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The journal PLOS ONE has published an article that explains the methodology used by Nutrimedia to assess the veracity of messages about nutrition. As reflected in the article, the Nutrimedia project, developed by the Science Communication Observatory (OCC) of the Department of Communication at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and by the Iberoamerican Cochrane Center, is a pioneer in the application of the GRADE method to determine the extent to which messages concerning nutrition contained in news items and advertisements in the media or posed by the public are true.

During its first 18 months, the Nutrimedia project has analysed the veracity of 30 nutrition-related messages, of which 21 are related to food, 6 to diets, and 3 to food supplements. According to their degree of truthfulness, the messages were classified into seven categories: true, probably true, possibly true, false, probably false, possibly false and uncertain. As described in the article published in PLOS ONE, almost half (14 out of 30) were classified as uncertain (for example, "chocolate is good for the heart" or "eating garlic reduces the risk of cancer") and four possibly true ("meat is carcinogenic" or "white bread is more fattening than wholemeal bread").

"Many answers to questions about food and health are uncertain or have a low degree of certainty because they are questions that have barely been studied or have been dealt with in studies of low quality", says Gonzalo Casino, director of Nutrimedia, UPF lecturer and head of knowledge transfer at the Iberoamerican Cochrane Center. "Nutrimedia aims to teach the public why the certainty of science varies and how to interpret the messages broadcast in the media and social networks critically".

Nutrimedia's most unique feature is its methodology. "The GRADE system is a method adopted by many scientific organizations to determine the degree of certainty of their research outcomes. And what we have done that is groundbreaking at Nutrimedia is to apply this method to assess the veracity of nutritional messages that reach the public", explains Pablo Alonso, a researcher at Nutrimedia and at the Iberoamerican Cochrane Center, as well as being head of the GRADE centre in Spain.

"It should be noted that 12 messages analysed come from questions raised by the public, nine myths or popular beliefs, eight press news items, and two ads", explains Montserrat Rabassa, a researcher at Nutrimedia and at the Iberoamerican Cochrane Center and first author of the PLOS ONE article. "The question that most interested the public was whether or not meat is carcinogenic, according to what we found out through a survey we conducted. The page that deals with this issue is one of the most visited at Nutrimedia and one of the first two or three hits returned by Google Spain when searching "meat and cancer", Rabassa reveals.

This presence in the search engines is proof of the considerable impact that the Nutrimedia project has had in the media: during its first 18 months, it was cited 84 times in the printed press and 386 on websites of Spain and of 14 other countries, most in Latin America, as evidenced in the article published in PLOS ONE. "The scientific rigour combined with the use of friendly presentation formats are distinctive features of this resource, developed to help the public to make informed choices about nutrition", the authors of the article write.

Autism has long been associated only with behavioral and environmental factors, but the role of genetics in its development is now increasingly evident. Some 100 genes have been found to play a role in autism spectrum disorder, and another thousand are being studied to the same end.

The diagnosis and treatment of the disorder on a genomic basis are hindered by this variability. However, a new study conducted at the University of São Paulo's Institute of Biosciences (IB-USP) in Brazil points to a common gene expression profile regardless of the DNA mutations in any autistic individual.

"We found a group of genes that's dysregulated in neural progenitor cells, which give rise to neurons, and in neurons themselves," said Maria Rita dos Santos e Passos-Bueno, a professor at IB-USP. In other words, while the DNA of different individuals with autism displays different alterations, the behavior of these genes is similar in all such people and differ from that observed in the brains of people without the disorder.

Passos-Bueno is affiliated with the Human Genome and Stem Cell Research Center (HUG-CELL), a Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center (RIDC) supported by São Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP and hosted by the University of São Paulo (USP).

The study was supported by FAPESP via two research grants awarded under the programs São Paulo Researchers in International Collaboration (SPRINT) and Multiuser Equipment
(EMU). The results are reported in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, a Nature publication.

Experiments

Samples of brain tissue cannot be taken from living people, so the researchers conducted in vitro experiments using a technique called cell reprogramming.

"We took dental pulp cells from people with and without autism, and from these, we created pluripotent stem cells, which can be transformed into any type of cell. In this way, we were able to create in the laboratory neural cells with the same genomes as those of the patients," said Karina Griesi Oliveira, the first author of the article. Oliveira has a PhD in genetics from IB-USP and is a researcher in the Albert Einstein Israeli Education and Research Institute (IIEP).

