Brain

Researchers at SAHMRI and Flinders University have conducted the largest ever meta-analysis of wellbeing studies from around the world to answer the question, 'What's the best way to build personal wellbeing?'.

The analysis included 400+ clinical trials involving more than 50,000 participants. Researchers divided people into three main groups, those in generally good health, those with physical illness and those with mental illness.

They found it is possible to build the wellbeing of all individuals, but Mr Joep Van Agteren, Co-lead at the SAHMRI Wellbeing and Resilience Centre, says there's no one-size-fits-all solution.

"During stressful and uncertain periods in our lives, pro-actively working on our mental health is crucial to help mitigate the risk of mental and physical illness," Mr Van Agteren said.

"Our research suggests there are numerous psychological approaches people should experiment with to determine what works for them."

Practicing mindfulness, using techniques such as meditation and conscious breathing, was found to be effective at increasing wellbeing across the three groups.

Positive psychological interventions, including working on your sense of purpose, performing small acts of kindness and keeping a gratitude journal were shown to be effective, but only when done in combination, but not individually.

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) proved to be beneficial for many with mental illness, while acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) was most useful for those in generally good health.

Co-author, Mr Matthew Iasiello from SAHMRI says all the interventions share a common need for consistent and prolonged practice for them to be effective in improving wellbeing.

"Just trying something once or twice isn't enough to have a measurable impact. Regardless of what method people are trying out, they need to stick at it for weeks and months at a time for it to have a real effect," Mr Iasiello said.

Professor Michael Kyrios from the Órama Institute for Mental Health and Wellbeing at Flinders University says the study shows that in addition to seeking out professional help when distressed, there are many practical steps people can take to improve their wellbeing and prevent mental health problems.

"Implementing such interventions can be done safely for individuals on their own or in a group format, either in person or online," Prof Kyrios said.

"It is therefore potentially a cost-effective addition to current referral pathways and treatment methods."

Researchers believe these results highlight the need for a change of tactics in how society cares for people's wellbeing, whether they're living with a mental illness or not.

"We need to take everyone's wellbeing seriously and ensure we're taking the necessary steps to improve mental and physical health so we can prevent future complications for ourselves and keep healthcare costs down," Prof Kyrios said.

The researchers, as part of the new SAHMRI and Flinders collaborative lab, the 'Be Well Innovation Lab', will continue the meta-analysis year on year to build on the evidence and ensure it stays up to date.

The data has been used to form the foundation of the 'Be Well Plan', a wellbeing program that is delivered in-person and via an app, recently tested on over a thousand South Australians, that can be accessed online.

Videoconferences may be less exhausting if participants feel some sense of group belonging, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

As remote work and the use of videoconferences have dramatically increased during the coronavirus pandemic, more people are fatigued from meeting through computer screens instead of in person. In this study, 55 employees in various fields in the United States were surveyed about their feelings about videoconferences. The researchers thought longer meetings and being on video would cause the most fatigue, but their findings surprised them, said lead researcher Andrew Bennett, PhD, an assistant professor at Old Dominion University.

"We expected that aspects of being on video would be related to fatigue, such as watching everyone's faces closely on a screen or even watching yourself, but we didn't find this to be true in our study. Longer meetings also didn't impact fatigue," Bennett said. "However, the importance of feeling a sense of belonging or connection with the group really minimized fatigue after a videoconference."

Bennett's team decided to study videoconference fatigue, or "Zoom fatigue," because they all felt exhausted after their first videoconferences together when they began working remotely during the early days of the pandemic. The research was published online in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

The study participants received nine hourly surveys every day for five consecutive working days last year. Out of the surveys sent, participants completed more than 1,700 surveys and participated in an average of five to six videoconferences during the week. The majority of participants were male (58%) and white (73%) with an average age of 33.

One participant said videoconferences "can be taxing on the mind and spirit," while another was "tired of being in them" and "extra tired after being in them." Only 7% of the participants didn't report any signs of videoconference fatigue.

Watching oneself on a webcam or turning the webcam off had no statistically significant impacts on post-meeting fatigue, the study found. Participants reported conflicting feelings about using the webcam, with some saying it was exhausting always to be staring at the screen while others felt it was impersonal when participants switched off their webcams.

"Everyone just wants to get in and get out, log in and log off," one participant reported. "There's very little chatter before and after the meeting like there would be in real life."

That chatter may help build a sense of group belonging, which had a marked effect in reducing videoconference fatigue, the researchers said. There also appeared to be a sweet spot in the early afternoon when videoconferences caused less fatigue than at other times of the day.

Based on their findings, the researchers made some recommendations to help reduce videoconference fatigue:

Hold videoconferences in the early afternoon.

Enhance perceptions of group belongingness, including time for small talk before or after the meeting or breakout rooms where people could talk about their interests (sports, movies, etc.).

Establish basic meeting rules, such as whether to keep webcams on and refraining from doing other work.

Take breaks by looking away from the screen, standing up and walking around.

"We know videoconferences are helpful," Bennett said. "We get more emotional and nonverbal information from them, but that doesn't mean everything needs to be done in a videoconference. Sometimes a phone call or email is more effective and efficient."

The internet seems like the place to go to get into fights. Whether they're with a family member or a complete stranger, these arguments have the potential to destroy important relationships and consume a lot of emotional energy.

Researchers at the University of Washington worked with almost 260 people to understand these disagreements and to develop potential design interventions that could make these discussions more productive and centered around relationship-building. The team published these findings this April in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the ACM in Human Computer Interaction Computer-Supported Cooperative Work.

"Despite the fact that online spaces are often described as toxic and polarizing, what stood out to me is that people, surprisingly, want to have difficult conversations online," said lead author Amanda Baughan, a UW doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. "It was really interesting to see that people are not having the conversations they want to have on online platforms. It pointed to a big opportunity to design to support more constructive online conflict."

In general, the team said, technology has a way of driving users' behaviors, such as logging onto apps at odd times to avoid people or deleting enjoyable apps to avoid spending too much time on them. The researchers were interested in the opposite: how to make technology respond to people's behaviors and desires, such as to strengthen relationships or have productive discussions.

"Currently many of the designed features that users leverage during an argument support a no-road-back approach to disagreement -- if you don't like someone's content, you can unfollow, unfriend or block them. All of those things cut off relationships instead of helping people repair them or find common ground," said senior author Alexis Hiniker, an assistant professor in the UW Information School. "So we were really driven by the question of how do we help people have hard conversations online without destroying their relationships?"

