Brain

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Adults who skip breakfast are likely to miss out on key nutrients that are most abundant in the foods that make up morning meals, a new study suggests.

An analysis of data on more than 30,000 American adults showed that skipping breakfast - and missing out on the calcium in milk, vitamin C in fruit, and the fiber, vitamins and minerals found in fortified cereals - likely left adults low on those nutrients for the entire day.

"What we're seeing is that if you don't eat the foods that are commonly consumed at breakfast, you have a tendency not to eat them the rest of the day. So those common breakfast nutrients become a nutritional gap," said Christopher Taylor, professor of medical dietetics in the College of Medicine at The Ohio State University and senior author of the study.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's latest dietary guidelines, calcium, potassium, fiber and vitamin D are considered "dietary components of public health concern" for the general U.S. population - with iron added for pregnant women - because shortages of those nutrients are associated with health problems.

Most research related to breakfast has focused on the effects of the missed morning meal on children in school, which includes difficulty focusing and behavioral problems.

"With adults, it's more like, 'You know how important breakfast is.' But now we see what the implications really are if they miss breakfast," Taylor said.

He completed the study with Ohio State School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences graduate students Stephanie Fanelli and Christopher Walls. The research, which was supported by a regional dairy association, is published online in Proceedings of the Nutrition Society.

The team used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which collects health information on a nationally representative sample of about 5,000 people every year through interviews, laboratory tests and physical exams.

The sample for this study included 30,889 adults age 19 and older who had participated in the survey between 2005 and 2016. The Ohio State researchers analyzed data from 24-hour dietary recalls participants completed as part of the NHANES survey.

"During the recall, participants self-designate their eating occasions as a meal or a snack, and they tell you at what point in time they ate whatever food they report," said Fanelli, first author of the study. "That's how we determined whether someone was a breakfast eater or a breakfast skipper."

In this sample, 15.2% of participants, or 4,924 adults, had reported skipping breakfast.

The researchers translated the food data into nutrient estimates and MyPlate equivalents using the federal Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies and daily dietary guidelines, and then compared those estimates to recommended nutrient intakes established by the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academies.

On several key recommendations measured, from fiber and magnesium to copper and zinc, breakfast skippers had taken in fewer vitamins and minerals than people who had eaten breakfast. The differences were most pronounced for folate, calcium, iron, and vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, C and D.

"We found those who skipped breakfast were significantly more likely not to meet the bottom threshold of what we hope to see people eat," Fanelli said.

Compared to the Healthy Eating Index-2015, which assesses how well a set of foods aligns with federal recommendations, breakfast skippers also had an overall lower-quality diet than those who ate breakfast.

For example, breakfast skippers were more likely than those who noshed in the morning to eat more added sugars, carbohydrates and total fat over the course of the day - in part because of higher levels of snacking.

"Snacking is basically contributing a meal's worth of calorie intakes for people who skipped breakfast," Taylor said. "People who ate breakfast ate more total calories than people who didn't eat breakfast, but the lunch, dinner and snacks were much larger for people who skipped breakfast, and tended to be of a lower diet quality."

While the data represent a single day in each participant's life, the huge sample provides a "nationally representative snapshot for the day," Taylor said.

"It shows that those who skipped breakfast had one nutrient profile and those who ate breakfast had a different nutrient profile," he said. "It helps us identify on any given day that this percentage of people are more likely to be skipping breakfast. And on that day, their dietary intake pattern showed that their consumption didn't capture those extra nutrients that they have basically missed at breakfast."

New research led by the University of Kent has found that there is no link between bed sharing, infant-mother attachment, and infant behavioural outcomes.

Contrary to previous beliefs that bed sharing is beneficial (or even required) for babies to develop a secure attachment style and for mothers to develop a strong bond to their baby, researchers have found that it is neither associated with positive or negative outcomes related to infant attachment and maternal bonding.

There is a lot of controversial debate about bed sharing by parents and the infant sleep literature, in particular. Notably, researchers and practitioners recommend against bed sharing, particularly before four months of age due to the increased risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).

In reality, parents quite often share their bed with their baby due to several reasons such as practicality and breastfeeding, or because they follow the idea of 'attachment parenting'.

The research paper, published by the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, analyses data from 178 infants and their parents, at term, three, six and eighteen months. No associations between bed sharing during the first six months and infant-mother attachment and infant behavioural outcomes (attention levels/hyperactivity and task persistence) at eighteen months were found. Similarly, there were no associations between bed sharing during the first six months and maternal bonding and sensitivity in interacting with the infant at consequent assessment points.

This new study, led by Dr Ayten Bilgin (Kent's School of Psychology) alongside Professor Dieter Wolke, Professor of Developmental Psychology and Individual Differences at the University of Warwick concludes that longer follow-up studies on effects on child development may be required.

Dr Bilgin said: 'A lot of people think that bed sharing is necessary to promote secure attachment with infants. However, there is little research in this area and quite mixed evidence. More insight into the outcomes of bed sharing is required to better inform parents, guardians and practitioners.'

Professor Wolke said: 'Around a third of all parents share their bed with their infant during the first 18 months of life occasionally to most nights in this UK study. We found the practice was associated with ease of breastfeeding and dealing with night waking of the baby.'

