Earth

Researchers from University of South Carolina, Singapore Management University, George Mason University, National University of Singapore, and University of Illinois - Chicago published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that combines the academic research and field interviews with managers to explicate the concept of marketing agility.

The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "Marketing Agility: The Concept, Antecedents and a Research Agenda" and is authored by Kartik Kalaignanam, Kapil Tuli, Tarun Kushwaha, Leonard Lee, and David Gal.

The business press repeatedly emphasizes the importance of creating marketing agility so that organizations can navigate fast-changing, high-uncertainty conditions. Little, however, is known about what marketing agility is, what challenges managers seeking to adopt marketing agility are likely to encounter, and importantly, is marketing agility even desirable for all marketing decisions?

Kalaignanam explains that "We define marketing agility as the extent to which an entity rapidly iterates between making sense of the market and executing marketing decisions to adapt to the market. Importantly, we argue that not all marketing decisions need to be executed using an agile marketing approach." Tuli continues that "Marketing agility is best suited for those marketing decisions where the market response is highly unpredictable, the decision parameters can be broken down into smaller components, and when it is feasible to get quick customer feedback, and when there is less dependence on third parties for executing the marketing activity."

Managers need to be aware of the multi-faceted challenges they are likely to encounter in the execution of marketing agility. In particular, managers need to be alert to the challenge of scaling marketing agility across the marketing ecosystem. For example, if channel partners and other external agencies are unwilling or unable to transition to an agile marketing approach, agile marketing benefits will be limited. In addition, marketing agility also raises concerns that rapid and frequent marketing experiments could dilute brand meaning in the long-run. Likewise, the quest for rapid marketing experiments using market data could tempt managers to ignore or overlook consumer privacy issues. Finally, to execute marketing agility, firms need marketing leaders with a savviness for integrating technology, analytics, and marketing experiments. In this regard, hiring and retaining marketing leaders with the requisite skills could prove to be challenging.

The research team then identifies factors that enable or inhibit marketing agility at different hierarchical levels. At the organizational level, marketing agility is enabled by marketing technology factors, organization structure, organizational capabilities, organizational culture, and the organization budgeting process. The factors that drive marketing agility at the leadership level are the CMO's background characteristics, CMO power, and the CMO-CIO interface factors. Similarly, at the team level, marketing agility is contingent on the autonomy available to teams, the diversity of teams in terms of their functional backgrounds and skills, and psychological factors such as superordinate identity and social cohesion. Finally, at the marketing employee level, marketing agility depends on the traits of employees as well as the training to adapt to changing information.

The study proposes that the product-market and stock market performance outcomes of marketing agility are likely to be nuanced. While marketing agility could shorten the time-to-market in some situations, the impact could be muted in industries where purchase cycles are longer and more complex. Similarly, while marketing agility could be beneficial for brand metrics such as brand differentiation, it could be detrimental for brand relevance. Managers should be cautious about executing marketing agility and mindful that marketing agility is not suited for all firms and all marketing actions.

Metal-based catalysts have shown considerable performances in heterogeneous catalysis for the production of various valuable products. With the development of modern chemical industry, enormous efforts have been devoted to the design and fabrication of highly efficient metal-based heterogeneous catalysts. Among the reported synthesis strategies, metal encapsulation, i.e., to uniformly disperse the nanoscale guest molecules within the pores/layers/vacancies of the porous supports, has been considered as one of the most effective protocols to enrich the amounts of active sites and enhance the interactions between the guest molecules and supports, thus promoting the activity and durability of the as-prepared catalysts through nanoconfinement and size effects. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), a class of emerging porous materials featuring large specific areas and tunable nanostructures, have been widely investigated as one of the ideal hosts for metal encapsulation.

Recently, the research group of Professor Yingwei Li at South China University of Technology demonstrates a solvent assisted ligand exchange-hydrogen reduction (SALE-HR) strategy to selectively encapsulate ultrafine metal nanoparticles (Pd or Pt) within the shallow layers of MOF for highly efficient hydrogenation reactions.
Taking the synthesis of LE-Pd@UiO-80-0.5 as an example, UiO-67 was primarily synthesized under solvothermal condition. Subsequently, the H2bpydc-PdCl2 (H2bpydc represents 2,2'-bipyridine-5,5'-dicarboxylic acid) was utilized to substitute for the initial ligand (i.e., H2bpdc) at the shallow layers of UiO-67 through the solvent assisted ligand exchange (SALE) method, followed by hydrogen reduction (HR) of the Pd in 10% H2/Ar flow. Characterization results implied the selective encapsulation and homogeneous distribution of ultrafine Pd nanoparticles (ca. 1.85 nm) within the shallow layers of monodispersed octahedral UiO-67 crystalline. In addition, the composition of the obtained composites as well as the location and sizes of the encapsulated Pd nanoparticles could be easily modified by tuning the time and temperature of SALE. Besides, this strategy was also applicable for the encapsulation of Pt.

