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Swansea University physicists, as leading members of the ALPHA collaboration at CERN, have demonstrated laser cooling of antihydrogen atoms for the first time. The groundbreaking achievement produces colder antimatter than ever before and enables an entirely new class of experiments, helping scientists learn more about antimatter in future.

In a paper published today in Nature, the collaboration reports that the temperature of antihydrogen atoms trapped inside a magnetic bottle is reduced when the atoms scatter light from an ultraviolet laser beam, slowing the atoms down and reducing the space they occupy in the bottle -- both vital aspects of future more detailed studies of the properties of antimatter.

In addition to showing that the energy of the antihydrogen atoms was decreased, the physicists also found a reduction in the range of wavelengths that the cold atoms can absorb or emit light on, so the spectral line (or colour band) is narrowed due to the reduced motion.

This latter effect is of particular interest, as it will allow a more precise determination of the spectrum which in turn reveals the internal structure of the antihydrogen atoms.

Antimatter is a necessity in the most successful quantum mechanical models of particle physics. It became available in the laboratory nearly a century ago with the discovery of the positively charged positron, the antimatter counterpart of the negatively charged electron.

When matter and antimatter come together annihilation occurs; a striking effect wherein the original particles disappear. Annihilation can be observed in the laboratory and is even used in medical diagnostic techniques such as positron emission tomography (PET) scans. However, antimatter presents a conundrum. An equal amount of antimatter and matter formed in the Big Bang, but this symmetry is not preserved today as antimatter seems to be virtually absent from the visible universe.

Swansea University's Professor Niels Madsen, who was responsible for the experimental run, said: "Since there is no antihydrogen around, we have to make it in the lab at CERN. It's a remarkable feat that we can now also laser-cool antihydrogen and make a very precise spectroscopic measurement, all in less than a single day. Only two years ago, the spectroscopy alone would take ten weeks. Our goal is to investigate if the properties of our antihydrogen match those of ordinary hydrogen as expected by symmetry. A difference, however small, could help explain the some of the deep questions surrounding antimatter."

Professor Eriksson, who was responsible for the spectroscopy lasers involved in the study, said: "This spectacular result takes antihydrogen research to the next level, as the improved precision that laser cooling brings puts us in contention with experiments on normal matter. This is a tall order since the spectrum of hydrogen that we compare with has been measured with a staggering precision of fifteen digits. We are already upgrading our experiment to meet the challenge!"

The younger generations are willing to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to sustainable living. In a study questioning both commitment to sustainable behaviors and willingness to trade better pay to work for a more sustainable-minded company, the surveyed young adults in Japan made their preferences clear.

The results were published on Jan. 31 in a special issue of the Journal of Cleaner Production focused on achieving the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Researchers issued two surveys investigating how people support the SDGs, which consists of 17 goals and 169 targets to achieve by 2030 -- including ending poverty and ensuring access to clean water and sanitation for all.

"Many people, in popular media or even in daily conversation, say that the younger generation is more socially conscious and has sustainable development goal-orientated behavior, but scientific evidence is limited," said paper author Tomomi Yamane, researcher with the Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability (NERPS) at Hiroshima University. "In this study, we provide novel evidence that the younger generation preferred a sustainable lifestyle than the older generation. And younger people are willing to dispense income to work for SDG-minded companies."

The first survey had a nationwide adult sample of 12,098 across all adult generations in 2019 and 2020, and it found that those between the ages of 18 and 30 were far more likely to value and practice sustainable behaviors, such as paying more for sustainably developed products.

"In 2030, the younger generation will be the central working force in society and is expected to make real efforts to create a sustainable future and likely play a substantial role in achieving the SDGs," said paper co-author Shinji Kaneko, professor with NERPS at Hiroshima University.

"Corporations wanting to attract younger people to buy their products or services or to work for them should incorporate the SDGs into their strategies and seriously contribute to SDGs."