Changing your eating habits or altering your circadian clock can impact healthy fat tissue throughout your lifespan, according to a preclinical study published today in Nature by researchers with The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).

Healthy fat tissue helps provide energy, supports cell growth, protects organs, and keeps the body warm. A good quality diet and one that is consumed in a rhythmic manner (i.e., during our active cycle) is important in maintaining healthy fat, the researchers found.

Adipocyte progenitor cells mature into adipocytes - the healthy fat cells that make up our adipose tissue, which stores energy as fat. Researchers discovered that adipocyte progenitors undergo rhythmic daily proliferation throughout the 24-hour cycle under normal patterns of energy intake.

However, when investigators introduced a high fat diet, or changed the temporal patterns of food consumption so that mice ate equal increments of food during both the sleep and the wake phase, this 24-hour pattern of pre-adipocyte proliferation was destroyed.

"We found that when we fed mice a high-fat diet, it increased the proliferation of preadipocytes and destroyed its rhythmic pattern," said Kristin Eckel-Mahan, PhD, assistant professor with the Center for Metabolic and Degenerative Diseases at the Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases at UTHealth and lead author on the study. "What we project is that over the course of our lifetime, these 24-hour variations in the proliferation of these cells is really important in maintaining healthy fat."

Throwing off the circadian rhythm and eating a high-fat diet over time will deplete healthy fat cells, and the study suggests that this disruption may be difficult to reverse. Depletion of adipocyte progenitor cells will not allow for healthy new adipocytes to be made within the tissue, ultimately causing defects in fat storage and excess lipid spilling over into other organs, such as the liver and muscle. Eckel-Mahan says having fat in these areas can lead to Type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance.

"In an ideal world, everyone would maintain a normal sleep-wake cycle, and not eat during the wrong hours of the day, so not too late before bed or into the early morning. You should also steer away from high-fat diets, which we have now shown destroys the rhythmic proliferation of our preadipocytes. The 24-hour clock we have is important when it comes to our healthy fat, and we need to protect it as much as we can," said first author Aleix Ribas-Latre, PhD, with the Helmholtz Institute for Metabolic, Obesity and Vascular Research (HI-MAG) of the Helmholtz Zentrum München at the University of Leipzig and University Hospital Leipzig in Germany.

CHAPEL HILL, NC - A group of scientists led by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian reported that the Moderna mRNA vaccine and a protein-based vaccine candidate elicited durable neutralizing antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 in pre-clinical research. There were no adverse effects.

The research, published June 15 in Science Immunology, suggests that vaccines for young children are likely important, safe tools to curtail the pandemic.

The co-senior authors of the paper are Kristina De Paris, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology at the UNC School of Medicine, and Sallie Permar, MD, PhD, chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine. Co-first authors are Carolina Garrido, PhD, at Duke University, and Alan Curtis, PhD, at UNC-Chapel Hill.

"Safe and effective vaccines for young children will help limit the spread of COVID-19 because we know children can transmit the virus to others, whether they get sick from SARS-CoV-2 infection or remain asymptomatic," said Permar, who is pediatrician-in-chief at NewYork-Presbyterian Komansky Children's Hospital. "Moreover, many children have become sick and even died from the infection, with many more negatively impacted by the measures put in place to curb the spread. Thus, young children deserve protection from COVID."

The strong neutralizing antibody responses elicited by the vaccines in 16 baby rhesus macaques persisted for 22 weeks, and the researchers are conducting challenge studies this year to better understand potential long-lasting protection of the vaccines.

"The level of potent antibodies we observed were comparable to what has been seen in adult macaques, even though the doses were 30 micrograms instead of the 100 microgram adult doses," said De Paris, who is a member of the UNC Children's Research Institute and the UNC Institute of Global Health and Infectious Diseases. "With the Moderna vaccine, we observed specific strong T cell responses, as well, which we know are important to limiting disease severity."

To evaluate SARS-CoV-2 infant vaccination, the researchers immunized two groups of 8 infant rhesus macaques at 2.2 months of age and 4 weeks later at the California National Primate Research Center. Each animal received one of two vaccine types: a preclinical version of the Moderna mRNA vaccine or a protein-based vaccine developed by the Vaccine Research Center of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, with an adjuvant from 3M that stimulates cells through toll-like receptor 7 and 8. The adjuvant was formulated in an emulsion by the Infectious Disease Research Institute (IDRI).

The mRNA vaccine is like a message; it delivers instructions to your body to produce the virus's surface protein, the spike protein. The vaccine does not enter the nucleus, does not affect your DNA, and it does not persist in the body. Instead, the vaccine will instruct the cells to create the spike protein and our immune cells recognize it, developing antibodies and other immune responses. NIAID VRC's vaccine is the actual spike protein itself, which the immune system recognizes in the same manner. It is similar to the Novavax protein-based vaccine, for which reports this week indicate is highly effective and safe.

Both vaccines elicited high magnitude of IgG neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 and Spike protein-specific T cell responses -IL-17, IFN-g, and TNF. These are called T helper 1 immune responses.