The selective encapsulation of Pd within the shallow layers of UiO-67 could efficiently reduce the influence of mass transfer resistance in liquid phase reactions, enhance the accessibility and metal dispersion of Pd active sites and therefore promote the metal utilizations. Besides, the nanoconfinement of UiO-67 can also suppress the Pd aggregation or leaching, hence enhancing the stability of the catalysts. As a result, the obtained LE-Pd@UiO-80-0.5 exhibited remarkable catalytic performances in the hydrogenation of nitroarenes, achieving a nearly quantitative conversion of nitrobenzene to aniline with a turnover frequency (TOF) value as high as 600 h?1. This work might open an avenue for the encapsulation of nanoparticles, nanoclusters or even single atoms of various metals within porous materials like MOFs for frontier applications including heterogeneous catalysis demonstrated here.

The latest animation technology has revealed the molecular detail of how our bodies are protected from cancer by a key 'tumour suppressor' protein called p53.

The new WEHI-TV animation visualises discoveries from more than 40 years of research to explain how the tumour suppressor protein p53 normally prevents cancer-causing changes in cells. More than half of human cancer cases involve faulty p53.

The animation was produced by WEHI.TV biomedical animator Ms Etsuko Uno, who worked closely with WEHI cancer researchers Professor Andreas Strasser and Dr Gemma Kelly to ensure the animation's scientific accuracy.

At a glance

A new WEHI.TV animation explains how the 'tumour suppressor' protein p53 protects our body from cancer.

This animation is based on more than 40 years of research on p53 and includes recent discoveries from WEHI scientists.

The full animation can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SjkIYClAkQ

Controlling cell life and death

In our bodies, p53 is an essential controller of cell division, cell death and DNA repair, ensuring that healthy cells can divide as needed, but forcing cells with damaged DNA to stop dividing and undergo repair - or die, if the damage is too severe. These processes are critical for maintaining good health; cancer is caused by damaged cells being allowed to persist and grow uncontrollably.

Cancer researcher Dr Gemma Kelly, who also narrated the animation, said more than half of human cancers carry defects in p53.

"The most frequently mutated gene in human cancer is p53 - and it is, I think, the most important 'tumour suppressor' protein. Mutations of the p53 gene are particularly common in several prevalent cancer types with poor prognosis, including lung cancer, ovarian cancer and pancreatic cancer," she said.

"Despite 40 years of intense research into p53, there is still a lot to learn about how this tumour suppressor works, in order to develop better therapies for cancers that have defective p53."

Using animation to understand science

The new WEHI.TV animation was created to clearly explain the latest knowledge about p53, said its creator Ms Etsuko Uno.

"Working closely with our researchers, I was able to produce very complex pictures of p53 functioning within cells, which reflect the most up-to-date data about this tumour suppressor," she said.

"This has been one of the most challenging proteins I have illustrated, because - unlike most other proteins I have tackled - this protein is largely unstructured. WEHI's structural biology researchers provided valuable guidance on how to accurately depict it."

"To create the detailed molecular shapes and movements, we turned to technologies used to make computer games, using a production software called Unity," Ms Uno said.

Explaining p53's function

The new animation demonstrates how p53 responds to DNA damage in cells, 'turning on' the production of proteins that can repair the damage. It also stops the cells dividing, to allow time for this repair and prevent errors in genes being transmitted to new cells. However, if the damage is too severe, p53 delivers its final blow, directing the production of 'cell death' proteins that trigger the cell's demise, by a programmed cell death process called apoptosis.

The animation also explains how malfunctions in p53 can lead to cancer development, by not adequately repairing DNA damage within cells.

Cancer researcher Professor Andreas Strasser said the animation provided a vivid and accessible explanation of how tumour suppressors within our cells work to prevent cancer developing. "It's a wonderful educational resource, which clearly explains how p53 protects us from cancer," he said.

"I am thrilled to see how it incorporates the latest discoveries about how p53 functions - including discoveries made by my own research group - incorporated in a dynamic and scientifically accurate way."

A team of researchers from UTSA's Neurosciences Institute is challenging the historical belief that the organization of the cortical circuit of GABAergic neurons is exclusively local.

UTSA College of Sciences researchers Alice Bertero, Hector Zurita and Marc Normandin and biology associate professor Alfonso Junior Apicella collaborated on the research project.

In the past, labeling individual neurons allowed researchers to study the neurons that project from the brain's cortex to the striatum. The results suggested that the pathways are exclusively excitatory. For this reason most people assumed that inhibition must occur when excitatory cortical neurons activate intrastriatal inhibitory.

