sold at significant losses to their senior-citizen owners - between now and 2040, according to new research from the University of Arizona.

The study predicts that many baby boomers and members of Generation X will struggle to sell their homes as they become empty nesters and singles. The problem is that millions of millennials and members of Generation Z may not be able to afford those homes, or they may not want them, opting for smaller homes in walkable communities instead of distant suburbs, .

Baby boomers are people born between 1946 and 1964, while Gen Xers were born between 1965 and 1980. Millennials were born between 1981 and 1997 and Gen Zers between 1998 and 2015.

The study predicts that the change in home-buying behaviors by younger generations may result in a glut of homes that could grow as high as 15 million by 2040, with homeowners selling for far below what they paid - if they can sell them at all. Most seniors will be able to sell their homes, the study says, but it may become especially difficult in smaller, distant and slow- or non-growing markets.

Arthur C. Nelson, a professor of urban planning and real estate development at the UArizona College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, calls his prediction "The Great Senior Short Sale" in a paper published this week in the Journal of Comparative Urban Land and Policy.

An expert in urban studies, public policy and land development, Nelson has spent a large part of his career studying the changing demand for suburban homes, since long before the housing market crash of the Great Recession.

His newest prediction, if it plays out, would undermine one of the "big promises" of homeownership for millions of seniors, Nelson said: that a home, after it's paid off, can be sold for a retirement nest egg.

"What if you pay off your mortgage over 30 years," he added, "and nobody buys the home?"

The Mismatch in the Market

Nelson's prediction comes from synthesizing data from sources such as the U.S. Census Bureau and the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. The Harvard center is a leading source of data for those in academia, government and business to make sense of housing issues to inform policy decisions.

Nelson, using those data, mapped how the ages of homeowners would change between 2018 and 2038. Looking at three age groups - over 65, 35-64 and under 35 - he came to the projection at the center of the study: that there may be fewer homeowners under 65 in 2038 than there were in 2018, even though the vast majority of people over 65 in 2038 will own their homes.

"There's the mismatch - if those over 65 unload their homes, and those under 65 aren't buying them, what happens to those homes?" he asks.

Nelson is careful not to overstate his findings; millions of people will buy the homes that older generations are selling, he said.

"But the vast supply is so large and the demand for them is going to be so small, in comparison, that there's going to be a real problem starting later this decade," he said.

Nelson said he expects the phenomenon to reveal itself not all at once, but gradually over the next couple decades, at about 500,000 to 1 million homes every year. It's not likely to have much impact in growing metropolitan areas such as Phoenix or Dallas where "growth will solve all kinds of problems," he said, but it will matter in thousands of suburban and rural areas - including some parts of Arizona.

"The people who own homes now in thousands of declining communities may simply have to walk away from them," he said.

Proposed Policy Solutions

Nelson's study urges action from lawmakers, and he offers some ideas of his own.

Among those is a program in which the federal government would buy back homes that have or may become unsellable. The Federal Emergency Management Agency already does something similar with homes that or have been or are likely to be damaged by natural disasters.

By bearing the cost of buying those homes, Nelson said, the government could help seniors avoid turning to federal social support programs after losing their homes. Those programs are costly to taxpayers, and the cost is even greater when programs need to be administered in rural or suburban areas - where homes are predicted not to sell, Nelson said.

"If you have millions of seniors spread all across the landscape costing a fortune to serve, we might be better off finding ways to induce many to sell their homes," he said. "And we could actually then save potentially billions in public money that would otherwise be used to serve people in very distant and remove locations."

Nelson also proposes programs at the state level that would allow younger people to live with older empty nesters, single people and others who live in homes larger than they may need, but who do not want to move.

By sharing homes, Nelson said, older people would not have to sell them, and younger housemates could act as caregivers and property managers.

The idea is already being tested in cities such as Minneapolis and Seattle and across the state of Oregon, Nelson said. There, laws were passed last year that allowed owners of single-family homes to divide them into multiple units.

Nelson completed his study just before the coronavirus outbreak became widespread. But the pandemic, he said, doesn't make the housing issue any less urgent.

"We're going to wake up in 2025 - give or take a few years - to realize that millions of seniors can't get out of their homes and that it's going to get worse in to the 2030s," he said. "We must start doing things now to reduce the coming shock of too many seniors trying to sell their homes to too few younger buyers."