Importantly, the vaccines did not elicit T helper type 2 responses, which can be detrimental to vaccine efficacy and safety in infants. Such responses can counter the immune response against the virus. And so, T helper 2 responses have hindered the development of vaccines in young children, most notably for the common Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV).

"We were sure to check for evidence of T helper 2 responses, such as IL4, in the blood plasma of all macaques to be sure neither vaccine produced such a response," De Paris said. "We need to keep studying this, but so far we have seen no evidence of this."

Vaccine testing in young children is currently underway, as advocated by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

A plant-based diet appears to afford significant protection to rats bred to become hypertensive on a high-salt diet, scientists report. When the rats become pregnant, the whole grain diet also protects the mothers and their offspring from deadly preeclampsia.

Although we have all heard to avoid the salt shaker, an estimated 30-50% of us have a significant increase in blood pressure in response to high-salt intake, percentages that are even higher and more impactful in Blacks.

The two new studies provide more evidence that the gut microbiota, which contains trillions of microorganisms that help us digest food and plays a key role in regulating the response of our immune system, is also a player in the unhealthy response to salt, investigators at the Medical College of Georgia and Medical College of Wisconsin report in the journals ACTA PHYSIOLOGICA and Pregnancy Hypertension: An International Journal of Women's Cardiovascular Health.

The findings provide more evidence of the "potential power" of nutritional intervention to improve the gut microbiota, and consequently our long-term health, says Dr. David L. Mattson, chair of the MCG Department of Physiology, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Hypertension and senior author on the two studies.

They result from the unexpected observation that the protection works even in a well-established model of salt-sensitive hypertension: The Dahl salt sensitive rat.

As their name indicates, these rodents are bred to develop hypertension and progressive kidney disease on a high-salt diet. In 2001, the Medical College of Wisconsin shared their colony of Dahl SS rats, who were fed a milk-based protein diet, with Charles Rivers Laboratories. Once the rats arrived as Charles River Laboratories, headquartered in Wilmington, Massachusetts, they were switched to a grain-based diet. Both diets are relatively low in sodium, although the protein, or casein-based, diet actually has a little less salt.

It was soon noted that when high-salt content was added to their diet, the relocated rodents developed significantly less high blood pressure and related kidney damage than the rat colonies that remained in Wisconsin.

"People ordered them and used them with the idea that they were going to study hypertension and they developed next to none," Mattson says. More than a decade of research documented these differences, Mattson and his colleagues at MCG and MCW write, and now has shown them that developing salt-sensitive hypertension isn't just about sodium consumption.

"The animal protein amplified the effects of the salt," says Mattson, a longtime hypertension researcher, who along with Dr. Justine M. Abais-Battad, physiologist, and postdoc Dr. John Henry Dasinger, came to MCG from Wisconsin two summers ago.

"Since the gut microbiota has been implicated in chronic diseases like hypertension, we hypothesized that dietary alterations shift the microbiota to mediate the development of salt-sensitive hypertension and renal disease," they write in the journal ACTA PHYSIOLOGICA.

The gut microbiome is designed to metabolize what we eat, break it down and put it in a form that gives us nutrition, first author Abais-Battad says, and reciprocally it reflects what we eat.

When they looked at the microbiomes in the rats: "Sure enough, they were different," she says.

They sequenced the genetic material of both rat colonies and found they were "virtually identical," but their response to a high-salt diet was anything but, Mattson says.

As they anticipated at this juncture, the Wisconsin rats developed renal damage and inflammation -- both indicators of high blood pressure -- but on the same high-salt diet, the Charles River rats experienced significantly less of these unhealthy results. The distinct differences they saw in their microbiota, reflected the difference in disease incidence and severity.

When they gave the protected rats some of the distinctive gut microbiota from the Wisconsin rats, via fecal transplant, the rats experienced increases in blood pressure, kidney damage and in the number of immune cells moving into the kidneys, organs which play a huge role in blood pressure regulation by regulating fluid balance, in part by determining how much sodium is retained. It also changed the composition of their microbiota.

But when they shared the microbiota of the protected rats with the Wisconsin rats, it didn't have much impact, potentially because the new microorganisms couldn't flourish in the face of the animal-based protein diet, the scientists say.

Preeclampsia is a potentially lethal problem during pregnancy where the mother's blood pressure, which typically was normal before, soars and organs like the kidneys and liver show signs of damage. There is evidence that even on a low-salt diet, Dahl salt sensitive rats are inclined to develop preeclampsia.

To look at the impact of diet in this scenario, the Dahl SS rats were kept on their respective plant- or animal-based protein diet, which again are each relatively low salt, and both groups had three separate pregnancies and deliveries.

Rats on the whole wheat based-chow were protected from preeclampsia while about half of the rats on the animal-based casein diet developed this significant complication of pregnancy, says Dasinger, first author on the preeclampsia study. They experienced a significant increase in the protein spilled into their urine, an indicator of kidney trouble, which worsened with each pregnancy; increased inflammation, a driver of high blood pressure; increased pressure inside the renal artery; and showed significant signs of kidney destruction when the organs were studied on follow up. They died of problems like stroke, kidney disease and other cardiovascular problems.

