Brain

A team of UBC Okanagan researchers has determined that the type of fats a mother consumes while breastfeeding can have long-term implications on her infant's gut health.

Dr. Deanna Gibson, a biochemistry researcher, along with Dr. Sanjoy Ghosh, who studies the biochemical aspects of dietary fats, teamed up with chemistry and molecular biology researcher Dr. Wesley Zandberg. The team, who conducts research in the Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science, explored the role of feeding dietary fat to gestating rodents to determine the generational effects of fat exposure on their offspring.

"The goal was to investigate how maternal dietary habits can impact an offspring's gut microbial communities and their associated sugar molecule patterns which can be important in immune responses to infectious disease," says Dr. Gibson, who studies gut health and immunity as well as causes of acute or chronic diseases like inflammatory bowel disease.

Their study suggests that the type of fat consumed during breastfeeding could differentially impact an infant's intestinal microbial communities, immune development and disease risk.

The three main classes of fatty acids include saturated (SFA), found in meats and dairy products, monounsaturated fats (MUFA), found in plant-based liquid oils, and polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), found in some nuts, fish and shellfish. PUFAs are further characterized as either n-3 PUFAs or n-6 PUFAs, based on the number and positions of double bonds in the acyl chain.

Previous research has determined both n-3 PUFAs and n-6 PUFAs can have a negative impact on intestinal infections such as Enteropathogenic E. coli, Clostridium difficile, salmonella and gastrointestinal illnesses from eating poorly prepared or undercooked food or drinking contaminated water. In contrast, diets rich in MUFAs and SFAs have been shown to be largely protective against these infections.

Dr. Gibson's latest research states the beneficial properties of milk fat, or saturated fats, during the pre-and postnatal period might improve protection against infectious intestinal disease during adulthood particularly when a source of n-3 PUFAs are combined with saturated fats.

"Our findings challenge current dietary recommendations and reveal that maternal intake of fat has transgenerational impacts on their offspring's susceptibility to intestinal infection, likely enabled through microbe-immune interactions," says Dr. Gibson.

Global consumption of unsaturated fatty acids has increased significantly between 1990 and 2010, she adds, while people are consuming lower amounts of saturated fats during pregnancy because of recommendations to reduce saturated fat intake.

"Although it has been known for decades that high-fat diets can directly alter inflammatory responses, recent studies have only just begun to appreciate how fatty acid classes may have discrete effects on inflammation, and can shift host responses to an infection," says Dr. Gibson.

Dietary fatty acids can impact inflammatory processes including defensive inflammatory responses following an intestinal infection. This can affect the severity of disease, making dietary fatty acids an important consideration in predicting disease risk, Dr. Gibson explains.

Researchers believe it's a combination of dietary fat-host interactions with the intestinal bacteriome that can determine the severity of these infections. The intestinal bacteriome, Dr. Gibson explains, is established during infancy and plays a critical role in aiding immune system maturation and providing a barrier against colonization with potential pathogens.

And Dr. Ghosh notes this latest research suggests current health guidelines should be reevaluated.

"Currently, Canadian dietary guidelines recommend nursing mothers replace foods rich in SFA with dietary PUFAs, with an emphasis on consuming n-6 and n-3 PUFAs," Dr. Ghosh says. "Given that PUFAs worsened disease outcomes in postnatal diet studies, in our views, these recommendations should be reconsidered."

While breast milk protein and carbohydrate concentrations remain relatively inert, fatty acid contents vary considerably and are influenced by maternal fat intake.

"Overall, we conclude that maternal consumption of various dietary fat types alters the establishment of their child's bacteriome and can have lasting consequences on their ability to respond to infection during adulthood," says Dr. Gibson. "At the same time, we show that maternal diets rich in SFA, provide a host-microbe relationship in their offspring that protects against disease."

It's important to understand that the intestinal bacteriome is established during infancy because it plays a critical role in aiding immune system maturation which can provide a barrier to potential pathogens, explains Dr. Zandberg. He also notes a healthy bacteriome is dependent on early-life nutrition.

"Sugars decorate important proteins in the gut," says Dr. Zandberg. "Their patterns are altered in the offspring due to the dietary choices of the mother during gestation and lactation. The change in patterns is associated with changes in the ability of the infant to fight off infectious disease in our model."

A key portion of MIT's campus overlaps with Kendall Square, the bustling area in East Cambridge where students, residents, and tech employees scurry around in between classes, meetings, and meals. Where are they all going? Is there a way to make sense of this daily flurry of foot traffic?

In fact, there is: MIT Associate Professor Andres Sevtsuk has made Kendall Square the basis of a newly published model of pedestrian movement that could help planners and developers better grasp the flow of foot traffic in all cities.

Sevtsuk's work emphasizes the functionality of a neighborhood's elements, above and beyond its physical form, making the model one that could be used from Cambridge to Cape Town.

"This model allows us to estimate how many pedestrian journeys are likely to occur," Sevtsuk says. "It also forecasts trip distribution. That depends directly on what's available around pedestrians and how many destinations they can access on foot."

Sevtsuk's model could help fill a void in urban planning. It is normal for a traffic impact assessment (TIA) report to be required for new developments, estimating automobile traffic that the project is likely to create. But there is no standard equivalent for pedestrian traffic, leaving most officials and planners who make decisions about urban projects with greater uncertainty.

In short, counting pedestrians can help pedestrians count.

"There's this whole history of treating [automobile] traffic numerically," says Sevtsuk, "Every road investment is accompanied by a cost-benefit analysis. But those benefits are geared to moving around in cars. The people around the table who have numbers are traffic engineers. Cities have great data on vehicular networks, but we know very little about sidewalks in most cities."

