Earth

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor subjects' brain activity as they were shown images of art, architecture or natural landscapes, the team found that in the visual parts of the brain, these different types of images led to very different patterns of activity, even across images all judged by subjects to be aesthetically pleasing.

Not so for other parts of the brain. Within the default mode network, regions of the brain that are typically active during inward contemplation, the images that people reported as aesthetically appealing led to remarkably similar patterns of brain activity across art, buildings and landscapes. This suggests the default mode network, or DMN, may contain a universal code for aesthetic appeal.

"We don't know yet if DMN actually computes this representation," said Edward Vessel of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany and leader of the team, which originally launched from New York University. "But it clearly has access to abstract information about whether we find an experience aesthetically appealing or not."

As the DMN is normally silent when a person engages with the outside world, it is highly unusual that it contains information about the aesthetic appeal of visual experiences.

The default mode network is at the center of much of the team's work. Known as the brain's place for self-reflection, mind-wandering and imagination, the DMN, as they discovered, has an important role in how we respond to beauty, selectively engaging with highly moving visual art.

Despite being highly personal, aesthetic experiences can be extremely powerful, even life-changing events.

A better understanding of such experiences may lead to insights that could aid learning and improve individuals' sense of well-being. It may also lead to a more coherent understanding about how different types of pleasures interconnect in higher order cortical regions and complex human experiences, according to Gabrielle Starr at Pomona College, one of the study's coauthors.

The researchers anticipate that future research will experiment with other modalities/stimuli such as music or poetry and explore whether DMN responds similarly when we find a song or a poem beautiful.

WASHINGTON, DC - The American College of Rheumatology (ACR), along with 369 other leading patient, physician, and healthcare professional organizations, sent a letter to Congress urging passage of the Improving Seniors' Timely Access to Care Act of 2019 (H.R. 3107), a bipartisan bill to protect Medicare Advantage beneficiaries from prior authorization requirements that needlessly delay or deny access to medically necessary care.

Introduced by Representatives Suzan DelBene (D-WA), Mike Kelly (R-PA), Roger Marshall, MD (R-KS), and Ami Bera, MD (D-CA), the Improving Seniors' Timely Access to Care Act would make it easier for patients to access medically necessary treatments by requiring the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to regulate the use of prior authorization by Medicare Advantage plans. The bill would also increase transparency by mandating that health insurance plans report to CMS their prior authorization usage rate and the frequency with which they approve or deny coverage.

"While intended to control costs, the unregulated use of prior authorization has devolved into a time-consuming and obstructive process that often stalls or outright revokes patient access to medically necessary therapies," said Paula Marchetta, MD, MBA, president of the ACR. "Many healthcare plans now use prior authorization indiscriminately, ensnaring the treatment delivery process in webs of red tape and creating gratuitous hurdles for patients and providers. Patients, physician groups, hospital associations and other key stakeholders all agree that reform is needed."

According to a study conducted by the American Medical Association, over a quarter of doctors surveyed said prior authorization has led to a "serious adverse event" for patients, such as hospitalization and permanent bodily damage. The same study found that 91 percent of doctors say that prior authorization is associated with treatment delays.

As part of the Regulatory Relief Coalition - a group of national physician specialty organizations - the ACR has been a staunch advocate for reducing regulatory burdens in the Medicare program to assure patients have access to timely and medically necessary treatment.

The full letter is available here.

EVANSTON, Ill. -- Most people have experienced the hair-raising effect of rubbing a balloon on their head or the subtle spark caused by dragging socked feet across the carpet. Although these experiences are common, a detailed understanding of how they occur has eluded scientists for more than 2,500 years.

Now a Northwestern University team developed a new model that shows that rubbing two objects together produces static electricity, or triboelectricity, by bending the tiny protrusions on the surface of materials.

This new understanding could have important implications for existing electrostatic applications, such as energy harvesting and printing, as well as for avoiding potential dangers, such as fires started by sparks from static electricity.

The research will be published on Thursday, Sept. 12 in the journal Physical Review Letters. Laurence Marks, professor of materials science and engineering in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering, led the study. Christopher Mizzi and Alex Lin, doctoral students in Marks's laboratory, were co-first authors of the paper.

Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus first reported friction-induced static electricity in 600 B.C. After rubbing amber with fur, he noticed the fur attracted dust.

"Since then, it has become clear that rubbing induces static charging in all insulators -- not just fur," Marks said. "However, this is more or less where the scientific consensus ended."

At the nanoscale, all materials have rough surfaces with countless tiny protrusions. When two materials come into contact and rub against one another, these protrusions bend and deform.