"This means that if mom is careful with what she eats during pregnancy, it will help during the pregnancy, but also with her long-term health and could provide protective effects for her children," Dasinger says. The scientists note this reinforces the message that physicians and scientists alike have been sending mothers-to-be for decades.

They plan to look more directly at the impact of diet on offspring and whether protection is passed to the babies through breast milk, Dasinger says. Since they know that the function of immune cells is affected by diet, they also want to look further at the function of the immune cells that show up and already have some evidence that T cells, drivers of the immune response, are a factor in the development of preeclampsia.

The work Abais-Battad, Dasinger and Mattson already have done shows that a key difference the different diets yield is the protein-based diet results in production of more proinflammatory molecules, where the plant-based diet actually seems to suppress these factors.

They also are further exploring the impact of diet of the renin-angiotensin system, which helps regulate blood pressure. They also want to better dissect the blood pressure-raising bacteria and the factors they produce.

High blood pressure is the largest modifiable risk factor for development of cardiovascular disease, and, according to the newest guidelines from groups like the American Heart Association, which say a systolic, or top number of 120+ is elevated and top numbers of 130-139 is stage one hypertension, nearly half of us are hypertensive. Diet -- including a high-salt diet -- is one of the top modifiable risk factors for high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease, the scientists say. Hypertensive humans and animals alike have been found to have an unbalanced, less diverse gut microbiota than those with normal blood pressure.

Tsukuba, Japan - Inequitable access to health care is a pressing global health concern, and care of our teeth is no exception. In fact, the World Health Organization established the Global Goals for Oral Health 2020 in its efforts to help counter socioeconomic-related imbalances. Economically advanced Japan has plentiful dentists, as well as a universal health insurance system, yet it also has oral care-related inequities, according to a new study.

A team of researchers centered at University of Tsukuba in Japan examined a huge set of claims and checkup data in search of regional and socioeconomic trends. Their findings included the key observation that regional lower income and educational levels may correlate with failing to seek preventive dental treatment. The study was reported in The Lancet Regional Health - Western Pacific.

"We conducted an ecological [population-level] study to try and grasp how people access oral care across Japan, and what they seek," former Associate Professor Takahiro Mori, a study co-author, says. "This was the first-ever national-level attempt to examine regional inequality in dental care use in our country."

The 216 million pieces of data in this study spanned April 2017 to March 2018 and included indicators such as outpatient visits, use of outreach (home) services, and treatments such as fillings and dentures. The data were also examined in different regions in relation to socioeconomic factors such as income and education. This is the first time that such findings were possible, as previous studies had been of a much smaller scale.

The basis for the researchers' calculations was what's called a standardized claim ratio (SCR). This is a numeric index representing the observed vs. expected claims. An SCR of 100 for a region (in this case a Japanese prefecture) indicates the same level as for the entire country. The low SCR of 1.4 for outpatient visits meant access was relatively balanced. The 19.3 and 17.6 for outreach services and periodontal surgeries, however, showed wide regional inequalities.

Perhaps the most important finding regarded income and education.

"Access to preventive care was negatively correlated with areas that showed lower income and education levels. This means people in those areas may be less likely to seek preventive dental measures such as calculus removal (i.e., cleaning)," Professor Nanako Tamiya, the study's senior author, says. "This, in turn, can make it harder to preserve teeth, and necessitates more severe treatment."

The authors stress this ecological study shows the big picture, not necessarily the individual one. Conversely, however, they note this is the first nationwide study in Japan to show regional inequalities. "Knowing these inequalities is a key first step in righting them," Professor Tamiya says.

Leesburg, VA, June 14, 2021--According to ARRS' American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), high-dose intranodal lymphangiography (INL) with ethiodized oil is a safe and effective procedure for treating high-output postsurgical chylothorax with chest tube removal in 83% of patients.

"To our knowledge," wrote corresponding author Geert Maleux of University Hospitals in Leuven, Belgium, "no data are available on the safety or potential beneficial effect of injecting higher doses of ethiodized oil to treat patients with refractory postoperative chylothorax."

All 18 patients (mean, 67 years; range, 43-76 years) the Belgian researchers reviewed between May 2015 and March 2019 had undergone INL with high doses of Guerbet's Lipiodol Ultra Fluid (mean, 75 mL; range, 40-140 mL). Eleven patients (61%) had previously undergone thoracic duct ligation, though seven (39%) had not, while lymphangiography confirmed lymphatic leak in 12 of 18 patients (67%).

For five of the 18 patients (28%), a second INL was performed within 11 days (range, 5-15 days)--due to increasing chest tube output after initiation of a medium-chain triglyceride-enriched diet--with three of the five (60%) showing complete resolution after the second session. Ultimately, removal of all chest tubes proved possible in 15 of 18 patients (83%) after a mean of 12 days (range, 1-25 days).

"Despite the doses being many times higher than the dose recommended by the manufacturer," the authors of this AJR article added, "no early or late clinically relevant complications, including symptomatic pulmonary or paradoxical embolism, were recorded for any of the patients."

What The Study Did: Researchers describe international hospitalization trends and key epidemiological and clinical features of children and youth with COVID-19.

Authors: Paul Avillach, M.D., Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School in Boston, and Florence Bourgeois, M.D., M.P.H., of Boston Children's Hospital, are the corresponding authors.