The paper presenting the model, "Estimating Pedestrian Flows on Street Networks," appears in the Journal of the American Planning Association. Sevtsuk, the sole author, is the Charles and Ann Spaulding Career Development Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning at MIT, and director of MIT's City Form Lab.

Bustling Main Street

The model itself draws upon network analysis, regarding most pedestrian trips as functional journeys between various origins and destinations: homes, offices, subway stops, restaurants, and other amenities. Sevtsuk placed a maximum radius on most trips and allowed for a "detour ratio" of up to 15 percent, meaning that pedestrian journeys in the model can go farther than the shortest path to get from one point to another.

To acquire data for the model, Sevtsuk obtained property-level data from the city and had observers count pedestrians on 60 street segments in Kendall Square for calibration purposes (before the Covid-19 pandemic) during two times of the day: a midday period from 12 to 2 p.m. and an evening rush-hour period from 4 to 8 p.m.

Among other things, Sevtsuk and his research assistants found that the average of these Kendall Square street segments had 872 pedestrians on it during the midday period, and 1,711 during the evening time slot. Kendall Square's Main Street -- which features a subway station, many MIT buildings, and offices for Google and Amazon, among other firms -- averaged a neighborhood-high 11,311 pedestrian trips during the four-hour evening period.

"We have to have real-world data to calibrate the model, and that's what puts us into a ballpark of accurate estimates on all streets," Sevtsuk says. "The representative sample only has to occur on some streets. But once it's calibrated on those 60 streets, the estimates are good to go for a whole lot more streets -- hundreds or thousands of streets can be estimated."

A tool for the drawing board, too

As Sevtsuk emphasizes, the model could be applied to almost any urban setting, and not just locations physically resembling Kendall Square. Given destinations to walk to and decent street conditions to connect them, people will walk around all kinds of neighborhoods.

"The estimates are not just comparatives from some similar places," Sevtsuk says. "They are directly estimated trips from specific buildings to other specific buildings nearby, depending on their uses."

Granted, the study did generate a number of particular observations about Kendall Square, where about 40 percent of workers and students appear to be walking to a lunch venue every day.

But more broadly, Sevtsuk emphasizes, the model could also be integrated into urban planning to help shape developments still on the drawing board in multiple ways -- to estimate pedestrian flows, to help with zoning decisions, and to make sure retail frontages are in places with significant pedestrian flow, among other things.

"What's particularly useful is it can be applied not just to existing areas like Kendall, but also newly planned places," Sevtsuk notes. "Even if we were planning a new area, just by knowing what the built configuration of the future development will be, and what land uses it may contain, we can have an educated forecast about what the pedestrian flows will look like."

A new scientific discovery in Australia by Flinders University has recorded for the first time how ghost currents and sediments can 'undo' the force of gravity.

The new theory, just published in the Journal of Marine Systems, helps explain obscure events in which suspended sediment particles mysteriously move upward, not downward, on the slope of submarine canyons of the deep sea.
While this activity seems to contradict the laws of gravity, Flinders University physical oceanographer Associate Professor Jochen Kaempf has found an answer, devising the first scientific explanation of the observed upslope sediment transport.

"To put it simply, the vehicle of this transport are currents that, while carrying sediments around and keeping them in suspension, leave the ambient seawater and its dissolved properties almost unchanged," he explains after studying the phenomena for two years.

"Such current, that I call ghost currents, adhere to the laws of physics and can move sediment particles over vast distances relative to the ambient seawater, also in directions opposite to the buoyancy force."

Associate Professor Kaempf believes that this astonishing new finding constitutes a breakthrough in the understanding of biogeochemical cycles at continental margins.

Suspended sediment particles in oceans are up to three times heavier than seawater of the same volume.

Hence, due to Archimedes law of buoyancy, which is an extension of Newton's law of gravity, sediment particles generally sink downward in the oceans, he says.

However, on continental margins, sediment particles can also form turbidity currents, which are rapid downslope flows of sediment-water mixtures on continental margins.

"My study may also help to better understand the feeding behaviour of suspension feeders including baleen whales and krill that often feed on particulate organic matter near the head of submarine canyons."

In 2018, when Professor Laurie Santos introduced her course "Psychology and the Good Life," a class on the science of happiness, it became the most popular in the history of Yale, attracting more than 1,200 undergraduate enrollees that first semester. An online course based on those teachings became a global phenomenon. By latest count, 3.38 million people have enrolled to take the free Coursera.org course, called "The Science of Well Being."

But the popularity of the course posed an interesting question. Does taking the course and participating in homework assignments -- which include nurturing social connections, compiling a gratitude list, and meditation -- really help improve a sense of well-being?

The answer is yes, according to two new studies that measured the psychological impact on individuals who took Santos's or a similar course. The findings suggest that free online courses that teach principles of positive psychology can enrich the lives of millions of people.

In the latest study, published April 14 in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Yale found that people who took the online "Science of Well Being" course reported a greater sense of well-being than those enrolled in another Yale Coursera course, "Introduction to Psychology." Although learners in both classes said they experienced significant improvement in their well-being after taking the courses, those who took the "Science of Well-Being" course reported greater mental health benefits than those learning about the basics of psychology.

Unlike the psychology course, "The Science of Well Being" requires participants to do exercises known to improve psychological health, such as improving sleep patterns, developing exercise routines, and practicing meditation, the authors say. Before and after taking the course, participants answered questions designed to measure factors related to psychological health such as positive emotions, engagement, and strength of relationships.