Marks's team found that these deformations give rise to voltages that ultimately cause static charging. This phenomenon is called the "flexoelectric effect," which occurs when the separation of charge in an insulator arises from deformations such as bending.

Using a simple model, the Northwestern team showed that voltages arising from the bending protrusions during rubbing are, indeed, large enough to cause static electricity. This work explains a number of experimental observations, such as why charges are produced even when two pieces of the same material are rubbed together and predicts experimentally measured charges with remarkable accuracy.

"Our finding suggests that triboelectricity, flexoelectricity and friction are inextricably linked," Marks said. "This provides much insight into tailoring triboelectric performance for current applications and expanding functionality to new technologies."

"This is a great example of how fundamental research can explain everyday phenomena which hadn't been understood previously, and of how research in one area -- in this case friction and wear -- can lead to unexpected advances in another area," said Andrew Wells, a program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funded the research. "NSF funds research like this in materials science and engineering for new knowledge that can one day open new opportunities."

Plants emit gases, called volatile organic compounds (VOCs), that enter the atmosphere, where they can interact with other natural and human-made molecules to form secondary organic aerosols (SOAs). These tiny, suspended particles influence atmospheric processes, such as cloud formation and sunlight scattering. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Earth and Space Chemistry have shown that aphid-infested Scots pine trees produce a different mixture of VOCs than healthy plants, which then leads to different SOAs.

Plant species emit a wide variety of VOCs, including terpenoids, benzenoids and plant stress compounds, and the mixture can change with environmental conditions, such as temperature, drought or insect outbreaks. Very few studies have examined SOA production from the full range of VOCs made by plants under different conditions, in particular, insect outbreaks that could become more prevalent in a changing climate. Therefore, Celia Faiola and colleagues wanted to compare VOC emissions and SOA production from Scots pines under healthy and aphid-stressed conditions.

The researchers brought potted Scots pines into the lab, half of which were infested with aphids, and collected and analyzed their VOC emissions. The biggest difference between the infested and healthy plants was in the production of a type of VOC called sesquiterpenes, which had different chemical structures and were produced at different levels. The team showed that these compounds would likely affect SOA formation, depending on various chemical processes, such as ozonolysis and photolysis, that occur in the atmosphere. Although the implications of these findings with regard to climate change are currently unclear, the experiments show that increased plant stress in a changing climate could influence SOA production, the researchers say.

In 2017, Scot Martin, the Gordon McKay Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), envisioned a novel drone-based chemical monitoring system to track the health of the Amazon in the face of global climate change and human-caused deforestation and burning.

The project would monitor chemical signals emitted by plants known as volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which help plants interact with organisms around them. Every species of plant emits a different VOC signature -- like a fingerprint -- which can change based on the season or if the plant is under duress from, for example, drought or flood. Monitoring and translating these signals can reveal how forest ecosystems respond to stress caused by climate change.

Traditionally, this kind of monitoring has been done from large platform towers that rise above the canopy of the forest.

"The Amazon contains thousands of small ecosystems, each with their own biodiversity and VOC signals," said Jianhuai Ye, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS. "Yet, there are less than 10 of these towers in the entire forest and they are all built in similar ecosystems where the soil can support large structures. As you can imagine, this leads to a lot of bias in the data."

Martin, Ye and the rest of the team, which includes collaborators from Amazonas State University (UEA) and the Amazonas State Research Support Foundation (FAPEAM), thought that drones could provide more accurate data of the forest.

Their first mission demonstrated how right they were.

In the summer of 2018, after years of prototyping, the researchers used their specially-designed drones to map the chemical fingerprint of two different ecosystems in central Amazonia. What they found overturned most present-day biosphere emissions models, which assumed that nearby ecosystems had the same emissions.

The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Plants and insects often communicate via chemical signaling, rather than visual or vocal signaling more common among animals," said Martin. "With our chemical sensors, we can better understand the current functioning of the forest and how it is changing with shifting regional climate, including a more frequent occurrence of fires in recent years in the central part of the Amazon."

In the central Amazon, sloping hills give rise to plateaus and water-logged valleys, dissected by streams and rivers. Each of these ecosystems -- the forests on the hillsides, the forests on the plateaus and in the valleys, and the vegetation along the water's edges -- has a different chemical fingerprint.

The research team flew drones over plateau forests and slope forests. They found that concentrations of a VOC called isoprene were more than 50 percent higher in the plateau forest than in the slope forest. Using this data, they developed a model that suggested that isoprene emissions doubled to tripled among these different forest sub-types. In the absence of measurements, previous emission models assumed no difference.

