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New Haven, Conn. - Exposure to violence does not change the ability to learn who is likely to do harm, but it does damage the ability to place trust in "good people," psychologists at Yale and University of Oxford report April 26 in the journal Nature Communications.

More than 80% of youth in urban areas experienced violence in their communities in the last year, and those experiences have a profound effect on their health, the researchers say.

"We know exposure to violence is related to negative life outcomes, from increased health and mental health problems to greater engagement in violent behavior, but there is very little research on understanding the underlying cognitive processes that might be affected by this life experience," said Yale psychologist Arielle Baskin-Sommers, co-senior author of the paper.

Baskin-Sommers, her Yale colleague and co-senior author Molly Crockett, and graduate students Jenifer Siegel and Suzanne Estrada evaluated 119 males incarcerated in Connecticut prisons, some of whom scored high on exposure to violence. Participants learned about two strangers who faced a moral dilemma: whether to inflict painful electric shocks on another person in exchange for money. While the "good" stranger mostly refused to shock another person for money, the "bad" stranger tended to maximize their profits despite the painful consequences. The participants were asked to predict the strangers' choices, and later had to decide how much trust to place in the good versus the bad stranger.

The team found that participants with higher exposure to violence effectively learned that the good stranger made fewer harmful choices than the bad stranger. However, when deciding whom to trust, they trusted the good stranger less than participants who had a lower exposure to violence.

"In other words, exposure to violence disrupted the ability to place trust in the 'right' person," said Siegel, an Oxford doctoral student and first author of the paper. "We also saw that this disruption led to a greater number of disciplinary infractions within the prison setting."

Crockett said the findings suggest that exposure to violence changes the way people use information they've learned to make healthy social decisions.

"Social flourishing depends on learning who is likely to be helpful vs. harmful, and then using that information to decide who to befriend versus avoid," she said. "Our research suggests exposure to violence impairs this crucial aspect of social functioning."

Baskin-Sommers added, "The combination of exposure to violence and this specific cognitive disruption may leave certain individuals vulnerable to continually developing problematic social connections that limit their chances for psychosocial and economic stability."

The research was partially funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Academy of Medical Sciences.

New research by New York University Steinhardt Associate Professor Susannah Levi finds that children with poorer language skills are at a disadvantage when given tasks or being spoken to by strangers because they cannot, as easily as their peers, understand speech from people they do not know.

Levi's research evaluated school-aged children and found that children with high language skills - a better ability to understand and process language - were able to understand speech well both by people they knew and were familiar with, as well as strangers who had a similar accent to people they were familiar with. Children with lower language skills understood speech from familiar speakers well, but found it more challenging to understand speakers who they did not know.

"These findings suggest that children who have lower language skills are able to understand speech from familiar speakers, as would be the case with a teacher or parent, but may have a harder time with new speakers, such as a substitute teacher or when interacting with other people in their day to day interactions," said Susannah Levi, NYU Steinhardt professor and the study's lead author.

Levi previously published research showing that when school-aged children are familiar with someone's voice or accent, they can more accurately and quickly process what a person is saying - a concept known as "familiar talker advantage." The new research, published in the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, by Levi and her co-authors examined how this advantage is impacted by a child's language ability.

With the concept "familiar talker advantage," child listeners naturally store information about what they hear and the way words sound when spoken from people they know. Each time a child is spoken to they go back to this stored information to process and understand words that are spoken to them. This new research demonstrates that children with poorer language skills have a more difficult time retrieving and processing this information.

The current study included children with a range of language abilities who completed spoken word recognition tasks in which they heard words mixed with background noise and had to indicate what word they heard. The tasks required children to identify words spoken by voices and accents they were familiar with as well as three unfamiliar voices.

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. (April 25, 2019)-- Biologists at Tufts University have developed a computational model of planarian (flatworm) regeneration that explains how fragments of planaria determine which end should form a tail and which should form a head. The development begins to answer an important question in regeneration research - what are the signals that determine the rebuilding of specific anatomical structures? Combining modeling and experiment, the researchers determined that the direction of nerve fibers sets the redistribution of chemical signals establishing the direction of the head-to-tail axis. The model was also able to predict the outcomes of numerous genetic, pharmacological, and surgical manipulations, such as worms with two heads or two tails.

The results published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology go beyond planaria, showing how computational modeling of physiological and genetic signals can help understand and control regeneration. The discovery that neural directionality helps guide organ-level structure could have many applications in biomedical contexts, such as regeneration in mammals, birth defects, bioengineering of organoids, and cancer.

The computational model, using a new open-source simulation platform called the Planarian Interface for Modeling Body Organization (PLIMBO), incorporates many biological mechanisms driving regeneration - some published previously, and others discovered in the current study. This computational environment creates a realistic quantitative simulation of events taking place at the molecular, cellular, tissue, and whole organism levels. The model helped identify the important role neurons play in regeneration by providing active transport of morphogens - the molecules that help guide the growth and organization of cells into different tissues and anatomical structures. The researchers found that neurons played a critical role in reconstructing the polarity of the body plan (head to tail), as well as ensuring that morphogens could be rapidly distributed to enable the regeneration process to work effectively at different scales - from tiny fragments to complete bodies.

The model is basically a 2-dimensional map of a planarian body, in which important signaling molecules such as Hh, NRF, ERK, Wnt, cAMP, beta-Cat, Ptc and APC, each follow their own rules of production, distribution and transport along cellular paths, and interact with each other. To better understand the regeneration process, the authors examined the calculated results of cutting out portions of the map, inhibiting transport of the virtual morphogens, and/or perturbing the production of specific morphogens. The results of these interventions were then examined experimentally by physical excision in the worm, and exposure to RNAi or pharmacological treatments, which can decrease or increase the biological production of specific morphogens.