Five individuals with high-functioning autism and one with low-functioning autism were selected for the study; all six had heterogeneous genetic profiles. A control group comprised six healthy subjects.

"The study bore out the hypothesis that, while the origin of autism is multifactorial and different in each person, these different alterations can lead to the same problems in the functioning of their neurons," Oliveira said.

The induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) were reprogrammed to simulate two stages in the development of the human brain: neural progenitor cells, which give rise to neurons, and neurons at a stage equivalent to those of a fetus between the 16th and 20th weeks of gestation.

The researchers then analyzed these cell transcriptomes, consisting of all their RNA molecules. RNA acts as an intermediary that converts the information in a gene into proteins, which in turn govern cell behavior.

"By counting the RNA molecules, we were able to determine gene expression with a considerable degree of precision," Oliveira said.

The researchers next used mathematical models to determine which genes were differentially expressed in both groups (with and without autism), arriving at those responsible for synapses and neurotransmitter release, i.e., genes that modulate communication among neurons. This process influences the functioning of the entire organism, but above all, the brain.

This set of genes, some of which have been associated with autism in previous research, displayed increased activity in neurons. "Some of them were dysregulated in iPSC-derived neural cells from autists studied in other research, and in neurons from postmortem brain tissue belonging to individuals with autism, validating the method," Passos-Bueno said.

On the other hand, this second analysis using postmortem tissue data showed decreased gene expression at the time of death. "We don't know the reason for the difference, but it's consistent evidence that expression of this group of genes is involved in autism spectrum disorder," Oliveira said.

Clinical relevance

The study also provides more evidence that autism begins to develop during gestation. "The study points to a disturbance in fetal neurodevelopment that alters neuronal functioning, so that the child is born with altered gene expression," Passos-Bueno said.

This knowledge may contribute to the diagnosis of autism, currently based on the clinical analysis of symptoms.

Imaging, blood tests and genetic sequencing cannot help diagnose the disorder in the vast majority of suspected cases. "A major genetic error causes autism in some 30% of patients, but the origin of the disorder is multifactorial in 70%, with several alterations to DNA causing clinical symptoms, so that interpretation of the genetic data is still complex," Passos-Bueno explained.

The research line may also favor the development of more effective treatment strategies. "To treat a genetic disease, you have to understand what the genes are doing wrong. The alterations to neurotransmitter control have never been demonstrated so clearly," said Mayana Zatz, a professor at IB-USP and HUG-CELL's principal investigator.

According to Zatz, HUG-CELL is at the forefront of international research on autism. One of the group's recent advances was the identification of new genes associated with the disorder, one of which is PRPF8. The study was published in February 2020 in the journal Autism Research.

"It's very important to stress that this has been possible only thanks to the work done for the past two decades by Professor Passos-Bueno with more than a thousand autists and their families," Zatz said. IB-USP offers pro bono genetic counseling for autists and people with hundreds of other genetic disorders and their families.

While cancer is rare in children, it is, nevertheless, the second most common cause of death during childhood in Switzerland and other European countries. In Switzerland, about 250 children and adolescents under the age of 16 are diagnosed with cancer each year. These diagnoses are recorded in the national Childhood Cancer Registry which exists since 1976. Little is known about the possible causes of these diseases. A small proportion is related to certain genetic conditions, but in most cases the cause remains unclear. Various environmental factors have come under suspicion. These include ionizing radiation (natural background radiation, medical diagnostic radiation), air pollution, electromagnetic fields or pesticides.

"However, the results of previous studies of these factors do not allow us to draw any firm conclusions" explains Ben Spycher of the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Bern, the last author of the study, which has now been published in the International Journal of Health Geographics. Increased exposure levels in certain areas may result in locally increased cancer risks. Model calculations by the researchers at the ISPM and Swiss Paediatric Oncology Group SPOG have now detected a slight increase in the risk of brain tumors in two regions in Switzerland.

Precise Bernese method

In a statistical model, the researchers included data on the places of residence of all children aged 0-15 years from the 1990, 2000 and 2010-15 censuses. The residential locations of children who developed cancer during the period 1985-2015 and are included in the Childhood Cancer Registry were compared with those of children who did not develop cancer. Precise location data (so-called geocodes) were used for this purpose.