The researchers did their study in three parts. First, they interviewed 22 adults from the Seattle area about what social media platforms they used and whether they felt like they could talk about challenging topics. The team also asked participants to brainstorm potential ways that these platforms could help people have more productive conversations.

Then the team conducted a larger survey of 137 Americans ranging from 18 to 64 years old with political leanings that ranged from extremely conservative to extremely liberal. These participants were asked to report what social media platforms they used, how many hours per week they used them and if they had had an argument on these platforms. Participants then scored each platform for whether they felt like it enabled discussions of controversial topics. Participants were also asked to describe the most recent argument they had had, including details about what it was about and whom they argued with.

Many participants shared that they tried to avoid online arguments, citing a lack of nuance or space for discussing controversial subjects. But participants also noted wanting to have discussions, especially with family and close friends, about topics including politics, ethics, religion, race and other personal details.

When participants did have difficult conversations online, people tended to prefer text-based platforms, such as Twitter, WhatsApp or Facebook, over image-based platforms, such as YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram.

Participants also emphasized a preference for having these discussions in private one-on-one chats, such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, over a more comment-heavy, public platform.

"It was not surprising to see that people are having a lot of arguments on the more private and text-based platforms," Baughan said. "That really replicates what we do offline: We would pull someone aside to have a private conversation to resolve a conflict."

Using information from the first two surveys, the team developed 12 potential technological design interventions that could support users when having hard conversations. The researchers created storyboards that illustrated each intervention and asked 98 new participants, ranging from 22 to 65 years old, to evaluate the interventions.

The most popular ideas included:

Democratizing

In this intervention, community members use reactions, such as upvoting, to boost constructive comments or content.

"This moves us away from the loudest voice drowning out everyone else and elevates the larger, quieter base of people," Hiniker said.

Humanizing

The goal of this intervention is to remind people that they are interacting with other people. Some ideas include: preventing users from being anonymous, increasing the size of users' profile pictures, or providing more details about users, such as identity, background or mood.

Channel switching

This intervention provides users with the ability to move a conversation to a private space.

"I envision this intervention as the platform saying: 'Would you like to move this conversation offline?' Or maybe it has some sort of button, where you can quickly say: 'OK, let's go away from the comments section and into a private chat,'" Baughan said. "That could help show more respect for the relationship, because it doesn't become this public arena of who's going to win this fight. It becomes more about trying to reach an understanding."

The least popular idea:

Biofeedback

This intervention uses biological feedback, such as a user's heart rate, to provide context about how someone is currently feeling.

"People would tell us: 'I don't want to share a lot of personal information about my internal state. But I would like to have a lot of personal information about my conversational partner's internal state,'" Hiniker said. "That was one of the design paradoxes we saw."

The next step for this research would be to start deploying some of these interventions to see how well they help or hurt online conversations in the wild, the team said. But first, social media companies should take a step back and think about the purpose of the interaction space they've created and whether their current platforms are meeting those goals.

"I would love to see technology help prompt people to slow down when it comes to things like knee-jerk emotional reactions," Baughan said. "It could ask people to reflect: Is this a good use of my time? How much do I value this relationship with this person? Do I feel like it's safe to engage in this conversation? And if a conversation happens in a public space, it could suggest taking it offline or going to a private space."

Southeastern Tibet is one of the most glaciated regions on the Tibetan Plateau both at present and during the Quaternary. Numerical dating of glacial deposits has allowed the establishment of a provisional chronology of Quaternary glacial fluctuations in this region, with the oldest glaciation (Guxiang Glaciation) occurring in marine oxygen isotope stage 6 (MIS-6). However, glaciations predating MIS-6 have been identified at many locations on the Tibetan Plateau and its surrounding mountains, posing the question: as a major glaciation center both at present and during the Quaternary, did a glaciation prior to MIS-6 ever occur in southeastern Tibet?

Zhou et al. (2021) provide evidence for a glacier advance in the Bodui Zangbo River valley in the eastern Nyainqêntanglha, southeastern Tibet that predates the Guxiang Glaciation. In the Bodui Zangbo main valley, there exists a level of discontinuous valley shoulders that are ~500-600 m above the Guxiang Glaciation moraine. On some of the valley shoulders there exists distinct glacial deposits, which are relatively well preserved on shoulders at Nitong, Baiyu, and Qingduo (Figures 1 and 2). Morphostratigraphically, these glacial deposits should be emplaced by a glacial expansion predating the Guxiang Glaciation in MIS-6. Considering the morainic morphology of the glacial deposits at Nitong is the most typical among the three sites, the newly identified glacial advance was named by the authors as Nitong Glaciation.

The glacial deposits at Nitong and Baiyu were dated using the Ti-Li-center ESR (electron spin resonance) signals. After excluding outliers, the deposition age of the glacial deposits was estimated to be 580.6±97.3--465.2±86.6 ka, yielding a peak age of 506.3±60.4 ka (1σ uncertainty) by using a normal kernel density function. Taking into account the age error and global climatic conditions, it is most likely that the Nitong Glaciation occurred during MIS-12, despite the possibility of happening during MIS-14 or even earlier. The glacial advance during MIS-12 has also been verified at many other locations on and surrounding the Tibetan Plateau. It is likely that the coupling of two critical drivers (surface uplift of the Tibetan Plateau and its surrounding mountains and decreased temperatures during MIS-12) caused the extensive glacier advance during MIS-12 in and surrounding the Tibetan Plateau. The finding is critical to better understand the whole history of Quaternary glacial fluctuations and tectonic uplift in southeastern Tibet.

Scientists have sequenced ancient DNA from soil for the first time and the advance will transform what is known about everything from evolution to climate change.

The findings have been described as the 'moon landings' of genomics because researchers will no longer have to rely on finding and testing fossils to determine genetic ancestry, links and discoveries - and it is thanks to Stone Age black bears who defecated in a remote cave in Mexico 16,000 years ago.

A team of scientists from The Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre, University of Copenhagen, led by Professor Eske Willerslev, director of the foundation and a Fellow of St John's College, University of Cambridge, recreated the genomes of animals, plants and bacteria of microscopic fragments of DNA found in Chiquihuite Cave.

The results, which have been published today (April 19 2021) in Current Biology, are the first time environmental DNA has been sequenced from soil and sediment and includes the ancient DNA profile of a Stone Age American black bear taken from samples in the cave.

This 'scientific first' has wider significance as it increases scientists' ability to study the evolution of animals, plants and microorganisms, which has been hailed as the dawn of an 'entirely new era' of population genetics. The work was possible as a result of advanced technology and understanding over the past five years.

