Earth

"Lingering ash." That's what the U.S. Forest Service calls the relatively few green and white ash trees that survive the emerald ash borer onslaught. Those trees do not survive by accident, and that may save the species, according to Penn State researchers, who conducted a six-year study of ash decline and mortality.

The research shows some ash trees have varying degrees of resistance to the strangely beautiful, invasive beetle from Asia. The study is unique because it took place at a plantation of ash trees planted on Penn State's University Park campus in the mid-1970s.

"We found that genetic variation exists in trees from around the country, and through time -- especially as the emerald ash borer population collapses because host trees are rapidly disappearing -- the resistance that we observed will likely ensure the survival of the species," said Kim Steiner, professor of forest biology, College of Agricultural Sciences.
shredded

Genetics moderated the rapidity with which emerald ash borers injured and killed trees, researchers learned. This suggests that some ash genotypes, especially on favorable sites, will survive.

Steiner, who also is director of The Arboretum at Penn State, collected seeds from wild green ash trees in 27 states and Canadian provinces in the fall of 1975. He grew the seedlings for two years before methodically planting 2,100 of them, all 12 feet apart, in a seven-acre plot. Mixed in were a small number of white ash trees.

Steiner conducted a provenance trial -- moving trees that had evolved in different climates to one location and carefully monitoring their growth and other characteristics -- with the goal of understanding how species adapt to their environments. over the last few decades, researchers maintained the plantation to study the effects of climate change on trees.

This little-known ash plantation off Porter Road near the Penn State's Swine Research Facility -- the largest collection of green ash germplasm in one location in the world -- may play a role in saving the species.

"We began measuring the decline in 2012, shortly after emerald ash borers arrived in the plantation, and we measured it every year through 2017," said Steiner. "The effect of the insect was devastating. As of August of this year, only 13 trees remained of the 1,762 that were alive when the emerald ash borer arrived."
Although final destruction was nearly complete, genetics moderated the rapidity with which emerald ash borers injured and killed trees, noted Lake Graboski, Steiner's assistant, who earned a master's degree in ecology at Penn State.

"This suggests that some ash genotypes, especially on favorable sites, will survive with lower densities of emerald ash borer beetles on the landscape," he said.

The fact that some trees survived longer means there are heritable genetic differences among trees from different populations and seed parents, Steiner added.

"For the first time, this study demonstrated that there is genetic variation that could be captured in a breeding program to improve resistance to emerald ash borer in both white ash and green ash species," he said.

There are three kinds of resistance to insects commonly exhibited by trees, Steiner explained, and more research will be needed to determine which ones the ash trees may be deploying. One is avoidance, when a tree doesn't attract the adult females that are flying between the trees as they look for a place to lay their eggs. A tree may accomplish this by not emitting a chemical signal the insects are homing in on.

The second is surviving attack. Adults lay insect eggs on a tree, the larvae hatch and the insects grow into adulthood, all the while causing damage, but the tree is vigorous enough to withstand that injury.

The third mode of resistance involves the tree producing compounds -- or alternately, not producing compounds -- that reduce the likelihood the larvae will survive to adulthood, either by actively killing the larvae or by not offering the nourishment they need.

The irony of addressing a modern-day ecological disaster, such as the emerald ash borer invasion, with research done in a 43-year-old experimental plantation intended to serve an entirely different purpose, was not lost on Graboski.

"Dr. Steiner planted those ash trees long before I was born, and the ultimate fate of the ash species may not be decided in my lifetime because the trees must evolve to survive attacks by the invasive beetles," said Graboski. "That is just the reality of working with trees."

Bottom Line: Reporting more positive childhood experiences was associated with a lower likelihood of adult depression or poor mental heath, or both, and a greater likelihood of adults reporting social and emotional support even after accounting for adverse childhood experiences in this observational study based on survey data representative of the entire population of adults in Wisconsin in 2015. Positive childhood experiences included seven interpersonal experiences with family, friends and in school or in the community, such as a sense of belonging, feeling protected and the ability to express feelings. Limitations of the study include its inability to confirm causal effects and that the adult population of Wisconsin is less diverse than the United States as a whole. Study authors suggest positive childhood experiences could have lifelong effects on mental and relational health.

Author: Christina Bethell, Ph.D., M.B.A., M.P.H., of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, and coauthors

(doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2019.3007)

Editor's Note: The article contains conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.

Scientists have greatly extended the amount of time human livers can be stored for transplantation by modifying a previous protocol to extend the viability of rat livers. Previously, human livers were only viable for an average of nine hours, but the new method of preservation maintains liver tissue for up to 27 hours, giving transplant doctors and patients a much longer timeframe to work with.

The research is supported by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease (NIDDK), both part of the National Institutes of Health.

Like a glass container broken by frozen water, when cells freeze, they often experience irreparable damage. Since human cells are especially sensitive, donor livers are stored above freezing at 4 degrees Celsius. As a result, doctors can typically only preserve human livers for nine hours before the chances of a successful transplantation drastically decrease. This short time frame makes it more difficult, and sometimes impossible, to get the organs to compatible patients who are located farther away.