In a previously published simulation study, the researchers were able to show that this model, which uses precise location data, identifies areas of increased risk more accurately than other widely used models that rely on spatially aggregated data, such as the number of cases per community or district. The model is also able to estimate local deviations of the cancer rate from the national average and distinguish them from random fluctuations that are to be expected due to the small number of cases.

The risk for brain tumors varies most

The most common types of cancer occurring in childhood are leukemias, lymphomas and tumors of the central nervous system CNS (brain tumors). In total, the analysis includes 5,947 cancers that occurred during 1985-2015. Of these, 1,880 (32%) were leukemias, 772 (13%) lymphomas, and 1,290 (22%) CNS tumors of the brain and the spinal chord.

For all cancers combined, the estimated local cancer rate deviated from the national average by up to -17% downwards and up to +13% upwards, depending on the location. The spatial variation was smaller for leukemias (-4% to +9%) and lymphomas (-10% to +13%), but larger for brain tumors (-18% to +23%).

A map displaying the results shows two regions with increased incidence of brain tumors, one in the north of the canton of Zurich (border area with the canton of Schaffhausen) and one in the so-called Seeland. "Further analyses showed that the risk increase mainly concerns the group of embryonal brain tumors," says Roland Ammann, co-author of the study at the University Clinic for Pediatrics at the Inselspital, University Hospital of Bern.

Variation only partially explainable

The researchers also investigated whether the observed geographical differences can be explained by certain spatial indicators such as degree of urbanization (urban, rural, intermediate) or socio-economic position ("Swiss neighborhood index of socioeconomic position"). As further explanatory variables, they also considered two environmental factors that were found to be associated with an increased risk of cancer in previous studies of the group, namely traffic-related air pollution (nitrogen dioxide concentration) and natural background radiation (estimated dose rates of terrestrial gamma radiation and cosmic radiation).

The factors considered partially explained the spatial variability of the cancer rate, specifically, 72% for all cancers together, 81% and 82% for leukemias and lymphomas, and 64% for brain tumors. However, they could not explain the increase rates of brain tumors observed in the two areas mentioned above.

"We conclude that the search for environmental risk factors of brain tumors should be intensified," says Spycher. Roland Ammann adds: "The various subgroups of brain tumors should be considered separately." The research group is investigating a number of possible risk factors. "At this stage, we cannot say what might explain the observed differences in Switzerland, this needs to be further investigated," says Spycher.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Nearly 50 years ago, Brown University physicist Michael Kosterlitz and his colleagues used the mathematics of topology -- the study of how objects can be deformed by stretching or twisting but not tearing or breaking -- to explain puzzling phase changes in certain types of matter. The work won Kosterlitz a share of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics and has led to the discovery of topological phenomena in all kinds of systems, from thin films that conduct electricity only around their edges, to strange waves that propagate in the oceans and atmosphere at the Earth's equator.

Now a team of researchers, including another Brown physicist, has added a new topological phenomenon to that ever-growing list. In new theoretical research, the team shows that electromagnetic waves of topological origin should be present on the surface of plasmas -- hot soups of ionized gas. If the theory proves true, those waves could provide a new way for scientists to probe the properties of plasmas, which are found in everything from fluorescent lightbulbs to stars.

The research was led by Jeffrey Parker, a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in collaboration with Brad Marston, a professor of physics at Brown, and others. The paper is published in Physical Review Letters.

The waves, called gaseous plasmon polaritons, propagate along the interface of a plasma and its surroundings when the system is exposed to a strong magnetic field. Marston says that what's interesting about these waves is that they are "topologically protected," meaning that they're inherently present in the system and are resistant to being scattered by impurities.

"Any time you have a wave that's protected against scattering, it means they can stay intact over a long distance," Marston said. "As a practical matter, we're hoping that these can be used to diagnose plasma states. One of the big problems in plasma physics is to figure out the state of a plasma without disturbing it. If you stick in a probe, you're going to disrupt the system. We might be able to use these waves to discern the state of a plasma without disturbing it."

One way to think about topological protection, Marston says, is something known as the hairy ball theorem. Imagine a ball covered in long hairs. If one were to try to comb those hairs down, there will always be at least one spot on the ball where the hairs won't lie flat.