"Knowledge is great but it isn't enough. You also have to do the work," said lead author David Yaden, research fellow in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins.

A similar study in Health Psychology Open, conducted by researchers at Yale and the University of Bristol, surveyed people who took either a live or an online credit-bearing course based on Santos's original class and found similar psychological benefits for enrollees.

Yaden stressed, however, that the classes are not a substitute for professional treatment for those who suffer from diagnosed mental illness. "These courses are not a panacea or replacement for psychotherapy or medication," he said.

However, both Yaden and Santos, who co-authored the study, say the findings show that massive open online courses can provide at least modest value to millions of people at no cost.

"We wanted to know if we could scale these benefits and we can," Santos said. "Even bringing a small mental health benefit to millions of people can have a huge value."

BUFFALO, N.Y. - Mindfulness is big business. Downloads of mindfulness apps generate billions of dollars annually in the U.S., and their popularity continues to rise. In addition to what individual practitioners might have on their phones, schools and prisons along with 1 in 5 employers currently offer some form of mindfulness training.

Mindfulness and meditation are associated with reducing stress and anxiety, while increasing emotional well-being. Plenty of scholarship supports these benefits. But how does mindfulness affect the range of human behaviors -- so-called prosocial behaviors -- that can potentially help or benefit other people? What happens when the research looks outwardly at social effects of mindfulness rather than inwardly at its personal effects?

It's within the area of prosocial behaviors that a new paper by University at Buffalo researchers demonstrates the surprising downsides of mindfulness, while offering easy ways to minimize those consequences -- both of which have practical implications for mindfulness training.

"Mindfulness can make you selfish," says Michael Poulin, PhD, an associate professor of psychology in the UB College of Arts and Sciences and the paper's lead author. "It's a qualified fact, but it's also accurate.

"Mindfulness increased prosocial actions for people who tend to view themselves as more interdependent. However, for people who tend to view themselves as more independent, mindfulness actually decreased prosocial behavior."

The results sound contradictory given the pop culture toehold of mindfulness as an unequivocal positive mental state. But the message here isn't one that dismantles the effectiveness of mindfulness.

"That would be an oversimplification," says Poulin, an expert in stress, coping and prosocial engagement. "Research suggests that mindfulness works, but this study shows that it's a tool, not a prescription, which requires more than a plug-and-play approach if practitioners are to avoid its potential pitfalls."

The findings will appear in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science.

Poulin says independent versus interdependent mindsets represent an overarching theme in social psychology. Some people think of themselves in singular or independent terms: "I do this." While others think of themselves in plural or interdependent terms: "We do this."

There are also cultural differences layered on top of these perspectives. People in Western nations most often think of themselves as independent, whereas people in East Asian countries more often think of themselves as interdependent. Mindfulness practices originated in East Asian countries, and Poulin speculates that mindfulness may be more clearly prosocial in those contexts. Practicing mindfulness in Western countries removes that context.

"Despite these individual and cultural differences, there is also variability within each person, and any individual at different points in time can think of themselves either way, in singular or plural terms," says Poulin.

The researchers, which included Shira Gabriel, PhD, a UB associate professor of psychology, C. Dale Morrison and Esha Naidu, both UB graduate students, and Lauren M. Ministero, PhD, a UB graduate student at the time of the research who is now a senior behavioral scientist at the MITRE Corporation, used a two-experiment series for their study.

First, they measured 366 participants' characteristic levels of independence versus interdependence, before providing mindfulness instruction or a mind wandering exercise to the control group. Before leaving, participants were told about volunteer opportunities stuffing envelopes for a charitable organization.

In this experiment, mindfulness led to decreased prosocial behavior among those who tended to be independent.

In the next experiment, instead of having a trait simply measured, 325 participants were encouraged to lean one way or the other by engaging in a brief but effective exercise that tends to make people think of themselves in independent or interdependent terms.

The mindfulness training and control procedures were the same as the first experiment, but in this case, participants afterwards were asked if they would sign up to chat online with potential donors to help raise money for a charitable organization.

Mindfulness made those primed for independence 33% less likely to volunteer, but it led to a 40% increase in the likelihood of volunteering to the same organization among those primed for interdependence. The results suggest that pairing mindfulness with instructions explaining how to make people think of themselves in terms of their relationships and communities as they're engaging in mindfulness exercises may allow them to see both positive personal and social outcomes.

"We have to think about how to get the most out of mindfulness," Poulin says. "We have to know how to use the tool."

Light can be used to operate quantum information processing systems, e.g. quantum computers, quickly and efficiently. Researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Chimie ParisTech/CNRS have now significantly advanced the development of molecule-based materials suitable for use as light-addressable fundamental quantum units. As they report in the journal Nature Communications, they have demonstrated for the first time the possibility of addressing nuclear spin levels of a molecular complex of europium(III) rare-earth ions with light. (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22383-x)

Whether in drug development, communication, or for climate forecasts: Processing information quickly and efficiently is crucial in many areas. It is currently done using digital computers, which work with so-called bits. The state of a bit is either 0 or 1 - there is nothing in between. This severely limits the performance of digital computers, and it is becoming increasingly difficult and time-consuming to handle complex problems related to real-world tasks. Quantum computers, on the other hand, use quantum bits to process information. A quantum bit (qubit) can be in many different states between 0 and 1 simultaneously due to a special quantum mechanical property referred to as quantum superposition. This makes it possible to process data in parallel, which increases the computing power of quantum computers exponentially compared to digital computers.