"Delivering viable organs to matching recipients within the window of viability can often be the most challenging aspect of organ transplantation," said Seila Selimovic, Ph.D., director of NIBIB's Engineered Tissues program. "By giving doctors and patients more time, this research could someday affect thousands of patients who are waiting for liver transplants."

In previous studies funded by NIH, Martin Yarmush, Ph.D., director of the Center for Engineering in Medicine, Korkut Uygun, Ph.D., associate professor of surgery, and their collaborators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Boston, had developed new techniques that extended the time that rat liver (hepatic) tissue can be stored at subzero temperatures without damage. They were able to do this by adding a modified glucose compound, 3-OMG, and PEG-35kD--an ingredient in antifreeze--to the protective solution that they use to cool the livers. The PEG compound lowers the temperature at which the cells freeze and 3-OMG acts as a protectant against the cold. With these additions, they were able to cool the rat livers to ?6 degrees Celsius without freezing them--a process called supercooling.

However, while the techniques worked with the rat livers in those earlier studies, it was unsuccessful when applied to human livers, which are 200 times larger. The size difference significantly increased the risk that ice crystals would start to spontaneously form (heterogenous ice nucleation), making the organ unusable for transplantation. In a paper published in Nature Biotechnology on Sept. 9, Reinier de Vries, M.D., a research fellow in surgery, Shannon Tessier, Ph.D., instructor in surgery at MGH and Harvard Medical School, Boston, and Uygun, and their collaborators at MGH detail three new steps to the protocol to avoid ice nucleation and preserve human livers for up to 27 hours.

"With supercooling, as the volume increases it becomes exponentially more difficult to prevent ice formation at sub-zero temperatures," said de Vries. "Before, there were a lot of experts who said, 'well this is amazing in small rats, but it will not work in human organs,' and now we have successfully scaled it up 200 times from rat to human livers using a combination of technologies."

The first step was to limit the contact of the storage liquid to air. When supercooled, the livers are submerged in the supercooling protective solution. The researchers found that the risk of ice crystals forming greatly increased in areas where the solution was in contact with air. To eliminate this risk, the scientists removed the air from the storage solution bag prior to supercooling, effectively eliminating the chance of spontaneous ice nucleation on the surface of the organ.

Next, the researchers included two additional ingredients to the protective solution to help protect the hepatocytes. The first additive, trehalose, helps to protect the cell as well as stabilize the cell membranes. The second, glycerol, supports the protective properties of the 3-OMG glucose compound added in the previous experiments. Both additives have been used in the cryogenic preservation of cells in the laboratory but had not been used in the preservation of organs for transplantation.

Finally, they developed a new method of delivering the preservation solution to the liver. The traditional method of delivery of the protective solution used in previous studies is to manually flush the preservation solution through the tissue. However, the new protective solution is thicker than the traditional solutions and can cause damage to the cell lining the inside of the blood vessels. In addition, the higher viscosity means that the solution is often not uniformly distributed throughout the organ, increasing the chance of ice nucleation spreading and freezing the liver. To combat this problem, the researchers used machine perfusion--a way of delivering oxygen and nutrients to capillaries in biological tissues while outside the body--at 4 degrees Celsius with the traditional protective solution. They then slowly lowered the temperature while increasing the concentration of the new protective additives. The staggered approach allowed the hepatic tissue time to adjust and the solution was able to spread throughout the organ more uniformly.

While the researchers have yet to implant a liver preserved using this new method into a human subject, traditional standards of assessing liver viability indicate that this process will not negatively affect the organ.

"This new liver preservation method exemplifies NIH's goal to foster the discovery and translation of innovative ideas," said Averell H. Sherker, M.D, NIDDK program director for liver diseases. "With further research, organs will be able to travel greater distances and benefit the most critically ill patients requiring liver transplantation."

Although predisposing processes occur earlier, schizophrenia breaks out at young adulthood, suggesting it might involve a pathological transition during late brain development in predisposed individuals. Using a genetic mouse model of schizophrenia, researchers from the Caroni group at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI) showed that, like in patients, characteristic network and cognitive deficits only emerge in adult mice. They then demonstrated that these deficits could all be permanently prevented by specific treatments during a late adolescence sensitive time window. Their study has been published yesterday in Cell.

Schizophrenia - affecting about 1% of the worldwide population - is a mental disorder characterized by disorganized thoughts, false beliefs, difficulty in social relationships, cognitive deficits, abnormal motor behavior, as well as blunted emotions and motivation. A notable feature of this severe, chronic condition is that its symptoms first emerge at the transition between late adolescence and young adulthood. Schizophrenia treatments focus on the symptoms and often consist of antipsychotic medications.

The causes of schizophrenia are complex. They include comparable contributions by environmental factors - such as problems during birth, psychosocial factors, stress, and the consumption of cannabis during adolescence - and genetic factors, which in most cases involve mutations in large numbers of genes, each making a small contribution to the condition.

In order to do research on the root causes of a condition with a complex genetic component, researchers need to focus, if possible, on simpler 'genetic models' - people or animals with well-defined mutations exhibiting a strongly elevated risk of developing the disease. In schizophrenia, such models include people with the 22Q11DS syndrome, caused by deletions within a segment of chromosome 22, who have a 20 to 30-fold increased risk of developing schizophrenia. This led researchers to develop mice carrying a corresponding deletion in order to use them as a model of schizophrenia for lab research. (These mice are called "LgDel mice" but for simplicity reasons we will call them "schizophrenia-mice" here.)