This is because working with highly fragmented DNA from soil samples means scientists no longer have to rely on DNA samples from bone or teeth for enough genetic material to recreate a profile of ancient DNA, which opens up the field to what can be tested and studied.

The samples included faeces and droplets of urine from an ancestor of North America's most familiar and common bear - the American black bear - which allowed scientists to recreate the entire genetic code of two species of the animal. The first is the Stone Age American black bear, the second is an extinct short-faced bear called Arctodus simus which died out 12,000 years ago.

Professor Willerslev said: "When an animal or a human urinates or defecates, cells from the organism are also excreted. And the DNA fragments from these cells are what we can detect in the soil samples. Using extremely powerful sequencing techniques, we reconstructed genomes - genetic profiles - based on these fragments for the first time. We have shown that hair, urine and faeces all provide genetic material which, in the right conditions, can survive for much longer than 10,000 years.

"All over the world, everyone scientifically involved in the study of ancient DNA recognised the need to reconstruct genomes from fragments found in soil or sediment. Being able to do that for the first time means we have opened up a new frontier. Analysis of DNA found in soil could have the potential to expand the narrative about everything from the evolution of species to developments in climate change - this is the moon landing of genomics because fossils will no longer be needed."

Chiquihuite Cave, where the samples were taken from, is a high-altitude site, 2,750 metres above sea level. Nearly 2,000 stone tools and small tool fragments, known as flakes, were discovered.

The same group of scientists revealed last year that DNA analysis of the plant and animal remains from the sediment packed around the tools in the cave dates the tools and the human occupation of the site to 25,000-30,000 years ago - 15,000 years earlier than people were previously thought to have reached the Americas. Human DNA has not yet been found.

DNA of mice, black bears, rodents, bats, voles and kangaroo rats was found and the genome of the two species of bear has now been sequenced. The huge predatory short-faced bear, which also lived in North America, stood at nearly two metres just on all fours and could weigh up to 1,000 kilos.

Assistant Professor Mikkel Winther Pedersen, first author of the paper, said: "The short-faced bears that lived in northern Mexico were distinctly different from the population of black bears living in north-western Canada. This is an excellent example of the new knowledge that suddenly becomes available when you reconstruct genomes based on DNA fragments extracted from soil."

Professor Pedersen described the new sequencing as 'the dawn of an entirely new era' of population genomics.

He said: "Studies of ancient environmental DNA have been very limited until now. Fragmented DNA from a soil sample could only tell us whether a specific species lived in a certain locality at a certain time, but it gave us no concrete details about the individual in question.

"So, we couldn't compare this individual with present-day individuals of the same species. But we can now. We have published for the first time a DNA profile of an American black bear that lived in a mountain cave in northern Mexico in the Stone Age. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the potential to extract this type of information from a soil sample of a mere few grams will revolutionise our field."

Fragments in sediment will be able to be tested in many former Stone Age settlements around the world.

Professor Willerslev added: "Imagine the stories those traces could tell. It's a little insane - but also fascinating - to think that, back in the Stone Age, these bears urinated and defecated in the Chiquihuite Cave and left us the traces we're able to analyse today."

Paper and images: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Vu6hmTsmo1nJLWYEc3KGA4VtC8Uz-YLD?usp=sharing

More blood thinners aren't automatically better, another study confirms.

A new publication in JAMA Internal Medicine focuses on the minimal pros and the concerning cons of combining a daily aspirin with a drug from the newer class of anticoagulants that include apixaban, dabigatran, edoxaban and rivaroxaban.

Patients were taking one of these direct oral anticoagulants known as DOACs to prevent strokes from non-valvular atrial fibrillation or for the treatment of venous thromboembolic disease (deep vein thrombosis or pulmonary embolism). The included patients did not have another reason to take aspirin such as a recent history of a heart attack or a history of a heart valve replacement. The researchers discovered that almost one-third of the people who were prescribed a DOAC were also taking aspirin without a clear reason for the aspirin.

"The patients on combination therapy were more likely to have bleeding events but they weren't less likely to have a blood clot," says lead author Jordan Schaefer, M.D., an assistant professor of internal medicine and a hematologist at Michigan Medicine, the academic medical center of the University of Michigan. "Therefore, it's important that patients ask their doctors if they should be taking aspirin when they are prescribed a direct oral anticoagulant."

The combination of an anticoagulant and an antiplatelet may be appropriate for people who have had a recent heart attack, recent coronary stent placement or bypass surgery, prior mechanical valve surgery or known peripheral artery disease, among other conditions says co-author Geoffrey Barnes, M.D., M.Sc., an assistant professor of internal medicine and a vascular cardiologist at the Michigan Medicine Frankel Cardiovascular Center.

For the others, "combination therapy may not be happening intentionally; rather, the addition of aspirin might get overlooked because it's not in any one specialist or general care provider's territory," Barnes says.

The authors note that there are many medical conditions and situations where adding aspirin with a direct oral anticoagulant has not been adequately studied. Schaefer adds that they plan to confirm their study findings in a larger, longer study because there were not many blood clots that occurred during the timeframe of this study, potentially limiting their ability to assess if aspirin could be beneficial.

Previously, Schaefer and Barnes also reported a significant increase in adverse outcomes for people taking both aspirin and warfarin, a different kind of anticoagulant.

Schaefer originally presented these registry-based cohort study results at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology.

A new study outlines the need for materials advances in the hardware that goes into making quantum computers if these futuristic devices are to surpass the abilities of the computers we use today.

The study, published in the journal Science by an international team, surveyed the state of research on quantum computing hardware with the goal of illustrating the challenges and opportunities facing scientists and engineers.

While conventional computers encode "bits" of information as ones and zeroes, quantum computers breeze past this binary arrangement by creating "qubits," which can be complex, continuous quantities. Storing and manipulating information in this exotic form - and ultimately reaching "quantum advantage" where quantum computers do things that conventional computers cannot - requires sophisticated control of the underlying materials.

"There has been an explosion in developing quantum technologies over the last 20 years," said Nathalie de Leon, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton University and the lead author of the paper, "culminating in current efforts to show quantum advantage for a variety of tasks, from computing and simulation to networking and sensing."

Until recently, most of this work has aimed to demonstrate proof-of-principle quantum devices and processors, de Leon said, but now the field is poised to address real-world challenges.

"Just as classical computing hardware became an enormous field in materials science and engineering in the last century, I think the quantum technologies field is now ripe for a new approach, where materials scientists, chemists, device engineers and other scientists and engineers can productively bring their expertise to bear on the problem."