"This research highlights how little we understood forest heterogeneity," said Martin. "But drone-assisted technologies can help us understand and quantify VOC emissions in different, nearby ecosystems in order to better represent them in climate and air quality model simulations."

The researchers plan to sample ecosystems in water-logged valleys and along the rivers in Fall 2019 using a boat in the middle of the river as a platform for launching and retrieving the drones. They also plan to test a three-drone fleet operated in unison.

The iconic saguaros on Tumamoc Hill served as harbingers in new research which sought to predict how the desert species will fare in the hotter, drier climate of the future and how topography might mitigate the effects of climate change.

Lead author Susana Rodríguez-Buriticá and her team crunched the numbers in a 48-year-long dataset that included information on more than 5,800 saguaros dotting the Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, an 860-acre ecological reserve owned and operated by the University of Arizona College of Science in partnership with Pima County. They found that small variations in the hill's topography might buffer saguaro populations from the impacts of a harsher climate.

"This was an ambitious but highly valuable undertaking, since these plants can live for over 100 years," said co-author and United States Geological Survey research ecologist Daniel Winkler. "As a result of the long-term data set, we're able to identify how saguaro populations have been maintained over time and predict how they'll likely respond to future climate change."

Previous studies have attributed changes in saguaro populations to climate. This new study, published in the journal Ecosphere in August, confirmed more saguaro growth and establishment during wet periods, and alternatively, death and reduced establishment during drought and extreme freezes.

"Ignoring spatial and temporal variability and their interactions can produce incorrect predictions when trying to model species' past and future population dynamics," said Rodríguez-Buriticá, who was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Arizona from 2011 to 2014 when she conducted this research. She is currently the lead researcher in the Spatial Ecology Lab at Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute in Colombia.

Specifically, the team found that Tumamoc Hill's saguaro population boomed during wet and cool periods, but that topographic variability interacts with climate fluctuations to produce unexpected demographic patterns, including the ability to foster new saguaros during periods of harsh climate conditions.

For example, saguaros are traditionally favored on south- and east-facing slopes in the winter, when saguaros are most at risk of dying by frost, because that's where the sun lingers longest, according to Rodríguez-Buriticá. But this is not strictly the case on Tumamoc Hill. The south and east slopes are steep and rocky, meaning water retention is too low for many saguaros to take hold. Alternatively, the north-facing slopes, which are less-steep, receive less sunlight but have deeper, richer soil that retains water for saguaros. As a result, saguaros could establish there too, even in years when the desert is hotter and drier than normal.

The team chose to study saguaros on Tumamoc Hill because of the diversity of slopes and elevations, and because of the rich history of long-term research there, said co-author Larry Venable, UA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and director of research for the Desert Laboratory at Tumamoc Hill.

"The Desert Laboratory at Tumamoc Hill has the longest record of population dynamics of saguaros," Venable said. "It's special because the Carnegie Institution founded it in 1903, and it has hosted leading ecologists since the early 20th century. There's a deep history of data collection. This research is more valuable because of the long-term nature of the data."

Existing population data spanned from 1964 to 1993 until Rodríguez-Buriticá and her team extended it to 2012. This is important because a lot has changed since 1993, Venable said, such as climate change and the invasion of buffelgrass.

Rodríguez-Buriticá is polishing her next paper, which will explore the importance of microtopography and plant-to-plant interactions to buffer extreme climate in saguaro populations. She believes that her team's work illustrates the power of long-running datasets to study how climate impacts species.

There are 157 organisms that form the baseline biome of a healthy human gut, according to research published in the journal PLOS ONE by investigators at the George Washington University (GW). The baseline microbial profile, called GutFeelingKB, can be expanded to 863 organisms if closely related proteomes are considered. This information will serve as a reference list for doctors, patients, and researchers, giving them an idea of what a "normal" human microbiome looks like.

"The more we learn about the human microbiome, the more we learn of its importance to our health," said Raja Mazumder, PhD, co-author and professor of biochemistry and molecular medicine at the GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences. "Knowing what a healthy human gut looks like is critical to research that will inform how to diagnose, treat, and prevent issues with the microbiome."

This comprehensive knowledge of the types and ratios of microbes that inhabit the healthy human gut is necessary before any kind of pre-clinical or clinical study can be performed. It is also important for researchers looking to find ways to alter the microbiome, treat a condition, or improve a therapy outcome. GutFeelingKB can serve as a healthy control for studies looking at the human microbiome.