The UTSA team contested this view by providing anatomical and physiological evidence for the existence of long-range parvalbumin-expression neurons from the cortex to the striatum in the brains of mice.

This finding is an essential step toward better understanding the neuronal mechanism of cortical long-range GABAerginc neurons in healthy and diseased brains. In particular this could lead to new treatments for patients with epilepsy, post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia and other mental conditions in which GABAergic neurons play a significant role.

"Daily we are bombarded by multiple auditory stimuli, including various speeches," said Apicella. "Particularly, listeners must determine which speech acoustic features are relevant and generalize across irrelevant ones during speech perception. We think that the interaction between the cortex and the striatum is fundamental to optimize nonnative speech learning in adulthood. Therefore, it is crucial to determine which of the cortical-striatum pathway's cellular elements are involved in this process."

The discovery that the striatum receives both excitatory and inhibitory inputs from the cortex suggests that these inputs' timing and relative strength can modulate the striatum's activity. This is important because it invites the scientific community to speculate that the long-range parvalbumin-expressing projects could play a role through gamma oscillation synchronization between the auditory cortex and striatum.

The team proposes that future experiments will provide further insight into the role of the timing and ratio of excitation and inhibition, two opposing forces in the mammalian cerebral cortex, affecting the cortico-striatal dynamic.

New epidemic diseases have an evolutionary advantage if they are of "intermediate" severity, research shows.

Scientists tested the theory that pathogens (disease-causing organisms) that inflict intermediate levels of harm on their host are the most evolutionarily successful.

The study, by the University of Exeter, Arizona State University and Auburn University, found that natural selection favours pathogens of intermediate virulence (how much harm a pathogen causes) at the point the disease emerges in a new host species.

This occurs because virulence and transmission are linked, with virulence arising because pathogens need to exploit hosts to persist, replicate and transmit.

While too-low virulence will be detrimental for pathogens if they cannot transmit, virulence that is too high will also be a disadvantage if infection kills hosts so fast that the pathogen does not have time to transmit.

Over time, pathogens that show intermediate levels of virulence should therefore have an evolutionary advantage.

"For a long time, conventional wisdom held that new diseases evolved to become harmless," said Dr Camille Bonneaud, of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation on Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall.

"Although theoretical developments in evolutionary biology in the 1980s showed that this was not necessarily the case, such belief still holds firm, even today.

"Our study focussed on the 'virulence-transmission trade-off' hypothesis, which allows us to make predictions about pathogen evolution.

"Experimental evidence for this theory is rare, but we were able to test it by using more than 50 variants of the infectious bacterial pathogen Mycoplasma gallisepticum, which infects house finches."

In the study, house finches from populations that had never encountered the disease were exposed to one of the different variants, simulating conditions at epidemic outbreak.

"We found that variants that were more virulent transmitted faster, but that variants of intermediate virulence were the most evolutionarily successful," Dr Bonneaud said.

"Our results therefore provide support for using the virulence-transmission trade-off hypothesis as a framework for understanding and predicting emerging pathogen evolution."

Counter to commonly held beliefs, however, variants of the pathogen that replicated faster during infection and achieved higher densities did not transmit better or faster than those that achieved lower densities.

"This tells us that transmission is not always a numbers game and that we cannot use pathogen numbers as a proxy for their success."

Many types of motile cells, such as the bacteria in our guts and spermatozoa in the female reproductive tracts, need to propel themselves through confined spaces filled with viscous liquid. In recent years, the motion of these 'microswimmers' has been mimicked in the design of self-propelled micro- and nano-scale machines for applications including targeted drug delivery. Optimising the design of these machines requires a detailed, mathematical understanding of microswimmers in these environments. A large, international group of physicists led by Abdallah Daddi-Moussa-Ider of Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany has now generated mathematical models of microswimmers in clean and surfactant-covered viscous drops, showing that the surfactant significantly alters the swimmers' behaviour. They have published their work in EPJ E.

The dynamics of microswimmers moving inside a drop of viscous liquid depends on many things, including the shape and size of the drop, the number of microswimmers and the Reynolds number of the liquid. This is a measure of viscosity; liquids with low Reynolds number are more viscous and flow in a linear manner with little turbulence. The flow of such a liquid can be modelled by solving a set of partial differential equations known as the Navier-Stokes equations. In this case, the microswimmer itself was considered as a force dipole confined within the drop and located at a set point. The presence of a layer of surfactant surrounding the drop containing the microswimmer was modelled using boundary conditions.

Solving these equations in a range of conditions - drops with or without surfactant coats, stationary and freely moving, and with different Reynolds numbers and radii - gave Daddi-Moussa-Ider and his co-workers a set of subtly different flow fields, from which the dynamics of the microswimmer could be defined. They note that these models of swimmer dynamics may prove useful in designing micro-machines for materials assembly, biosensing and micro-surgery as well as drug delivery.