The paper is a call to scientists who study materials to turn to the challenge of developing hardware for quantum computing, said Hanhee Paik, corresponding author and a research staff member at IBM Quantum.

"The progress in quantum computing technologies has been accelerating in recent years both in research and industry," Paik said. "To continue moving forward in the next decade, we will need advances in materials and fabrication technologies for quantum computing hardware -- in a similar way to how classical computing progressed in microprocessor scaling. Breakthroughs do not happen overnight, and we hope more people in the materials community will begin to work on quantum computing technology. Our paper was written to give the materials community a comprehensive overview of where we are in materials development in quantum computing with expert opinions from the field."

At the heart of quantum computers are qubits, which work together to churn out results.

These qubits can be made in various ways, with the leading technologies being superconducting qubits, qubits made from trapping ions with light, qubits made from the silicon materials found in today's computers, qubits captured in "color centers" in high-purity diamonds, and topologically protected qubits represented in exotic subatomic particles. The paper analyzed the chief technological challenges associated with each of these materials and proposes strategies for tackling these problems.

Researchers hope that one or more of these platforms will eventually progress to the stage where quantum computing can solve problems that today's machines find impossible, such as modeling the behaviors of molecules and providing secure electronic encryption.

"I think [this paper] is the first time that this kind of comprehensive picture has been assembled. We prioritized 'showing our work,' and explaining the reasoning behind the received wisdom for each hardware platform," de Leon said. "Our hope is that this approach will make it possible for new entrants to the field to find ways to make a big contribution."

The ten co-authors come from research institutions around the world as well as IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, which has a major quantum computing research group. The scientists met during a symposium on materials for quantum computing sponsored by IBM Quantum and the Kavli Foundation and held at the Materials Research Society Fall Meeting in 2019. They then spent much of their time during the pandemic's stay-at-home period last year developing this review paper.

"It was a great experience to work with a group with such diverse expertise, and a lot of our activity involved asking each other tough questions about why we believed the things we did about our respective material platforms," said de Leon, whose research exploits flaws in diamond materials to enable communication between nodes in a future quantum internet.

MINNEAPOLIS - April 19, 2021 - Despite access to some of the best possible medical care in the world, Senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy both died within 18 months of their diagnosis of glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. While this deadly outcome typifies the nature of this disease, some glioblastoma patients see exceptional benefits from chemotherapy and survive beyond expectations. Why this happens has been revealed by researchers at the University of Minnesota in a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Deciphering the molecular underpinning of these exceptional responses may hold the key to transforming the hope for miracles into the reality of an expected cure for glioblastoma patients," said Clark C. Chen, MD, PhD, Lyle French Chair in Neurosurgery and head of the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Minnesota Medical School, who is also lead author of the study.

The study team looked at the gene expression profiles of glioblastoma specimens collected from approximately 900 glioblastoma patients from regions across the world to identify unique features associated with exceptional responders, defined as glioblastoma patients who survive more than two years after treatment.

"We utilized different state-of-the-art analytics to study these samples, including methods innovated by Dr. Aaron Sarver, a member of the University of Minnesota Institute of Health Informatics. Impressively, these analytics converged on a single observation, a paucity of microglia and macrophages," Chen said.

Microglia and macrophages are specialized, immune cells that act as scavengers to recognize and remove cells not normally present in a healthy brain, including cancer cells. These immune cells migrate to sites harboring abnormal cancer cells to defend the body against the cancer cells and can make up more than half of the cells in a glioblastoma sample.

"If microglia and macrophages normally fend off cancer cells, more of them should allow the body to better fend off the tumor. So, we expected to see more of them in the exceptional responders; however, we found the contrary," said Jun Ma, a researcher in the Department of Neurosurgery at the U of M Medical School and a co-first author of this study.

Resolving this paradox, the research team subsequently demonstrated glioblastoma cells possess the capacity to recondition the surrounding microglia and macrophages and corrupt their native anticancer functions. Instead of fending off cancer growth, these immune cells are now re-programmed by glioblastoma cells to promote tumor growth.

"It is frightening to consider the possibility that cancer cells can 'brainwash' our own immune cells and convert them from cells that fight cancer to cells that promote cancer," said Judith Varner, a co-senior author of the study and professor of pathology at the University of California, San Diego. "Fortunately, we have figured out how glioblastoma cells subvert our immune system and can now reverse this cellular version of the 'Stockholm syndrome.'"

Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response in which hostages or abuse victims develop an emotional bond with and act to help their captors.

The key to curing this cellular "Stockholm syndrome" and possibly glioblastoma lies in a protein called phosphoinositide-3-kinase gamma isoform (PI3Kγ). Activation of this protein turns microglia and macrophages from immune cells that police cancer growth into hostage cells that promote cancer growth. Varner has studied this process for many years and pioneered drugs that restore the anti-tumor activities of microglia and macrophages.

"In our animal glioblastoma models, treatment with drugs targeting PI3Kγ consistently resulted in impressively durable responses to chemotherapy," Chen said. "We are eager to translate these findings into a human trial, with the hope of transforming every glioblastoma patient into an exceptional responder."

New FLEET research confirms the potential for topological materials to substantially reduce the energy consumed by computing.

The collaboration of FLEET researchers from University of Wollongong, Monash University and UNSW have shown in a theoretical study that using topological insulators rather than conventional semiconductors to make transistors could reduce the gate voltage by half, and the energy used by each transistor by a factor of four.

To accomplish this, they had to find a way to overcome the famous 'Boltzmann's tyranny' that puts a lower limit on transistor switching energy.

They found a surprising result: gate voltage applied to a topological insulator could create a barrier to electron flow larger than the voltage itself times the electron charge, a result previously thought impossible.

The mission of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies (FLEET) is to reduce the unsustainable energy load of information and computing technology (ICT), now consuming around 10% of global electricity.

TRANSISTORS: THEY'RE NOT JUST IN GRANDPA'S SHED RADIO

Computer chips contain billions of transistors - tiny electrical switches that perform the basic switching operations of computing.

Individual transistors today are as small as 5 nanometres across (5 millionths of a millimetre).

Transistors use a voltage applied to a 'gate' electrode to switch on and off the current flowing between 'source' and 'drain' electrodes. The energy used to charge up the gate electrode is thrown away each time each transistor turns on and off. A typical computer has literally billions of transistors turning on and off billions of times each second, adding up to a lot of energy.