Using the schizophrenia mouse model, researchers from the Caroni group set out to investigate the deficits exhibited by the schizophrenia-mice, and how these could be treated and perhaps prevented. The researchers showed that what was already known in human patients was also true in the schizophrenia-mice: network and cognitive dysfunctions emerged after late adolescence. Like patients, adult mice showed profound dysfunctions in a particular type of neurons called PV neurons, which are important orchestrators of neural networks. The dysfunctions led to network synchronization deficits, a hallmark of schizophrenia. Notably, antipsychotic drugs temporarily suppressed network and cognitive deficits in adult schizophrenia-mice.

Although PV neuron dysfunctions only spread through the brain in the adult, they were already present in the hippocampus of adolescent schizophrenia mice. Since late adolescence represents a time window when coordinated activity depending on hippocampal and cortical PV neurons is important for late brain maturation, the Caroni group hypothesized that adolescent hippocampal dysfunctions might interfere with proper brain maturation in schizophrenia-mice. The researchers investigated whether they could prevent the onset of schizophrenia by suppressing the network dysfunctions during the most critical time window, long enough to allow for transition to normal adult brain function, in spite of a strongly predisposing genetic background.

They succeeded! They showed that repeated treatments targeting the hippocampal PV network with common antipsychotic drugs or with more specific genetic activators of PV neurons, during 6-10 days, at the transition between late adolescence and adulthood, produced a complete and long-lasting rescue of network dysfunctions, as well as cognitive deficits in adult schizophrenia-mice.

"Our findings in a genetic mouse model support the hypothesis that a critical developmental time window influences the emergence of schizophrenia at the transition between late adolescence and adulthood - and that it is possible to prevent the progression of schizophrenia by treatment during that time window," says Pico Caroni. "It might be possible to build on our study to develop therapeutic strategies to prevent the outbreak of schizophrenia in at risk individuals."

The lightning season in the Southeastern U.S. is almost finished for this year, but the peak season for the most powerful strokes of lightning won't begin until November, according to a newly published global survey of these rare events.

A University of Washington study maps the location and timing of "superbolts" -- bolts that release electrical energy of more than 1 million Joules, or a thousand times more energy than the average lightning bolt, in the very low frequency range in which lightning is most active. Results show that superbolts tend to hit the Earth in a fundamentally different pattern from regular lightning, for reasons that are not yet fully understood.

The study was published Sept. 9 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

"It's very unexpected and unusual where and when the very big strokes occur," said lead author Robert Holzworth, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences who has been tracking lightning for almost two decades.

Holzworth manages the World Wide Lightning Location Network, a UW-managed research consortium that operates about 100 lightning detection stations around the world, from Antarctica to northern Finland. By seeing precisely when lightning reaches three or more different stations, the network can compare the readings to determine a lightning bolt's size and location.

The network has operated since the early 2000s. For the new study, the researchers looked at 2 billion lightning strokes recorded between 2010 and 2018. Some 8,000 events - one in 250,000 strokes, or less than a thousandth of a percent - were confirmed superbolts.

"Until the last couple of years, we didn't have enough data to do this kind of study," Holzworth said.

The authors compared their network's data against lightning observations from the Maryland-based company Earth Networks and from the New Zealand MetService.

The new paper shows that superbolts are most common in the Mediterranean Sea, the northeast Atlantic and over the Andes, with lesser hotspots east of Japan, in the tropical oceans and off the tip of South Africa. Unlike regular lightning, the superbolts tend to strike over water.

Explore a visualization of the data at https://public.tableau.com/profile/uw.news#!/vizhome/Superbolts/Dashboard1.

"Ninety percent of lightning strikes occur over land," Holzworth said. "But superbolts happen mostly over the water going right up to the coast. In fact, in the northeast Atlantic Ocean you can see Spain and England's coasts nicely outlined in the maps of superbolt distribution."

"The average stroke energy over water is greater than the average stroke energy over land -- we knew that," Holzworth said. "But that's for the typical energy levels. We were not expecting this dramatic difference."

The time of year for superbolts also doesn't follow the rules for typical lightning. Regular lightning hits in the summertime -- the three major so-called "lightning chimneys" for regular bolts coincide with summer thunderstorms over the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. But superbolts, which are more common in the Northern Hemisphere, strike both hemispheres between the months of November and February.

The reason for the pattern is still mysterious. Some years have many more superbolts than others: late 2013 was an all-time high, and late 2014 was the next highest, with other years having far fewer events.

"We think it could be related to sunspots or cosmic rays, but we're leaving that as stimulation for future research," Holzworth said. "For now, we are showing that this previously unknown pattern exists."

A research team led by the University of Basel and the University of Montreal examined how the ongoing climate warming affects the "behavior" of lakes. The researchers found out why, in near-bottom waters, lakes may even cool down despite warming at the surface, and what the consequences are for the production and emission of greenhouse gases. The results of the study were published in the most recent edition of the journal Limnology and Oceanography Letters.