According to research led by The University of Texas at Austin, seasonal rainfall is expected to rise significantly in East Africa over the next few decades in response to increased greenhouse gases.

The study, published in July in Climate Dynamics, used high-resolution simulations to find that the amount of precipitation during the rainy season known as the "short rains" could double by the end of the century, continuing a trend that has already been observed in recent years. The season known as the "long rains" on the other hand, is expected to remain stable according to the new projections. These results are in contrast to previous analyses that associated global warming with drier conditions that occurred earlier this century.

"There are two East African rainy seasons with different sensitivities to greenhouse gases," said Kerry Cook, a professor in the Jackson School of Geosciences' Department of Geological Sciences. "Our paper shows that the short rains will continue to increase--in fact, flooding and locust infestations are already occurring--and that there is no drying trend for the long rains."

Both the transportation of water vapor by atmospheric circulation and the distribution of rain are sensitive to differences between ocean and land temperatures. These differences occur because oceans warm and cool more slowly than the land due to differences in heat capacity.

When the short rains develop, typically with a peak in November, the southern hemisphere circulation is in a summer pattern, with high pressure over the ocean and low pressure over land in the subtropics, setting up a circulation pattern that funnels more moisture over East Africa. It is this rainy season that is more sensitive to greenhouse-gas induced climate change.

The region's long rains, on the other hand, appear to be less sensitive to greenhouse gas forcing. This season occurs from March through May, peaking near the northern hemisphere's spring equinox, when continental low pressures are centered over the equator.

The newly published simulations have a 30 kilometer resolution that resolves the complex East African topography, and more accurately represent currently observed rainfall amounts and seasonality than coarser resolution global models. Simulations of rainfall through 2050 are consistent with currently observed rainfall amounts and seasonality. These results show that the pattern of the long rains is not changing. But the short rains are increasing: rainfall in November over East Africa will increase by about one-third by 2050 and double by 2100.

"This research will allow people to plan ahead in East Africa," said Cook. "But future work will need to see how additional rainfall will be delivered because, if it is as intense as in the current observations and continues to impact agriculture, developing infrastructure will be important."

Scientists at Stockholm University have discovered that water can exhibit a similar behavior like a liquid crystal when illuminated with laser light. This effect originates by the alignment of water molecules, which exhibit a mixture of low- and high-density domains that are more or less prone to alignment. The results, reported in Physical Review Letters on the 11th of August 2020, are based on a combination of experimental studies using X-ray lasers and molecular simulations.

Liquid crystals were considered a mere scientific curiosity when they were first discovered in 1888. Over 100 years later, they are one of the most widely used technologies, present in digital displays (LCDs) of watches, TVs and computer screens. Liquid crystals work by applying an electric field, which makes the neighboring molecules of a liquid align, in a way that resembles a crystal. Water too can be distorted towards a liquid crystal, when illuminated with laser light. It is known that the electric field of the laser can align the water molecules for less than a billionth of a second. Can this discovery have future technological applications?

An international team of researchers at the Physics Department of Stockholm University carried out experiments at Japan's X-ray Free-electron laser SACLA and probed for the first time the dynamics of transiently oriented molecules using X-ray pulses. This technique, relies on aligning the molecules with a laser pulse (with wavelength λ = 800nm) and probing the alignment with X-ray pulses, which allow to see in real time the changes in the structure on a molecular level. By varying the time between the laser and the X-ray pulses, the researchers were able to resolve the aligned state, which lives only for 160 fs.

"It is known that the water molecules are aligned due to the polarization of the laser pulse" explains Kyung Hwan Kim, former researcher at Stockholm University and currently assistant professor at POSTECH University in Korea, "it is a unique capability however to be able to use X-ray lasers to see the molecular alignment in real time."

"X-rays are perfect for probing molecules because their wavelength matches the molecular lengthscales" says Dr. Alexander Spa?h, former PhD student in Physics at Stockholm University, and currently being a postdoc at Stanford University. "I really enjoy having the opportunity to use state-of-the-art X-ray facilities to investigate fundamental questions that could have future technological applications."