"This spot will always be there," Marston said. "You can move it around, but the only way to get rid of it is to tear some hair out. But barring something violent like that, if you're just manipulating it continuously without tearing anything, there's always going to be a vortex."

The ever-present vortex on the hairy ball is mathematically analogous to the waves on a plasma's surface, Marston says.

"In this case, there's always a vortex but it's in the wave-number space, wavelengths of the different waves," he said. "It's a little more abstract than in real space, but the math is largely similar."

Having fleshed out the theoretical basis for these waves, the next step is to perform experiments to confirm that they're really there. Marston and his colleagues recently won a seed grant from Brown to help them do just that. With the help of researchers at UCLA's Basic Plasma Physics Facility, Marston and his colleagues plan to perform experiments to detect these waves.

Ultimately, Marston hopes that the discovery of these waves could be a boon for plasma physics, helping scientists to better understand and control plasma systems. One major area Marston is interested in is plasma fusion reactors. Such reactors could one day harness nuclear fusion to produce an abundance of clean energy, but so far the plasma systems have proven hard to control.

"In the long term, we hope this can make an impact on fusion energy," Marston said. "If we can use these waves to discern the states of plasmas, it might help in designing a fusion reactor that's stable and able to produce energy."

But for now, Marston and his colleagues are looking forward to performing their experiments.

"If we can demonstrate these things experimentally, people in the plasma community will hopefully start paying closer attention to this idea," he said.

Other co-authors on the paper were Steven Tobias and Ziyan Zhu.

PORTLAND, OR - Text message reminders are not a silver bullet when it comes to overcoming the long-standing challenge of ensuring that breast cancer patients continue to take aromatase inhibitors, pills to treat hormone-sensitive cancers that are prescribed for as long as five years.

Aromatase inhibitors (AIs) are one of the most common treatments for breast cancer, with tens of thousands of post-menopausal women prescribed the drugs each year to fight hormone-sensitive breast cancers, which make up about 80 percent of all breast cancers. AIs stop the production of estrogen, essentially starving hormone receptor-positive breast cancer cells, and patients must take them for months or years. Side effects are common, with about half of patients reporting bone pain. Headaches, nausea, and hot flashes are common. Quitting AI treatment can be dangerous. Those who do are at increased risk for their breast cancer returning.

SWOG Cancer Research Network Vice Chair Dawn Hershman, MD, director of the Breast Cancer Program at NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia University Irving Medical Center's Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, wanted to find out whether a relatively new form of medication reminder - texts - would encourage more women to keep up their AI regimen.

In new study results out now in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Hershman shows they did not.

Her SWOG study is the first large, long-term, randomized trial to test any intervention aimed at directly improving AI adherence. Founded in 1956, SWOG is a cancer clinical trials network funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and a member of the oldest and largest publicly-funded research network in the nation.

To conduct her trial, Hershman and her team enrolled 724 post-menopausal women with early-stage breast cancer into the study from 40 SWOG sites across the United States. Every woman had been taking AIs for at least a month, and would continue to take the pills at least 36 months under their doctors' orders. Of the women enrolled, 348 received brief, twice-weekly text messages reminding them to take their medication or reminding them of the benefits of taking their medication. Another 354 did not receive the texts. Patients and physicians both reported on drug adherence - and women even took routine urine tests to screen for AI biomarkers. After 36 months, there was no difference between the two groups. The percentage of women who remained AI adherent was 55 percent - the same number for both groups, no matter how adherence was measured.

Hershman, who presented preliminary results of her study at the 2019 ASCO annual meeting, said the take-home message is not that text messages are ineffective tools in the fight for cancer drug adherence. Rather, generic, one-way text messages are not the answer.

"Persuading patients to take AIs, or any long-term cancer drug, will likely require a more personalized approach, one that includes many interventions and supportive efforts to provide relief from symptoms and also provide encouragement and support for patients," Hershman said. "Texts alone don't do the trick."

TORONTO, May 14, 2020 - An international environmental agreement to regulate the use of chemicals depleting the ozone layer may have inadvertently allowed higher levels of other harmful chemicals to flourish, new research co-led by York University and Environment and Climate Change Canada has found.

The 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer was designed to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), such as freon used in older air conditioners.

But these replacement compounds, thought to be a better alternative, degrade into products that do not break down in the environment and have instead continually increased in the Arctic since about 1990.