Qubit Superposition States Are Required to Persist Long Enough

"In order to develop practically applicable quantum computers, the superposition states of a qubit should persist for a sufficiently long time. Researchers speak of 'coherence lifetime'," explains Professor Mario Ruben, head of the Molecular Materials research group at KIT's Institute of Nanotechnology (INT). "However, the superposition states of a qubit are fragile and are disturbed by fluctuations in the environment, which leads to decoherence, i.e. shortening of the coherence lifetime." To preserve the superposition state long enough for computational operations, isolating a qubit from the noisy environment is conceivable. Nuclear spin levels in molecules can be used to create superposition states with long coherence lifetimes because nuclear spins are weakly coupled to the environment, protecting the superposition states of a qubit from disturbing external influences.

Molecules Are Ideally Suited As Qubit Systems

One single qubit, however, is not enough to build a quantum computer. Many qubits to be organized and addressed are required. Molecules represent ideal qubit systems as they can be arranged in sufficiently large numbers as identical scalable units and can be addressed with light to perform qubit operations. In addition, the physical properties of molecules, such as emission and/or magnetic properties, can be tailored by changing their structures using chemical design principles. In their paper now published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers led by Professor Mario Ruben at KIT's IQMT and Strasbourg´s European Center for Quantum Sciences - CESQ and Dr. Philippe Goldner at École nationale supérieure de chimie de Paris (Chimie ParisTech/CNRS) present a nuclear-spin-containing dimeric europium(III) molecule as light-addressable qubit.

The molecule, which belongs to the rare earth metals, is designed to exhibit luminescence, i.e., a europium(III)-centered sensitized emission, when excited by ultraviolet light-absorbing ligands surrounding the center. After light absorption, the ligands transfer the light energy to the europium(III) center, thereby exciting it. Relaxation of the excited center to the ground state leads to light emission. The whole process is referred to as sensitized luminescence. Spectral hole burning - special experiments with lasers - detect the polarization of the nuclear spin levels, indicating the generation of a efficient light-nuclear spin interface. The latter enables the generation of light-addressable hyperfine qubits based on nuclear spin levels. "By demonstrating for the first time light-induced spin polarization in the europium(III) molecule, we have succeeded in taking a promising step towards the development of quantum computing architectures based on rare-earth ion-containing molecules," explains Dr. Philippe Goldner. (or)

The time children and adolescents spend on screen time entertainment -computers, mobile phones, television and video games- adversely affects their eating habits. This is the main conclusion drawn from a research carried out by EpiPHAAN (Epidemiology, Physical Activity, Accelerometry and Nutrition) research group of the University of Malaga, which further establishes that parents' education level is also associated with the adherence to the Mediterranean diet.

This research was conducted within the PASOS Study -Physical Activity, Sedentarism, lifestyles and Obesity in Spanish youth- of Gasol Foundation, which analyzed more than 3800 children and adolescents, aged 8 to 16, from 245 schools from all over Spain, in order to assess the level of physical activity, sedentarism, lifestyles and obesity in Spanish youth and their families.

"The Mediterranean diet is one of the most complete, balanced and healthy diets, as it prevents obesity and represents a life assurance against cardiovascular diseases", explains Julia Wärnberg, researcher of the University of Malaga, Nutrition expert, and main author of this study, which has been published in Journal of Clinical Medicine.

This study evidences that in children and adolescents a greater amount of screen time is associated with a lower consumption of fruit, vegetables, legumes, fish and nuts -the foundations of the Mediterranean diet- and a greater consumption of sweets, candies and fast food.

According to the experts, it is important for children and adolescents to follow the Mediterranean diet to maintain good eating habits, reduce the probability of childhood and adolescent obesity and enhance their health in adulthood. "It is essential to promote this dietary pattern, as well as its related lifestyle habits, such as physical activity and reduced sedentary behavior", remarks the researcher of the UMA.

Likewise, the scientists evidenced that low parent education level influences the adoption of worse lifestyles among children and adolescents, including poor diets, as well as little knowledge of nutrition and awareness about nutritional aspects.

'Screen Time and Parents' Education Level Are Associated with Poor Adherence to the Mediterranean Diet in Spanish Children and Adolescents: The PASOS Study' was conducted by 28 researchers of PASOS from more than ten R&D&I groups. The scientists of the UMA Javier Barón, Juan Carlos Benavente and Napoleón Pérez Farinós are other members of EpiPHAAN who authored this study.

Diapause is a phenomenon in which animals and insects foresee changes in the environment and actively reduce metabolism, or halt regular differentiation and development. It is an adaptation strategy for adverse environments such as surviving winters, but also to encourage uniform growth of the generational group. By knocking out genes that allow the silkworm to detect temperature, researchers at Shinshu University et al. found that the silk moth diapause changes from temperature to photoperiod, or day length. This is not only valuable as an elucidation of the molecular mechanism in the environmental response mechanism of organisms such as insects, but also a very important finding in exploring the process of domestication of silk moths. The production of dormant and non-diapausing eggs by artificially adjusting the environmental temperature has been widely used in the sericulture industry for more than 100 years.

In the Kosetsu type of the domesticated silk moth, adult females lay dormant eggs when exposed to 25 ° C and non-diapausing eggs when exposed to 15 ° C, respectively during their egg stage. It had been previously known that the temperature sensor, TRPA1, a type of temperature-sensitive protein found in humans and insects and detects 25 ° C at the embryo stage, and as a result, a dormancy-inducing peptide hormone DH, is released. This hormone is produced in the cells of the subesophageal ganglion which is then released by a command from the brain to lay a dormant egg.