Stress is a major cause of relapse after people quit smoking. Worrying situations, such as money or relationship problems, can affect neurotransmitter levels in the brain, leading former smokers to reach for a cigarette. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science have discovered that compounds that activate γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) receptors in the brain can keep rats from self-administering increased levels of nicotine during stressful conditions in an animal model for relapse.

GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter that decreases nerve signaling in the brain. When a person experiences stress, their GABA levels can decrease, causing some neurons to become hyperactive. Using an animal model, Burt Sharp and colleagues wanted to find out if giving rats compounds that stimulate GABAA, a specific type of GABA receptor, on certain neurons, called basolateral amygdala principal output neurons, could lessen the rats' relapse to nicotine during stressful conditions.

In the animal model, rats were taught to press a lever to self-administer nicotine. After a week, the animals were withdrawn from nicotine for 8 days. To cause stress, the researchers confined the rats in a small space. After releasing the rodents, the team injected one of three compounds, called positive allosteric modulators of GABAA, or PAMs, into a specific region of the stressed rats' brains, and then gave them access to the nicotine-administering levers. Untreated stressed rats pressed the levers about 1.5 times more frequently than they had before the abstinence period, while rats treated with any of the PAMs reduced nicotine intake to levels seen in unstressed rats before the abstinence period. If similar effects are confirmed in humans, novel, selective PAMs could be helpful in alleviating the stress-induced relapse to smoked tobacco, with potentially fewer side effects than GABA administration, the researchers say.

The tongue helps people taste food, but structures on its surface also help them sense textures -- something that's also very important when savoring a meal. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have made a 3D silicone surface that, for the first time, closely mimics the surface features of the human tongue. The material could help food scientists study mechanical interactions of foods, liquids and medicines with the organ.

In humans, the tongue is essential for moving food around in the mouth, sensing taste and texture, and speech. The surface of the tongue is covered in thousands of tiny bumps, or papillae, that contain the taste buds and provide friction and lubrication. Studying how foods and liquids mechanically interact with the tongue could help food scientists, drug developers and manufacturers of toothpastes or mouthwashes make more desirable products. Currently, scientists rely mainly on human tasters to assess texture, or mouth feel, but this is time-consuming, expensive and subjective. There are electronic tongues, or e-tongues, available, but most analyze taste, and the few developed to study texture aren't very accurate. Anwesha Sarkar and colleagues wanted to develop a soft 3D surface that replicates the topography and wettability of a real human tongue.

The team began by making silicone masks of the tongue surfaces of 15 healthy adults. Using 3D optical scanning and computational surface reconstructions, they created digital models and measured the average density, diameter and height of the two major two types of papillae. Next, they designed a master mold with the appropriate spatial distribution of these papillae and 3D printed it. Then, they used the mold to make soft, tongue-like surfaces out of silicone, with a surfactant added to improve wettability. Testing showed that the 3D biomimetic surface demonstrated similar frictional properties to an actual human tongue, and simulations showed similar mechanical sensing properties. The tongue-like surface could help accelerate the development of nutritional, biomedical and clinical products, as well as find applications in soft robotics, the researchers say.

A large-scale study conducted by molecular biologists from Heidelberg University has yielded groundbreaking new insights into the evolution and regulation of gene expression in mammalian organs. The scientists investigated RNA synthesis and subsequent protein synthesis in the organs of humans and other representative mammals, and with the aid of sequencing technologies, they analysed more than 100 billion gene expression fragments from various organs. They were able to demonstrate that the finely tuned interplay of the two synthesis processes during evolution was crucial for shaping organ functions.

A complex interplay of activity between a large number of genes - known as gene expression - underlies organ functions. "Until now, our understanding of these essential genetic programmes in mammals was limited to the first layer of gene expression - the production of messenger RNAs," explains Prof. Dr Henrik Kaessmann, group leader of the "Functional evolution of mammalian genomes" research team at the Center for Molecular Biology of Heidelberg University (ZMBH). "The next layer - the actual synthesis of proteins at the ribosome through the translation of the messenger RNAs - remained largely unknown."

It is this second synthesis process that the Heidelberg researchers have now studied more closely. Using so-called next-generation sequencing technologies, they analysed the gene expression of various organs on both layers. They studied the brain, liver and testes from humans and other selected mammals, including rhesus monkeys, mice, opossum and platypus. "On the basis of these data, we could jointly investigate both gene expression layers and compare them across mammalian organs using state-of-the-art bioinformatics approaches," explains Dr Evgeny Leushkin of the ZMBH.