Conventional transistors are made from semiconductors, materials which possess a 'bandgap' or a range of energies within which electrons are forbidden. The action of the voltage applied to the gate is to move this range of forbidden energies to allow (the 'on' state) or block (the 'off' state) the energies at which incoming electrons are moving from source to drain.

In an ideal transistor, 1 volt applied to the gate would move up the range of energies blocked by 1 electron-volt.

LEAKAGE 'TYRANNY' PUTS A LOWER LIMIT ON SWITCHING ENERGY

How big a barrier is needed for the transistor to operate correctly?

The problem is that the energies of the electrons coming from the source are inherently 'smeared out' at finite temperature, so there are always a few electrons with sufficiently-high energy to make it over the barrier. This 'leakage' current leads to wasted energy.

Basic thermodynamic considerations require that to reduce the current by a factor of 10 requires raising the barrier by about 60 milli-electron-volts at room temperature. But to avoid wasted energy via leakage current requires the current to be reduced by a factor of about 100,000, or a barrier of about 300 milli-electron-volts, which requires a gate voltage of at least 300 milli-volts.

This minimum gate voltage puts a lower limit on switching energy.

This is called 'Boltzmann's tyranny' after Ludwig Boltzmann who described the smearing of the energies of particles by temperature.

Boltzmann's tyranny is thought to limit how small the operating gate voltage can be for a transistor, no matter what material it is made of.

OVERCOMING BOLTZMANN'S LIMIT WITH NEW MATERIALS

Researchers in FLEET were curious whether a different effect could be used to make a barrier for electron flow in a transistor.

In some materials, an electric field can change the size of the bandgap. They wondered whether the electric field due to voltage applied to a gate electrode could be used to expand the bandgap and create a barrier to electrons. The answer is yes, but for typical materials this effect doesn't beat Boltzmann's tyranny: 1 volt applied to the gate can still only make a barrier no bigger than 1 electron-volt.

The researchers decided to look at a special class of materials called topological insulators, which have a bandgap that is effectively negative.

"Thin (two-dimensional) topological insulators are insulating in their interior, but conduct along their edges," explains lead author Muhammad Nadeem (University of Wollongong). "In this state they can function as the 'on' state of a transistor, with current carried by the conducting edges."

"The bandgap of a topological insulator can also be changed by an electric field," says Nadeem. "When it becomes positive, the material is no longer a topological insulator, and no longer has conducting edges, acting much like a regular semiconductor, with the bandgap acting as a barrier to electron flow (the 'off' state)."

However, the research team found that, unlike a regular semiconductor, the increase in the bandgap (in electron-volts) in the topological insulator could be larger than the voltage applied to the gate (in volts), beating Boltzmann's tyranny.

"The right topological materials could switch at voltages half as large as a similar conventional transistor, which would require only one fourth the energy," says co-investigator Dimi Culcer (UNSW).

WHERE TO FROM HERE?

Many challenges remain. The study is for the moment only theoretical. Co-investigator Xiaolin Wang (UOW) says "some of the candidate materials such as bismuthene, a single atom thick layer of bismuth arranged in a honeycomb structure, have only just begun to be studied in the laboratory, and haven't yet been made into transistors."

Other materials are still on the drawing board and it isn't yet known how to synthesize them. "However," says co-investigator Michael Fuhrer (Monash), "researchers within FLEET are working hard to make these new materials, characterize them, and incorporate them into electronic devices."

THE STUDY

Overcoming Boltzmann's Tyranny in a Transistor via the Topological Quantum Field Effect was published in Nano Letters in March 2021 (DOI 10.1021/acs.nanolett.1c00378)

The research was carried out by a collaboration between FLEET researchers at the University of Wollongong, University of New South Wales, and Monash University.

Solid-matrix catalysts called heterogeneous catalysts are among the most widespread industrial applications in reducing toxic gases, unburned fuel, and particulate matter in the exhaust stream from the combustion chamber. They are also used in energy, chemical, and pharmaceutical sectors, i.e., production of biodiesel, polymers, biomass/waste conversion into valuable products, and many others processes. All thanks to their active sites and high surface. Nevertheless, their high efficiency is limited by the astronomic price of noble metals, So, cost-effective substitutes with comparable effectivity seem to be a holy grail for the industry. A recent paper presented by scientists from the Institute of Physical Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences led by dr. eng.I zabela S. Pieta faces the challenge of presenting novel nanostructural bimetallic composite for catalysis.

C like catalysis

Catalysts are everywhere and have a tremendous impact on chemical processes. They surround us even in nature; for example, cells require natural catalysts like enzymes for multiple biochemical processes. The same happens in the energy conversion field, where solid catalysts pursue technological processes. According to the combustion engines, noble metals like platinum are placed on the flue gases flowing out the combustion chamber. Once toxic gases touch catalysts' surface, they decompose, giving the final products CO2 and H2O. The secret lies in the active sites onto the material that influences the intermediates' adsorption energy of reaction and transition states' activation. The final mechanism of bond-breaking leads to the formation of particular molecules. It makes noble metals rock stars in industrial applications.

In recent decades, catalysts application tremendously grew, reaching a critical point for high costs of precious metals needed for fuel, pharmaceutics, and chemical compounds production. So, economic catalysis having high efficiency became one of the principal challenges for future progress in many industrial technologies. For sure, it is almost impossible to provide one material to fulfill all industrial requirements. We can surely improve much catalyst activity and even durability by chemical modifications of active surfaces for the given process, while let's start from the beginning - catalyst size. Nanomaterials offer a high surface-volume ratio that increases their activity. In the case of noble metals, maintaining nanometric size makes these materials highly active, providing strong reactants binding and catalysts selectivity.

Novel catalysts on the horizon

Recently, scientists from the Institute of Physical Chemistry led by dr. Izabela S. Pieta described nanostructural bimetallic catalysts immobilized onto the semi-conducting surface for their potential application in the thermal-, photo-, and electrocatalysis. Those systems have already been reported to give extraordinary results in processes dedicated to fuel cells, i.e., methanol and ethanol electrooxidation (I.S.Pieta et al. Applied Catalysis B: Environmental, 2019, 244), sustainable green chemicals, and fuels production (I.S.Pieta et al. Applied Catalysis B: Environmental, 2019, 244, and ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering, 2020, 8(18), and even carbon dioxide reduction towards gaseous ad liquid fuels (I.S.Pieta et al. Advanced Materials Interfaces, 2021, 2001822). Let's take a look closer at them.