To compile their database, the research group genetically sequenced 48 fecal samples from 16 healthy participants recruited in Washington, D.C., in addition to using 50 fecal metagenomic samples downloaded from the Human Microbiome Project from individuals also screened as healthy. Of the 157 organisms described in GutFeelingKB, 20% were Clostridia, 19% were Bacterioidia, 17% were Bifidobacteriales, 14% were Enterobacterales and from the phylum Firmicutes 20% were Clostridia and 14% were Lactobacillales -- all classes of bacteria found in probiotic foods like yogurt. The research team noted that 84 organisms were common to all the samples, indicating that this group of bacteria may be core species for the human gut.

The research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Clinical and Translational Science Awards Program at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, the McCormick Genomic and Proteomic Center, and the Clinical Translational Science Institute (CTSI) at GW and Children's National in Washington, D.C. Raw sequence data was generated at KamTek, Inc. with subsidized pricing using MiSeq Illumina instruments at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland.

"This study demonstrates the power of multidisciplinary team science to advance translational research as this team involves colleagues from across multiple institutions, disciplines and schools within GW," said Keith A. Crandall, PhD, informatics co-lead on the CTSI grant, co-author, and director of the Computational Biology Institute at Milken Institute School of Public Health at GW. "The GutFeelingKB provides a foundational model and initial data to begin to understand the diversity of the healthy gut microbiome, which is a key component of any study trying to detect disease associated with microbiome changes."

In addition to creating GutFeelingKB, the research group published a novel Fecal Biome Population Report, known as FecalBiome, which has clinical capability. FecalBiome can help physicians compare a patient's microbiome to the microbiomes of healthy individuals, allowing them to better assess the effectiveness of fecal transplants and other microbiome products. The research team also developed a prototype reporting template for physicians to relay the information to patients.

"Uncovering the complex metabolic exchanges between gut microbial species and their human hosts has tremendous implications for a wide variety of health conditions, possibly even our moods. Can the microbiome be 'tuned' to increase beneficial bacterial populations? How does our diet affect this tuning? We are excited this knowledgebase will let us quantify these shifts and relate them to human health," said Hiroki Morizono, PhD, informatics co-lead on the CTSI grant, co-author, director of biomedical informatics at Children's National and associate research professor of genomics and precision medicine and pediatrics at the GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

MINNEAPOLIS, MN- September 11, 2019 - About one in 8,000 people have facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, according to a 2014 study, which is relatively common in the world of genetic diseases. New University of Minnesota Medical School research identifies an inhibitor that protects cells from toxic effects associated with this disease in cells and mice.

Facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD) is a genetic disease that affects the muscles in the face, upper body, abdomen, and back, and can be extremely debilitating. It is caused by the misexpression of a gene called DUX4. The pathophysiology of FSHD is not yet understood, but it is known that people who get the disease have a mutation that leads to the DUX4 gene being expressed when it should be off. The gene codes for a protein that is an important central regulator to the function of the cell because it controls other genes. Therefore, when DUX4 gets misexpressed, the protein activates other genes that also shouldn't be expressed, and the cell ultimately stops functioning properly, which leads to FSHD.

In a study published in Science Advances, Michael Kyba, PhD, and Darko Bosnakovski, DVM, PhD, both researchers in the Department of Pediatrics at the U of M Medical School, and their team discovered a way to deactivate DUX4 and take away the toxic effects in cells, as well as in a mouse model for FSHD.

Kyba had previously found that DUX4 turns on target genes by bringing in an enzyme called p300 to certain genes, where it then adds chemical modification to all of the histones around that gene. As the most abundant proteins in the nucleus of a cell, histones regulate the function of the DNA. The chemical modification to the histones opens up the gene and allows it to be expressed at a high level when it would normally never be expressed in the muscle.

Kyba's new research tested a compound that was newly synthesized by Medicinal Chemists Michael Walters at UMN and Ajit Jadhav at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), due to its potential to block p300. Kyba tested this compound in a mouse model for FSHD and found that the compound called iP300w was effective in blocking the p300 enzyme needed by DUX4. Therefore, DUX4 did not have the resources to perform its job, and cells were protected from its toxic effects.

Drug companies are currently researching ways to turn the DUX4 gene off, but Kyba's findings are the first to show that the disease can be treated by blocking the activity of the DUX4 protein, even after it is already expressed.

"Whether this drug will be tested in patients will require additional study. The p300 enzyme functions in other situations, therefore blocking it in all cells may have side effects," said Kyba. "In the case that such side effects should be significant, we are also actively searching for a drug that interferes with the ability of DUX4 to recognize p300, which would allow p300 to continue functioning normally in its other roles."