While it has been known for decades that neurons are in some way important for regenerative capacity, this is the first study that reveals that it is neural directionality that specifically instructs subsequent redistribution of biochemicals that determine the anatomical polarity of a major body axis. This shows how ordered pattern arises at the single cell scale and is propagated to tissues and organs.

"The model did remarkably well in predicting the actual biological outcomes in the worm," said Michael Levin, Ph.D., Vannevar Bush Professor of Biology in the School of Arts & Sciences and director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts. "It enabled us to visualize how patterning information can percolate up from the cell- to the organism-level, and how directionality of specific cells (such as neurons) drive downstream biochemical gradients and organ determination. The model enabled us to make accurate predictions of new experiments that had never been done before, revealing that neural directionality trumps (and re-sets) pre-existing biochemical gradients."

Neural direction guides polarity in regeneration by serving as a rapid conduit for certain morphogens. Neurons contain within them a system of "tracks" called microtubules, and molecular "engines" that transport molecules along those tracks. The engines include dynein and kinesin, and inhibiting either of those molecules can lead to regeneration anomalies predicted by the model. Novel experiments showed, as predicted by the model, that pre-existing gradients of chemicals in fragments did not set the direction of the head and tail axis, but rather were re-written by the directionality of neuron fibers.

"PLIMBO permits us to examine regeneration in a quantitatively rigorous manner," said lead author Alexis Pietak, the biophysicist who devised the model and member of the Allen Discovery Center. "We can fill in gaps in knowledge by simulating the role of neurons and novel morphogens and seeing if they improve the ability to predict experimental outcomes. This can provide us with not only a better understanding into the process of regeneration, tissue and organ formation but also insights into how body patterns could be disrupted in other animals during gestation, leading to birth defects."

Individualized nutrition not only causes hospital patients to consume more protein and calories, but also improves clinical treatment outcomes. This has been demonstrated in a study by researchers from the University of Basel and Aarau Cantonal Hospital in the journal The Lancet.

People who struggle to eat and drink properly following an illness are at risk of consuming too little protein and energy. This phenomenon affects over a third of inpatients in the medical wards of hospitals.

Malnutrition not only reduces the hospitalized patients' quality of life; it also has an adverse impact on disease progression, increasing the risk of complications and the mortality rate.

Where there is a risk of nutritional deficit, guidelines recommend individualized nutrition during the patient's stay in hospital in order to guarantee their supply of protein and calories. Possible measures range from a nutritional plan to tube feeding and intravenous feeding.

First controlled study

Until now, the lack of meaningful studies meant that it was unclear whether individual nutrition management actually had a positive impact on patients, especially as nutritional support can also have unwanted side effects.

Now, in a clinical trial involving more than 2,000 patients at eight Swiss hospitals, researchers have examined the benefits of such nutritional support in a randomized controlled study for the first time.

For the trial, medical patients at risk of malnutrition were divided at random into two groups. One group received the usual dishes from the hospital kitchen during their hospitalization. For the patients in the second group, dieticians compiled an individual nutritional plan.

Individual nutrition shows benefits

After 30 days, it was clear that individualized nutrition not only achieved a better supply of energy and protein, but also led to a general improvement in treatment outcomes. The comparison showed that fewer serious complications occurred and the mortality rate fell. Statistically, it was possible to prevent a serious complication in one in 25 people treated and one death for every 37 people treated.

"Our results show that malnutrition is a modifiable risk factor and that the therapy has a positive influence on disease progression," says study leader Professor Philipp Schütz, who is an SNSF professor at the University of Basel and head of internal and emergency medicine at the Aarau Cantonal Hospital in Switzerland.

"This study has major implications for the treatment of hospital patients with multiple morbidities and should help to reinforce the importance of nutritional therapy in high-risk patients."

Extreme ocean winds and wave heights are increasing around the globe, with the largest rise occurring in the Southern Ocean, University of Melbourne research shows.

Researchers Ian Young and Agustinus Ribal, from the University's Department of Infrastructure Engineering, analysed wind speed and wave height measurements taken from 31 different satellites between 1985-2018, consisting of approximately 4 billion observations.

The measurements were compared with more than 80 ocean buoys deployed worldwide, making it the largest and most detailed dataset of its type ever compiled.

The researchers found that extreme winds in the Southern Ocean have increased by 1.5 metres per second, or 8 per cent, over the past 30 years. Extreme waves have increased by 30 centimetres, or 5 per cent, over the same period.

As the world's oceans become stormier, Professor Young warns this has flow on effects for rising sea levels and infrastructure.

"Although increases of 5 and 8 per cent might not seem like much, if sustained into the future such changes to our climate will have major impacts," Professor Young said.

"Flooding events are caused by storm surge and associated breaking waves. The increased sea level makes these events more serious and more frequent.

"Increases in wave height, and changes in other properties such as wave direction, will further increase the probability of coastal flooding."

Professor Young said understanding changes in the Southern Ocean are important, as this is the origin for the swell that dominates the wave climate of the South Pacific, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

"Swells from the Southern Ocean determine the stability of beaches for much of the Southern Hemisphere, Professor Young said.

"These changes have impacts that are felt all over the world. Storm waves can increase coastal erosion, putting costal settlements and infrastructure at risk."

International teams are now working to develop the next generation of global climate models to project changes in winds and waves over the next 100 years.

"We need a better understanding of how much of this change is due to long-term climate change, and how much is due to multi-decadal fluctuations, or cycles," Professor Young said.

The research was published today in Science.