In bimetallic nanostructures, two metals, e.g., Pt-Au, are joined, where the primary metal works as a host role, and the second is a guest. In other words, it is an alloy, while on a nanometric scale, the distribution of particular atoms in the particles has tremendous meaning.

Interestingly, bimetallic structures occur higher catalytic activity in comparison to monometallic counterparts. Their joining may differ from a mixture of two different metals where the second one is distributed quite regularly in the matrix of the first one or core-shell structure where the first metal is covered with the second one. Another option is nanostructures having two chemically different halves (called Janus nanoparticles) or linking two chemically different nanoparticles. Unfortunately, these combinations of two different metals can undergo constant changes on such a small scale due to the atomic reorganization.

The composition and atomic arrangement in bimetallic structures determine their catalytic performance. Nanomaterials may easily agglomerate or change surface structure due to their high surface activity, lowering their catalysis effectiveness. Moreover, their surface can be easily poisoned by the half-products of chemical reactions, so predicting the changes taking place onto bimetallic surfaces affecting material activity is difficult.

So why don't to start from the beginning and create a platform that would stabilize these nanostructures? Once settled, nanoparticles would be less susceptible to surface changes. Researchers proposed to stabilize bimetallic nanoparticles onto the electrically conducting material like carbon or carbon nitride. Then, its surface was modified with polymeric material based on the graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) made of subunits of triazine molecules merged in flat triangles looking like the graphene sheet. The surface of the bimetallic system was investigated within several spectroscopic techniques.

"The development and optimization of bimetallic nanocatalysts might provide a new class of materials with superior, tunable performance, thermal stability, and reduced costs compared to presently available commercial catalysts. We anticipate that thanks to the unique properties of support material, i.e., graphitic carbon nitride, these catalysts can find a potential application in -thermal/-electro/ and -photocatalysis. However, before that happens, one needs to understand how to design the efficient bimetallic system, how this system works under operating conditions, and why the shape-structure-activity relation matters." - Izabela S.Pieta claims. (GoGREEN project application H2020).

g-C3N4 has a rich heteroatoms structure that reveals catalytic properties. Thanks to the presence of multiple functional groups, it can easily host on its surface bimetallic systems like noble Pt-Au Pt-Pd, or transitions metals-based Cu-Ni nanoparticles. It has been considered as promising supporting material stabilizing the bimetallic nanoparticles and inhibiting their poisoning with chemicals. Moreover, it gives a huge opportunity for solar energy harvesting and conversion into a valuable product or another energy form.

"Inspired by nature, humankind has learned that sunlight is one of the most powerful sources of energy on the Earth. The effective conversion of light into a usable form of energy is mainly limited due to non-efficient charge separation and poor light-harvesting catalysts architecture. The prerequisites for broad spectral harvesting and favorable energy-level alignment for the intended light-triggered process should be coupled with fast charge separation and collection, competing successfully with photogenerated charge recombination. The issue mentioned above might be overcome by the proper selection of photoactive components and the suitable engineering of photoreactors. Combining the material properties and microfluidics technology is a perfect solution integrating multiple components and providing a simple solution for the continuous catalytic process at dynamic liquid-liquid, solid-liquid, or gas-solid-liquid interfaces' - first author dr. Ewelina Kuna claims (the Pi of Pd2PI project holder).

Immobilization protects against surface changes and nanoparticle agglomeration and enables scalable application onto a large surface.

Remarks dr. Izabela Pieta - "The bimetallic catalytic systems are known to provide higher catalytic activities, and they allowed to reach very high efficiencies in many processes. We are still focused on more complex systems where the catalyst composition and structure arrangement may result in higher activity but higher selectivity towards targeted products and improved catalyst stability towards poisoning, durability, and lifetime. Our research covers a fundamental understanding of catalytic surfaces and reaction mechanism development under not-isolated conditions. This knowledge surely will result in innovative catalyst design, both at the molecular scale (active site architecture design) and applicative scale (industrial reactor-scale) via tailoring multiple catalytic active sites and their distribution over the working surfaces".

Bimetallic nanoparticles embedded into the g-C3N4 modified carbon surface seems to be an universal platform in catalysis, bringing bright light into the processes that need novel nanostructural solutions. Thanks to such studies focused on the shape and structure-activity relation in bimetallic systems and its immobilization onto the scalable and economic matrix, we are a step closer to designs of the novel and sustainable catalysts for industrial.

Science Advances publishes proteomics technology from Oblique Therapeutics AB with a potential to bring several novel antibody medicines to large patient populations in multiple disease areas

Gothenburg, Sweden, April 16th, 2021 - Oblique Therapeutics AB, a Sweden-based biotech company, in collaboration with Karolinska Institutet (Stockholm, Sweden), Gothenburg University (Sweden) and several local biotechs published promising research results in the highly-acclaimed scientific journal Science Advances (AAAS) entitled: Rational Antibody design for Undruggable Targets using Kinetically Controlled Biomolecular probes. The peer-reviewed article describes how Oblique Therapeutics´ Abiprot® technology can be used to discover and develop pharmacologically tailored antibodies against clinically important targets widely considered undruggable with antibodies. Two example antibodies are presented in the article. One is targeting hTRPV1, a clinically validated pain target. The second antibody is targeting KRAS, a highly relevant oncogene of critical importance in the etiology of many aggressive cancers (ex: pancreatic cancer). These early results have the potential to contribute to the development of much needed novel medicines across several therapeutic areas.

The global antibody therapeutics market is estimated to be worth close to 200 Bn USD in 2026 (MarketWatch). Surprisingly, only about 60 antibody medicines (based on target), are currently available to patients. Important target classes such as G-protein-coupled receptors and ion channels are particularly underexploited. In contrast, there are about 1,500 known drug targets of which several are clinically or human-genetics validated. Novel medicines addressing these drug targets would bring game changing benefits to large populations of patients suffering from uncurable, untreatable, and refractory disease. A staggering example is the need for new pain medications to replace the unsatisfactory and addictive morphine and opioid regimens. But here, and in many other therapeutic areas, current antibody technologies fail to deliver meaningful medicines.

The research article in Science Advances presents a new high-tech antibody discovery approach called Abiprot®, developed from nanoscience, computer technology, and proteomics. Abiprot® identifies antibody binding sites on native-state, disease-relevant proteins at high resolution. The platform was developed by Oblique Therapeutics with the intention to create new antibody medicines addressing large unmet medical needs across several therapeutic areas. As an example, the paper demonstrates the first-ever stimuli-selective monoclonal antibody targeting TRPV1, prospectively developed for replacing opioids in pain management. Another example includes novel mutant-selective KRAS antibodies providing means to target the most prevalent KRAS mutated cancers.