On the other hand, Bombyx mandarina, believed to be the ancestral species of the domesticated silk moth, Bombyx mori, which was domesticated between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago still inhabit the outdoor mulberry fields in East Asia and the Japanese archipelago, also diapauses during the egg period, but the temperature conditions during the embryonic stage of the mother are not related to diapause, and the photoperiod of the larval stage is followed. They lay non-diapause eggs under long-day conditions and dormant eggs under short-day conditions.

Professor Kunihiro Shiomi of the Faculty of Textile Science and Technology of Shinshu University and his research group found that the egg diapause of Bombyx mandarina is also induced by DH. The group also revealed that the temperature sensor TRPA1 that detects 25 ° C are in the eggs of Bombyx mandarina.

How are the mechanisms for inducing dormancy between domesticated silk moths and Bombyx mandarina silkworms different? To elucidate it, Professor Shiomi created the KO lineage of her TRPA1 on the silk moth. Through this the group found that diapause is not determined by the temperature of the embryonic stage as in the case of Kosetsu silk moth without KO, but by the day length of the larval stage as in the case of Bombyx mandarina.

Artificial environmental temperature adjustment is easier than adjusting day length. Therefore, subspecies such as the Kosetsu-type, whose dormancy is determined by temperature, may have spread in the sericulture field during the process of artificial selection of domestication from Bombyx mandarina to silk moth.

So, how different are the mechanisms that induce dormancy different between domesticated silk moths and Bombyx mandarina? To investigate this, the group used genome editing technology (TALEN system) to create a KO strain of silk moth temperature sensors. It is thought that this type cannot detect temperature at the embryonic stage, which is involved in diapause induction, but it was found that the diapause is determined by the larval day length condition, similar to that of Bombyx mandarina. In other words, diapaused eggs were laid under short-day conditions, and non-diapause eggs were laid under long-day conditions. Perhaps the wild-type Kosetsu has a strong link to temperature information and diapause induction, but in the KO-type this link is broken, similar to the ancestral silk moth. It is speculated that a photoperiod-dependent diapause determination mechanism happens during the larval stage. In addition, lineages that determine dormancy depending on temperature, such as the Kosetsu type, are easier to control artificially through temperature than the day length control in the process of domestication of silk moths from Bombyx mandarina. It is thought that it may have spread within the silk moth group during the selection process.

University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) researchers have shown that psilocybin--the active chemical in "magic mushrooms"-- still works its antidepressant-like actions, at least in mice, even when the psychedelic experience is blocked. The new findings suggest that psychedelic drugs work in multiple ways in the brain and it may be possible to deliver the fast-acting antidepressant therapeutic benefit without requiring daylong guided therapy sessions. A version of the drug without, or with less of, the psychedelic effects could loosen restrictions on who could receive the therapy, and lower costs, making the benefits of psilocybin more available to more people in need.

In all clinical trials performed to date, the person treated with psilocybin remains under the care of a guide, who keeps the person calm and reassures them during their daylong experience. This can include hallucinations, altered perception of time and space, and intense emotional and spiritual encounters.

Researchers in the field have long attributed psilocybin's effectiveness to the intense psychedelic experience.

"We do not understand the mechanisms that underlie the antidepressant actions of psilocybin and the role that the profound psychedelic experience during these sessions plays in the therapeutic benefits," says Scott Thompson, Ph.D., Professor and Chair, Department of Physiology at UMSOM and senior author of the study. "The psychedelic experience is incredibly powerful and can be life-changing, but that could be too much for some people or not appropriate."

Several barriers prevent the wide-spread use of psychedelic compounds. For example, there is fear that the psychedelic experience may promote psychosis in people who are predisposed to severe mental disorders, like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, so the clinical therapy sessions performed to-date have been limited to a highly selected screened group without a family history of these disorders.

Dr. Thompson adds that there may also be an equity issue because not everyone can take several days off work to prepare and engage in the experience. The costs of staffing a facility with at least one trained guide per treated person per day and a private space may also be prohibitive to all but a few. He says it is conceivable that a depression treatment derived from psilocybin could be developed without the psychedelic effects so people can take it safely at home without requiring a full day in a care facility.

For their study, led by UMSOM MD/PhD student Natalie Hesselgrave, the team used a mouse model of depression in which mice were stressed for several hours a day over 2-3 weeks. Because researchers cannot measure mouse moods, they measure their ability to work for rewards, such as choosing to drink sugar water over plain water. People suffering from depression lose the feeling of pleasure for rewarding events. Similarly, stressed mice no longer preferred sugar water over plain water. However, 24 hours after a dose of psilocybin, the stressed mice regained their preference for the sugar water, demonstrating that the drug restored the mice's pleasure response.

Psilocybin exerts its effects in people by binding to and turning on receptors for the chemical messenger serotonin. One of these receptors, the serotonin 2A receptor, is known to be responsible for the psychedelic response. To see if the psychedelic effects of psilocybin were needed for the anti-depressive benefits, the researchers treated the stressed mice with psilocybin together with a drug, ketanserin, which binds to the serotonin 2A receptor and keeps it from being turned on. The researchers found that the stressed mice regained their preference for the sugar water in response to psilocybin, even without the activation of the psychedelic receptor.

"These findings show that activation of the receptor causing the psychedelic effect isn't absolutely required for the antidepressant benefits, at least in mice," says Dr. Thompson, "but the same experiment needs to be performed in depressed human subjects." He says his team plans to investigate which of the 13 other serotonin receptors are the ones responsible for the antidepressant actions.