Emperor penguins at the Halley Bay colony in the Weddell Sea have failed to raise chicks for the last three years, scientists have discovered.

Researchers from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) studied very high resolution satellite imagery to reveal the unusual findings, published today (25 April 2019) in the journal Antarctic Science.

Until recently, the Halley Bay colony was the second largest in the world, with the number of breeding pairs varying each year between 14,000 - 25,000; around 5-9% of the global emperor penguin population.

The failure to raise chicks for three consecutive years is associated with changes in the local sea-ice conditions. Emperor penguins need stable sea-ice on which to breed, and this icy platform must last from April when the birds arrive, until December when their chicks fledge.

For the last 60 years the sea-ice conditions in the Halley Bay site have been stable and reliable. But in 2016, after a period of abnormally stormy weather, the sea-ice broke up in October, well before any emperor chicks would have fledged.

This pattern was repeated in 2017 and again in 2018 and led to the death of almost all the chicks at the site each season.

The colony at Halley Bay colony has now all but disappeared, whilst the nearby Dawson Lambton colony has markedly increased in size, indicating that many of the adult emperors have moved there, seeking better breeding grounds as environmental conditions have changed.

The re-location of many of the birds to a more stable breeding ground is encouraging, as until now it was not known whether the penguins would seek alternative sites in response to significant changes in their local environment.

Lead author and BAS remote sensing specialist Dr Peter Fretwell said: "We have been tracking the population of this, and other colonies in the region, for the last decade using very high resolution satellite imagery.

"These images have clearly shown the catastrophic breeding failure at this site over the last three years. Our specialised satellite image analysis can detect individuals and penguin huddles, so we can estimate the population based on the known density of the groups to give reliable estimate of colony size."

BAS penguin expert and co-author Dr Phil Trathan, said: "It is impossible to say whether the changes in sea-ice conditions at Halley Bay are specifically related to climate change, but such a complete failure to breed successfully is unprecedented at this site.

"Even taking into account levels of ecological uncertainty, published models suggest that emperor penguins numbers are set to fall dramatically, losing 50-70% of their numbers before the end of this century as sea-ice conditions change as a result of climate change."

By using satellite imagery to study the behaviour of this colony and its response to catastrophic sea-ice loss scientists will gain vital information about how this iconic species might cope with future environmental change.

Coral reefs worldwide are threatened by a variety of human impacts. Fishing is among the most pressing threats to reefs, because it occurs on most reef systems and fundamentally alters food webs. Meanwhile, observing coral reefs, particularly remote, hard-to-access locations such as the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI), remains notoriously difficult and expensive. But a University of Hawai'i (UH) at Mānoa researcher and her collaborators may have found a mysterious natural phenomenon that can help us observe coral reef health from space.

Patches of coral reef are often surrounded by very large 'halos' of bare sand that are hundreds to thousands of square meters. Beyond these halos lie lush meadows of seagrass or algae. Two recently published studies and a third feature story led by Elizabeth Madin, assistant research professor at the Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) in the UH at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, shed light on these enigmatic features that are visible from space.

Scientists have observed reef halos for decades and explained their presence as the result of fish and invertebrates, who typically hide in a patch of coral, venturing out to eat algae and seagrass that cover the surrounding seabed. But the fear of predators keeping these smaller animals close to safety has long been thought to explain why the cleared area is circular. Madin's recent work reveals there is more to the story, and further that these features may be useful in observing aspects of reef ecosystem health from space.

In one of Madin's new studies, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, her team of scientists found that no-take marine reserves, where fishing is prohibited, dramatically shape these seascape-scale vegetation patterns in coral reef ecosystems, influencing the occurrence of the prominent 'halo' pattern. This means that marine reserves may have even greater impacts on coral reef seascapes than previously known.

The team hypothesized that if the "formation of the halos was driven by small fish's fear of being eaten, so the number of predators around should be linked to whether these bare patches appear and how big they are," Madin explained in an article published recently in New Scientist. "With fewer predators, you would expect the grazing fish to be less fearful and so venture further from the reef, resulting in wider halos."

But to Madin and her team's great surprise, using freely-available satellite imagery they saw no difference in size of the halos inside versus outside of no-fishing marine reserves. However, they did find that the halos are significantly more likely to occur in no-take marine reserves, demonstrating novel landscape-scale effects of marine reserves.

In the second study, published in Frontiers, Madin and colleagues found that a more complex set of species interactions than previously assumed likely influence these halos. Using a combination of very high definition remote underwater video camera traps and traditional ecological studies on coral reefs within Australia's Great Barrier Reef, Madin observed that in addition to the plant-eating fishes known to play a role in halo formation, invertebrate-eating fishes that dig in the sand for prey were disrupting the algae out to the halos' edges and making them bigger. Another piece of the puzzle had been revealed.

Collectively, Madin's work shows that the presence of halos may serve as an indicator of aspects of reef ecosystem health, because halos are suspected to be the indirect result of healthy predator and herbivore populations. Madin's ongoing studies of halos have shown that they can appear and disappear over time and change significantly in size, a phenomenon that suggests environmental factors also influence halos.

"We urgently need more cost- and time-efficient ways of monitoring such reefs," said Madin. "Our work couples freely-available satellite imagery, with traditional field-based experiments and observations, to start to unravel the mystery of what the globally-widespread patterns of 'halos' around coral reefs can tell us about how reef ecosystems may be changing over space and/or time due to fisheries or marine reserves. This will therefore pave the way for the development of a novel, technology-based solution to the challenge of monitoring large areas of coral reef and enable management of healthy reef ecosystems and sustainable fisheries."