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

(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.12596)

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

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (June 11, 2021) -- In recent years, community science--also known as citizen science--has become a global phenomenon, engaging millions of people through wildlife observation platforms like iNaturalist and contributing unparalleled amounts of data on the natural world. Despite this, however, community science data remains widely underutilized by the scientific community due to its perception as being less reliable than expert-collected data. In a paper published last week in Oikos, California Academy of Sciences researchers--with support from the California Ocean Protection Council--present a new framework for how community-generated data can be effectively used to monitor and protect our planet's biodiversity. Their findings show that community science data is not only useful, but necessary for uncovering the real-time impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss.

"Community-generated data has had tremendous potential for a long time, specifically for monitoring global biodiversity change," says study author and former Academy data scientist Giovanni Rapacciuolo, PhD, who is now Director of Applied Science Programs at NatureServe. "By synthesizing the best available knowledge into a framework for how to make community science data usable and readily available for conservationists and land managers, this paper serves as a key to unlock that potential."

Whereas traditional biodiversity monitoring methods, such as standardized surveys, are heavily structured--conducted in a particular area for a specific amount of time and focused on certain species--community science data is generally unstructured with anyone capable of uploading an observation of any species anywhere in the world at anytime.

By using their framework, however, the researchers were able to take community-generated data and retroactively apply structure to measure biodiversity change similarly to traditional methods. Instead of comparing biodiversity between two surveys with specific parameters, for example, you filter uploaded community science data for areas where a similar number of observers made a similar number of observations over a similar period of time.

"Traditional, long-term monitoring is critically important, but it is not the only way to gather meaningful data," says Academy Co-director of Community Science and study co-author Rebecca Johnson, PhD. "We empower people to share their nature observations wherever they are and apply structure and statistical corrections after those observations are made as opposed to asking community scientists to follow the same strict protocols experts would."

To ensure their framework accurately captures large-scale biodiversity change, the researchers compared treated community-generated species observations from iNaturalist with nearly a decade of long-term standardized monitoring surveys conducted along the California coast and found that they agreed in many cases.

Ultimately, the research team sees the framework leading to the development of easily accessible tools that allow researchers and land managers to integrate community-generated data with traditional data sources to get a more complete picture of global biodiversity change.

But more than just another tool for monitoring species, according to the researchers, community science may be the best--and perhaps the only--way of answering important questions about our planet's biodiversity.

"Community scientists can collect a breadth of data across time, space, and taxa that complements gaps left by traditional methods," Rapacciuolo says. "Using the framework laid out in this paper, these data can be used to identify real-time, systemic changes in biodiversity. As the impacts of climate change accelerate, leveraging community-generated data to monitor these changes will be more important than ever."

While directed initiatives such as Snapshot Cal Coast--an annual two-week event starting June 11th this year that encourages people to upload observations of wildlife along the California coast to iNaturalist--are already providing researchers with an abundance of rich biodiversity data, the researchers say their framework can help community-generated data reach its full potential.

"Through programs like Snapshot Cal Coast, researchers are already utilizing community science data to better understand and protect ecosystems on a statewide level," Johnson says. "This paper lays out the framework for doing so at national, even global, scales."

By unlocking the potential of community science, they also hope it will inspire more people than ever to get out into nature and contribute to platforms like iNaturalist.

"People are always looking for what they can do to help the planet," Johnson says. "By implementing this new framework and working in partnership with land and coastal managers we can ensure that uploading wildlife observations and participating in community science events that monitor local biodiversity will be one of the most meaningful things a person can do to protect nature. It doesn't hurt that it's a lot of fun, too."

Earth's atmosphere has a budget, and when expenses outpace savings, secondary aerosols form in areas of excessive pollution. Greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere, and free radicals bond to the molecules, rendering them inert. But when there are more pollution molecules than free radicals, they are left to recombine and form ozone and visible particulate matter -- smog and haze.

The precise mechanisms underlying this atmospheric oxidation capacity are not well understood, leaving the process inadequately described or completely missed in research, according to Yuesi Wang, professor with the State Key Laboratory of Atmospheric Boundary Layer Physics and Chemistry (LAPC), Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). To address this challenge, Wang and co-author Zirui Liu, also with LAPC, penned the preface to a special issue of Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, titled, "Atmospheric Oxidation Capacity, Ozone, and PM2.5 Pollution: Quantification Methods, Formation Mechanisms, Stimulation, and Control."

"This special issue focuses on the quantification and simulation of atmospheric oxidation capacity processes to better probe the role of missing mechanisms participating in the formation of secondary aerosols," Wang said.

The special issue contains 14 recently published scientific papers investigating atmospheric oxidation capacity processes through various approaches. The papers include field observations of key oxidizing species in different environments, laboratory dynamics studies on ozone formation and more.

Wang co-authored three of the featured papers, including one quantifying the free radical budget and ozone production with numerical modeling. In this study, Wang and his co-authors found that the aerosol uptake of hydrogen superoxide, which consists of a hydrogen and two oxygen atoms, can help break down certain pollutants, essentially expanding the free radical budget by 11% and reducing the daytime ozone production by 14%.