The experiments were well reproduced by molecular simulations, which gave an insight to the underlying alignment mechanism. By assuming that water behaves like a two-state liquid, consisting of high- and low-density liquid (HDL and LDL) domains, the researchers discovered that each domain shows a different tendency to align.

"Water molecules in the LDL regions have stronger hydrogen bond network, which makes the molecules easier to respond to the strong laser field" explains Anders Nilsson, professor in Chemical Physics at Stockholm University. "It would be fascinating to measure the lifetime of the molecular alignment in the supercooled regime, where everything is expected to slow down dramatically".

"Being able to understand water on a molecular level by watching the changes of the hydrogen-bond network, can play a major role in biological activity" says Fivos Perakis, assistant professor in Physics at Stockholm University. "I am curious to see whether the observed alignment can lead to technological applications in the future, for example in connection to water cleaning and desalination".

The toughest call to make by a cricket umpire is a leg-before-wicket (LBW) decision and new research from QUT reveals the ability to judge correctly changes with the format of the game, with T20 matches the most likely to produce mistakes.

Joshua M. Adie, a PhD candidate in QUT's School of Exercise & Nutrition Sciences, has just published a new paper highlighting research conducted in partnership with Cricket Australia.

When in doubt, it's not out: Match format is associated with differences in elite-level cricket umpires' leg-before-wicket decisions was co-authored by QUT's Associate Professor Ian Renshaw and Professor Remco Polman, along with Dr Matthew B Thompson (Murdoch) and Associate Professor David L. Mann (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).

It can be viewed on the ScienceDirect open access website prior publication in the November issue of Psychology of Sport and Exercise.

As an uncertain cricket season approaches and the men's T20 World Cup postponed from October/November until next year, administrators of the game are still working out how to pivot and adapt to the COVID-19 sporting landscape.

In the world of Australian cricket, it is certain there will be more T20 matches in both the newly extended Big Bash League and the Women's Big Bash League. Mr Adie's research suggests that umpires have some room for improvement for LBW decisions in T20 cricket.

"In professional sport, players and spectators expect referees and umpires to make judgements under pressure with speed and precision. However, judgements can be shaped by a range of contextual factors including crowd noise and home advantage," said Mr Adie.

"The LBW law requires umpires to adjudicate whether the ball - after hitting the batter - would have gone on to hit the stumps.

"The umpire has to consider where the ball bounced and hit the batter, and did it hit their bat before hitting them, as well make as a predictive judgement as to where the ball would have travelled had it not hit the batter. If all these criteria are met, then the batter can be given 'out'.

"First though, they must judge whether the ball is a 'legal' delivery by determining whether the bowler's front foot landed. That's a lot to take in during the ultra-fast pace of a T20 match."

Mr Adie examined historical elite-level match data from four-day, one-day and T20 games supplied by Cricket Australia to gain a better understanding of LBW decision-making in real matches.

"The playing conditions of each format shape how players approach the game and present different challenges for umpires," he said.

"Batters in test cricket take a conservative approach to bat for as long as possible, while those playing T20 cricket typically opt for a more explosive approach to score runs as quickly as possible. Laws, player strategies and crowd sizes differ greatly across all forms of the game, yet the LBW law remains identical.

"Interestingly, we found that umpires' decision-making behaviour also changed between match types. Viewing the data from Cricket Australia, we found that overall, umpires' decisions were rated as correct an impressive 98.08% of the time. However, in T20 matches, they had a Hit rate of 86.15 per cent and a False Alarm rate of 2.04 per cent, compared to 96.20% and 0.87% in four-day matches. This meant that umpires were biased to say 'not out', especially in T20 which resulted in more errors.

"It could be that the significantly larger crowds and TV audiences in T20 cricket compared to Four-day matches are putting more pressure on umpires to give the batter the 'benefit of the doubt' and if that's the case then future studies could explore their influence in sports officiating.

"Another possibility is that because T20 cricket is heavily focussed on entertainment in the form of explosive batting performances, umpires are being unconsciously more conservative for the sake of continuing entertainment, resulting in more 'miss' errors.

"Considering how incorrect decisions can change the outcome of a match, the future career prospects of participants (officials, players and coaches), and have financial repercussions for all, it is vital to know of and eliminate such errors in sports officiating wherever possible."