"This new study has interesting implications, and shows that more basic research is needed in animals to reveal the mechanisms for how these drugs work, so that treatments for these devastating disorders can be developed" says Albert E. Reece, MD, PhD, MBA, Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, University of Maryland Baltimore, and the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor and Dean, University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Study: "Untested Admissions: Examining Changes in Application Behaviors and Student Demographics Under Test-Optional Policies"
Author: Christopher Bennett (Vanderbilt University)

This study was published today in American Educational Research Journal.

Key Findings:

In undergraduate admissions, the adoption of test-optional policies at selective private institutions was linked to a 3-4 percent increase in enrollment of Pell Grant recipients, a 10-12 percent increase in enrollment of first-time Black, Latinx, and Native students, and a 6-8 percent increase in enrollment of first-time students who were women.

However, these gains translate into only a 1 percentage point increase in the share of the student body receiving Pell Grants, a 1 percentage point increase of the share of incoming students who were from underrepresented racially/ethnically minoritized backgrounds (i.e., Black, Latinx, and Native students), and a 4 percentage point increase in the share of incoming students who were women.

Details:

In recent decades, a growing number and variety of institutions have turned to test-optional admissions policies (which enable students to apply without submitting ACT or SAT scores), frequently citing a goal of boosting the diversity of their student populations.

By the 2010s, what originated as a niche practice among liberal arts colleges had expanded to an increasingly mainstream approach to admissions at institutions that varied substantially in terms of selectivity and mission. These policies attracted even more extensive attention following the implementation of a test-optional policy at the University of Chicago in 2018. This study offers some of the earliest evidence regarding test-optional policies at this much wider pool of adopters.

This study examined a diverse set of selective private institutions that adopted test-optional undergraduate admissions policies to determine the effect of the policies on application behaviors and student demographics.

Using an institution-level dataset assembled from multiple sources, this study compares nearly 100 selective private institutions that implemented test-optional policies between 2005-06 and 2015-16 (a treated group of earlier-adopters) to more than 100 others that subsequently enacted or announced test-optional policies by December 2019 (a comparison group of later-adopters).

The author found that adoption of test-optional policies was linked to a 3-4 percent increase in enrollment of Pell Grant recipients, a 10-12 percent increase in enrollment of first-time students from underrepresented racial/ethnic backgrounds, and a 6-8 percent increase in enrollment of first-time students who were women. These patterns were generally similar for both the more selective and less selective institutions examined.

There were no detectable changes in the enrollment of White and Asian students after test-optional policies went into effect.

Although the enrollment increases among Pell Grant recipients and underrepresented racially/ethnically minoritized students were somewhat substantial in relative terms (3-4 percent and 10-12 percent, respectively), such effects would translate into only a 1 percentage point increase for those groups as a share of the student body.

"While demonstrating the potential of test-optional policies to help improve college access, these findings suggest that test-optional policies alone may be insufficient to achieve a truly transformative change in the representation of underserved students at selective private institutions," said author Chris Bennett, a doctoral candidate in education policy at Vanderbilt University. "For institutions seeking dramatic shifts in the student populations they serve, thoughtfully designed test-optional policies would likely need to represent one facet of a more comprehensive plan."

"Given that students from low-income backgrounds are among those whose standardized test scores are systematically lower than their other academic performance measures, they would appear to be some of the prime candidates to benefit from test-optional policies, but that didn't appear to happen to a large degree," said Bennett.

"That may be because many of them were not aware of the option or because their wealthier peers strategically used these policies in a way that offset the benefit to students from low-income backgrounds," Bennett said.

Due to the share of women already enrolled at the private institutions examined in the study, the absolute effects on enrollment trends for women--an increase of 4 percentage points in their share--exceeded the shifts for both Pell Grant recipients and underrepresented racially/ethnically minoritized students.

The author noted that with women accounting for the majority of students at adopting institutions, increases in the enrollment of women could be an unintended consequence of test-optional policies.

The author did not find evidence of changes in overall application volume or yield rate. Some evidence suggested that there may have been early gains in applications that quickly subsided.

The author noted that it is especially difficult to anticipate the likely effects of the test-optional policies that became a practical necessity for hundreds of additional institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic, due in part to a substantially diminished number of standardized tests completed during the pandemic, a dramatic rise in pass/failing grading, and the abrupt nature of these pandemic-related shifts to test-optional policies.

PRINCETON, N.J.--Increasing diversity remains a key priority at universities, especially in the wake of mass demonstrations in support of racial equality in 2020 following the death of George Floyd. Many universities are guided by the motivation that diversity enhances student learning, a rationale supported by the U.S. Supreme Court.

This approach, however, is a view preferred by white and not Black Americans, and it also aligns with better relative outcomes for white Americans, according to a paper published by Princeton University researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Across eight studies including 1,200 participants, the researchers looked at two different approaches to diversity: an "instrumental rationale," which asserts that including minority perspectives provides educational benefits; and a "moral rationale," which, often invoking a legacy of racial inequality, argues that people from all backgrounds deserve access to a quality education.

They found that both university admissions staff and parents of Black students expected Black students to be less happy and healthy and -- to fare worse academically -- at universities that used an instrumental approach to diversity. Graduation rates for Black students were lower the more that universities took such an approach.

The findings suggest that universities seeking more racially equitable outcomes should consider the motivations shaping their approach to diversity. Schools aiming for inclusion of all students may need to embrace alternative or more nuanced reasons for valuing diversity, rather than solely championing the benefits diversity can provide. This could include a more justice-centered approach to diversity.