"This suggests the synergetic mechanism of complex air pollution formation and is useful for the development of environmental measures," Wang said, noting the work has resulted in a deeper understanding of atmospheric oxidation capacity mechanisms.

He and his team have developed indexes, or indicators, to characterize the atmospheric oxidation capacity in Beijing. Next, they plan to evaluate how the indexes might be applied in other highly polluted regions of China as they further study the relationship between the indexes and air quality.

It is one example of the type of research the special issue highlights and demands more of, according to Wang.

"More in-depth analyses and attributions are still needed for atmospheric oxidation capacity quantification and simulations to further understand the secondary formation processes and improve the underlying mechanisms," Wang said.

Haifa, Israel June 11, 2021 - Using an ultrafast transmission electron microscope, researchers from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology have, for the first time, recorded the propagation of combined sound and light waves in atomically thin materials.

The experiments were performed in the Robert and Ruth Magid Electron Beam Quantum Dynamics Laboratory headed by Professor Ido Kaminer, of the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the Solid State Institute.

Single-layer materials, alternatively known as 2D materials, are in themselves novel materials, solids consisting of a single layer of atoms. Graphene, the first 2D material discovered, was isolated for the first time in 2004, an achievement that garnered the 2010 Nobel Prize. Now, for the first time, Technion scientists show how pulses of light move inside these materials. Their findings, "Spatiotemporal Imaging of 2D Polariton Wavepacket Dynamics Using Free Electrons," were published in Science following great interest by many scientists.

Light moves through space at 300,000 km/s. Moving through water or through glass, it slows down by a fraction. But when moving through certain few-layers solids, light slows down almost a thousand-fold. This occurs because the light makes the atoms of these special materials vibrate to create sound waves (also called phonons), and these atomic sound waves create light when they vibrate. Thus, the pulse is actually a tightly bound combination of sound and light, called "phonon-polariton." Lit up, the material "sings."

The scientists shone pulses of light along the edge of a 2D material, producing in the material the hybrid sound-light waves. Not only were they able to record these waves, but they also found the pulses can spontaneously speed up and slow down. Surprisingly, the waves even split into two separate pulses, moving at different speeds.

The experiment was conducted using an ultrafast transmission electron microscope (UTEM). Contrary to optical microscopes and scanning electron microscopes, here particles pass through the sample and then are received by a detector. This process allowed the researchers to track the sound-light wave in unprecedented resolution, both in space and in time. The time resolution is 50 femtosecond - 50X10-15 seconds - the number of frames per second is similar to the number of seconds in a million years.

"The hybrid wave moves inside the material, so you cannot observe it using a regular optical microscope," Kurman explained. "Most measurements of light in 2D materials are based on microscopy techniques that use needle-like objects that scan over the surface point-by-point, but every such needle-contact disturb the movement of the wave we try to image. In contrast, our new technique can image the motion of light without disturbing it. Our results could not have been achieved using existing methods. So, in addition to our scientific findings, we present a previously unseen measurement technique that will be relevant to many more scientific discoveries."

This study was born in the height of the COVID-19 epidemic. In the months of lockdown, with the universities closed, Yaniv Kurman, a graduate student in Prof. Kaminer's lab, sat at home and made the mathematical calculations predicting how light pulses should behave in 2D materials and how they could be measured. Meanwhile, Raphael Dahan, another student in the same lab, realized how to focus infrared pulses into the group's electron microscope and made the necessary upgrades to accomplish that. Once the lockdown was over, the group was able to prove Kurman's theory, and even reveal additional phenomena that they had not expected.

While this is a fundamental science study, the scientists expect it to have multiple research and industry applications. "We can use the system to study different physical phenomena that are not otherwise accessible," said Prof. Kaminer. "We are planning experiments that will measure vortices of light, experiments in Chaos Theory, and simulations of phenomena that occur near black holes. Moreover, our findings may permit the production of atomically thin fiber optic "cables", which could be placed within electrical circuits and transmit data without overheating the system - a task that is currently facing considerable challenges due to circuit minimization."

The team's work initiates the research of light pulses inside a novel set of materials, broadens the capabilities of electron microscopes, and promotes the possibility of optical communication through atomically thin layers.

"I was thrilled by these findings," said Professor Harald Giessen, from the University of Stuttgart, who was not a part of this research. "This presents a real breakthrough in ultrafast nano-optics, and represents state of the art and the leading edge of the scientific frontier. The observation in real space and in real time is beautiful and has, to my knowledge, not been demonstrated before."

Another prominent scientist not involved with the study, John Joannopoulos from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, added that, "The key in this accomplishment is in the clever design and development of an experimental system. This work by Ido Kaminer and his group and colleagues is a critical step forward. It is of great interest both scientifically and technologically, and is of critical importance to the field."

MORGANTOWN, W. Va.-- Joining a club that sparks a new interest, playing a new intramural sport or finding a new group of friends may be just as indicative of a college freshman's loss of self-control as drinking or drug use, according to new research at West Virginia University.

Self-control--the ability to exercise personal restraint, inhibit impulsivity and make purposeful decisions--in that first year partly depends on a student's willingness to try new things, including things adults would call "good."