All humans start out from a single cell which then divides to eventually form the embryo. Depending on the signals sent by their adjacent cells, these divided cells are then developed or differentiated into specific tissues or organs.

In regenerative medicine, controlling that differentiation in the lab is crucial as stem cells could be differentiated to allow for the growing of organs in vitro and replace damaged adult cells, particularly those with very limited abilities to replicate, such as the brain or heart.

One common approach scientists adopt when differentiating stem cells is by using chemical stimulators. While this method is very efficient to make one single type of cells, it lacks the ability to reproduce the complexity of living organisms, where several cell types coexist and collaborate to form an organ.

Alternatively, inspired by the natural process of cell development, another method involves the packing of stem cells into small cellular aggregates, or spheres called embryoid bodies. Similar to real embryos, the cell-cell interaction in embryoid bodies is the main driver of differentiation. From the production of these embryoid bodies, it was found that parameters such as cell numbers, size, and sphericity of the embryoid body influenced the types of cells that are produced.

However, since scientists have not been able to control those parameters, they have had to laboriously produce large numbers of embryoid bodies and select specific ones with suitable characteristics to be studied.

To address this challenge, researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) turned to additive manufacturing to control stem cell differentiation in embryoid bodies. Their research study was published in Bioprinting.

Adopting a multidisciplinary approach by combining the research domains of 3D manufacturing and life sciences, PhD student Rupambika Das and Assistant Professor Javier G. Fernandez 3D printed several micro-scaled physical devices with finely tuned geometries. They used the devices to demonstrate unprecedented precision in the directed differentiation of stem cells through the formation of embryoid bodies (refer to image). In their study, they successfully regulated the parameters for enhancing the production of cardiomyocytes, cells which are found in the heart.

"The field of additive manufacturing is evolving at an unrivaled pace. We are seeing levels of precision, speed and cost that were inconceivable just a few years ago. What we have demonstrated is that 3D printing has now reached the point of geometrical accuracy where it is able to control the outcome of stem cell differentiation. And in doing so, we are propelling regenerative medicine to further advance alongside the accelerated rate of the additive manufacturing industry," said principal investigator Assistant Professor Javier G. Fernandez from SUTD.

"The use of 3D printing in biology has been strongly focused on the printing of artificial tissues using cell laden cells, to build artificial organs 'piece by piece'. Now, we have demonstrated that 3D printing has the potential for it to be used in a bio-inspired approach in which we can control cells to grow in a lab just as they grow in vivo," added first author Rupambika Das, PhD student from SUTD.

CLEMSON, South Carolina -- When you think of surfing and Brazil, the first image that comes to mind is probably warm waves crashing on a white sand beach, not a cloud of gas swirling 65 miles above the Earth. But the latter is exactly what was found by Clemson University researcher Rafael Mesquita, a native of Brazil.

Mesquita and a multi-institutional research team documented "surfer waves" in the upper atmosphere that create a pipeline of energy between layers in space. Just like ocean waves crash onto the beach, the atmospheric "surfer waves" generate turbulence that carries oxygen down low and nitrogen up high. Usually the oxygen is high in the atmosphere and nitrogen is closer to Earth's surface.

"For many years, atmospheric scientists have studied oxygen showing up lower than it should be, but we identified a possible cause for it and revealed more detail than ever before," said Mesquita, a doctoral candidate in the College of Science's department of physics and astronomy.

The groundbreaking discovery was funded by NASA. It is featured on the NASA Heliophysics homepage and was published July 23, 2020 in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Space Physics. The paper is titled "In?situ observations of neutral shear instability in the statically stable high?latitude mesosphere and lower thermosphere during quiet geomagnetic conditions."

The Clemson research team launched rockets that released a harmless gas as a contrast medium to illuminate the atmospheric wind patterns so they could be photographed. Called the Super Soaker campaign, the research was conducted at the Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska on January 26, 2018.

"Our measurements were made at 65 miles above Earth's surface and showed winds swirling at about 100 miles per hour," Mesquita said.

The "surfer waves," currents of wind curling into each other and creating the dramatic effect of waves in the sky, are a result of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI). This effect is often seen in nature when gases or liquids pass each other at different speeds, creating the curling pattern similar to waves on the beach or dust swirls in the desert.