"Though there has been active debate about whether, how, and why to value diversity in institutions of higher education in this country for several decades, as far as we know our study is the first to quantify how different reasons for valuing diversity might differentially impact Black and white students," said lead author Jordan Starck, who is pursuing his Ph.D. in Psychology and Social Policy at Princeton University.

"Diversity and inclusion efforts seem to gain traction when they serve to advance majority group interests. Students, universities, and policymakers should consider cultivating a culture that values diversity for a more balanced mix of reasons," said Stacey Sinclair, professor of psychology and public affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.

Sinclair and Starck conducted the study with Nicole Shelton, Stuart Professor of Psychology at Princeton.

In the first four studies, the researchers investigated whether the instrumental rationale -- a common approach by national universities -- lined up with the preferences of white and Black people.

Participants were asked to imagine themselves as university students and then read and react to multiple diversity statements. An instrumental statement conveyed, for example, that "diversity is about enriching students' intellectual experience and preparing them to excel," while a moral statement would say, "diversity is about justice and ensuring that people from different backgrounds have access to an excellent education."

In the next two studies, questionnaires were employed on physical college campuses as well as at college fairs. The first set of questionnaires targeted visiting families of first-year students or newly admitted students to campus. The second set was distributed to university personnel working at a college fair. Both were asked to read about two universities that employed either an instrumental or moral diversity rationale and predict student outcomes.

Next, the researchers visited 188 university websites (excluding historically Black colleges and universities) and coded diversity statements to determine whether they conveyed moral or instrumental rationales. The researchers paired this data with both the admissions officers' questionnaires and data related to students' graduation rates, which they compiled from several sources including the National Center for Education Statistics.

The first several studies revealed the most significant finding: The most common approach to diversity in higher education ironically reflects the preferences of, and advances the expected outcomes, of white Americans. Overall, white participants felt they would receive more educational value from, belong more at, and have their social identities threatened less at universities employing the instrumental approach. In contrast, Black participants preferred and felt they would be more successful at morally motivated universities.

This finding also held true in the questionnaire-related studies. White parents or caregivers felt their children would do better at an instrumentally motivated university over the morally motivated one, while Black parents or caregivers expected their children to be happier and healthier at morally motivated universities. Admissions officers also predicted that white prospective students would succeed at instrumentally focused schools, while Black students would fare better at universities employing a morally motivated approach to diversity.

When looking across university diversity statements, the researchers found that the instrumental approach was used more frequently. When linking this with graduation data, they saw that instrumental approaches also corresponded with worse graduation rates for Black students, especially when universities' use of moral rationales was low. A similar pattern was found among Hispanic students' graduation rates, as well.

The researchers highlighted a few caveats of the study. While the diversity statements correspond with institutional commitments to diversity, they are unlikely to be the key reason behind these disparate outcomes. They simply shape and reflect organizational cultures and norms. Institutional decision-making, interpersonal interactions, and individual behaviors and attitudes also play a role in these educational outcomes and preferences.

Researchers have used a technique similar to MRI to follow the movement of individual atoms in real time as they cluster together to form two-dimensional materials, which are a single atomic layer thick.

The results, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, could be used to design new types of materials and quantum technology devices. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, captured the movement of the atoms at speeds that are eight orders of magnitude too fast for conventional microscopes.

Two-dimensional materials, such as graphene, have the potential to improve the performance of existing and new devices, due to their unique properties, such as outstanding conductivity and strength. Two-dimensional materials have a wide range of potential applications, from bio-sensing and drug delivery to quantum information and quantum computing. However, in order for two-dimensional materials to reach their full potential, their properties need to be fine-tuned through a controlled growth process.

These materials normally form as atoms 'jump' onto a supporting substrate until they attach to a growing cluster. Being able to monitor this process gives scientists much greater control over the finished materials. However, for most materials, this process happens so quickly and at such high temperatures that it can only be followed using snapshots of a frozen surface, capturing a single moment rather than the whole process.

Now, researchers from the University of Cambridge have followed the entire process in real time, at comparable temperatures to those used in industry.

The researchers used a technique known as 'helium spin-echo', which has been developed in Cambridge over the last 15 years. The technique has similarities to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), but uses a beam of helium atoms to 'illuminate' a target surface, similar to light sources in everyday microscopes.

"Using this technique, we can do MRI-like experiments on the fly as the atoms scatter," said Dr Nadav Avidor from Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, the paper's senior author. "If you think of a light source that shines photons on a sample, as those photons come back to your eye, you can see what happens in the sample."

Instead of photons however, Avidor and his colleagues use helium atoms to observe what happens on the surface of the sample. The interaction of the helium with atoms at the surface allows the motion of the surface species to be inferred.

Using a test sample of oxygen atoms moving on the surface of ruthenium metal, the researchers recorded the spontaneous breaking and formation of oxygen clusters, just a few atoms in size, and the atoms that quickly diffuse between the clusters.

"This technique isn't a new one, but it's never been used in this way, to measure the growth of a two-dimensional material," said Avidor. "If you look back on the history of spectroscopy, light-based probes revolutionised how we see the world, and the next step - electron-based probes - allowed us to see even more.

"We're now going another step beyond that, to atom-based probes, allowing us to observe more atomic scale phenomena. Besides its usefulness in the design and manufacture of future materials and devices, I'm excited to find out what else we'll be able to see."