"Our results suggest that global regulation and replacement of other environmentally harmful chemicals contributed to the increase of these compounds in the Arctic, illustrating that regulations can have important unanticipated consequences," says Assistant Professor Cora Young of the Faculty of Science and the paper's corresponding author.

It is important to study these products of CFC replacement compounds, short-chain perfluoroalkyl carboxylic acids (scPFCAs), before more of them are phased in over the next few years as they can adversely impact human health and the environment. They are part of the perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) class of man-made chem icals used in commercial products and industrial processes that are currently receiving a lot of attention.

These scPFCAs are products of chemicals used in the fluoropolymer industry in automotive, electrical and electronic applications, industrial processing and construction.

"Our measurements provide the first long-term record of these chemicals, which have all increased dramatically over the past few decades," says Young. "Our work also showed how these industrial sources contribute to the levels in the ice caps."

They can travel long distances in the atmosphere and often end up in lakes, rivers and wetlands causing irreversible contamination and affecting the health of freshwater invertebrates, including insects, crustaceans and worms.

Current drinking water treatment technology is unable to remove them, and they have already been found accumulating in human blood as well as in the fruits, vegetables and other crops we eat.

The researchers measured all three known scPFCA compounds over several decades in two locations of the high Arctic and found all of them have steadily increased in the Arctic, particularly trifluoroacetic acid.

The researchers acknowledge the importance of the Montreal Protocol's positive impact on the ozone and climate but point out that even the best regulations can have unintended negative impacts on the environment.

The research is published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

WASHINGTON - The Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions (SCAI) has released guidelines that provide a comprehensive review of comparative effectiveness data for devices used in aorto-iliac arterial interventions. The recommendations aim to provide clinicians with guidance for device selection in patients for whom these devices are intended as definitive therapy. The document was published today in SCAI's official journal, Catheterization and Cardiovascular Interventions and presented during the SCAI 2020 Scientific Sessions Virtual Conference.

Aorto-iliac disease leads to significant limitation in patients' functional status and quality of life. "endovascular device selection in peripheral arterial interventions remains challenging due to paucity of comparative data and a wide spectrum of available devices. In 2018, SCAI developed the first-of-its-kind guidance document to address device selection in femoral-popliteal arterial interventions," said Dmitriy Feldman, MD, FSCAI, chair of the writing group. "The purpose of newly released 2020 SCAI guidelines is to provide a comprehensive review of comparative effectiveness data for aorto-iliac devices and to arm clinicians with evidence-based recommendations and practical guidance for selection of devices in aorto-iliac arterial interventions," Feldman continued.

The writing group used a modified Delphi panel methodology to form recommendations based on data extracted through a systematic review of available evidence. The writing group graded recommendations for eleven relevant anatomical scenarios according to strength of the recommendation (magnitude of benefit or harm, including cost of use) and certainty of the evidence (type, quality, and consistency of data).

The team included researchers from CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) and the University of Melbourne.

Corals with increased heat tolerance have the potential to reduce the impact of reef bleaching from marine heat waves, which are becoming more common under climate change.

"Coral reefs are in decline worldwide," CSIRO Synthetic Biology Future Science Platform (SynBio FSP) science lead Dr Patrick Buerger said.

"Climate change has reduced coral cover, and surviving corals are under increasing pressure as water temperatures rise and the frequency and severity of coral bleaching events increase."

The team made the coral more tolerant to temperature-induced bleaching by bolstering the heat tolerance of its microalgal symbionts - tiny cells of algae that live inside the coral tissue.

"Our novel approach strengthens the heat resistance of coral by manipulating its microalgae, which is a key factor in the coral's heat tolerance," Dr Buerger said.

The team isolated the microalgae from coral and cultured them in the specialist symbiont lab at AIMS. Using a technique called "directed evolution", they then exposed the cultured microalgae to increasingly warmer temperatures over a period of four years.

This assisted them to adapt and survive hotter conditions.

"Once the microalgae were reintroduced into coral larvae, the newly established coral-algal symbiosis was more heat tolerant compared to the original one," Dr Buerger said.

The microalgae were exposed to temperatures that are comparable to the ocean temperatures during current summer marine heat waves causing coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.

The researchers then unveiled some of the mechanisms responsible for the enhanced coral bleaching tolerance.