In Japan Science and Technology Agency's Strategic Basic Research Programs, Dr. Masato Hirano of Sony Computer Science Laboratories and his colleagues discovered a sensorimotor function integration mechanism that enables the skillful fingering of pianists.

The tactile sensation signaled by the skin and the proprioceptive sensation (deep sensation) signaled by muscles and joints are collectively called somatosensory sensation. It has long been understood that somatosensory information plays an important role in movement control. However, how somatic sensation contributes to production of the skillful movements of pianists has not been elucidated.

The research group developed a system to produce tactile and proprioceptive sensation in the fingers with an electric current stimulator and an exoskeletal robot hand 1) and developed an assessment system that evaluated the processing of each neural information in the cerebral cortex using electroencephalogram measurements and transcranial magnetic stimulation 2). Using this system, expert pianists were found to have altered mechanisms by which tactile and proprioceptive sensation suppress the activity of the primary motor cortex 3) in a specialized manner (somatosensory-motor integration). This neuroplastic adaptation was associated with enhancement of speed and precision of finger movements in pianists.

This finding is expected to be useful in the development of techniques to identify factors necessary for acquiring proficiency in skills such as piano playing, tailor-made training methods that take individual differences into account, diagnostic methods for the early detection of neurological disorders where the function of fingers deteriorates due to excessive training, and in the development of rehabilitation methods.

Researchers have developed a neural network approach that can accurately identify congestive heart failure with 100% accuracy through analysis of just one raw electrocardiogram (ECG) heartbeat, a new study reports.

Congestive heart failure (CHF) is a chronic progressive condition that affects the pumping power of the heart muscles. Associated with high prevalence, significant mortality rates and sustained healthcare costs, clinical practitioners and health systems urgently require efficient detection processes.

Dr Sebastiano Massaro, Associate Professor of Organisational Neuroscience at the University of Surrey, has worked with colleagues Mihaela Porumb and Dr Leandro Pecchia at the University of Warwick and Ernesto Iadanza at the University of Florence, to tackle these important concerns by using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) - hierarchical neural networks highly effective in recognising patterns and structures in data.

Published in Biomedical Signal Processing and Control Journal, their research drastically improves existing CHF detection methods typically focused on heart rate variability that, whilst effective, are time-consuming and prone to errors. Conversely, their new model uses a combination of advanced signal processing and machine learning tools on raw ECG signals, delivering 100% accuracy.

Dr Massaro said: "We trained and tested the CNN model on large publicly available ECG datasets featuring subjects with CHF as well as healthy, non-arrhythmic hearts. Our model delivered 100% accuracy: by checking just one heartbeat we are able detect whether or not a person has heart failure. Our model is also one of the first known to be able to identify the ECG' s morphological features specifically associated to the severity of the condition."

Dr Pecchia, President at European Alliance for Medical and Biological Engineering, explains the implications of these findings: "With approximately 26 million people worldwide affected by a form of heart failure, our research presents a major advancement on the current methodology. Enabling clinical practitioners to access an accurate CHF detection tool can make a significant societal impact, with patients benefitting from early and more efficient diagnosis and easing pressures on NHS resources."

The water regime of a landscape commutes more and more between the extremes drought or flooding. The type of vegetation and land use plays an important role in water retention and runoff. Together with scientists from the UK and the US, researchers from the Leibniz- Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) have developed a mathematical model that can reflect the complex interplays between vegetation, soil and water regimes. They show, for example, that in beech forests water is increasingly cycled between soil and vegetation to increase evaporation to the atmosphere, while grass cover promotes groundwater recharge.

With the developed model EcH2o-iso the researchers can quantify where, how and for how long water is stored and released in the landscape. The model helps to better predict the effects of land-use changes on the water balance under changing climatic conditions. In drought-prone areas in particular, this knowledge can help to develop land use strategies that increase the landscape's resistance to climate change and protect water resources. "So far, the type of vegetation has been considered primarily with a view to preventing soil erosion. In view of more frequent extreme weather events such as droughts and floods, however, it is increasingly a question of which plants can be cultivated to control the retention or loss of water in the landscape," says Prof. Doerthe Tetzlaff, head of the study, leader of the research group "Landscape Ecohydrology" at IGB and Professor in Ecohydrology at the Humboldt Universitaet zu Berlin.