Lakes play an important role in the global carbon cycle, acting as large natural bioreactors. The temperature of a lake represents an important constraint on the amount of carbon dioxide and methane it emits into the atmosphere. It was generally assumed that global warming stimulates microbial respiratory processes and the production of these greenhouse gases, while at the same time reducing the carbon storage in lake sediments. An international research team has now examined these interactions more closely and discovered unexpected effects.

The research project not only targeted the direct effects of global warming, but also the indirect ones. The main focus of the investigations was the water temperature and greenhouse gas production in the deeper parts of the lakes. "We don't want to question the fundamentals of thermodynamics. There is no doubt that the rates of respiratory metabolic processes in lakes are generally higher at increased water temperatures," explains Professor Moritz Lehmann from the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Basel. "However, climate change will not cause every lake to warm up everywhere."

Warming near the surface, cooling near the bottom

Lakes worldwide are warming at the surface. However, they are also losing transparency due to increased algae production and enhanced turbidity of the lake water. "The surface-water warming and the loss of transparency have the effect that more heat is trapped in the upper layers of the lakes, leaving the deeper waters thermally isolated," says lead author Dr. Maciej Bartosiewicz from the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Basel. "Under some circumstances, this can even lead to the cooling of water masses near the bottom of the lake."

The subtle cooling slows down respiratory decay processes and carbon dioxide production in the lakes, increasing carbon burial within the sediments. Model simulations suggest that the observed effects are most pertinent to relatively small and shallow lakes, which make up approximately half of the global lake surface.

Less carbon dioxide, more methane

The increased differential warming in lakes has yet another effect: the pronounced thermal stratification entails that the deeper water layers do barely mix and are poorly ventilated, which can lead to prolonged anoxia. Under these oxygen-free conditions, methane production by anaerobic microorganisms is enhanced.

"All in all, global warming increases the greenhouse gas potential of lakes, as expected. However, this has less to do with the warming directly, and more to do with increased oxygen depletion at the bottom of these lakes," concludes Bartosiewicz.

Although various image-based central position estimation (termed "centroid fitting") methods such as 2D Gaussian fitting methods have been commonly used in single-molecule localization microscopy (SMLM) to precisely determine the location of each fluorophore, it is still a challenge to improve the single-molecule lateral localization precision to molecular scale (In a study published online in Nature Methods, Prof. XU Tao and Prof. JI Wei from the Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a new interferometric single-molecule localization microscopy with fast modulated structured illumination, called Repetitive Optical Selective Exposure (ROSE).

ROSE utilizes six different direction and phase interference fringes to excite the fluorescent molecules. The intensity of the fluorescent molecules is closely related to the phase of the interference fringes. A fluorescence molecule is located by the intensities of multiple excitation patterns of an interference fringe, providing around two-fold improvement in the localization precision. This technique has pushed the resolution of single-molecule localization microscopy (SMLM) to less than 3 nm (~1 nm localization precision).

The researchers first designed three different lattice grids of DNA origami structures with 5-, 10- and 20-nm point-to-point spacing to verify the performance of ROSE. Both conventional centroid fitting and ROSE could resolve the 20-nm structure at the same photon budget. ROSE could also clearly resolve the 10-nm distance, which could not be resolved by centroid fitting.

They demonstrated that ROSE could resolve a 5-nm structure at a resolution of ~3 nm over a large field of view of 25 x 25 μm2, which means that ROSE has the ability to push the resolving power of SMLM to the molecular scale.

In addition, using ROSE to analyze cellular nanostructures, the researchers showed that ROSE has advantages in resolving the hollow structure of single microtubule filaments, small clathrin-coated pits (CCPs) and cellular nanostructures of actin filament. The Fourier ring correlation (FRC) analysis indicated that ROSE improved final resolution by twofold compared with the centroid fitting method.

ROSE can be extended to 3D nanometer-scale imaging by introducing additional excitation patterns along the axial direction. The researchers envision that this method could extend the application of SMLM in biomacromolecule dynamic analysis and structural studies at the molecular scale.

Dogs in tropical Africa run the risk of contracting canine trypanosomosis if they are bitten by bloodsucking tsetse flies carrying trypanosomes - microscopic, single-celled organisms found in the bloodstream. In dogs, this disease runs a severe course and is often fatal; "white eyes" or corneal cloudiness is one of the characteristic and obvious signs of the disease.

Sick dogs suspected of trypanosomosis are frequently brought to the University of Nigeria Veterinary Teaching Hospital (UNVTH) in Nsukka, where diagnosis relies on examination of a blood smear under the microscope. While trypanosomes are easily detected by their rapid motion among the blood cells, it is hard to determine the exact species of trypanosome by microscopy alone.

To help with the diagnosis, Dr Paschal Umeakuana of UNVTH contacted Professor Wendy Gibson from the School of Biological Sciences, as Bristol's Trypanosome Research Group has developed molecular-based methods for trypanosome identification.

The collaboration led to the accurate identification of trypanosomes in 19 recent cases of canine trypanosomosis referred to UNVTH and these results are published in the journal Parasites & Vectors.