Seemingly contradictory to their overall interpretation, the researchers also found from the first survey that the younger generations are more concerned about finding a secure, well-paying job than older generations. However, the younger generation is more willing to be paid less to work for an SDG-minded company, according to Yamane.

The second survey sampled 668 university students to understand the job preferences and how pay and company values may interact for the younger generation. The probability of a participant selecting the least SDG-minded company was about 28%, even if offered a high salary. The probability of selecting a highly SDG-minded company increased to 56%, even with the lowest pay. The probability of a participant electing to work at an SDG-minded company with high pay was 87%.

"Combined, the findings suggest that younger generations could change their behavior when they become knowledgeable about the inherent nature of SDGs, despite the findings from the first survey showing that the younger generation prefers better pay more than older generations," Yamane said. "Our findings suggest that today's younger generation can be the driving force for achieving the SDGs."

Next, the researchers will conduct a more comprehensive survey that also assess job-related activities and attitudes in relation to SDG contributions and salaries.

Japan is a country known for its continuous quality improvement (KAIZEN) in manufacturing. Now doctors are bringing this philosophy to the medical field. In pediatric intensive care units (PICU), quality improvement (QI) is needed to ensure complex medical care is provided to critically ill patients in a timely manner.

A research group led by Associate Professor Etsuko Nakagami-Yamaguchi and Graduate Student Yu Inata of the Department of Medical Quality and Safety Science, Osaka City University Graduate School of Medicine, set out to understand and assess the literature describing quality improvement in PICUs.

"Although the number of QI articles has increased over time, the quality of research reports was not always high," states Dr. Inata. Their findings were published online in the international journal Pediatric Critical Care Medicine.

Through a systematic review of existing literature mainly in North America and the U.K., the team gave a score of 0-16 to 158 articles using the Quality Improvement Minimum Quality Criteria Set. They found the articles to have a median quality score of 11.0, but "only 17% of the articles were deemed high quality, with a score between 14 and 16," says Dr. Inata, "and only 5% cited Standards for QUality Improvement Reporting Excellence (SQUIRE) guidelines for reporting quality improvement works."

This study is the first to identify the full range of medical quality improvement research being conducted in PICUs and the first to show "there is room for improvement in the quality of reporting of QI research in healthcare," suggests Prof. Nakagami-Yamaguchi.

The team hopes this study draws attention to the issues of quality improvement that have not yet been addressed and creates momentum to improve the quality of research reports. "And through this," continues Dr. Inata, "continuously improve the quality and timely delivery of medical care in pediatric intensive care units."

Since early in the COVID-19 pandemic, parents, teachers, and school administrators have faced difficult questions regarding when and how to safely reopen for in-person learning. During the 2020-2021 fall semester, school districts around the United States navigated their reopening plans -- many opting for exclusively online learning or hybrid models -- with little data on how SARS-CoV-2 spreads among children or how in-person learning would impact transmission in the schools' communities. A new study in The Journal of School Health joins a growing body of evidence that, with appropriate measures, there are ways for schools to safely reopen.

In this study, scientists analyzed data from two large, independent k-12 schools that re-opened for in-person learning last fall. The results suggest that, with robust universal testing and mitigation measures, in-school transmission can remain low even as the surrounding community transmission rates rise.

The two schools in this study, one located in the southeastern United States and the other in the Mid-Atlantic, both conducted regular testing of all students and staff and required mitigation measures like mask-wearing, social distancing, and ventilation and air filtering. When positive cases were detected, the schools and local health authorities did contact tracing to determine how the person was likely exposed.

Throughout the semester, both schools saw cases, but the rate of transmission was 0.5 or lower. "Because each infection causes less than one additional infection on average, an infection doesn't spread much within the school," says Santa Fe Institute Professor Michael Lachmann, who co-authored the study with Santa Fe Institute External Professor Lauren Ancel Meyers (University of Texas at Austin), Darria Long Gillespie, Stephen C Redd, and Jonathan M Zenilman. "If we could get a rate of 0.5 in the community, that would be amazing -- we would be rid of COVID already."