Previous forecasting models often capture vegetation as a static element. Thus, the complex interactions between evapotranspiration - the evaporation of water by plants and of soil and water surfaces - and the physiological processes of plants could only be insufficiently understood. In this study, however, long-term data of direct vegetation measures were also used (e.g. biomass production and transpiration). This improves the reliability of the models and their transferability. In the field, the models were tested with so-called conservative tracers. These are markers that can be used to determine the age and origin of the water. This is a novel approach to assess the effects of climate change on the water balance.

In a region around Lake Stechlin in northern Germany, the researchers validated the model using field studies. They compared land areas with deciduous forest and grass cover. The results of the field study show that grassland use leads to more groundwater recharge and that in beech forests more water is returned to the atmosphere by evapotranspiration. However, the effects are site-specific and depend on the respective hydroclimate, biogeography and landscape ecology. With the help of the EcH2o-iso model, however, these differences can be taken into account in the future and local as well as large scale forecast models can be created.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- The belief that one is smarter, better looking, more successful and more deserving than others - a personality trait known as narcissism - tends to wane as a person matures, a new study confirms. But not for everyone, and not to the same extent.

The study, reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, finds that the magnitude of the decline in narcissism between young adulthood and middle age is related to the specific career and personal relationship choices a person makes.

The research tracked participants across two time points. The first occurred when they were 18 and just starting out as freshmen at the University of California, Berkeley. The second was 23 years later, when participants were 41 years old. Of the original 486 participants, 237 completed a new round of evaluations.

Participants at both time points answered questions from a survey designed to assess their narcissistic traits. For the follow-up study, researchers also asked about relationship and employment history, job satisfaction, and health and well-being.

"We looked at the different facets of narcissism in adults at age 18 and again at 41," said Eunike Wetzel, a professor of psychology at Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany, who led the research with University of Illinois psychology professor Brent Roberts; Emily Grijalva, an organizational behavior professor at Washington University in St. Louis; and Richard Robins, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis. "We focused on participants' vanity, the belief in their own leadership qualities and their tendency to feel entitled."

Each facet of narcissism was associated with several negative - and in a few cases, positive - outcomes for the individual, the researchers found. Those who had higher levels of vanity at age 18 were prone to unstable relationships and marriages, and were more likely to be divorced by middle age. But they also reported better health at age 41. In contrast, those who felt the most entitled as young adults reported more negative life events and tended to have lower well-being and life satisfaction at middle age.

"We originally hypothesized that the leadership facet of narcissism would increase," Roberts said. "In fairness to my co-authors, that hypothesis was mine, and it turns out I was wrong."

Leadership is associated with goal persistence, extraversion, self-esteem and a desire to lead. It is considered one of the least pathological elements of narcissism, Roberts said.

"We know from past research that another component of personality, assertiveness, tends to increase during this time of life," he said. "So, I thought it was reasonable to hypothesize a similar increase in the leadership facet. This either means the past research is wrong, or our read of the leadership component of narcissism is wrong - it may actually be more negative than we thought. We have to figure this out in future research."

Vanity appeared to be most strongly linked to life events, the researchers found. For example, vanity declined more in those who entered into serious romantic relationships and those with children. But vanity declined significantly less in middle-aged adults who had experienced more negative life events than their peers.

"We also found that narcissistic young adults were more likely to end up in supervisory jobs 23 years later, suggesting that selfish, arrogant individuals are rewarded with more powerful organizational roles," Grijalva said. "Further, individuals who supervised others decreased less in narcissism from young adulthood to middle age - meaning that supervisory roles helped maintain prior levels of narcissism."

Despite the differences between individuals, most of the participants who responded to researchers' questions again at age 41 saw a decline in narcissism as they matured, the researchers found.

"Very few people, only 3% of participants, actually increased in overall narcissism between the ages of 18 and 41," Wetzel said. "And some remained just as narcissistic at age 41 as they had been when they were 18 years old."

"The findings should bring comfort to those who are concerned that young people are problematically narcissistic," Roberts said. "With time, it seems most people turn away from their earlier narcissistic tendencies."

Nanoclusters are little "heaps" of a few atoms that often have interesting optical properties and could become useful probes for imaging processes in areas such as biomedicine and diagnostics. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, researchers have introduced a nanocluster of 16 silver atoms stabilized by a wrapping of DNA strands. Using X-ray analysis, they were able to determine the crystal structure and identify important interactions within it.

In contrast to solids or nanoparticles, nanoclusters, like molecules, can switch between discrete energy levels by absorbing or emitting light (fluorescence). Nanoclusters made of silver are especially interesting--in particular because they can fluoresce very brightly. Their optical properties depend strongly on the size of the nanoclusters, so it is important to make individual clusters with a precisely defined number of atoms. For several years, scientists have been using short DNA strands as biocompatible, water-soluble alternatives to conventional "templates".