The early arrival of spring in parts of the Arctic is driven by winter snow melting sooner than in previous decades and by rising temperatures, research suggests.

The findings, from a study of plants at coastal sites around the Arctic tundra, help scientists understand how the region is responding to a changing climate and how it may continue to adapt.

Researchers studied the timing of activity in seasonal vegetation, which acts as a barometer for the environment. Changes in the arrival of leaves and flowers - which cover much of the region - can reflect or influence shifts in the climate.

A team from the University of Edinburgh, and universities in Canada, the US, Denmark and Germany, gathered data on the greening and flowering of 14 plant species at four sites in Alaska, Canada and Greenland.

They sought to better understand which factors have the greatest influence on the timing of spring plants in the tundra - temperatures, snow melt or sea ice melt.

Variation in the timing of leaves and flowers appearing on plants between the sites was found to be linked to the timing of local snow melt and, to a lesser extent, temperatures.

Across the tundra, leaves and flowers were found to emerge as much as 20 days sooner compared with two decades ago. Within the same timeframe, spring temperatures warmed by 1 degree Celsius each decade on average, while loss of sea ice occurred around 20 days sooner across the different regions.

Overall snow melt, which advanced by about 10 days over two decades, had the greatest influence on the timing of spring.

The study, published in Global Change Biology, was funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council.

Dr Isla Myers-Smith, of the University of Edinburgh's School of GeoSciences, who took part in the study, said: "In the extreme climate of the Arctic tundra, where summers are short, the melting of winter snows as well as warming temperatures are key drivers of the timing of spring. This will help us to understand how Arctic ecosystems are responding as the climate warms."

People over the millennia have reported having deeply moving religious experiences either spontaneously or while under the influence of psychedelic substances such as psilocybin-containing mushrooms or the Amazonian brew ayahuasca, and a portion of those experiences have been encounters with what the person regards as "God" or "ultimate reality." In a survey of thousands of people who reported having experienced personal encounters with God, Johns Hopkins researchers report that more than two-thirds of self-identified atheists shed that label after their encounter, regardless of whether it was spontaneous or while taking a psychedelic.

Moreover, the researchers say, a majority of respondents attributed lasting positive changes in their psychological health ¾ e.g., life satisfaction, purpose and meaning ¾ even decades after their initial experience.

The findings, described in a paper published April 23 in PLOS ONE,[VM1] add to evidence that such deeply meaningful experiences may have healing properties, the researchers say. And the study's design, they add, is the first to systematically and rigorously compare reports of spontaneous God encounter experiences with those occasioned, or catalyzed, by psychedelic substances.

"Experiences that people describe as encounters with God or a representative of God have been reported for thousands of years, and they likely form the basis of many of the world's religions," says lead researcher Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "And although modern Western medicine doesn't typically consider 'spiritual' or 'religious' experiences as one of the tools in the arsenal against sickness, our findings suggest that these encounters often lead to improvements in mental health."

The historic and widespread anecdotal evidence for their benefits led to the research team's latest effort to research the value, and possible downsides, of such encounters, Griffiths says.

For the new study, the scientists used data from 4,285 people worldwide who responded to online advertisements to complete one of two 50-minute online surveys about God encounter experiences. The surveys asked participants to recall their single most memorable encounter experience with the "God of their understanding," a "higher power," "ultimate reality" or "an aspect or representative of God, such as an angel." They also asked how respondents felt about their experience and whether and how it changed their lives.

About 69 percent of the participants were men, and 88 percent were white. Of those who reported using a psychedelic, 1,184 took psilocybin ("magic mushrooms"), 1,251 said they took LSD, 435 said they took ayahuasca (a plant-based brew originating with indigenous cultures in Latin America), and 606 said they took DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine), also a naturally occurring substance found in certain plants and animals.

Of the total participants, 809 were those who responded to the non-drug survey, whereas 3,476 responded to the psychedelics survey. Respondents were an average age of 38 when they took the survey. The people who said they had a God encounter experience when on a psychedelic reported that these experiences happened at age 25 on average, whereas those whose experience was spontaneous reported having it at an average age of 35.

Among other key findings:

About 75 percent of respondents in both the non-drug and psychedelics groups rated their "God encounter" experience as among the most meaningful and spiritually significant in their lifetime, and both groups attributed to it positive changes in life satisfaction, purpose and meaning.

Independent of psychedelics use, more than two-thirds of those who said they were atheists before the experience no longer identified as such afterward.

Most participants, in both the non-drug and psychedelics groups, reported vivid memories of the encounter experience, which frequently involved communication with some entity having the attributes of consciousness (approximately 70 percent), benevolence (approximately 75 percent), intelligence (approximately 80 percent), sacredness (approximately 75 percent) and eternal existence (approximately 70 percent).

Although both groups reported a decreased fear of death, 70 percent of participants in the psychedelics group reported this change, compared with 57 percent among non-drug respondents.

In both groups, about 15 percent of the respondents said their experience was the most psychologically challenging of their lives.

In the non-drug group, participants were most likely to choose "God" or "an emissary of God" (59 percent) as the best descriptor of their encounter, while the psychedelics group were most likely (55 percent) to choose "ultimate reality."

For future studies, Griffiths said his team would like to explore what factors predispose someone to having such a memorable and life-altering perceived encounter, and they would like to see what happens in the brain during the experience.

"Continuing to explore these experiences may provide new insights into religious and spiritual beliefs that have been integral to shaping human culture since time immemorial," says Griffiths.z

Griffiths and the research team caution that the study relied on self-reported responses to a questionnaire, a method that carries substantial possibilities for biased or inaccurate responses among participants. They don't advocate that people use hallucinogenic substances on their own because they carry not only legal risks, but also behavioral risks associated with impaired judgment under the influence and the possibility of negative psychological consequences, particularly in vulnerable people or when the experience isn't safeguarded by qualified guides.