In addition, neither school observed any instance where a teacher was infected by a student or vice versa. While in-school transmission did occur, 72% of those cases in one school were associated with non-mask-wearing. No outbreaks at either school occurred from in-school transmission when mitigation measures were being followed. However, testing revealed a spike in cases at the start of the school year and following fall break -- times when the students were out of school -- and one school had an outbreak following an out-of-school football party.

So, is it safe to reopen schools, and to do so before all teachers are vaccinated?

"While that depends on your definition of 'safe,' this study says that if you implement all these measures, including testing, there won't be big outbreaks in schools," says Lachmann. "But the key here is testing. If you implement all these measures, testing allows you to see when things go wrong."

Still, there are several caveats. The new, more contagious, variants will likely require schools to be extra vigilant to avoid outbreaks. Also, both schools in this study had the resources to conduct regular testing. "Given that both schools are well-resourced, with a population that likely has a lower burden of chronic disease and better access to medical care, the exact consequence of these introductions in less well-resourced communities is not known," write the authors in the study. "There is a critical need for educational and public health support of rapid expansion of school-based testing capacity and the resources required if communities are to return to in-person education."

A researcher from Skoltech and his German colleagues have developed a neural network-based classification algorithm that can use data from an apple orchard to predict how well apples will fare in long-term storage. The paper was published in Computers and Electronics in Agriculture.

Before the fruit and vegetables we all like end up on our tables, they have to be stored for quite some time, and during this time they can develop physiological disorders such as flesh browning or superficial scald (brown or black patches on the skin of the fruit). These disorders contribute to the loss of a substantial amount of product, and a lot of research effort is dedicated to the development of robust methods of disorder prediction - a notoriously difficult task due to the multitude of factors involved, both at the orchard and in the storage facility.

Skoltech Assistant Professor Pavel Osinenko (formerly at Automatic Control and System Dynamics Laboratory, Technische Universität Chemnitz) and his colleagues gathered three years' worth of data on a Braeburn apple orchard in Germany, including weather data and information from non-destructive sensors such as visible and near-infrared spectroscopy. The information gathered included data on chlorophyll, anthocyanins, soluble solids and dry matter content. The team also used assessments of fruit quality post-storage (for instance, consumers like their apples nice and firm, so there is a metric for that).

"The experimental orchard was quite normal and the developed methodology can in fact be implemented in industry without much effort," Osinenko says.

The researchers developed a classification algorithm based on a recurrent neural network and trained it on the orchard data. The algorithm ended up being 80% successful in predicting internal browning of apples, the appearance of cavities on the surface and fruit firmness. "This is definitely a success since we are talking about an automated solution that does not require human experts. Of course, more data and tuning are needed, but as a proof of concept, the achieved results are indeed promising," Osinenko notes.

He adds that thanks to the predictive design of the methodology, farmers can use the information from the classifier to get better yield. And the team has already received inquiries about possible collaboration on other types of fruits and even vegetables since this approach can work for them too.

In a joint effort, researchers from the Humboldt-Universität (Berlin), the Max Born Institute (Berlin) and the University of Central Florida (USA), have revealed the necessary conditions for the robust transport of entangled states of two-photon light in photonic topological insulators, paving the way the towards noise-resistant transport of quantum information. The results have appeared in Nature Communications.

Originally discovered in condensed matter systems, topological insulators are two-dimensional materials that support scattering-free (uni-directional) transport along their edges, even in the presence of defects and disorder. In essence, topological insulators are finite lattice systems where, given a suitable termination of the underlying infinite lattice, edge states are formed that lie in a well-defined energy gap associated with the bulk states, i.e. these edge states are energetically separated from the bulk states, see Fig 1.

Importantly, single-particle edge states in such systems are topologically protected from scattering: they cannot scatter into the bulk due to their energy lying in the gap, and they cannot scatter backwards because backward propagating edge states are either absent or not coupled to the forward propagating edge states.