A team led by Tom Vosch at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Jiro Kondo at Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan, have crystallized a nanocluster of exactly 16 silver atoms using a DNA sequence of ten nucleotides. The magenta crystals emit light in the near infrared when irradiated with green light, with nearly identical spectra as a crystal or in solution.

Structural analysis revealed that the Ag(16) nanoclusters have a diameter of about 7 Å and a height of about 15 Å (1 Å is one ten millionth of a millimeter). Each nanocluster is tightly wrapped and almost completely shielded by two DNA strands in a horseshoe conformation. The two DNA strands are primarily bound by interactions with the silver atoms and to some extent by a few hydrogen bonds. Surprisingly, none of the Watson-Crick base pairing typically observed for DNA is found in this case. Additionally, novel silver-silver interactions were observed within the cluster.

Packing of the DNA-silver nanoclusters into the crystal is promoted by various interactions, including those between phosphate groups and calcium ions, and π-stacking between neighboring thymine nucleobases. The latter plays an important role in the crystallization process. Additionally, loosely associated silver cations are present within the crystal; some form a bridge between DNA bases, while others interact only with silver atoms within the core of the clusters.

These new insights could help to explain the relationship between the structural and emission properties of nanoclusters, and to develop a method for the synthesis of further monodisperse, biocompatible, water-soluble silver clusters with advantageous photophysical features for applications such as biomedical imaging.

PHILADELPHIA - A standardized medical school exam, often used as a criterion for medical residency programs, may reduce the diversity of applicants in radiation oncology. The discovery represents a call to action for medical societies to reduce the barriers and biases in competitive medical fields.

"Studies suggest patients benefit when physicians of the same background as the patient are available," says lead author of the new research Christian Fernandez, MD, a radiation oncology resident at Thomas Jefferson University and researcher with the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center - Jefferson Health. "To improve diversity among healthcare providers is to improve patient outcomes."

Dr. Fernandez and colleagues explored whether one of the standardized tests commonly used as a criterion for residency programs might reduce diversity in the applicant pool in radiation oncology.

"This is a first step toward understanding biases in the field of radiation oncology so we can then move toward addressing them," adds Dr. Fernandez, who published the research with Robert Den, MD, an associate professor in the departments of radiation oncology, urology and cancer biology at Thomas Jefferson University, July 29, 2019 in the journal Practical Radiation Oncology.

During medical school, students generally undergo a series of three tests, referred to as the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) Step exams, to receive their medical degree and become a licensed practitioner. The tests evaluate students' overall competency in the basic sciences, medical knowledge, and their ability to translate that information into clinical practice. Students take the first exam called "Step 1" after the second year of medical school. This test assesses students' knowledge of basic sciences such as physiology, biochemistry, anatomy, pharmacology and cell biology.

Many residency programs use students' results from the USMLE Step 1 exam as a screening metric for further consideration. The aim of the scores is to enable residency programs to judge applicants' academic qualifications using a standardized tool.

"We wanted to understand how people of different backgrounds are faring," says Dr. Den. "Are we introducing an unknown bias because of this huge emphasis on an objective measure, in this case, the Step 1 licensing exam?"

The researchers reviewed residency applications submitted to the radiation oncology program at Thomas Jefferson University between 2015 and 2018, which they found to represent nearly 90 percent of all radiation oncology applications nationwide. Then they assessed whether the distribution of applicant demographics - sex, age and race/ethnicity - changed with increasing USMLE Step 1 score requirements.

The analysis revealed Step 1 screening scores impacted applicants' representation based on sex, age and race/ethnicity. They found higher score cutoffs decreased representation of female applicants, underrepresented minority applicants and applicants over the age of 30. Likewise, elevated score requisites built up representation of non-minority applicants.

"As an initial screening tool, using Step 1 scores likely removes more minority representation and apparently increases non-minority or young Caucasian male representation, which runs counter to what all the major oncology and education societies have in their mandates," Dr. Fernandez says.

The researchers emphasize the point of the paper is not to say that test scores are irrelevant, but perhaps are only part of what matters in an application.

"There are six core competencies in medical education," Dr. Fernandez says. "One of them is medical knowledge, but you can't make it the only pillar. The others are practice based-learning, patient care, systems-based practice, interpersonal and communications skills and professionalism. These have been set by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) as foundational to all practicing physicians."

Dr. Fernandez, Dr. Den and colleagues are looking at more holistic ways to evaluate applicants. One element is emotional intelligence.