In addition, says Griffiths, "We want to be clear that our study looks at personal experiences and says nothing about the existence, or nonexistence of God. We doubt that any science can definitively settle this point either way."

Griffiths has been researching psychedelic drugs for nearly two decades. Some of his earlier studies have used psilocybin to explore mystical-type experiences and their consequences in healthy volunteers, and the therapeutic potential of the drug in helping people to quit smoking or to ease mental distress in people due to a cancer diagnosis.

His team is hopeful that, one day, psilocybin may be developed as a drug to use in therapeutic settings under the care of a trained guide.

Scientists from TPU, Germany, and the United States have found a new way to functionalize a dielectric, otherwise known as 'white graphene', i.e. hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), without destroying it or changing its properties. Thanks to the new method, the researchers synthesized a 'polymer nano carpet' with strong covalent bond on the samples.

Prof Raul Rodriguez from the TPU Research School of Chemistry & Applied Biomedical Sciences explains:

'For the first time, we have managed to covalently functionalize hexagonal boron nitride without strong chemical compositions and the introduction of new defects into the material. In fact, earlier approaches had resulted in a different material with altered properties, i.e. hydrolyzed boron nitride. In our turn, we used nanodefects existing in the material without increasing their number, and eco-friendly photopolymerization.'

One of the promising options for using the new material, according to researchers, is catalysts for splitting water in hydrogen and oxygen. With this in view, 'polymer carpets' functioned as carriers of active substances, i.e. matrices. Nickel nanoparticles were integrated into the matrix. Catalysts obtained were used for electrocatalysis. Studies showed that they could be successfully used as an alternative to expensive platinum or gold.

'One of the important challenges in catalysis is forcing the starting material to reach active centers of the catalyst. 'Polymer carpets' form a 3D structure that helps to increase the area of contact of the active centers of the catalyst with water and makes hydrogen acquisition more efficient. It is very promising for the production of environmentally friendly hydrogen fuel,' - says the scientist.

Boron nitride is a binary compound of boron and nitrogen. While, hexagonal boron nitride or 'white graphene' is a white talc-like powder with hexagonal, graphene-like lattice. It is resistant to high temperatures and chemical substances, nontoxic, has a very low coefficient of friction, and functions both as a perfect dielectric and as a good heat conductor. Boron-nitride materials are widely used in the reactions of industrial organic synthesis, in the cracking of oil, for the manufacturing of products of high-temperature technology, the production of semiconductors, means for extinguishing fires, and so on.

Previously, a number of studies were devoted to functionalization of hexagonal boron nitride. Typically, this process uses strong chemical oxidants that not only destroy the material but also significantly change its properties. The method, which TPU scientists and their foreign colleagues use, allows them to avoid this.

'Studies have shown that we obtained homogenous and durable 'polymer carpets' which can be removed from the supporting substrate and used separately. What is more, this is a fairly universal technology since for functionalization we used different monomers which allow obtaining materials with properties optimal for use in various devices,' - says Prof Raul Rodriguez.

OAKLAND, Calif. - More than 80 percent of all waste from Pennsylvania's oil and gas drilling operations stays inside the state, according to a new study that tracks the disposal locations of liquid and solid waste from these operations across 26 years. Numerous human health hazards have been associated with waste from oil and gas extraction, including potential exposure to compounds known to cause cancer.

The study is the first comprehensive assessment of Pennsylvania's waste-disposal practices, tracking from 1991 - when the state began collecting waste-disposal information - through 2017. In southwestern Pennsylvania, most solid waste goes to landfills in the county where it was produced, the study also found, while in northern counties along state borders, solid waste generally moves to neighboring states of Ohio and New York.

"Tracking waste across space - the distance and direction it travels and where it ends up - and across time helps us determine who is absorbing the potential health burdens associated with these waste products, both from recent operations and from legacy pollution across the lifetime of the state's oil and gas operations," said Lee Ann Hill, a researcher at Physicians, Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy (PSE) and lead author of the study, which was published in Science of the Total Environment on April 22.

Use the interactive data tool to explore the study's findings in a visual format.

Oil and gas development produces high-salinity water that can contain strontium and radium - substances classified as known human carcinogens. Solid waste includes cuttings from drilling that can bring naturally occurring radioactive materials including uranium, radium, and thorium, up from the subsurface to the surface, creating the potential for human and environmental exposures to these toxic compounds.

Previous studies have tracked only subsets of oil and gas waste-disposal data. For example, many past studies have focused just on waste from high-volume hydraulic fracturing, the process used at scale since 2008 to extract oil and gas from Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale formation. But the PSE-led study also tracks waste from conventional oil and gas development, which has taken place in Pennsylvania since records have been kept and continues today. Conventional drilling operations accounted for nearly one third of all waste, the data showed.

"We know that many of the hazards and risks associated with waste from oil and gas extraction exist for both conventional and unconventional operations," Hill said. Yet, researchers note, legislation passed in 2016 strengthened disposal location tracking for unconventional oil and gas operations, but similar reporting practices were not required for conventional operations. "From a public health perspective, it doesn't really make sense that conventional operators are held to a different standard," she says.

Where does it go?

Solid waste mainly goes into landfills. Some of the state's liquid waste - 7.6 percent, or 30 million barrels over the study's time period - is sent to municipal or other water treatment plants, which discharge into surface waters like rivers after limited treatment. Studies have shown that despite treatment operations, pollution remains in sediment downstream from release sites. For example, radium persists in sediment for many years and strontium, which accumulates in bones of living things, much like calcium, has been found in the shells of riverbed mussels downstream of treatment facilities.