The feasibility of engineering complex Hamiltonians using integrated photonic lattices, combined with the availability of entangled photons, raises the intriguing possibility of employing topologically protected entangled states in optical quantum computing and information processing (Science 362, 568, (2018), Optica 6, 955 (2019)).

Achieving this goal, however, is highly nontrivial as topological protection does not straightforwardly extend to multi-particle (back-)scattering. At first, this fact appears to be counterintuitive because, individually, each particle is protected by topology whilst, jointly, entangled (correlated) particles become highly susceptible to perturbations of the ideal lattice. The underlying physical principle behind this apparent 'discrepancy' is that, quantum-mechanically, identical particles are described by states that satisfy an exchange symmetry principle.

In their work, the researchers make several fundamental advances towards understanding and controlling topological protection in the context of multi-particle states:

- First, they identify physical mechanisms which induce a vulnerability of entangled states in topological photonic lattices and present clear guidelines for maximizing entanglement without sacrificing topological protection.

-Second, they stablish and demonstrate a threshold-like behavior of entanglement vulnerability and identify conditions for robust protection of highly entangled two-photon states.

To be precise, they explore the impact of disorder onto a range of two-photon states that extend from the fully correlated to the fully anti-correlated limits, thereby also covering a completely separable state. For their analysis, they consider two topological lattices, one periodic and one aperiodic. In the periodic case they consider the Haldane model, and for the aperiodic case a square lattice, whose single-particle dynamics corresponds to the quantum Hall effect, is studied.

The results offer a clear roadmap for generating robust wave packets tailored to the particular disorder at hand. Specifically, they establish limits on the stability of entangled states up to relatively high degrees of entanglement that offer practical guidelines for generating useful entangled states in topological photonic systems. Further, these findings demonstrate that in order to maximize entanglement without sacrificing topological protection, the joint spectral correlation map of two-photon states must fit inside a well-defined topological window of protection, Fig. (2).

A study examining bean productivity among smallholder farmers in Tanzania, has found that on average, yields are 6% lower among female than male farmers. Women are often 'invisible' in agriculture, researchers say, due to social structural barriers and national agricultural policies, which do not address discriminatory land rights; education and agricultural information and decision making, which must be tackled to reverse this trend.

The paper 'What Does Gender Yield Gap Tell Us about Smallholder Farming in Developing Countries?' published in the open access scientific journal Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing (MDPI), analyzed data from southern region in Tanzania since 2016 and also drew on research from case studies conducted in Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe among other countries in the region.

Eileen Nchanji, Gender Specialist at the Alliance of Bioversity International and International Center for Tropical Agriculture (The Alliance), said: "We think this six percent drop in productivity is significant, because it shows that with access to the right information and resources, and if we are intentional about making gender part of new interventions, women will be able to increase their yields significantly."

"Our case studies from Burundi and Zimbabwe have shown that, when women have access to improved seeds and information, they can double their yields," she added. By bringing the public and private sector together, and targetting women, youth and men together with improved seed varieties and better knowledge about agricultural practices and collective decision making on farm operations, productivity among the whole community increases.

Researchers highlight that issues of more concern to women are often ignored at policy level. They include providing more nutritious food crops such as beans for the family instead of relying on staples like maize which may fetch more income but offer less nutritional value; selection of varieties with attributes such as faster cook-times or easier processing attributes; as well as overall household food security.

Among the challenges women face in boosting crop yields are land rights and ownership. Even if women have gained access to better seeds and knowledge on how to plant them to increase yields, they may not have the power to implement changes if the land is not theirs. Similarly, while women contribute around 65% more on-farm labor than men, they do not always have the same access to information or technology, resulting in lower yields.

Agness Nduguru, a researcher at the Agricultural Research Institute Uyole, Mbeya, Tanzania, said that a key solution at community level is to ensure the co-distribution of end resources to both women and men. "Even if we conduct training about gender constraints and differences, and communities are aware about production and yield gaps, at policy-level, if we want to eliminate poverty, women have to be able to make their own decisions."