Now that Clemson scientists have observed the KHI in more detail than ever, they have a clearer understanding of how the winds in the upper atmosphere carry gases farther than they thought possible.

"These surfer waves offer insight into the complex system of Earth's atmosphere where slight temperature changes on one side of the world affect wind patterns on the other," Mesquita concluded. "The upper reaches of the atmosphere may seem like a world away, but what happens up there affects us more than we may realize."

NASA's Terra satellite revealed that a wispy looking Tropical Depression 06W in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean was being battered by wind shear. That wind shear is not expected to wane and the storm is expected to weaken.

Tropical Depression 06W formed two days ago on August 9 by 11 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC) near latitude 26.1 degrees north and longitude 147.6 east, about 250 nautical miles east-northeast of Iwo To Island, Japan. 06W briefly strengthened to a tropical storm by 5 p.m. EDT (2100 UTC) when maximum sustained winds reached 45 knots (52 mph/83 kph). By Aug. 10 at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC) the storm had weakened back to tropical depression status.

On Aug. 11, 2020, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Terra satellite provided forecasters at the Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Honolulu, Hawaii with a visible image of Tropical Depression 06W. The image showed a ring of wispy clouds around a fully-exposed, well-defined, low-level center of circulation. It also showed that any precipitation and thunderstorms were pushed to the south-southwest of the center from vertical wind shear.

Vertical wind shear, that is, winds outside of a tropical cyclone at different heights in the atmosphere (the troposphere) push against a tropical cyclone and tear it apart. Winds from the north-northeast were affecting 06W. In addition, dry air was moving into the storm and sapping the development of the thunderstorms that make up a tropical cyclone.

At 5 a.m. EDT (0900 UTC) on Aug. 11, the center of Tropical Depression 06W was located near latitude 26.6 degrees north and longitude 140.5 degrees east, about 681 nautical miles east of Kadena Air Base, Okinawa Island, Japan. 06W was moving to the west and had maximum sustained winds near 25 knots (29 mph/46 kph).

The Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) forecast notes that 06W will continue to move west and weaken before dissipating after a few days.

About NASA's Worldview and Terra Satellite

NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Worldview application provides the capability to interactively browse over 700 global, full-resolution satellite imagery layers and then download the underlying data. Many of the available imagery layers are updated within three hours of observation, essentially showing the entire Earth as it looks "right now."

NASA's Terra satellite is one in a fleet of NASA satellites that provide data for hurricane research.

Tropical cyclones/hurricanes 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.

By Rob Gutro
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Philadelphia, August 11, 2020 - Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is rarely diagnosed until symptoms arise, often well into childhood. Evidence however, is mounting that developmental abnormalities likely emerge in the brain long before then: early identification of babies at risk for ASD could allow for interventions that would improve their developmental outcomes.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have found evidence of signature brain activity in infants that predicted ASD symptoms later at 18 months old. The work, led by Shafali Jeste, MD, at UCLA appears in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, published by Elsevier.

"Early identification and intervention is key to getting better outcomes for children with neurodevelopmental disorders," said Cameron Carter, MD, Editor of Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging. "This study suggests that relatively low-cost diagnostic tools such as EEG may, in the not-too-distant future, help us to do a better job by identifying atypical brain development in infancy, when interventions may be even more impactful than when offered to toddlers and young children."

The researchers used electroencephalography (EEG), a non-invasive technique to measure electrical brain activity from outside the head and tracked neural activity in the so-called alpha range. Alpha-range activity is associated with long-range connections in the brain. The group then used an approach that allowed them to integrate data from across the brain.

First author Abigail Dickinson, PhD, said, "One crucial aspect of brain development is the change in patterns of brain activity. We wanted to know if measures of neural activity could detect atypical brain development in ASD during early infancy."

Dr. Dickinson and the team performed EEG measurements in 65 3-month-old infants; 29 with low familial risk of ASD and 36 at high risk, with an affected older sibling.

When the children were 18-months-old, they were assessed for ASD by a trained clinician.

The researchers used computer modeling to predict symptom outcomes at 18 months based on the babies' neural activity in infancy. The model's predictions correlated with the actual symptoms measured in the toddlers. The model was not able to predict verbal or non-verbal congitive scores in the toddlers--suggesting that the brain connectivity pattern may be a specific marker of ASD.