Blood taken from a small group of children before the COVID-19 pandemic contains memory B cells that bind SARS-CoV-2 and weakly cross-react with other coronaviruses, a new study finds, while adult blood and tissue showed few such cells. "Further study of the role of cross-reactive memory B cell populations... will be important for ongoing improvement of vaccines to SARS-CoV-2, its viral variants, and other pathogens," the authors say. As the COVID-19 pandemic has continued, children have often exhibited faster viral clearance and lower viral antigen loads than adults; whether B cell repertoires against SARS-CoV-2 (and other pathogens) differ between children and adults, contributing to differential responses, remains unknown. More broadly, it is still unclear how B cell memory to different antigens distributes in human tissues and changes during an individual's lifespan. To study this, Fan Yang et al. analyzed blood samples taken from pre-pandemic children and pre-pandemic adults. They also studied blood and tissue samples from deceased organ donors. The authors analyzed B cell receptor (BCR) repertoires - which reveal the antigen a B cell targets - specific to six common pathogens as well as two viruses the participants had not encountered before: Ebola virus and SARS-CoV-2. In comparison to adults, pre-pandemic children not only had higher frequencies of convergent (shared) B cell clones in their blood for pathogens they have encountered, but also higher frequencies of class-switched convergent B cell clones against SARS-CoV-2 and its viral variants. Adult blood and tissues showed few such clones. Notably, neither children nor adults had many BCRs for Ebola virus, highlighting the contrast to SARS-CoV-2 and other human coronaviruses commonly encountered prior to the current pandemic. "We hypothesize that previous [coronavirus] exposures may stimulate cross-reactive memory, and that such clonal responses may have their highest frequencies in childhood," the authors say. The results highlight the prominence of early childhood B cell clonal expansions and cross-reactivity for future responses to novel pathogens.

Just over half of surveyed Ontario high schools reported providing CPR and AED training to students despite being mandated by the province to provide training for the lifesaving technique, according to a new study by Unity Health Toronto researchers.

The study, published Monday April 12, in CJC Open, surveyed elementary and high schools from 15 different school boards across Ontario to understand the scope of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) and Automated External Defibrillator (AED) training, which are mandated in the Ontario Grade 9 Health and Physical Education Curriculum. Researchers from St. Michael's Hospital of Unity Health Toronto worked with 120 elementary, 25 middle and 60 high schools to complete a web-based survey to understand the scope of this training.

They found that most surveyed schools have an AED installed and 60% offer CPR training to staff. But despite the government mandated curriculum, only 56% of high schools offer this lifesaving training to students. Commonly reported barriers included lack of funding, time and availability.

"Clearly legislation alone is not enough to guarantee successful implementation of this lifesaving training in schools" the authors wrote. "We need additional strategies, such as raising awareness of the mandated legislation, providing funding and easy access to relevant teaching materials".

In Canada, an estimated 35,000 sudden cardiac arrests occur each year and fewer than 10 per cent survive. Previous research has found teaching students how to perform CPR and use an AED has widespread public health implications, as they will be more likely as adults to help in an emergency situation. Trained students are also effective "CPR multipliers" by teaching their friends and families. In countries where this training has been mandated and implemented in schools for a number of years, there have been marked increases in people performing CPR leading to higher survival rates.

Dr. Katherine Allan, lead author for the study said: "With effective implementation of this training in schools, there is the opportunity to save hundreds of future lives."

During the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, emergency department doctors, nurses and other frontline staff experienced unprecedented levels of stress and emotional exhaustion that included nightmares or insomnia, according to a UC San Francisco-led study of emergency departments across the country.

The study, among the first to assess mental health effects of the pandemic at a geographically diverse sample of emergency rooms, found that nearly one-fifth of the ER staff were at elevated risk for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The study also reported that regular testing for COVID-19 helped to reduce stress among emergency personnel, particularly for those with previous positive antibody results.

The results are published April 9, 2021, in Annals of Emergency Medicine.

"As the nation moves into what many believe is a fourth wave of COVID, this study is important to our understanding of the impact of the pandemic on the mental well-being of frontline medical personnel," said lead author Robert M. Rodriguez, MD, a professor of Emergency Medicine at UCSF.

"We found that feelings of work-related anxiety, emotional exhaustion and burnout were prevalent across the full spectrum of emergency department staff," Rodriguez said. "Early recognition of the signs of stress, burnout, anxiety is critical. Emergency department personnel serve as the initial hospital caregivers for the majority of critically ill patients with known or suspected COVID-19 infection. Protecting and maintaining the health of the emergency department workforce is imperative in the ongoing battle against COVID-19."

The study was conducted between May and July 2020, using electronic surveys to document self-reported symptoms before and after serologic testing for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.

Some 1,600 physicians, nurses, advanced practice providers, social workers and other personnel at 20 emergency departments took part. This included hospitals in San Francisco and Los Angeles, New York, New Orleans, Miami and Orlando, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Denver, Baltimore, Birmingham, Iowa City, Dallas.

Participants had not previously been diagnosed with COVID-19. After the initial survey, they underwent serial nasal swab PCR and serum antibody tests, then completed a follow-up survey.

Participants said their greatest concerns included exposing their family members or others in their community. They also voiced strong concerns about the well-being of co-workers diagnosed with COVID-19, and of patients with an unclear diagnosis who might expose others in their community.

"Considering the relatively high levels of burnout symptoms, and that more than half of participants reported experiencing at least one symptom of PTSD and as many as 20 percent were at higher risk, employers should encourage workers to take time off, get adequate rest and utilize available well-being resources," said Rodriguez.

The researchers had previously reported moderate to severe stress levels during the pandemic, but that study was limited to academic emergency medicine physicians in California, New Jersey and Louisiana. In one difference between the studies, researchers found that personal protective equipment (PPE) was no longer among the top five listed worries in the later study, suggesting that PPE became more widely available.