The Alliance's Agricultural Economist, Enid Katungi, said: "We researched on who manages the land or makes decisions about the plot; what age and sex they are; what information and knowledge they have access to. We found structural differences; women tend to cultivate more degraded land, highlighting power differences within households when it comes to resources. So it's clear we need interventions to address those differences at both developmental and policy level, involving all decision makers in the community at all levels."

The study also reveals that women who engaged their families in decisions on varieties to plant often had better yields, and that access to improved varieties boosted productivity by 35% compared to growing indigenous or local varieties, implying that access to better information and resources for both men and women is key. Yet a woman's age, family size, years of schooling and how they spend income from beans or other crops all restrict a woman's ability to produce more food and nutritious family meals in general.

Key recommendations in the paper to tackle gender inequality for improved agricultural yields include gender-specific support to close the yield gap, ensuring equal income distribution and reduced poverty among female farmers. These include deliberate women empowerment strategies through trainings and free improved seed provision, participatory plant breeding that considers variety attributes that appeal to women; national policy on gender issues in agriculture and general public support to finance women's agriculture.

Education is considered one of the most critical personal capital investments. But formal educational attainment doesn't necessarily pay off in job satisfaction, according to new research from the University of Notre Dame.

In fact, there is almost no relationship between the two, according to "Does Educational Attainment Promote Job Satisfaction? The Bittersweet Trade-offs Between Job Resources, Demands and Stress," forthcoming in the Journal of Applied Psychology from Brittany Solomon (Hall), assistant professor of management, and Dean Shepherd, the Ray and Milann Siegfried Professor of Entrepreneurship, both at Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business, along with Boris Nikolaev from Baylor University.

"Our study shows people who have invested in formal education do not tend to be more satisfied in their jobs," Solomon said. "We found that better-educated individuals do enjoy greater job-related resources including income, job autonomy and variety. But they also endure longer work hours and increased job pressure, intensity and urgency. On average, these demands are associated with increased stress and decreased job satisfaction, largely offsetting the positive gains associated with greater resources."

In supplemental analyses, the team found that women were more likely to experience an increased negative association between education and job satisfaction, and self-employed individuals experienced a reduced negative association.

"Women still face workplace adversity that can undermine the positive returns on their educational investment," Solomon said. "This dynamic is particularly important given the reversal of the gender gap in education, with more women completing higher education than men. We explored the notion that the education-job satisfaction link is negative and stronger for women and discovered that, compared to their highly educated male counterparts, highly educated women experience more stress at work and lower job satisfaction."

Relative to traditional occupations, self-employment offers considerable flexibility to organize one's work schedule, choose the work content and decide how to respond to job demands.

"We found that, compared to their wage-employed counterparts, those in self-employment seem to be more insulated from the adverse effects of education on job stress and satisfaction," Solomon said. "We believe illuminating this boundary condition is notable for the educated and organizations that value and want to retain their educated employees."

The researchers do not suggest avoiding higher education in an effort to achieve higher job satisfaction, but recommend a realistic calculation of trade-offs between "good" and "bad" working conditions and the associated stress and job satisfaction.

"Balancing those conditions that lead to both stress and job satisfaction may help workers recalibrate their values and ultimately make decisions that suit their priorities," Solomon said. "Leaders may also consider better ways to manage the greater demands encountered by their highly educated employees so that exploiting an organization's greatest human capital does not backfire. For example, by removing incentives for employees to take on excessive work hours, organizations can avoid inadvertently pressuring employees to incur stress that undermines job satisfaction.

"Many people pursue higher education to get a better job on paper, not realizing that this 'better job' isn't actually better due to the unanticipated effects of demands and stress over time," Solomon said. "It's good for people to be realistic about the career paths they pursue and what they ultimately value."

Scientists have discovered that tracking malaria as it develops in humans is a powerful way to detect how the malaria parasite causes a range of infection outcomes in its host.

The study, found some remarkable differences in the way individuals respond to malaria and raises fresh questions in the quest to understand and defeat the deadly disease.