That's a new finding, according to Kristin Moilanen, associate professor of child development and family studies. The study, "Predictors of initial status and change in self-control during the college transition," observed 569 first year students ages 18-19 at five points over the course of the academic year. Participants completed the first wave of the study two weeks before arriving on campus and the other four over the course of the year.

The tendency to try new things is one of two indicators--the other is maternal attachment--that may gauge which students would benefit from an intervention, the study found.

"It does suggest that one of the points of college is to go out and try new things," she said. "There may be some value in finding out who needs reining in or training in decision making that they need to slow down and think."

Students who were less interested in trying new things maintained stable control throughout the year, she said.

A first-year student's self-control tendencies also depend on the students' attachment to their parents, particularly their mothers.

"They're responsive," she continued. "They tend to get along, their relationship is predictable and they know what their parents are going to do, how they're going to react. They don't hide their mistakes from their parents."

Conversely, students who were detached from their parents were more likely to tread more dangerous behavioral waters.

Moilanen said that stems from parents who were unavailable or inconsistent, making their children tend to push other people away and dismiss the importance of parental attachment.

"Their self-control erodes more than those who are more securely attached," she said.

Screening for insecure attachment and personality dimensions may be valuable for identifying first year college students who could benefit from discrete targeted early interventions, particularly those who aren't as attached to their mothers; those student may benefit from connecting with peers and building a support system, according to the study.

A third factor, stress, is also likely to blame for college freshmen's loss of self-control, though this was not considered in the study.

"It's probably reflecting fluctuations in stress over the academic year," Moilanen said. "First year students don't have the most accurate representation for what to expect and then they get here and they find that it's fun, but they also find it's stressful."

Stressors, even small ones, Moilanen said, can be more disruptive to self-control than people realize.

Co-authors of the study included Amy Gentzler and Nicholas Turiano, both faculty in the WVU Department of Psychology, and former WVU graduate students Katy DeLong and Shantel Spears.

Humans have been plagued by a myriad of deadly cancers since ages. Parallelly, they have also been attempting different permutations and combinations of treatments to cure the disease. Part of these attempts involving biomolecular targets have come to the fore in recent years. Like a broad-spectrum antibiotic that can attack and eliminate several microbes at a time, some of these biomolecular targets, when manipulated appropriately, can alleviate different cancers. One such biomolecular target of interest is LIM domain only 1 gene (LMO1).

LMO1 codes for a protein 'connector' that helps in the assembly of biomolecules involved in the production of RNA molecules, which in turn, leads to the synthesis of proteins implicated in cancer formation. This generates hope for devising ways to manipulate LMO1, which could take modern medicine one step closer to curing cancer. As such, a group of medical researchers from Affiliated Hospital of Hebei University in China, and Texas State University in USA, took it upon themselves to answer this question better, through a review published in Chinese Medical Journal.

The researchers scanned several studies on LMO1 to determine its key molecular features. On the question of why they narrowed their focus on LMO1, Professor You-Chao Jia of Affiliated Hospital of Hebei University, who led the study, explains, "Unique biological features of LMO1 distinct from other LMO members, such as its tissue-specific expression patterns, interacting proteins, and transcriptional targets, have been increasingly recognized. Studies indicated that LMO1 plays a critical oncogenic role in various types of cancers, including T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, neuroblastoma, gastric cancer, lung cancer, and prostate cancer."

The protein 'connectors' that LMO1 codes for are called as transcription cofactors (COF). Much like a puppeteer who manipulates strings to move the puppets in different ways, the LMO1 COF acts through its protein products to effect various cancer-causing changes in the cell. Here, it is important to note that these protein products regulate expression by binding to the DNA. So, through their DNA-binding protein counterparts, LMO1 COF extensively interacts with other important components of the cell and facilitates production of other proteins, essentially functioning as a carcinogenic 'power-broker' of sorts. Accordingly, the researchers stress the importance of better studying the LMO1 interactome and transcriptome in the review.

Moving to a higher level of organization, the researchers also looked into the tissue-specific expression of LMO1 in cancer. Here again, they identified the mediation of LMO1 activities through its DNA-binding 'partners'. So, they propose that the analysis of cancer condition should incorporate not only LMO1 expression, but also nuances in their partners' expression. They observed similar correlations at the epigenetic level too.

Further, the researchers highlight the role of random unique genetic changes called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the LMO1 as possible contributors to carcinogenesis. They specifically identified LMO1 SNP contributions to T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia and neuroblastoma.

Needless to say, the researchers highlight the diagnostic value of LMO1 expression levels. They observed from several studies that the overexpression of LMO1 is implicated in poor patient clinical outcomes in different cancers. Therefore, they believe that with a little more analysis, LMO1 expression levels could well become the clinical determiner of cancer progression in affected patients. Also, they implied that further research into the gene could lead to targeted therapy for these cancers.

Overall, the researchers have made a convincing argument to take a better look at LMO1 for devising more effective cures for different cancers. In this regard, Professor Jia hopes, "LMO1 is an oncogene or a key factor in carcinogenesis in many kinds of cancers. We hope that more studies will be carried out to explore its application value in clinical treatment of tumors." The world can indeed be optimistic about a possible breakthrough in cancer cure, through this review.