Wendy Gibson, Professor of Protozoology, said: "To our surprise, we found that two of the dogs were carrying Tbg1, the trypanosome that causes most of the cases of human trypanosomiasis in Africa."

Human African trypanosomiasis is rarely found in Nigeria nowadays, and indeed elsewhere in tropical Africa, as this deadly disease is now on track for elimination as a public health problem. According to the World Health Organisation, fewer than 1,500 cases were reported in 2017, whereas many countries in tropical Africa suffered devastating epidemics in the last century.

Optical microresonators convert laser light into ultrashort pulses travelling around the resonator's circumference. These pulses, called "dissipative Kerr solitons", can propagate in the microresonator maintaining their shape.

When solitons exit the microresonator, the output light takes the form of a pulse train - a series of repeating pulses with fixed intervals. In this case, the repetition rate of the pulses is determined by the microresonator size. Smaller sizes enable pulse trains with high repetition rates, reaching hundreds of gigahertz in frequency. These can be used to boost the performance of optical communication links or become a core technology for ultrafast LiDAR with sub-micron precision.

Exciting though it is, this technology suffers from what scientists call "light-bending losses" - loss of light caused by structural bends in its path. A well-known problem in fiber optics, light-bending loss also means that the size of microresonators cannot drop below a few tens of microns. This therefore limits the maximum repetition rates we can achieve for pulses.

Publishing in Nature Physics, researchers from the lab of Tobias J. Kippenberg at EPFL have now found a way to bypass this limitation and uncouple the pulse repetition rate from the microresonator size by generating multiple solitons in a single microresonator.

The scientists discovered a way of seeding the microresonator with the maximum possible number of dissipative Kerr solitons with precisely equal spacing between them. This new formation of light can be thought of as an optical analogue to atomic chains in crystalline solids, and so the researchers called them "perfect soliton crystals" (PSCs).

Due to interferometric enhancement and the high number of optical pulses, PSCs coherently multiply the performance of the resulting pulse train - not just its repetition rate, but also its power.

The researchers also investigated the dynamics of PSC formations. Despite their highly organized structure, they seem to be closely linked to optical chaos, a phenomenon caused by light instabilities in optical microresonators, which is also common for semiconductor-based and fiber laser systems.

"Our findings allow the generation of optical pulse trains with ultra-high repetition rates with several terahertz, using regular microresonators," says researcher Maxim Karpov. "These can be used for multiple applications in spectroscopy, distance measurements, and as a source of low-noise terahertz radiation with a chip-size footprint."

Meanwhile, the new understanding of soliton dynamics in optical microresonators and the behavior of PSCs opens up new avenues into the fundamental physics of soliton ensembles in nonlinear systems.

In a large study, German scientists have shown that physical fitness is associated with better brain structure and brain functioning in young adults. This opens the possibility that increasing fitness levels may lead to improved cognitive ability, such as memory and problem solving, as well as improved structural changes in the brain. This work is presented for the first time at the ECNP Congress in Copenhagen, with simultaneous publication in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports*.

Scientists have previously shown that "exercise is good for the brain", but most studies have not controlled for underlying causes which might give distorted results, such as body weight, blood glucose levels, education status, age and other factors, making it difficult to take an overall view of the benefits. In addition, studies have rarely looked at fitness in relations to both brain structure and mental functioning.

The scientists used a publicly available database of 1206 MRI brain scans from the Human Connectome Project**, which had been contributed by volunteers who wanted to contribute to scientific research. The volunteers (average age 30 years old) underwent some additional testing. The first test was a "two-minute walking test", where each person was asked to walk as fast as possible for 2 minutes and the distance was then measured. The volunteers then underwent a series of cognitive tests***, to measure such things as memory, sharpness, judgement, and reasoning.

As team leader, Dr Jonathan Repple (University Hospital Muenster, Germany) said "The great strength of this work is the size of the database. Normally when you are dealing with MRI work, a sample of 30 is pretty good, but the existence of this large MRI database allowed us to eliminate possibly misleading factors, and strengthened the analysis considerably".

The tests were able to show two main points: better performance on a 2-minute walking test in young healthy adults is associated with better cognitive performance, and with structural integrity of the white matter in the brain: healthy white matter is known to improve the speed and quality of nerve connections in the brain.

Repple continued, "It surprised us to see that even in a young population cognitive performance decreases as fitness levels drops. We knew how this might be important in an elderly population which does not necessarily have good health, but to see this happening in 30 year olds is surprising. This leads us to believe that a basic level of fitness seems to be a preventable risk factor for brain health.

This type of study raises an important question. We see that fitter people have better brain health, so we now need to ask whether actually making people fitter will improve their brain health. Finding this out is our next step. There are some trials which point in that direction, but if we can prove this using such a large database, this would be very significant".

Commenting, Professor Peter Falkai (University Clinic, Munich, Germany) said:

"This is an important cross-sectional study demonstrating a robust correlation between physical health and cognitive functioning in a large cohort of healthy young adults. This correlation was backed by changes in the white matter status of the brain supporting the notion that better macro-connectivity is related to better brain functioning. It stresses the importance of physical activity at all stages of life and as preliminary recent evidence suggests one can start improving physical health even in later life even if one has never trained before (see reference). These findings however need to be replicated in longitudinal studies and translated for the use in mental illness".