Prof. Owe Orwar, CEO Oblique Therapeutics: "The excitement and joy of science and technological advancement is to prove that what was previously impossible or highly improbable is now possible. Even more satisfying is if the impossible or improbable translate into a hope for creating higher societal values, better health, and improved quality of life for millions of patients. Our dream is that the published technology will widen the scope of antibody therapeutics for the benefit of patients and we are very excited about what the future will hold. Science Advances, is globally ranked as the number three scientific journal in multidisciplinary sciences only after Nature (Springer Nature Limited) and Science (AAAS). To be able to publish company-critical results in Science Advances is therefore a testimony to the importance and potential impact of the study results. Since the conclusion of the published study, we have made significant advancements, and improvements in our antibody programs. For the TRPV1 antibody program we have entered into an R&D collaboration and exclusive option to licence agreement with a top-20 pharma company. A key component in our vision is to be the first-ever pharma company to bring a pain antibody medicine targeting ion channels to market".

Boulder, Colo., USA: Volcanologists' ability to estimate eruption risks is largely reliant on knowing where pools of magma are stored, deep in the Earth's crust. But what happens if the magma can't be spotted?

Shane Rooyakkers, a postdoctoral scholar at GNS Science in New Zealand, grew up in the shadow of Mount Taranaki on the country's North Island, hiking on the island's many volcanoes. Today, his research is revealing hidden dangers that may have been beneath his feet all along.

A new study, published yesterday in Geology, explores a threat volcanologists discovered only recently: surprisingly shallow magma pools that are too small to be detected with common volcano monitoring equipment. Such a magma body was discovered in Iceland in 2009, when scientists with the Iceland Deep Drilling Project accidentally drilled directly into the molten rock two kilometers shallower than the depths where magma had been detected before. Magma began to creep up the drill hole, reaching several meters before it was stopped with cold drilling fluids. The study adds a critical piece of information to the puzzle by linking the hidden magma to a centuries-old eruption.

Rooyakkers, who is lead author on the study and completed the work while at McGill University, compared the composition of the quenched magma, which had formed smooth volcanic glass, with rocks from an eruption from that same volcano, Krafla, in 1724. Before his study, scientists thought the shallow magma they'd drilled into had been emplaced after a series of eruptions in the 1980s. No one expected the hidden magma to be related to the 1724 eruption, so what Rooyakkers found was a surprise.

"When we looked at the compositions from 1724, we found an almost perfect match for what was sampled during the drilling," Rooyakkers says. "That suggests that actually, this magma body has been there since 1724 and has previously been involved in an eruption at Krafla. So that raises the question of, 'Why did geophysics not pick it up?'"

The answer is size. Most magma detection relies on seismic imaging, like oil companies use to detect reserves deep under the seafloor. When there's an earthquake, the instruments detect how long it takes for sound waves to travel through the crust. Depending on the density of the rocks, the soundwaves return at different times. So if there's water, oil, or magma stored underground, the soundwaves should reflect it. But these hidden magma chambers are too small for these instruments, as well as other detection tools, to find.

"In traditional approaches to volcano monitoring, a lot of emphasis is placed on knowing where magma is and which magma bodies are active," says Rooyakkers. "Krafla is one of the most intensely-monitored and instrumented volcanoes in the world. They've thrown everything but the kitchen sink at it in terms of geophysics. And yet we still didn't know there was this rhyolitic magma body sitting at just two kilometers' depth that's capable of producing a hazardous eruption."

Studies like Rooyakkers' suggest that smaller, more widely-distributed magma bodies might be more common than previously thought, challenging the conventional view that most eruptions are fed from larger and deeper magma chambers that can be reliably detected.

Beyond not being able to monitor magmatic activity, planning for eruptions and estimating risks becomes more difficult if scientists suspect that hidden magma bodies could be present. For example, the Krafla volcano is usually dominated by basalt, a type of magma that tends to erupt passively (like the recent eruption at Fagradallsfjall in Iceland) rather than in an explosion. But the hidden magma body at Krafla is made of rhyolite, a magma type that often creates violent explosions when it erupts.

"So the concern in this case would be that you have a shallow rhyolitic magma that you don't know about, so it hasn't been considered in hazards planning," Rooyakkers explains. "If it's hit by new magma moving up, you might have a much more explosive eruption than you were anticipating."

As volcanologists become aware of the hazards associated with these shallow, distributed magma systems, they can work on improving monitoring, trying to capture these hidden magma pools. Covering a volcanic area in more detectors may be costly, but by improving the resolution of magma imaging, scientists may save a community or company far more than the cost of the study. The risks vary from volcano to volcano, but in general, as we learn more about these magma systems, scientists concerned with estimating hazards can be aware of the possibility of hidden magma.

Despite the risks he's uncovering, will Rooyakkers still live around volcanoes?

"Oh yeah, for sure," he says with a laugh. "I mean, there's risk with anything, isn't there?"

New Haven, Conn. -- It is well established that autism occurs much more frequently in boys than in girls, and that girls seem to have a greater resilience to developing the condition. It has been unclear, however, why that is.

In a new Yale-led study, researchers find that autism may develop in different regions of the brain in girls than boys and that girls with autism have a larger number of genetic mutations than boys, suggesting that they require a larger "genetic hit" to develop the disorder.

The findings appear in the April 16 edition of the journal Brain.

"We know so little about how autism unfolds in the brain," said Dr. Abha Gupta, assistant professor of pediatrics at the Yale School of Medicine and lead author of the study. "It's important to be able to land on spots where the dysfunction might arise because that gives us more traction into where in the brain to look. We need to be accurate about this."

Other members of the research team included Dr. Allison Jack, from George Mason University, and Dr. Kevin Pelphrey, from the University of Virginia's Brain Institute (and formerly of Yale School of Medicine).

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder that can interfere with the ability to interact, communicate, and learn. Rates have been steadily climbing -- ASD now impacts one in 54 children in the U.S. and boys are four times more likely than girls to receive a diagnosis. Even when controlling for important factors -- such as boys' tendency to "externalize" symptoms -- the discrepancy remains, said Gupta.

One of the reasons that researchers don't know more about why autism tends to affect boys more frequently than girls is the fact that most studies have been based on male-predominant samples, Gupta said.

For this study, the researchers studied a balanced sample of boys and girls ages 8 to 17 -- including 45 girls and 47 boys with autism, and 45 typically developing girls and 47 typically developing boys.