"We found that the heat tolerant microalgae are better at photosynthesis and improve the heat response of the coral animal," Professor Madeleine van Oppen, of AIMS and the University of Melbourne, said

"These exciting findings show that the microalgae and the coral are in direct communication with each other. "

The next step is to further test the algal strains in adult colonies across a range of coral species.

"This breakthrough provides a promising and novel tool to increase the heat tolerance of corals and is a great win for Australian science," SynBio FSP Director Associate Professor Claudia Vickers said.

What The Viewpoint Says: Recommendations for resuming intense exercise training for athletes and highly active people with COVID-19 are discussed.

Authors: Eugene H. Chung, M.D., M.Sc., of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, is the corresponding author.

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

(doi:10.1001/jamacardio.2020.2136)

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As is well known, atomic nuclei not only are the cores of substances but also directly participate in bremsstrahlung (namely deceleration radiation), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), nuclear scattering, and spontaneous and induced nuclear reactions including nuclear fission, fusion, spallation and decay, all of which are significant for scientific research and practical applications, such as nuclear power, nuclear medicine and NMR imaging. Therefore, extensive efforts have been devoted to studying atomic nuclei for over 100 years by many scientists. However, to date, no methods of optical imaging can observe atomic nuclei, because it is extremely challenging to image such tiny entities surrounded by electrons.

Fortunately, aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) can provide an opportunity. Its electron beam is capable of positioning sample sites with the picometer (pm)-scale precision, and the interactions of the electron beam with the atomic nucleus and the electrons of an atom can emit bremsstrahlung X-ray photons and characteristic ones, respectively. Moreover, the bremsstrahlung and the characteristic X-ray photons can be received and distinguished by the detectors of energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) in aberration-corrected STEM. The above functions can be performed simultaneously by modern instruments of aberration-corrected STEM.

Herein, Prof. Jun Luo and the co-authors propose and realize a new microscopy type of optical imaging for realizing the X-ray imaging of atomic nuclei (ANXRI) by integrating aberration-corrected STEM, the bremsstrahlung generation of X-ray photons, and the EDS receiving and mapping of the photons. ANXRI successfully images atomic nuclei in three different types of materials, including nanoporous gold (NPG) coated with Pd and Pt, NPG without Pd or Pt, and SrTiO3. "Our idea about the ANXRI method was originally inspired by the working mechanism of atomic force microscopy (AFM)," said Prof. Luo.

The accuracy of ANXRI can reach 1 pm, and the individual imaged sizes of atomic nuclei in ANXRI are adjustable by altering the X-ray energies. More importantly, ANXRI is capable of distinguishing atomic nuclei of different elements. This function is very useful, because in most of nuclear scattering and reactions, not the electrons in a material but only its atomic nuclei change and evolve, which cannot be imaged and monitored by characteristic EDS peaks. This work provides a new opportunity for imaging and studying atomic nuclei and their evolutions in materials science, chemistry and physics, such as nuclear fission, fusion, spallation and decay.

Foreign language teaching in primary schools literally opens up new worlds for primary school children: with a large portion of curiosity, willingness to learn and impartiality, they encounter not only new languages but also new cultures. Early foreign language teaching takes advantage of the special learning conditions at this age. It is therefore all the more important that the learned content is permanently anchored in the children's memory and not only available for a short time.

In a recent study, a team of neuroscientists at TU Dresden, in cooperation with researchers from the Universities of Leipzig and Linz, has shown that the use of gestures and pictures leads to an improvement in the learning performance of primary school children in foreign language teaching.

The study was conducted with eight-year-olds at a primary school in Leipzig. In several experiments, the children learned new English vocabulary for 20 minutes per day on five consecutive days. They learned the words while viewing pictures (sensory enrichment), performing gestures (sensorimotor enrichment), or by listening only (no enrichment). The children's knowledge of the new vocabulary was tested eight days, two months, and six months after the learning period.

Neuroscientist Katharina von Kriegstein and her team found that both looking at pictures and performing gestures improved the children's memory of English vocabulary compared to pure listening comprehension, and that this improvement continued for six months after the learning week. "Based on previous studies conducted with adults, we actually thought that sensorimotor enrichment (performing gestures) would help the children even more over the long-term than sensory-only enrichment (viewing pictures). Unexpectedly, however, we found that pictures and gestures were equally helpful for children's foreign language learning, even six months after the learning week. This means that the types of enrichment that work for adults may not necessarily work for kids," explains the Professor of Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience at TU Dresden.