Note. Dr Falkai was not involved in this work, this is an independent comment.

St. Paul, MN (September 2019)--Powdery mildew is a common fungal disease that infects many plants around the world, absorbing their nutrients and weakening or even killing them. In turn, powdery mildews are often attacked in the field by even smaller mycoparasites (fungi that feed on other fungi).

These mycoparasites penetrate the powdery mildews on the host plant surface and live inside of them, reducing or even stopping the harmful effects of the powdery mildew. Because of this, some strains of these mycoparasites (which belong to the genus Ampelomyces) are used as commercialized biocontrol agents (BCAs) of powdery mildews. There have been concerns about the environmental impact of the usage of these BCAs as little is known about the interactions between mycoparasites and powdery mildews.

To address environmental concerns, and to better understand these interactions, a group of scientists working at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Austrian Institute of Technology, and the University of Southern Queensland (Australia) genetically modified two strains of the mycoparasite to express Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP). As a result, the mycoparasites emit green light when examined with a fluorescence microscope, enabling researchers to better understand their structures and functions. This is the first study to explore these interactions with fluorescent protein biotechnology.

Their research revealed that these mycoparasites can live up to 21-days on mildew-free host plant surfaces, where they can attack powdery mildew structures as soon as they appear. Also of note, this research showed that these mycoparasites cannot spread in sterile soil or in decomposing leaves on the ground, showing that concerns about the potentially negative environmental impact of the BCAs are largely unsubstantiated.

These results, which can be found in "Green Fluorescent Protein Transformation Sheds More Light on a Widespread Mycoparasitic Interaction" published in the August issue of Phytopathology, present the first successful genetic transformation of a group of common mycoparasites that have also been used as a BCA of an important group of crop pathogens. They are important for both biocontrol studies of crop pathogens and the ecology of natural interfungal parasitic relationships.

A new chemistry method from scientists at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, greatly simplifies the creation of an important class of compounds called hindered ethers, which are integral to many drugs and commercial products. Hindered ethers are often coveted for their special properties, but until now have required laborious methods to synthesize.

The new method, reported in Nature, may also help bring "electrochemistry" into the mainstream of modern medicinal chemistry.

Electrochemistry involves passing a current through a compound in liquid solution to generate a key reactive component. Traditional electrochemistry techniques are often very limited in their scope, but the Scripps Research scientists demonstrated the broad versatility of their technique by showing that it can perform faster, higher-yield syntheses of dozens of hindered ethers used in products today.

"These are compounds that historically have required more than a dozen steps and more than a week of work to synthesize using standard methods," says Phil Baran, PhD, the Darlene Shiley Chair in Chemistry at Scripps Research and senior author of the study. "With our method, the compounds can be made in just a few steps--often in less than a day--and for that reason, drug companies that know of this new method already have started using it."

Hindered ethers are particularly prized as structures in medicines because they can be made to powerfully resist enzymes in the human body that would otherwise degrade the drug molecules quickly. Yet the standard approach to creating ethers, a 168-year-old process known as the "Williamson ether synthesis," becomes unwieldy when the desired ether includes bulky side-groups of atoms. These atoms can hinder the ether's reactivity (thus, the term "hindered").

Baran and his team in recent years began exploring new electrochemical methods with the hope of improving upon this old, yet somewhat neglected, realm of chemistry to create valuable molecules that were otherwise hard or impossible to make. To address the problem of synthesizing hindered ethers, they investigated a little-used electrochemical method called the Hofer-Moest reaction, first published in 1902.

This method can generate an important reactive intermediate molecule known as a carbocation ("carbo-cat-ion") needed for ether synthesis from an inexpensive carboxylic acid. However, this method requires a high electric current and an expensive setup, including platinum electrodes. These and other factors have severely limited this reaction's utility. Over the course of hundreds of experiments, Baran and his team developed their own easier and more versatile technique, which uses a low electric current compatible with the simplest electrochemistry equipment, a cheap carbon electrode, and improved solvents and electrolytes.

In their paper, Baran and his colleagues describe more than 80 examples of hindered ethers they were able to create using the new method. These include:

A key building-block of a potential cancer drug, which the team synthesized in just 15 hours with a yield of 51 percent, compared with six days and 3.4 percent yield for the standard method;

A key building-block of a potential diabetes drug, which the team synthesized in three hours in a single step, compared with 2.5 days and five steps for the previous method;

A key building-block of a potential HIV drug, which the team synthesized cheaply with one step in three hours, compared with six steps and two days, with a requirement for expensive reaction materials, for the previous method;

A key building-block of liquid crystals used in LCD monitors, which the team made in one step in three hours, compared with four steps in two days for the previous method. LCD technology is widely used in products such as laptops, flat-screen TVs, digital cameras and watches.

In a selection of these and eight other real-world examples, the team found that the new method enabled an average yield of 43 percent, average step count of 1.5 and average time of 9.8 hours, compared with averages of 19 percent, 6.3 steps and about 100 hours using previous methods.

"These are compounds that we know people care about and are making, so we expect this method to have a real impact," Baran says.