Malaria, caused by the parasite - Plasmodium falciparum - is a huge threat to adults and children in the developing world. Each year, around half a million people die from the disease and another 250 million are infected. Malaria parasites are spread to humans through the bites of infected mosquitoes.

The outcomes that follow a malaria infection can vary from no symptoms to life-threatening disease and death. The precise reasons why people respond in different ways to the same parasite infection are still unknown, experts say.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh, in collaboration with teams at the Universities of Oxford and Glasgow and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, explored infection outcomes in 14 volunteers who were injected with malaria parasites.

Scientists studied how the volunteers responded to the parasites over the course of 10 days. The group were then treated with antimalarial drugs to cure the infection before there was any risk of them developing severe symptoms.

The study, published in eLife, found that the immune systems in about half of the volunteers were rapidly alerted to the presence of parasites and began to produce signals to mobilise host defences.

These volunteers began to suffer symptoms of malaria such as fever and headache. The other volunteers, however, either showed no sign of immune activation, or else started to develop responses to dampen their body's immune response. These volunteers did not develop malaria symptoms.

Dr Phil Spence, Sir Henry Dale Fellow, Institute of Infection and Immunology Research, University of Edinburgh and one of the project leads, said: "It looks like most of the variation in malaria is due to intrinsic differences between people in how they respond to infection.

"We need to do further work to tease out the underlying factors responsible for immune variation, such as investigating human genetics and prior experience of other infections."

The study also asked whether variation in parasite growth rate, the rate at which a parasite replicates within the body, or virulence factors, the properties of a parasite thought to make an infection more severe, were different in the volunteers and if this had a bearing on infection outcomes.

Surprisingly, the researchers found that although parasite growth rates did vary substantially between volunteers, this was not linked to outcomes. For example, a volunteer could have a small number of parasites with a strong immune reaction or have a large number with no symptoms.

Furthermore, monitoring the parasite virulence factors through time, in particular a family of molecules called group A var genes, showed no differences between volunteers and no changes over the course of infection.

Professor Alex Rowe, Personal Chair of Molecular Medicine, Institute of Infection and Immunology Research, University of Edinburgh and project co-lead, said: "The biggest surprise from our study was that there was no variation in expression of the parasite virulence factors.

"Current theory, based on data from infected patients in malarious countries, suggested that parasites expressing group A var genes would rapidly come to dominate as the infection progressed, but this was not seen in our volunteers.

"There are many possible reasons for this - maybe a parasite collected more recently from a field site would give a different result, or maybe longer infection times are needed so the host immune response can influence these changes."

The unexpected results from this study shows the power of human volunteer studies to raise new questions and give novel insights into diseases that have been studied in other ways for many decades, according to the team.

United Methodist churches -- whether the congregation is white or not -- have higher attendance when located within white neighborhoods. But racial diversity within a church is associated with higher average attendance over time, according to a new study.

"This is a startling contrast to previous research that reported multiracial congregations are less stable," said lead author Kevin D. Dougherty, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology at Baylor University.

The study is published in the journal Social Forces.

Previous research has found that it is difficult for congregations to build and sustain racially diverse memberships, but little research has been done to explore the overlap of racial changes in congregations and neighborhoods over time.

The research also found that white churches in nonwhite neighborhoods fare the worst in attendance.

"Overall, our understanding of racial diversity and congregational participation remains ambiguous," said co-author Gerardo Martí, Ph.D., L. Richardson King Professor of Sociology at Davidson College. "In this study, we consider: What does the history of demographic change in local churches and their neighborhoods tell us about the potential for congregational survival over time?"

Researchers tracked data from more than 20,000 United Methodist Church (UMC) congregations over 20 years -- from 1990 to 2010 -- and paired that information with census tract data for that time frame to investigate the effect of demographic change on congregations.

The racial composition of the United States is changing, with a majority of the population to be nonwhite by 2035, according to U.S. Census Bureau projections. Congregations in this country are voluntary organizations, and their growing number, along with advances in transportation, gives people more options for where they attend. The growth also increases churches' competition to attract and keep members, researchers noted.