More than half of the liquid waste that remains in Pennsylvania was reused in extraction operations, the study found, a practice that can result in more concentrated levels of salinity and chemical residues with each subsequent use. Researchers note that the pervasiveness of this practice raises questions about how to treat or dispose of these more concentrated waste streams in the future, when drilling operations slow or cease, diminishing the demand for wastewater reuse.

For more than a third of liquid waste from all oil and gas operations - 35 percent - the final location is unknown, often because reporting reflects only intermediary locations for transfer or storage. "This finding illuminates what we don't know," Hill said.

The study concludes that a uniform cradle-to-grave reporting system should be put in place to properly assess hazards and risks to human health and the environment posed by waste streams from all types of oil and gas production. "Understanding where and when waste enters our environment helps scientists and communities quantify human exposures to these contaminants and measure environmental impacts," she said.

Human skeletal muscles have a unique combination of properties that materials researchers seek for their own creations. They're strong, soft, full of water, and resistant to fatigue. A new study by MIT researchers has found one way to give synthetic hydrogels this total package of characteristics: putting them through a vigorous workout.

In particular, the scientists mechanically trained the hydrogels by stretching them in a water bath. And just as with skeletal muscles, the reps at the "gym" paid off. The training aligned nanofibers inside the hydrogels to produce a strong, soft, and hydrated material that resists breakdown or fatigue over thousands of repetitive movements.

The polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) hydrogels trained in the experiment are well-known biomaterials that researchers use for medical implants, drug coatings, and other applications, says Xuanhe Zhao, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. "But one with these four important properties has not been designed or manufactured until now."

In their paper, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Zhao and his colleagues describe how the hydrogels also can be 3-D-printed into a variety of shapes that can be trained to develop the suite of muscle-like properties.

In the future, the materials might be used in implants such as "heart valves, cartilage replacements, and spinal disks, as well as in engineering applications such as soft robots," Zhao says.

Other MIT authors on the paper include graduate student Shaoting Lin, postdoc Ji Liu, and graduate student Xunyue Liu in Zhao's lab.

Training for strength and more

Excellent load-bearing natural tissues such as muscles and heart valves are a bioinspiration to materials researchers, but it has been very challenging to design materials that capture all their properties simultaneously, Zhao says.

For instance, one can design a hydrogel with highly aligned fibers to give it strength, but it may not be as flexible as a muscle, or it may not have the water content that makes it compatible for use in humans. "Most of the tissues in the human body contain about 70 percent water, so if we want to implant a biomaterial in the body, a higher water content is more desirable for many applications in the body," Zhao explains.

The discovery that mechanical training could produce a muscle-like hydrogel was something of an accident, says Lin, the lead author of the PNAS study. The research team had been performing cyclic mechanical loading tests on the hydrogels, trying to find the fatigue point where the hydrogels would begin to break down. They were surprised instead to find that the cyclic training was actually strengthening the hydrogels.

"The phenomenon of strengthening in hydrogels after cyclic loading is counterintuitive to the current understanding on fatigue fracture in hydrogels, but shares the similarity with the mechanism of muscle strengthening after training," says Lin.

Before training, the nanofibers that make up the hydrogel are randomly oriented. "During the training process, what we realized is that we were aligning the nanofibers," says Lin, adding that the alignment is similar to what happens to a human muscle under repeated exercise. This training made the hydrogels stronger and fatigue-resistant. The combination of the four key properties appeared after about 1,000 stretching cycles, but some of the hydrogels were stretched over 30,000 cycles without breaking down. The tensile strength of the trained hydrogel, in the direction of the aligned fibers, increased by about 4.3 times over the unstretched hydrogel.

At the same time, the hydrogel demonstrated soft flexibility, and maintained a high water content of 84 percent, the researchers found.

The antifatigue factor

The scientists turned to confocal microscopy to take a closer look at the trained hydrogels, to see if they could discover the reasons behind their impressive anti-fatigue property. "We put these through thousands of cycles of load, so why doesn't it fail?" Lin says. "What we did is make a cut perpendicular to these nanofibers and tried to propagate a crack or damage in this material."

"We dyed the fibers under the microscope to see how they deformed as a result of the cut, [and found that] a phenomenon called crack pinning was responsible for fatigue resistance," Ji says.

"In an amorphous hydrogel, where the polymer chains are randomly aligned, it doesn't take too much energy for damage to spread through the gel," Lin adds. "But in the aligned fibers of the hydrogel, a crack perpendicular to the fibers is 'pinned' in place and prevented from lengthening because it takes much more energy to fracture through the aligned fibers one by one."

In fact, the trained hydrogels break a famous fatigue threshold, predicted by the Lake-Thomas theory, which proposes the energy required to fracture a single layer of amorphous polymer chains such as those that make up PVA hydrogels. The trained hydrogels are 10 to 100 times more fatigue-resistant than predicted by the theory, Zhao and his colleagues concluded.

Despite the growing body of evidence showing that social forces like income, housing and educational attainment have a greater bearing on health outcomes than behavior or genetics, healthcare leaders remain reluctant to identify racism as a root cause of racial health inequities. In an April 18 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Rush Medical College student Kristen Pallok with Dr. David Ansell and Dr. Fernando De Maio -- from Chicago's Center for Community Health Equity -- use the experience of a 60-year-old African-American woman's breast cancer fight to illustrate how institutionally and culturally embedded racial hierarchies prevent people of color from meeting their basic needs.