Dr. Brian Mathias adds "Enrichment teaching strategies may work because they allow learners to experience the meanings of words through multiple senses, and with their own bodies. Positive effects of enrichment for the children in this study were surprisingly robust in that they lasted six months following a minimal amount of vocabulary exposure. Moreover, gestures and pictures enhanced children's memory not only for foreign language words whose meanings are more concrete such as "newspaper" and "monument," but also for words whose meanings are rather abstract such as "innocence" or "recommendation"."

Cancer cells remain clumped together via a sort of 'Velcro' which allows them to adhere to each other wherever they appear. In order for cancer cells to leave a tumour and spread throughout the body during metastatic processes, cancer cells must reduce their adhesion and increase their ability to migrate. They can do this by changing the amount and type of proteins on their surface.

University of Louvain (UCLouvain) research conducted by Henri-François Renard and François Tyckaert and directed by Professor Pierre Morsomme targeted these surface proteins, particularly one called CD166, a kind of microscopic 'Velcro' which allows the cells to stick together.

UCLouvain researchers observed that certain cancer cells are, in fact, capable of decreasing the abundance of this 'Velcro' (CD166) on their surface. More specifically, these cells have found a way to reduce the adhesion of their surface by redirecting it into small internal vesicles: this is a mechanism called endocytosis, which UCLouvain's researchers highlighted in their study published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Communications.

If there is less adhesion, owing to less 'Velcro' (CD166) on the surface of cancer cells, they stick together less and therefore migrate more easily.

The next step? This fundamental mechanism still has many secrets to reveal. But UCLouvain researchers hypothesise that it could contribute to the formation of metastases which allow cancer to spread. And who knows, in the future this will perhaps make it possible to develop new solutions that block metastases and thus slow down the development of certain cancers.

An international collaboration, which included the involvement of the research team from the Institut de Neurociències of the UAB (INC-UAB), has shown that neurons expressing dopamine D2 receptors have different molecular features and functions, depending on their anatomical localization within the striatum. This research, conducted with mouse models and published in Nature Communications, opens the door to develop better treatments for diseases in which dopamine is altered, such as schizophrenia, addictions and Parkinson's disease.

The striatum is a brain region involved in motor control, habit formation, decision-making, motivation and reinforcement, among other aspects, and its disfunction has been associated with many neurological and psychiatric disorders. One of the most important neurotransmitters in the striatum is dopamine, which exerts different functions depending on the kind of receptor it binds to.

This study has focused on D2 receptors, and has shown that, contrary to paradigm, not all D2 neurons within the striatum have the same molecular identify or function, but that their neuro-anatomical localization is key. Researchers identified hundreds of novel region-specific molecular markers, which may serve as tools to target selective subpopulations.

"These results show that there is significant molecular and functional heterogeneity of neuronal populations in the striatum. If we know them better, we will be able to be more selective in the design of treatments for diseases in which dopamine levels are altered, such as in schizophrenia or Parkinson's disease", says Emma Puighermanal-Puigvert, first author of the article. "The more specific we are with our therapeutic target, the less secondary effects will appear". The work was conducted by an international collaboration of researchers in which Albert Quintana and Elisenda Sanz, from the INC-UAB, also participated.

Using cutting-edge technologies, they analyzed mouse models to see what genes are expressed in D2 neurons from the two main areas of the striatum: the ventral striatum, consisting mainly of the nucleus accumbens, and the dorsal striatum, and revealed overwhelming differences among them. Thus, depending on their precise anatomical location, they express different kinds of proteins, changing neurons' features and functions.

In this research, scientists also focused on a group of neurons mainly located in the accumbens, which express the protein WFS1, and studied the effects of deleting their D2 receptors. What they observed was a significant reduction in digging, an innate behavior used in many species to seek or hoard food, as shelter, or to hide away from predators, whose underlying neuronal mechanisms were still unknown. Additionally, the authors found that these animals present an exacerbated hyperlocomotor response when their dopamine levels are increased through amphetamine administration, suggesting a key role of D2 receptors from WFS1 neurons in the response to psychostimulants.