In their large-scale study, the ZMBH researchers showed that the finely tuned interplay of the two synthesis processes during evolution was critical for shaping organ functions. For the first time, they were able to show that - in addition to regulation of messenger RNA production - other regulatory mechanisms at the layer of translation are crucial for optimising the amount of protein produced in all organs. This is especially true in the testes, where translational regulation is key for sperm development. Another important finding concerns mutational changes in gene expression regulation that arose during evolution. These changes were often balanced between the two layers. Changes that offset one another were primarily maintained to ensure the production of consistent amounts of protein.

Researchers from France and Switzerland contributed to the study. Funding was provided by the German Research Foundation and European Research Council. The data are available in a public access database. Their research results were published in Nature.

SOLOMONS, MD (November 11, 2020)--Arctic researchers Jacqueline Grebmeier and Lee Cooper have been visiting the Bering and Chukchi seas off Alaska for nearly 30 years, collecting information about the biological diversity of the watery world under the sea ice to understand how marine ecosystems are responding to environmental changes. This year, a late-season research cruise in October revealed a surprise. At a time of year when an ice-breaking ship is usually required to get them to some of the data-gathering outposts, scientists found nothing but open water and an unusually active ecosystem.

"The water and air temperatures were warmer, and we had ecosystem activity that normally doesn't occur late in the season," said University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Professor Jacqueline Grebmeier, chief scientist on the research cruise and a national and international leader in Arctic research.

Grebmeier and Cooper were part of a small team of researchers from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and Clark University that completed an unusual late-season Arctic research cruise due travel challenges presented by COVID-19 pandemic. They found an ecosystem--expected to be powering down to low-level winter activity with sea ice forming--to be still active, likely due to unseasonably warm ocean temperatures. Sea ice formation was still a number of weeks away.

"2020 turned out to be the second lowest minimum sea ice extent, meaning that sea ice retreated back closer to the North Pole," Grebmeier said. "We had warming water up to 3 degrees Celsius higher than typical all the way through water column. That means you can't cool it down that quickly to build ice."

And ice is important. It's the ice that sets up that really productive spring system to power the ecosystem.

"Without ice forming you don't get that spring ice algal production, which is the first hit of nice, fresh carbon that the animals in the sediments use to increase their growth," she said. "So some open water areas are going to bloom later in the season because it will be like opening a larger playing field and provide food for water column animals like zooplankton, while others that depended on that ice algal production in the bottom shallow shelf sediments are going to have more limited seasonal food."

The late fall season sampling indicates that delays in sea ice formation are supporting late-season biological production that has not been commonly observed before.

"The biomass of microalgae in the water column was unexpectedly high and not much lower than often observed in the middle of the summer under near 24-hour daylight," said University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Professor Lee Cooper, who led water column biological and chemical measurements.

Grebmeier and Cooper are also seeing shifts in these benthic animals. The clams and worms that live on the bottom of the Arctic and are an important food source for everything from bottom-feeding fish to walruses and diving sea ducks.

"We are seeing declines in the biomass in a lot of areas so there isn't as much food on the sea floor as there used to be, meaning less food available for the things that we traditionally think of as Arctic animals," said Cooper. "The ecosystem is changing."

"It's kind of like you took a balloon and you squeezed it, and the southern part of it is getting smaller and the northern part is getting bigger. There's a contraction of these rich Arctic fatty benthic animals from the south to higher amounts in the north," said Grebmeier.

The researchers usually do their annual observations July-September, but the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in delays and pushed their cruise into October for the first time. Maintaining the continuity of long-term observations is crucial as the region is affected by climate change.

"We've been working up there for nearly 30 years annually. This would've been a gap in the measurements, and this was a critical year given the low ice extent," said Cooper. "We did the full suite of sampling we do in observing program, we just did it in October."

The research vessel Norseman II carried the scientists for the three-week research cruise. Prior to the cruise, the science crew undertook a Covid-19 quarantine in Anchorage, including multiple testing, before flying to Nome and transferring directly to the ship to avoid any potential viral exposure to residents in the Bering Strait region. The individual participating universities had their own stringent requirements and testing protocols prior to approving travel.

The team stopped at several established observing stations where scientists can monitor everything from the temperature and salinity of the water and the amount of zooplankton (fish food) swimming around to harmful algal blooms of phytoplankton and animals living in the sediment. The goal is to observe and document how the Arctic creatures are responding to climate change and track those ecosystem changes under further loss of sea ice.

The Distributed Biological Observatory (DBO) is a series of standard stations occupied seasonally by national and international ships and moorings that take continuous physical, chemical and biological measurements in the U.S. Arctic waters to document how biological systems are changing and/or adapting as a result of environmental change. Grebmeier led an international team of scientists to establish the DBO in the North American Arctic.