He notes that the new method can be used at small or modest scales--for example, for the exploratory chemistry of drug discovery--but also for large-scale chemical production. Additionally, the method makes it easy for medicinal chemists to generate sets or "libraries" of closely related compounds; they can use the same basic setup and starting compound, and simply vary some of the reaction ingredients. The study was a collaboration with the laboratory of Donna Blackmond, PhD, professor and co-chair of chemistry at Scripps Research.

"The contributions from Donna and her students were critical in helping us develop this chemistry," Baran says. "They elucidated a molecular understanding of each of the processes occurring in the reaction flask, so we could rationally optimize the new method."

Baran and his team are now exploring other potential applications of their method.

"Its ability to generate highly reactive carbocations under mild conditions suggests that we might be able to use it to make other classes of molecules that were previously inaccessible," Baran says.

Boulder, Colo., USA: The real Jurassic Park was as an ancient landscape home to a vast desert covered mostly in sand dunes as far as the eye could see, where dinosaurs and small mammals roamed southern Utah. The Navajo Sandstone is known for its beautiful red and tan crossbedded sandstones that grace many of the national parks and monuments in the southwest USA--for example Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, and Zion national parks.

The sands were deposited in dunes within the largest known sand sea (erg) in Earth's history during the Early Jurassic. These deposits show a record of desertification--the process by which fertile lands become desert. How did this landscape lose its water bodies, vegetation, and animals? How long did desertification take to happen? How long did it last? What amount of time is actually represented by these deposits? Understanding the timing, scale, and duration of this significant period in Earth's history is challenging, and many questions are unanswered due to the lack of age constraints in these deposits.

A new study by Parrish et al., published in Geology, has determined numerical ages from several calcium carbonate (i.e., carbonates, CaCO3) rock layers that represent lake deposits that once occupied interdune areas, which served as watering holes for a variety of dinosaurs and small theraspids (relatives of mammals). These carbonates were age dated using the radiometric method of uranium-lead (U-Pb), providing ages of 200.5 ± 1.5 million years (Ma) and 195.0 ± 7.7 Ma.

These age dates show that in eastern Utah parts of the Navajo desert are much older than previously thought, and together with age dates from Arizona show that the giant sand sea became younger to the south. The lake and associated spring deposits also show that this vast desert, at times, had a wetter climate and more active hydrologic cycle than had been previously assumed.

This work demonstrates that the desertification process is complex, and that age dates from carbonates and correlation of rock layers will help answer major questions of how desertification takes place in continental interiors.

This study has societal relevance because the history of hydroclimate (i.e., groundwater and climate) change recorded in the Navajo desert deposits can serve as a model for modern marginal environments that may be impacted by desertification from a warming climate. With the projected rise in global temperature, regions in marginal zones are anticipated to become even more vulnerable to desertification. That is, these zones will become part of the growing desert regions. Particularly vulnerable areas are found in Africa and Asia, areas with large population densities that are already exceeding the capacity to supply food and water. By studying how the Navajo erg evolved, we can provide important insights into rates of modern desertification.

ALEXANDRIA, VA--The most current research on head and neck cancer, cochlear implants, techniques in tonsillectomies, opioid prescribing patterns, residency matching, and other topics related to otolaryngology-head and neck surgery will be presented in New Orleans, LA, September 15-18, during the 2019 Annual Meeting & OTO Experience of the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation.

Abstracts of all the research to be presented are now available online at https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/otoj/161/3 and https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/otoj/161/2_suppl.

The 2019 Annual Meeting includes hundreds of research presentations. The Program Committee, comprised of physician members, selected 19 studies to highlight in recognition of outstanding scientific merit and innovation. The following selected studies will be presented during the "Best of Orals" session on Sunday, September 15, at 10:00 am in Theater B of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center:

Association of Age-Related Central Auditory Disorder and Mild Cognitive Impairment in GreatAGE Study
Rodolpho Sardone, AuD, MsBE, MPH (presenter); Petronilla Battista; Giancarlo Logroscino; Nicola Quaranta, MD

Biodegradable Magnesium Stents: Treatment for Pediatric Laryngotracheal Stenosis
Leila J. Mady, MD, PhD, MPH (presenter); Abhijit Roy; Ali Mübin Aral; Jingyao Wu; Prashant N. Kumta; David H. Chi, MD

Changes in Eustachian Tube Symptoms Following Endoscopic Sinus Surgery
Michael Chang, MD (presenter); Davood Karimi Hosseini, MD; Sun Hee Song; Jennifer Y. Lee, MD; Jayakar V. Nayak, MD, PhD; Zara M. Patel, MD; Peter H. Hwang, MD

Cochlear Implantation in Adults with Asymmetric Hearing Loss: Quality of Life
Nicholas Thompson, MD (presenter); Margaret Dillon, AuD; Meredith A. Rooth, AuD; Harold C. Pillsbury, MD; Brendan P. O'Connell, MD; Kevin D. Brown, MD, PhD

Correlation of Fine-Needle Aspiration and Histopathology after Thyroidectomy
Richard D. Bavier (presenter); Lea C. George; Nicole Farber; Amishav Bresler, MD; Soly Baredes, MD; Richard C. Park