"Racism is often assumed to be interpersonal discrimination. But here we see how societal levels of disinvestment and increased poverty manifest themselves at the institutional level into resource allocation that meant African American women living in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage did not have the same opportunities to be healthy as white women," noted lead author Pallok.

A social medicine perspective

The article, Structural Racism: A 60-Year-Old Black Woman with Breast Cancer, is part of a new New England Journal of Medicine series devoted to highlighting the importance of social concepts and social context in clinical medicine. These articles will call for more collaboration between medical doctors and social scientists -- something that study authors have been pursuing for several years through the Center for Community Health Equity, collaboration between Chicago's DePaul University and Rush University Medical Center that seeks to improve community health outcomes and contribute to the elimination of health inequities in Chicago.

The article details the experience of 60-year-old, uninsured African-American woman who visited the emergency department of a Chicago hospital concerned with a breast lump. Since her prior mammograms had been normal, the emergency medicine physician suspected an infection and discharged her with antibiotics without follow-up care or diagnostic testing. When the lump persisted and further imaging indicated breast cancer, a general surgeon removed the lump and recommended a mastectomy without telling the woman the cancer stage nor referring her to an oncologist.

But an on-site navigator from the nonprofit Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Task Force was able to intervene. She reviewed the abnormal mammograms, referred her to a breast surgical oncologist at an academic medical center who then diagnosed the patients with stage III infiltrating ductal carcinoma that was able to be successfully treated without a mastectomy. "This came just in time to stop me from having my breast cut off," the woman noted.

The Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Task Force was established in 2008 to close the gap in the number of deaths from breast cancer between Chicago's black and white women. By first identifying gaps in mammography access to mammography and the quality of breast cancer diagnosis and treatments, the task force initiated a city-wide public health initiative to more equitably allocate resources and expand access to care. According to study authors, in this case "the Taskforce disrupted the invisible, structural roots of inadequate breast cancer care provided by community hospitals serving segregated neighborhoods."

"This article rests on the idea of structural racism, one of the clearest examples we have of the wider-ranging concept of structural violence: social and political arrangements that harm populations. These concepts are critical for understanding health inequities but they challenge many of the taken-for-granted assumptions of health research, which tends to value things that can be observed or measured at the individual level. Here we are looking at and naming larger societal level forces that directly harm people in systematic ways," noted co-author Fernando De Maio, associate professor of sociology at DePaul University.

Clinical implications: identifying structural racism in health care

Beyond the success of this breast cancer success story, the authors suggest that the task force's success in systematically identifying race-driven health disparities and then finding ways to address them regionally can be replicated. They argue that there are three critical strategies to addressing structural racism in healthcare:

Make the invisible visible. The authors suggest physicians can examine health disparities in their own practices by comparing clinical outcomes in their patients with national data that health across racialized groups to assess.

Engage community to change the narrative: The negative impact that social forces and structures can have in disadvantaged communities is well understood in those communities. Thus community-based organizations, politicians and even the media can be allies for change when provided the right information.

Make systemic changes to eliminate structural racism: Quality improvement efforts, such as updating technical skills of breast-imaging staff and establishing standardized systems for follow-up of abnormal results in the case, can help to alleviate the presence of structural racism. When these efforts were employed at low-performing hospitals, facilities showed gradual improvements in meeting quality benchmarks as well as helping to overall reduce Chicago's breast cancer mortality disparity between white and black women.

In 2017 the task force published data showing that since the inception of the Taskforce, the black:white breast cancer mortality disparity decreased 20% in Chicago--a result not observed in the nine other US cities with the largest African-American populations, including New York and Los Angeles.

"Although the precise reasons for this the 20% drop in the black to white mortality disparity are unclear, it has highlighted the effectiveness of quality improvement in mitigating structural racism in health care." Pallok noted.

Eliminating structural racism 'at its root cause'

"To eliminate structural racism at its root cause, we must look beyond the walls of our clinics to the community. We must push for equity in other social systems -- such as housing, schools and incarceration -- that affect health outcomes," said co-author Ansell, Rush University Medical Center's senior vice president for community health equity and a founding member of the task force.

"And we must be willing to identify the health impact of racism. The biological differences between blacks and whites are tiny, yet the gaps in outcomes are simply too wide to continue to see race as a disease risk factor when the root cause is racism."

Tokyo, Japan - Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have used carbon nanotube templates to produce nanowires of transition metal monochalcogenide (TMM), which are only 3 atoms wide in diameter. These are 50 times longer than previous attempts and can be studied in isolation, preserving the properties of atomically quasi "1D" objects. The team saw that single wires twist when perturbed, suggesting that isolated nanowires have unique mechanical properties which might be applied to switching in nanoelectronics.

Two-dimensional materials have gone from theoretical curiosity to real-life application in the span of less than two decades; the most well-known example of these, graphene, consists of well-ordered sheets of carbon atoms. Though we are far from leveraging the full potential of graphene, its remarkable electrical and thermal conductivity, optical properties and mechanical resilience have already led to a wide range of industrial applications. Examples include energy storage solutions, biosensing, and even substrates for artificial tissue.

Yet, despite the successful transition from 3D to 2D, the barrier separating 2D and 1D has been significantly more challenging to overcome. A class of materials known as transition metal monochalcogenides (TMMs, transition metal + group 16 element) have received particular interest as a potential nanowire in precision nanoelectronics. Theoretical studies have existed for over 30 years, and preliminary experimental studies have also succeeded in making small quantities of nanowire, but these were usually bundled, too short, mixed with bulk material or simply low yield, particularly when precision techniques were involved e.g. lithography. The bundling was particularly problematic; forces known as van der Waals forces would force the wires to aggregate, effectively masking all the unique properties of 1D wires that one might want to access and apply.