The Arctic Marine Biodiversity Observing Network, led by Katrin Iken at University of Alaska Fairbanks' College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, is part of a national network studying how biodiversity and species distributions are changing as a result of climate change in the U.S. Arctic.

The researchers also visited the Chukchi Ecosystem Observatory, a set of highly instrumented oceanographic moorings that monitor the ecosystem year-round.

"This was a really worthwhile effort that paid off in making biological data available from a part of the year where there have been historically few observations," said Grebmeier.

The samples obtained and brought back to home laboratories in Maryland, Washington State, and Alaska will support multiple long-term projects. The scientists were also able to collect samples for others who couldn't go on the cruise due to COVID travel and research restrictions.

Disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes are occurring with increasing frequency and severity across the globe. In addition to impacting local communities, infrastructure and the economy, these disasters also can lead to severe emotional distress and anxiety for those living in their paths.

A team of researchers including the University of Delaware's Jennifer Horney, founding director of the epidemiology program in the College of Health Sciences, examined the impact of 281 natural disasters on suicide rates during a 12-year span.

Horney and others looked at disaster declaration data and found overall suicide rates increased by 23% when compared to rates before and after the disaster. Suicide rates increased for all types of disasters -- including severe storms, floods, hurricanes and ice storms -- with the largest overall increase occurring two years after a disaster, according to an article published in The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention.

"That finding is important, I think, because those could be preventable deaths with better disaster preparedness and response," Horney said. "It's particularly important to consider the risk of suicide since those with more existing social vulnerabilities live in areas with a greater risk of being damaged by disaster."

The researchers looked at counties in the continental United States with a single major disaster declaration between 2003 and 2015, based on data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). For each county, suicide rates were estimated for three 12-month periods before and after the disaster. Although FEMA gives disaster declarations for nine types of disasters, storms, floods and hurricanes occurred frequently enough to be included in the study.

For all disaster types combined as well as individually for severe storms, flooding and ice storms, researchers found the suicide rate increased in both the first and second year following a disaster, then declined in the third year. Flooding saw suicide rates increase by nearly 18% the first year and 61% the second year before declining to the baseline rate after that.

By contrast, the suicide rate following hurricanes rose in the first year -- jumping 26% -- then returned to the baseline in the second year. "Counties impacted by hurricanes saw the biggest increase in the rate of suicide in the first year, which makes sense because it's the most widespread type of disaster among those we examined," Horney said.

The study only looked at counties with a single disaster declaration and excluded those with multiple disaster episodes. Therefore, "these data are probably underestimate the association between disaster exposure and suicide because we know that there are a lot of additional mental health impacts from repetitive loss," Horney said.

The findings suggest a need for more mental health resources being made available to address challenges that can arise after a natural disaster, Horney said. Policy changes also should address the duration of these funding resources.

"From a policy perspective, we can use this data to say we should really extend funding for mental health services out at least two years after a disaster because people clearly are not yet recovered, even to their old normal, after one year, when this type of funding typically expires" she said. "The goal cannot be to recover to the pre-disaster status quo. We want those impacted by disasters to recover and be more resilient to the mental health impacts of disasters than they were before."

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Researchers at Mayo Clinic in Florida and collaborators have found that a biomarker in the blood may determine the extent of brain injury from different types of strokes and predict prognosis in these patients. Their findings are reported in Science Translational Medicine.

The blood biomarker is a protein known as neurofilament light (NFL). The protein is abundant in neurons found in the brain. When neurons are injured following a stroke or from other neurological diseases, NFL is released into cerebrospinal fluid that bathes the brain and then into the blood. The amount of NFL released is indicative of neuron injury in the brain, according to the research team. Stroke is a leading cause of death, but symptoms vary widely from temporary and nondisabling, to severe, long-term impairment.

"Estimating the severity of a stroke and how well a person is expected to recover is important to patients and their loved ones," says Tania Gendron, Ph.D., first author of the paper.

"Reliably predicting a patient's prognosis is also important to their care, as it informs treatment and rehabilitation decisions. We sought to determine whether the amount of NFL in patients' blood could be used to predict their prognosis after a stroke -- be it an ischemic stroke, which occurs when blood flow to the brain is blocked by a clot, or a hemorrhagic stroke, which occurs when a weak blood vessel bursts and bleeds into the brain."