Overall, this study demonstrates that there is a huge complexity and functional specificity among D2 neuron subpopulations, and reveals the possibility to manipulate them specifically to better understand their functions, in both physiological and pathological contexts.

Dyslexia is a specific learning disorder that affects 5 - 15% of the world population. MusVis, a web game developed by Maria Rauschenberger supervised by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Luz Rello, researchers associated with the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) at UPF, received the W4A Attendees' Award on 20 April at the 17th International Web for All Conference, whose specific theme this year was Automation for Accessibility, for the communication paper entitled "Screening risk of dyslexia through a web-game using language-independent content and machine learning".

"The aim of our web game, called MusVis, was to measure the differences in the interaction of children with and without dyslexia while they identify visual and musical elements in a fun way", says Maria Rauschenberger, a 2019 PhD from Pompeu Fabra University with her thesis on dyslexia supervised by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Luz Rello, co-authors of the paper and researchers associated with the UPF DTIC. Thanks to her research, Maria Rauschenberger was hired as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max-Planck Research Institute in Germany.

"To our knowledge, this is the first time the risk of dyslexia has been analysed by means of a web game based on language-independent contents and using machine learning", Rauschenberger affirms. This new method could be used to detect possible learning disorders in children, even before they develop language skills, and lead to possible early intervention. Thus, "we aimed to detect dyslexia through interactions that do not require a knowledge of language", the authors affirm.

Although it is likely that the differences are not as strong or visible as reading and spelling errors that characterize children with dyslexia, in the light of the results obtained so far, the authors consider MusVis as being a promising tool for predicting dyslexia in pre-readers using language-independent audio and visual content. "Since children with dyslexia need about two years to offset their difficulties, our method, as it is language-independent, could help reduce school failure, delayed treatment and, most importantly, reduce the suffering of children and parents", Rauschenberg highlights.

"Our approach might optimize the resources to detect and treat dyslexia, however, we would need to examine many more children at an early age to expand the training data for our predictive models based on machine learning and improve our results", the authors add.

They are in the shape of a tadpole and interact with each other by harpooning between head and tail, thus presenting interesting and unexpected physical properties. Tadpoles are the large molecules at the centre of the new research just published on the journal ACS Macro Letters, and the result of an international collaboration between SISSA and the Universities of Vienna, Warwick and Edinburgh. In the study, the researchers described how these particular constructs, conceived by the scientists as the union between a circular and a linear polymer, in dense solutions present much "slower" molecular dynamics compared to that recorded by the two parts that make it up: and this is because "heads" and "tails" tend to "capture" each other, in a cascade process. What is the result? A much less fluid and much more viscous product. The research has been conducted thanks to computer simulations and made it possible to analyse the dynamics of the molecules in a very fine way, with a resolution that is impossible to reproduce in the laboratory. Studies like this, which allow to shed light on the physical behaviour of the macromolecules under specific conditions, are essential for possible future technological applications of polymers, which range from materials engineering to pharmaceuticals.

In Physics, 1+1 does not always add up to 2

"How many times do we hear ourselves say that 1+1 always adds up to 2? Although this is usually the case when it comes to maths, the same cannot be said about physics: in particular, the physical properties of complex objects deriving from the union of two or more simpler parts, are not always interpretable as intermediate at the same physical properties of the different parts" explain the researchers.

"An important example of this are polymers, large molecules formed by the union of several parts, which can be summarised according to various architectures: linear polymers, circular polymers and polymers which we could call "chimeric" i.e. resulting from the union of more types of distinct architectures". Just like the ones used in this research.

This is how tadpoles harpoon

"Exploring various sizes of heads/tails through numeric simulations we have shown how these objects in solution behave differently from what one would suppose considering the behaviour, already known, of the two polymers that make them up: the circular and the linear one. The researchers explain that this slowdown is because the tail of each "tadpole" tends to 'harpoon' the head of a tadpole close to it and the latter does the same with the others, in a cascading process. The result is a compound with characteristics very close to those of a highly viscous fluid but achievable with relatively small polymers. The importance of this research above all deals with the possibility to explore and design so-called 'soft' materials with new physical properties: all based on relatively small molecules whose reciprocal interactions dramatically affect the structure and the dynamics of the compound. Following the study with the simulations, the research is now awaiting experimental confirmation.