In infants that later showed higher ASD symptoms, researchers saw decreased connectivity between frontal regions. The infants also showed increased connections across temporo-parietal areas in the right hemisphere, which are associated with social information processing.

"These findings improve our understanding of the neural differences that precede autism and show which brain regions reveal the earliest signs of disruption," Dr. Dickinson said. The findings bolster the idea that disrupted brain connectivity is a root cause of ASD, not a consequence.

The authors suggest that the low cost, wide availability and low risk of EEG make it a good screening tool to identify babies at higher risk of developing ASD or those with "borderline" symptoms, so that they get early intervention. "Mapping patterns of activity associated with autism could ultimately help identify infants who show early signs of neural risk," Dr. Dickinson added.

Archaeologists at The Australian National University (ANU) have found the earliest evidence of Indigenous communities cultivating bananas in Australia.

The evidence of cultivation and plant management dates back 2,145 years and was found at Wagadagam on the tiny island of Mabuyag in the western Torres Strait.

The site comprised a series of retaining walls associated with gardening activities along with a network of stone arrangements, shell arrangements, rock art and a mound of dugong bones.

Soils from the site showed definitive evidence for intensive banana cultivation in the form of starch granules, banana plant microfossils and charcoal.

Lead researcher, Kambri-Ngunnawal scholar Robert Williams, says the findings help dispel the view that Australia's first peoples were "only hunter gatherers".

"The Torres Strait has historically been seen as a separating line between Indigenous groups who practiced agriculture in New Guinea but who in Australia were hunter gatherers," Mr Williams said.

"Our research shows the ancestors of the Goegmulgal people of Mabuyag were engaged in complex and diverse cultivation and horticultural practices in the western Torres Strait at least 2,000 years ago.

"So rather than being a barrier, the Torres Strait was more of a bridge or a filter of cultural and horticultural practices going both north and south.

"The type of banana we found on Mabuyag appeared much earlier on New Guinea, which was a centre of banana domestication."

The team also found stone flake tools with plant residues along their cutting surfaces.

"What we're seeing here is an Indo-Pacific horticultural tradition based primarily on things like yams, taro and banana and important fat and protein elements in the form of fish, dugong and turtle, these people had a very high-quality diet," Mr Williams said.

"Food is an important part of Indigenous culture and identity and this research shows the age and time depth of these practices. I hope it will spark interest in these food traditions and might move people back towards them."

Mr Williams said the charcoal found at the site indicated burning for gardening activities. Excavated charcoal provided dates for the finds through radiocarbon dating.

Co-researcher Dr Duncan Wright said the Torres Strait region was a place where local innovations took place.

"The age of the banana propagation is also very significant. It's not something we expect to see in continental Australia and this is the earliest well dated evidence for plant management in Torres Strait," Dr Wright said.

"At the time I thought it was odd to see cultivation in a landscape otherwise set aside for ritual activities. Now we know why, the retaining walls were part of a much older phase of activity at Wagadagam."

As a descendant of the Kambri Ngunnawal peoples, Mr Williams said he was mindful of how his research could affect a first nations' community.

"Historically, culture has been appropriated by non-Indigenous archaeologists and anthropologists, so it was really important for me to make a connection with the people in this community and ensure they understood the research really belongs to them.

"I hope this work is something the community can be really proud about. It demonstrates through clear evidence the diversity and complexity of early horticulture in the western Torres Strait."

Mr Williams is the lead author on the research published in Nature, Ecology and Evolution.

He did his Masters in Archaeology at ANU and is currently a third year PhD candidate in the Department of Archaeology at Sydney University.

"This paper is led by a First Australian author. It's another big achievement for Robert, whom I suspect will play an important role in the discipline of Archaeology," Dr Wright said.

"His work makes a statement that goes beyond academia, representing a much-needed shift for the discipline where research into First Nations' communities is led by First Nations' peoples."

A new study in Nucleic Acids Research, published by Oxford University Press, suggests a possible effective treatment strategy for patients suffering from prion disease.