The retrospective study involved participants who enrolled in, and donated blood for, the Mayo Clinic in Florida Familial Cerebrovascular Diseases Registry directed by James Meschia, M.D., a neurologist and chair of the Department of Neurology at Mayo Clinic in Florida. Researchers used an investigative blood test to measure NFL concentrations in blood collected from 314 patients following a stroke and in blood from 79 healthy individuals. This allowed them to determine whether NFL is elevated after a stroke. They also examined whether NFL levels are indicative of stroke severity and eventual recovery. To do so, the researchers examined correlations between NFL levels and the degree of brain injury, in addition to neurological, functional or cognitive status of patients at the time their blood was collected. The study also examined whether NFL levels could anticipate future recovery by reliably predicting post-stroke outcomes and survival. To verify their findings, the researchers used a similar approach to evaluate NFL as a prognostic biomarker in two additional groups of stroke patients.

The blood samples and clinical information were provided by clinical research authors on the paper from Mayo Clinic, University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, Massachusetts General Hospital and Washington University.

"We discovered that blood levels of NFL do predict stroke severity," says Leonard Petrucelli, Ph.D., one of the senior authors on the paper. "We found that higher NFL levels forecast worse functional outcomes and shorter survival time after a stroke. We found this to be the case for ischemic stroke and hemorrhagic strokes. Our study establishes NFL as a promising prognostic biomarker for stroke." Dr. Petrucelli is the Ralph B. and Ruth K. Abrams Professor of Neuroscience.

Currently, brain imaging is used to determine damage from a stroke. While a blood test for NFL is not yet available in the clinical setting, researchers hope that in the future, physicians may be able to decrease use of imaging -- using instead an NFL blood test to better determine the best course of treatment -- as well as boost clinical trials with better matched groups of patients based on degree of brain injury and severity of symptoms.

"We are hopeful that our findings will ultimately change how patients are treated by using NFL biomarkers in clinical trials to allow for more rapid and reliable detection of therapeutic effects," says Dr. Meschia. "Our findings may also help us better plan rehabilitation needs for patients who need it most and for longer term."

This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, Mayo Clinic, and the Donald G. and Jodi P. Heeringa family. See the published paper for a full list of authors, funding sources and competing interests.

ITHACA, N.Y. - Like restless children posing for a family portrait, electrons won't hold still long enough to stay in any kind of fixed arrangement.

Cornell researchers stacked two-dimensional semiconductors to create a moiré superlattice structure that traps electrons in a repeating pattern, ultimately forming the long-hypothesized Wigner crystal.

Now, a Cornell-led collaboration has developed a way to stack two-dimensional semiconductors and trap electrons in a repeating pattern that forms a specific and long-hypothesized crystal.

The team's paper, "Correlated Insulating States at Fractional Fillings of Moiré Superlattices," published Nov. 11 in Nature. The paper's lead author is postdoctoral researcher Yang Xu.

The project grew out of the shared lab of Kin Fai Mak, associate professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Jie Shan, professor of applied and engineering physics in the College of Engineering, the paper's co-senior authors. Both researchers are members of the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science; they came to Cornell through the provost's Nanoscale Science and Microsystems Engineering (NEXT Nano) initiative.

A crystal of electrons was first predicted in 1934 by theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner. He proposed that when the repulsion that results from negatively charged electrons - called Coulomb repulsions - dominates the electrons' kinetic energy, a crystal would form. Scientists have tried various methods to suppress that kinetic energy, such as putting electrons under an extremely large magnetic field, roughly a million times that of the Earth's magnetic field. Complete crystallization remains elusive, but the Cornell team discovered a new method for achieving it.

"Electrons are quantum mechanical. Even if you don't do anything to them, they're spontaneously jiggling around all the time," Mak said. "A crystal of electrons would actually have the tendency to just melt because it's so hard to keep the electrons fixed at a periodic pattern."

So the researchers' solution was to build an actual trap by stacking two semiconductor monolayers, tungsten disulfide (WS2) and tungsten diselenide (WSe2), grown by partners at Columbia University. Each monolayer has a slightly different lattice constant. When paired together, they create a moiré superlattice structure, which essentially looks like a hexagonal grid. The researchers then placed electrons in specific sites in the pattern. As they found in an earlier project, the energy barrier between the sites locks the electrons in place.

"We can control the average occupancy of the electrons at a specific moiré site," Mak said.

Given the intricate pattern of a moiré superlattice, combined with the jittery nature of electrons and the need to put them into a very specific arrangement, the researchers turned to Veit Elser, professor of physics and a co-author of the paper, who calculated the ratio of occupancy by which different arrangements of electrons will self-crystallize.

However, the challenge of Wigner crystals is not only creating them, but observing them, too.

"You need to hit just the right conditions to create an electron crystal, and at the same time, they're also fragile," Mak said. "You need a good way to probe them. You don't really want to perturb them significantly while probing them."

The team devised a new optical sensing technique in which an optical sensor is placed close to the sample, and the whole structure is sandwiched between insulating layers of hexagonal boron nitride, created by collaborators at the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan. Because the sensor is separated from the sample by about two nanometers, it doesn't perturb the system.