High-speed internet access has gone from an amenity to a necessity for working and learning from home, and the COVID-19 pandemic has more clearly revealed the disadvantages for American households that lack a broadband connection.

To tackle this problem, Michigan State University researchers have developed a new tool to smooth the collection of federal broadband access data that helps pinpoint coverage gaps across the U.S. The research was published May 26 In the journal PLOS ONE.

"Nearly 21% of students in urban areas are without at-home broadband, while 25% and 37% lack at-home broadband in suburban and rural areas," said Elizabeth A. Mack, associate professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences in the College of Social Science.

"As more of our day-to-day activities continue to move online, including education, commerce and health care, it's essential that we understand where gaps in digital infrastructure exist. This is especially important if we want to address disparities in access related to demographics, socioeconomic status, and educational attainment," she said.

When the U.S. Congress first passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the goal was to encourage competition in the telecommunications industry while improving the quality of service and lowering customer prices. To determine the act's effectiveness, the Federal Communications Commission created a standardized form (Form 477) where twice a year, internet service providers are required to report where they provide service to residential and business customers.

"To date, Form 477 data remains the best publicly available data source regarding broadband deployment," said Scott Loveridge, a professor in the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics (AFRE). "Unfortunately, there are a lot of nuances to these data which to this point have prevented us from conducting useful analyses over time."

One of these nuances is that the data collected from 2008 to 2018 spans the two census reporting periods of 2000 and 2010. This has made it difficult to look at the data overall and align it with the shifting census geographies, which do change each census year.

Loveridge, Mack and John Mann, an assistant professor with the Center for Economic Analysis, and several other researchers at the University of Texas and Arizona State University, worked together to produce a new dataset that resolves some of these issues by linking the breaks in the Form 477 data into a continuous timeline and aligning the data to the 2010 census.

"We developed a procedure for using the data to produce an integrated broadband time series," Mann said. "The team has labeled the dataset BITS, which stands for a Broadband Integrated Time Series."

"We hope these (BITS) data will be a tool to diagnosing gaps in broadband availability to help close the digital divide and enhance the participation of all people in online activities," Mack said. "With shrinking public budgets and a need to pinpoint locations suffering from a chronic shortage of broadband, it is critical for policymakers to efficiently allocate the human, infrastructural and policy resources required to improve local conditions."

Plastic bottles drifting in the sea; bags in the stomachs of turtles; Covid-19 masks dancing in the surf: few images are as unpleasant to look at as those that show the contamination of our oceans. And few environmental issues are as urgent and as present in the public awareness. "Most people have an emotional connection to the sea. They think of ocean pollution as an attack on a place they long for," said Nikoleta Bellou, marine scientist at Hereon's Institute of Coastal System - Analysis and Modeling. Between 1990 and 2015 alone, an estimated 100 million metric tons of mostly plastic waste entered the oceans. For that instance the study fits to the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, which started this year to emphasize a sustainable use of the seas.

The new overview study is the first to document the bulk of existing solutions--technologies as well as methods--regarding the prevention, monitoring, and cleanup with an innovative approach. With a view to the future, Nikoleta Bellou and together with an international team, namely Camilo A. Arrieta-Giron, João Canning-Clode, Chiara Gambardella, Konstantinos Karantzalos, Stephanie Kemna, Carsten Lemmen and João Monteiro, categorized and analyzed solutions from around the world. Led by Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon, co-authors participants included the National Research Council of Italy, the Marine Environmental Sciences Centre, the National Technical University of Athens, the Smithsonian Institution, and Maritime Robotics.

Exploring all categories

The team looked at all categories and examined everything from crowdfunding projects to research databases. The scientists studied close to 200 solutions that plan to utilize drones, robots, conveyor belts, nets, pumps, or filters, depending on whether they will clean in coastal areas, at sea, or on the ocean floor.

To date, many developers have been using similar technological approaches, but there are indications that the next generation will increasingly rely on a wide variety of solutions. More and more, they will integrate machine learning, robotics, automation, big data analyses, and modeling. While the scientific community seems to focus mainly on monitoring and NGOs mostly emphasize prevention, most cleanup solutions result from the cooperation of different players, the study claims.

Rarely implemented

Still, most projects never move beyond the development stage. Very few solutions have become a technological reality or have been launched commercially. The study's authors point to the need to overcome the planning stage and think many issues through to the end. "The integration of solutions into policy guidelines should be pushed politically in order to establish a future industry," Bellou said. Based on research and data collection, the analysis reveals how thinly distributed and difficult to access such information can be. Most solutions--about 60 percent--were primarily geared toward monitoring and developed in the last three years.

Policy recommendations

The study addresses the limits of existing solutions as well as the challenges of developing new ones. It also makes political action recommendations. In addition to international cooperations between researchers and national environmental departments and agencies, the scientists recommend defining standards for each solution, such as assessments based on respective size, effectiveness, and an environmentally compatible footprint. This enables the creation of new funding programs that further develop both existing and new solutions, aided by a global database. "This is a way to encourage researchers as well as political decision makers to create a sustainable approach to bring maritime litter under control. We want to leave clean oceans to future generations," Nikoleta Bellou said.