Prion disease is a rapidly fatal and currently untreatable neurodegenerative disease. While prion disease is quite rare, it typically causes rapid neurodegeneration. About 300 cases of prion diseases are reported each year in the United States. The most common form of prion disease that affects humans is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, popularly known as Mad Cow Disease, is another prion disease. Prion diseases are caused by disrupting the structure of a normal human prion protein, producing toxic clumps in the brain. Because prion protein is central to disease, reducing levels of prion protein in patients is a promising therapeutic approach.

Senior author Sonia Vallabh learned that she carried a mutant form of the prion protein gene prior to switching careers to become a patient-scientist and advocate for treatment. She and her coworkers had previously observed that antisense oligonucleotides that reduce levels of prion protein can extend the survival of animals infected with misfolded prions. While these initial data were promising, many critical questions remained before therapeutic development could be possible.

Research teams led by Vallabh at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Holly Kordasiewicz at Ionis Pharmaceuticals, and Deb Cabin at McLaughlin Research Institute, report the results of preclinical studies of an antisense therapy against prion disease. In this new work, using an expanded set of prion protein -targeting antisense oligonucleotides, the authors have laid the basis for full scale clinical development. This research shows that, across multiple treatment paradigms, reducing levels of prion protein in prion-infected lab animals significantly extends their survival.

Researchers here showed that reducing levels of prion protein can triple the survival of prion-infected animals. Even reducing prion protein levels by a small amount, which should be easier to achieve clinically, resulted in significant survival benefits.

Reduction of prion protein is effective across prion strains and across a battery of different treatment timepoints. The researchers show that reducing prion protein is effective before any symptoms are seen. They also demonstrate, for the first time, that a single dose of a prion protein -lowering treatment can reverse markers of disease even after toxic clumps have formed in the brain.

"While there are still many steps ahead," said Vallabh, "these data give us optimism that by aiming straight at the genetic heart of prion disease, genetically targeted drugs designed to lower prion protein levels in the brain may prove effective in the clinic."

New research out today highlights the future effects of climate change on important fish stocks for south-west UK fisheries.

The study, which generated future projections of climate impacts on fish in a rapidly warming sea region, suggests changes in the availability and catchability of commercially important Atlantic fish species including Atlantic cod, Dover sole, monkfish and lemon sole. This could have implications for fisheries management, and future fish diets of the British public.

The Celtic Sea, English Channel and southern North Sea have experienced significant warming over the past 40 years and further increases in sea temperatures are expected over the coming decades. Projecting future changes can help prepare the fishing industry and management systems for resulting ecological, social and economic effects.

The study involved researchers from the University of Exeter, the University of Bristol, the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas) and the Met Office Hadley Centre. They used computer models to look at how fish abundances may alter by 2090 under a range of future climates. This provided opportunities to not only understand future trends, but how these trends might differ depending on the amount of warming in these seas.

Main findings from the study include:

Projections suggest increases in abundance of warm-adapted species red mullet, Dover sole, John dory and lemon sole, and decreases in abundance of cold-adapted species Atlantic cod, monkfish and megrim.

These changes will challenge current fisheries management systems, with implications for decisions on future fishing mortality rates, fishing effort and allowable catches. For example, declining species may need further measures to reduce their vulnerability to further warming temperatures.

Increasingly flexible and adaptive management approaches are required that reduce climate impacts on fish species while also facilitating industry adaptation.

Importantly, the results indicate implications not only for the wider ecosystem (e.g. predator prey dynamics or community composition) but that the fishing industry and management systems will likely have to adjust their operations to address these changes. British consumers may need to also adapt their diets into the future to eat species that could benefit under future warming, such as the warm-water species red mullet, Dover sole, john dory and squid.

Lead author Dr Katherine Maltby, who undertook the research while at Cefas, said: "Our results show that climate change will continue to affect fish stocks within this sea region into the future, presenting both potential risks but some opportunities that fishers will likely have to adapt to. Consumers can help fishers take advantage of these fishing opportunities by seeking out other fish species to eat and enjoy."

Co-author Louise Rutterford, from University of Exeter, said: "We know from working with fishers that warmer water species are appearing in catches more. Bringing together their 'on-the-ground' experiences with studies like ours will help inform future management decisions that enable sustainable exploitation while supporting fishers' adaptation."