The new technique enabled the team to observe numerous electron crystals with different crystal symmetries, from triangular-lattice Wigner crystals to crystals that self-aligned into stripes and dimers. By doing so, the team demonstrated how very simple ingredients can form complex patterns - as long as the ingredients sit still long enough.

LOS ANGELES (Nov. 11, 2020) -- Blood clots are the biggest cause of death in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) -- ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease. In a retrospective study recently published in the journal Gastroenterology, Cedars-Sinai investigators found that a combination of rare and common genetic variants in some IBD patients significantly increased their risk of developing clot-causing thromboembolic diseases.

"The genetic signature we identified more than doubled the risk of developing potentially fatal blood clots in approximately 1 in 7 IBD patients," said Dermot P. McGovern, MD, PhD, the Joshua L. and Lisa Z. Greer Chair in Inflammatory Bowel Disease Genetics and the study's senior author.

In general, several factors can contribute to an individual's chance of having dangerous blood clots form in their body, including hospitalization, surgery, age and pregnancy.

"While the risk for blood clots in IBD patients could be attributed to episodes of severe inflammation in the gastrointestinal tract that led to surgery, or to a side-effect of some medications, very little was known about the impact of genetics on that risk," said McGovern.

Researchers used whole genome sequencing and genotyping to assess 792 IBD patients and then identify patterns associated with the development of venous or arterial thromboembolisms. Investigators at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, also contributed to the study.

"We found that rare genetic variations which have a big impact on blood clot risk in IBD patients, combined with more common genetic markers that have less of an impact, allowed us to more accurately predict the development of clots than looking at just one of those influences alone," said Takeo Naito, PhD, first author of the study and a postdoctoral scientist at Cedars-Sinai.

"Also, patients who had both the rare and common genetic fingerprints developed more serious thromboembolic diseases," said Naito.

The ability to identify IBD patients who are at high risk for developing life-threatening blood clots could lead to improvements in treatment.

"Understanding the influence of the small and large genetic variants we identified would enable physicians to provide more precise or personalized medical care. For example, it might be wise to provide regular anticoagulant therapy for some IBD patients or to avoid using certain therapeutic drugs," said McGovern.

The new IBD genetic information has the potential to help some of the sickest COVID-19 patients, according to McGovern.

"Beyond IBD, we believe this approach could be used to identify people at high-risk of developing clots including, people who become infected with SARS-COV-2, where blood clotting has been associated with the most severe cases."

Bramsh Chandio, a Ph.D. candidate in intelligent systems engineering, advised by Assistant Professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering Eleftherios Garyfallidis, published a paper in Nature Scientific Reports that lays out a large medical analytics framework that can be used in neuroscience and neurology to study brain connectivity in living organisms.

The study, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health, focused on Parkinson's Disease progression markers. However, the framework, called Bundle Analytics, or BUAN, can be adapted to any neurological or psychiatric disorder. The data can be acquired safely in any MRI scanner using diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) acquisitions, which are used to monitor strokes and are widely available. In this way, BUAN can be a handy tool for multiple domains of science, engineering, and medicine.

"We wanted to create a generic, forethought, robust, and thoroughly tested framework for studying brain pathways in vivo that could be used to study and find the effects of any pathological or psychological conditions on brain connectivity," Garyfallidis said.

The paper, "Bundle analytics, a computational framework for investigating the shapes and profiles of brain pathways across populations," describes a robust and user-friendly software tool that can allow neuroscientists and neuroengineers to explore the brain connections in a safe and reproducible way. Bundle analytics, or BUAN, provides a framework for real-world tractometric studies, which feature tract-specific microstructural measurements of white matter in the brain.

"A psychologist can benefit from BUAN to develop a theory about the brain's function," Chandio said. "A neurologist can use it to find which brain pathways of a patient have defects or deviate from the normal population. It can be used for longitudinal studies to test the effects of a medication on a population, neurosurgical procedures, age, etc. A medical or neuroscience student can use BUAN to study and learn the major pathways of the brain, understand the connectivity of the brain, and investigate the possibility of new pathways. There are endless possibilities for the practical use of BUAN in multiple fields of science."

To strengthen reproducibility and openness in science, BUAN is freely available in DIPY, a well-established and reputable medical imaging software library. This allows data scientists and software developers to extend the framework using standard software engineering practices.

Chandio and her colleagues are currently contacting medical imaging centers, clinics, and pharmaceutical companies to deploy BUAN in their daily practice to improve patient treatment and care.

"This research presents an important step forward in understanding how the brain works and how different diseases impact it," said Kay Connelly, associate dean for research for the Luddy School. "These types of tools sit at the heart our school's mission, and it reinforces our leadership when it comes to developing the healthcare technology of tomorrow."