The researchers focused on how the brains of young people with and without ASD process human motion. Children with autism do not pick up on social cues easily, and have difficulty reading reactions. Past studies which relied largely on male subjects found that a part of the brain called the posterior superior temporal sulcus -- which is thought to be involved in processing auditory and visual stimuli -- is active in the social perception in typical kids but less responsive for those with ASD.

Using a brain imaging technology called functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers found that the accepted wisdom that the posterior superior temporal sulcus region constitutes a "neural signature" for autism was primarily true for boys. In neuroimaging done on girls, however, they found that a different region of the brain -- called the striatum, which controls cognition, reward, and coordinated movements -- is involved.

They also found girls with autism had a larger number of genetic mutations known as copy number variations in the striatum region. This suggests that girls require a larger number of genetic mutations in order to develop autism.

Genetic analysis allowed the researchers to probe even further into these differences. After examining data from the Simons Simplex Collection -- a genetic database drawn from more than 2,000 families with at least one child with ASD -- they again found that there was a larger number of copy number variations containing genes expressed in the same region of the brain -- the striatum -- among girls with autism.

Gupta says the findings provide a clue into what is driving the female autism neural profile and may also reveal what drives the "female protective effect" that makes girls less susceptible to developing autism.

"The hope, the vision, is that somehow we can manage these protective effects to understand better what makes some people more resilient to developing autism and leverage that somehow into potential targets for treatment," she said.

She added that her team will next do whole-genome sequencing on the subjects to look for additional patterns and study brain connectivity as it pertains to male and female autism.

It is always exciting to find new isotopes with extreme neutron/proton numbers in nuclear physics research. In the region of heavy nuclei, α-decay is one of the pervasive decay modes and plays an essential role in searching for new isotopes. However, even after about a century of studying α-decay, scientists still cannot perfectly describe how the α-particle is formed at the surface of the nucleus before its emission.

In the α-decay process, the α-particle can be regarded not only as two protons plus two neutrons, but also as two proton-neutron pairs. Although previous studies have proved the importance of the pairing forces between the identical nucleons, it remains unclear whether the strong proton-neutron interactions have an impact on α-decay properties, especially in the heavy nuclear region.

Published in Physical Review Letters as an Editors' Suggestion on April 14, a study has reported the observation of 214U, a new uranium (U) isotope, and has revealed for the first time the abnormal enhancement of α-particle clustering in uranium isotopes.

The study was led by scientists at the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Researchers carried out the experiments at the gas-filled recoil separator, Spectrometer for Heavy Atoms and Nuclear Structure (SHANS), at the Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou (HIRFL), China.

By employing the SHANS separator and the recoil-α correlation method, the researchers discovered the new isotope 214U, and precisely measured the α-decay properties of 214,216,218U.

It is well known that the interaction between valence protons and neutrons occupying orbits with the same number of nodes and orbital angular momenta leads to many exotic changes of closed shells. "The nuclei near the magic neutron number N = 126 provide an ideal place to probe how nuclear structure changes influence α-decay properties," said ZHANG Zhiyuan, a researcher at IMP.

The researchers extracted the α-decay reduced widths, which are related to the α-particle formation probability, for the even-even polonium-plutonium nuclei near the N = 126 shell closure, and discussed their systematic trends in terms of the NpNn scheme.

By combining the experimental data, "the behavior in the N

Meanwhile, it is notable that the reduced widths of 214,216U studied in this work are remarkably enhanced by a factor of two relative to the systematic trend for the N NpNn scheme.

This phenomenon might be caused by the strong monopole interaction between the valence 1f7/2 protons and 1f5/2 neutrons combined with increased occupancy of the 1f7/2 proton orbit, which was confirmed by the large-scale shell model calculations.

The results break new ground in an under-explored part of the nuclide chart, where the α- particle is preformed with higher probability and emitted at a faster decay rate.

"As a possible preview of future studies in this region, it is expected that this effect might become even stronger in the plutonium isotopes. Thus, it is extremely intriguing to extend the decay-width systematics to higher-Z nuclei," the study suggests.

To better understand the psychological and physical impact caused by the profound consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic - and also inform priorities for interventions and policy changes to address the mental health consequences of the pandemic -- researchers from the Center for the Developing Brain at the Child Mind Institute developed and deployed the CoRonavIruS health and Impact Survey (CRISIS). This questionnaire covered key topics relating to mental distress and resilience during the pandemic. According to a newly-published manuscript of the findings, perceived risk of COVID-19, prior mental health status, and lifestyle changes were key predictors of mental health during the pandemic in adults and children surveyed in the U.S. and U.K.

In the study, supported by the Morgan Stanley Alliance for Children's Mental Health, "The Coronavirus Health and Impact Survey (CRISIS) reveals reproducible correlates of pandemic?related mood states across the Atlantic," published in the journal Scientific Reports, research scientist Aki Nikolaidis and his colleagues detail how survey data was collected from April 7-17, 2020 among more than 5,900 participants: 1,527 U.S adults and 1,539 U.K. adults, as well as 1,121 U.S. parents and 1,459 U.K. parents reporting on their children. In addition to questions about prior mental health status and COVID worries - expected to be the strongest predictors of current mental health - the questionnaire also posed questions about lifestyle changes such as social distancing and financial insecurity, as well as key behaviors like sleep and exercise, to identify additional factors that impact mental well-being.

The researchers also explain how these results in the U.S. and U.K. - including participation and completion rates - demonstrate the feasibility, reliability, and validity of the CRISIS. CRISIS is currently being administered in more than eight countries, and translations have been developed in several languages.

"Our findings suggest that future research and intervention efforts may benefit from focusing on how to ameliorate the negative ramifications of social isolation and economic insecurity that we find related with the worst mental health outcomes in children and adults, in particular those already with a history of mental health problems," said Nikolaidis. "These results support prior work suggesting that individual differences in the stresses associated with changes in lifestyle are one of the most important correlates of the pandemic's effect on mood and anxiety."

"These survey findings help identify those who are at risk and lay the groundwork for targeted support to improve mental health outcomes," said Joan Steinberg, President of the Morgan Stanley Foundation and CEO of the Morgan Stanley Alliance for Children's Mental Health. "We are proud to support research that will identify changes in behavioral and mental health among children and adults as the pandemic continues. CRISIS, and the work of the Child Mind Institute, furthers Morgan Stanley's commitment to bring together nonprofit organizations to help deliver positive, tangible impact on the critical challenges of stress, anxiety, and depression in children, adolescents and young people."