"When we think about residency, there are two components to it. One is how bright an applicant is, but especially in oncology, there's an entire emotional, empathetic nature to the profession that we believe is very important," says Dr. Den.

The researchers are working to figure out how to create national benchmarks like the USMLE using a metric that would gather the emotional intelligence of applicants. "That's the other balance piece we all know we need but don't have a way to implement yet," says Dr. Den.

Efforts at Thomas Jefferson University are already underway to help incorporate standardized empathy evaluation in medicine. Mohammadreza Hojat, PhD, a research professor in the department of psychiatry and human behavior at Sidney Kimmel Medical College - Jefferson Health, and his team developed the Jefferson Scale of Empathy, a validated questionnaire that measures empathy in healthcare professionals and trainees, and which correlates with patient outcomes.

"Diversity is the best way for our field to grow, to have more ideas, to come up with new approaches, to think of problems from a different perspective," he adds. "What this research really shows is not that we need to necessarily eliminate USMLE scores, but rather, raise the other components to match the rigor of those tests."

Contrary to conventional wisdom, sulphur production by tiny marine algae decreased during glacial periods, and is more closely linked to climate than previously thought, according to latest research by scientists in Japan. A clearer understanding of the link between the climate and marine phytoplankton, the microscopic single-celled algae that live in the surface waters of the ocean, can help scientists incorporate these impacts in future climate models.

Their findings were published on July 19, 2019 in Nature Communications.

Sulphur produced by marine phytoplankton affects the balance between incoming energy from the sun and the outgoing energy the Earth reflects back into space. It may also be an indicator of primary productivity by photosynthesizing phytoplankton in the Southern Ocean. Phytoplankton, which also plays an important role in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, can therefore significantly influence climate.

Marine phytoplankton, like land plants, are primary producers at the bottom of the food chain. Through photosynthesis, phytoplankton absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) and produce organic carbon that ultimately supports the entire marine food web. As a result, CO2 is removed from the surface waters and eventually getting bound up in sediments at the bottom of the ocean. This is called "export production," which is measured in units of carbon.

Marine phytoplankton emit dimethylsulphide, or DMS, an organic sulphur-containing compound that gives the sea its distinct smell. When oxidized, DMS can produce sulphur aerosols that serve as cloud condensation nuclei that play an important role in cloud formation. Increased sulphur therefore contributes to Earth cooling both by scattering radiation and by reflecting radiation back out to space through the albedo affect.

DMS is the most abundant biological sulphur compound emitted into the atmosphere and is thought to significantly influence the Earth's climate and possibly also play a role in keeping the Earth in a state of equilibrium. Its contribution to climate is complex and needs to be fully understood. Examining sulphur and methanesulphonate, the oxidized products of dimethylsuphide, in Antarctic ice cores provides a useful tool for investigating the link between the sulphur cycle and climate.

It was previously believed that marine phytoplankton were the dominant source of non-sea-salt sulphur over glacial-interglacial cycles, with terrestrial sources only contributing a small portion. Yet, the contribution from terrestrial sources can be much more significant during glacial periods when the amount of dust increases.

"Previous ice-core studies in Antarctica, which have assumed that the majority of non-sea-salt sulphate originates from DMS emissions produced by phytoplankton, do not show a link between marine phytoplankton and sulphur emissions, and therefore primary productivity, and climate," said Professor Kumiko Goto-Azuma a research scientist with the National Institute of Polar Research, Research Organization of Information and Systems, and the Department of Polar Science, Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI) in Japan.

"This is contradictory to marine sediment records which show increased export production in the Antarctic Zone of the Southern Ocean, suggesting increased primary productivity. We wanted to solve this puzzle and see if the previous hypothesis derived from ice-core studies is correct."

According to Goto-Azuma, new ice core records obtained at Dome Fuji in East Antarctica, spanning the last 720,000 years, show that a large portion of non-sea-salt sulphate, which was traditionally used as a representative of marine phytoplankton sulphate, likely originates from terrestrial dust during glacial periods.

"By correcting for this, we have made a revised calculation of phytoplankton sulphate and have found that its flux is reduced in glacial periods and increased in interglacial periods," explained Goto-Azuma. "Our results suggest reduced dimethylsulphide emissions in the Antarctic Zone of the Southern Ocean during glacial periods and provide new evidence of how the Southern Ocean sulphur cycle and climate are linked."

The next step is "to investigate links between climate, marine phytoplankton sulphate, and CO2 through climate and atmospheric chemistry modeling based on our revised calculation of DMS-derived sulphate," said Goto-Azuma.