Now, a team led by Assistant Professor Yusuke Nakanishi from Tokyo Metropolitan University has succeeded in producing bulk quantities of well-isolated single nanowires of TMM. They used tiny, open-ended rolls of single-layered carbon, or carbon nanotubes (CNTs), to template the assembly and reaction of molybdenum and tellurium into wires from a vapor. They succeeded in producing single isolated wires of TMM, which were only 3-atoms thick and fifty times longer than those made using existing methods. These nanometer-sized CNT "test tubes" were also shown to be not chemically bound to the wires, effectively preserving the properties expected from isolated TMM wires. Importantly, they effectively "protected" the wires from each other, allowing for unprecedented access to how these 1D objects behave in isolation.

While imaging these objects using transmission electron microscopy (TEM), the team found that these wires exhibited a unique twisting effect when exposed to an electron beam. Such behavior has never been seen before and is expected to be unique to isolated wires. The transition from a straight to twisted structure may offer a novel switching mechanism when the material is incorporated into microscopic circuits. The team hope the ability to make well-isolated 1D nanowires might significantly expand our understanding of the properties and mechanisms behind the function of 1D materials.

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) scientists have developed a sustainable way to demonstrate a new genetic modification that can increase the yield of natural oil in seeds by up to 15 per cent in laboratory conditions.

The new method can be applied to crops such as canola, soybean and sunflower, which are in a multi-billion dollar industry that continues to see increasing global demand.

The research team led by Assistant Professor Wei Ma from NTU's School of Biological Sciences genetically modified a key protein in plants which regulates the amount of oil they produce. This results in larger oil reserves in the seed that primarily serves as an energy source for germination.

The team's patent-pending method involves modifying the key protein known as "Wrinkled1" or "WRI1", which regulates plants' oil production. After modification, the seeds have a wrinkled appearance, which is the basis for its scientific codename.

In the lab, these modified seeds have successfully displayed seed oil increase that is able to produce up to 15 per cent more natural oils. The research findings were published in the scientific journal Plant Signaling & Behavior.

"Plant seed oil is an essential component in our daily diet and the agricultural industry is seeking ways to maximise plants' yield while reducing environmental effects of crop cultivation, especially land use. Our research helps to increase the production of seed oil in a sustainable and cost-effective way, and it also opens up new doors in agriculture research," said Asst Prof Ma.

The ability to increase oil yield in a sustainable manner is expected to result in higher economic gain. Past research has shown that a small 1.5 per cent increase in oil yield (by dry weight) in soybean seeds equates to a jump of US$ 1.26 billion in the United States market.

Discovery a boost for biofuel production

The increased yield in seed oil would also benefit the production of biofuel, which is a form of clean fuel produced from organic sources, such as vegetable oils.

Biofuel is being used in various applications, including powering machines in protected forests to reduce fossil fuel contamination and fuelling long-distant transportation by automobiles, ships, and airplanes.

"Global demand for vegetable oil is increasing very rapidly, and it is estimated to double by 2030. In addition, research is also ramping up in the use of biofuels in various applications, which can provide a cleaner and more sustainable source of fuel than petroleum. Increasing oil production of key crops such as soybean, sunflower, and canola is thus essential for a more sustainable and greener future," said Asst Prof Ma.

He is currently exploring industrial collaboration to commercialise and further develop the technology.

The NTU team is also studying other ways to maximise plants' oil reserves, for example, using other plant parts such as stems, for oil production.

Sustainable way to increase oil yield

Previous research efforts to improve seed oil yield involved increasing the number of the WRI1 protein - known as overexpression - but this did not succeed in increasing the oil yield stably and consistently.

Asst Prof Ma used the Arabidopsis plant - a small flowering plant related to cabbage and mustard. It contains all the characteristics of crops such as sunflower, canola and soybean, which serves as an ideal model plant for research.

He and the NTU research team developed a patent-pending method that stabilises the key WRI1 protein which also improves its ability to interact with other proteins. This enhances its effectiveness in producing natural oils and the method can be easily done on other crops. This also encourages a more sustainable way for industries to produce natural oils instead of simply increasing the amount of land used for agriculture.

Dr. Bo Shen, a Senior Manager at DuPont Pioneer, a US-based international producer of hybrid seeds for agriculture who is not involved in the NTU team's research said, "Vegetable oil is an important renewable resource for biodiesel production and for dietary consumption by humans and livestock. The total production of vegetable oil worldwide reached about 185 million tons in 2017. Wrinkled1 (WRI1) is a ubiquitous regulator controlling oil biosynthesis in maize, soybean, canola, and palm. With increasing demand for vegetable oil, Asst Prof Wei Ma's research on WRI1 can have global importance. A better understanding of how WRI1 regulates oil biosynthesis could inform how we breed plants that produce more oil."

Providing another independent view, Dr. Eric Moellering, a Senior Scientist from Synthetic Genomics, a California company focusing on synthetic biology, said, "Asst Prof Ma's research on the plant transcriptional factor WRI1 has greatly advanced our understanding of how seed oil biosynthesis is regulated. While the WRI1 gene has been known for some time, Asst Prof Ma's research has revealed key insight into the structural features of the WRI1 protein that are critical for its function, WRI1 interactions with other regulatory proteins, and the role of WRI1 in processes outside of seed oil regulation.

"These discoveries will undoubtedly contribute to the optimisation of seed oil yield in a variety of crops. As such, Asst Prof Ma's research is helping to address some of the major 21st century challenges we face in feeding a growing global population and developing renewable transport energy."