Direct Versus Endoscopic Lingual Tonsillectomy: Comparing Techniques
Kathleen M. Sarber, MD (presenter); Raisa Tikhtman; David F. Smith, MD, PhD; Christine H. Heubi, MD; Sally Shott, MD; Stacey L. Ishman, MD, MPH

Effects of Parathyroidectomy on Normocalcemic Primary Hyperparathyroidism
Ehab Alameer, MD (presenter); Emad Kandil, MD

Gadolinium Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging to Predict hearing Loss in Pediatric Patients with Bacterial Meningitis
Kevin Shi, MD (presenter); Jeremy Purser; John A. Germiller, MD, PhD; Albert H. Park, MD

Incorporating Electronic Data Capture into Routine Practice: A Feasibility Study
Jennifer Shin, MD, SM (presenter); Alan W. Langman, MD; Debra G. Weinberger, MD

Inhibition of TH2 CD4 T-cell Differentiation Attenuates Laryngotracheal Stenosis
Kevin M. Motz, MD (presenter); Michael Murphey; Dacheng Ding, MD, PhD; Alexander T. Hillel, MD

Leveraging Advance Care Practitioner Expertise in an Otolaryngology Practice
Nita Sharma, FACHE (presenter); David Upjohn; Carrlene Donald; Michael L. Hinni, MD; Devyani Lal, MD

Mouse Model of Patch Tracheoplasty Using Tissue Engineered Synthetic Scaffolds
Sayali Dharmadhikari, MS (presenter); Andrew Goins; Himani Akula; Susan Reynolds; Jed Johnson, PhD; Tendy Chiang; MD

Obstructive Sleep Apnea Outcomes: Comparing Uvulopalatopharyngoplasty and the Upper Airway Stimulation Acute Decompensated Heart Failure National Registry
Colin T. Huntly, MD (presenter); Maurits Boon, MD; Alan Kominsky, MD; Erica R. Thaler, MD; Clemens Heiser

Prevalence and Consequences of Bone Segment Malunion in Free Flap Patients
Brian Swendseid, MD (presenter); Ayan Kumar; Howard D. Krein, MD, PhD; Ryan Heffelfinger, MD; Adam Luginbuhl, MD; Joseph Curry, MD

Recurrence and Progression of Head and Neck Paragangliomas After Treatment
Kevin James Contrera, MD, MPH (presenter); Valeda Yong; Chandana Reddy; Robert Lorenz, MD, MBA

Reducing Transfusion Criteria in Free Flap Surgery
Taylor Bryce Cave (presenter); Daniel Petrisor, PhD; Ryan Li, MD; Peter Andersen, MD; James Azzi, MD; William Thomas, MD; Mark K. Wax, MD

Split-Face Randomized Controlled Trail of Sharp Needle Versus Blunt Cannula Use for Filler Injection
Natalie Kim-Orden, MD (presenter); Amy K. Hsu, MD; Jon-Paul Pepper, MD; Alexander Markarian, MD

Trends in the National Residency Matching Program Match: Comparing OTO-HNS with Other Competitive Specialties
Parsa P. Salehi, MD (presenter); Madison Sharp; Pauniz Salehi; Sina J. Torabi; Yan H. Lee, MD

The Impact of Marijuana Laws on Opioid Prescribing Patterns in Otolaryngology
Nicole I. Farber (presenter); Monica Azmy; Richard D. Bavier; Denny Varughese, MD; Wayne D. Hsueh, MD; Jean Anderson Eloy, MD

Barcelona--Video-assisted thoracic surgery is associated with lower in-hospital complications and shorter length of stay compared with open surgery among British patients who were diagnosed at an early stage of lung cancer, according to research presented today the IASLC 2019 World Conference on Lung Cancer, hosted by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer.

Video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery is a minimally invasive surgical technique used to diagnose and treat problems in the chest and lungs using small incisions. A small camera transmits images of the inside of the chest onto a video monitor, guiding the surgeon in performing the procedure. Open surgery is achieved through a long cut in the chest and the ribs are spread open with the surgeon operating through direct vision into the chest. A lobectomy for lung cancer can be achieved by either approach which involves removing one lobe of lung from either the right or left side of the chest.

The National Institute of Healthcare Research funded the trial, called VIOLET, because there was limited information comparing a VATS procedure with open surgery for lobectomy among lung cancer patients. Eric Lim, M.D. from Royal Brompton Hospital, London/United Kingdom randomized 503 lung cancer patients at nine surgery centers in the United Kingdom. The average age of the patients was 69 years and 49.5 percent were male and 50.5 percent female.

After randomization, Lim and his researchers found that patients who received VATS had a significant reduction of overall in-hospital complications (32.8 percent) compared to patients who received open surgery (44.3 percent). Additionally, patients randomized to VATS stayed in the hospital one day less than patients who were given open surgery.

"The VIOLET Trial is the largest randomized trial conducted to date to compare clinical efficacy, safety and oncologic outcomes of VATS versus open surgery for lung cancer," said Lim. "The study achieved its positive results without any compromise to early oncologic outcomes--pathologic complete resection and upstaging of mediastinal lymph nodes."