While neighborhoods are generally becoming more diverse, congregations are not. Only one in four American adults attends a multiracial congregation, defined as one in which no single racial or ethnic group has more than 80 percent representation.

Changing demographic conditions can threaten the survival of congregations. The number of all-white neighborhoods has fallen sharply since 1980; attendance at United Methodist churches also has declined, and Methodist churches with a higher percentage of whites have had increasingly lower average attendance over time.

"As one of the largest religious denominations in the United States, with more than 6 million U.S. members, the United Methodist Church is a wonderful test case to explore how changes in neighborhood demographics impact local congregations," said third author Todd W. Ferguson, Ph.D, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor.

Here are the researchers' three hypotheses and findings:

* Racial uniformity inside congregations will be associated with higher attendance. Findings did not support this hypothesis. Instead, Methodist churches with more racial diversity had higher attendance.

* Neighborhood racial uniformity will be associated with higher congregational attendance. This hypothesis was supported in the study. Specifically, Methodist churches in neighborhoods in which 100 percent of residents were white had more people attending worship services than Methodist churches in racially mixed or predominantly non-white neighborhoods.

* When the racial makeup of a congregation matches that of a neighborhood, this will correspond with higher church attendance. Contradicting the hypothesis, attendance levels were highest for nonwhite Methodist churches in 100 percent white neighborhoods as well as racially diverse Methodist churches in neighborhoods with racial uniformity. The authors speculate that nonwhite or racially diverse Methodist churches may attract more participants because they offer an attractive alternative to typical white Methodist churches found in white neighborhoods.

"Our findings challenge the popular assumption of the Church Growth Movement that churches grow by focusing on a single racial or ethnic group," Martí said. "For Methodist churches, reaching across racial lines proves a better strategy for growth."

Other influences on church attendance were region of the country and population size. The study found that Methodist churches in the Midwest and West had higher attendance, as did Methodist churches in more populated neighborhoods.

"More research is needed on race and attendance over time in other denominations," Dougherty said. "Neither congregations nor neighborhoods stay the same indefinitely. Understanding how change in one impacts change in the other is a crucial task for researchers and religious leaders."

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., March 29, 2021—A first-of-its-kind instrument that samples smoke from megafires and scans humidity will help researchers better understand the scale and long-term impact of fires—specifically how far and high the smoke will travel; when and where it will rain; and whether the wet smoke will warm the climate by absorbing sunlight.

“Smoke containing soot and other toxic particles from megafires can travel thousands of kilometers at high altitudes where winds are fast and air is dry,” said Manvendra Dubey, a Los Alamos National Laboratory atmospheric scientist and co-author on a paper published last week in Aerosol Science and Technology. “These smoke-filled clouds can absorb much more sunlight than dry soot—but this effect on light absorption has been difficult to measure because laser-based techniques heat the particles and evaporate the water, which corrupt observations.”

The new instrument circumvents this problem by developing a gentler technique that uses a low-power, light-emitting diode to measure water’s effect on scattering and absorbtion by wildfire smoke and hence its growth. By sampling the smoke and scanning the humidity from dry to very humid conditions while measuring its optical properties, the instrument mimicks what happens during cloud and rain formation, and the effects of water are measured immediately. Laboratory experiments show for the first time that water coating the black soot-like material can enhance the light absorption by up to 20 percent.

The instrument will next be tested and the water effects probed in smoke from wildfires sampled at Los Alamos’ Center for Aerosol-gas Forensics (CAFÉ). Los Alamos will be deploying instruments to Houston next year as part of the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) facility’s Tracking Aerosol Convection Interactions Experiment (TRACER) campaign. Los Alamos’s effort, called TRACER-CAT, will measure how water uptake by soot interacts with deep convective storms.

Limerick, Ireland, 26 March 2020: Researchers at Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software and University of Limerick (UL), have found video gamers can significantly improve their esport skills by training for just 10 minutes a day.

The research team at Lero's Esports Science Research Lab (ESRL) at UL also found novice gamers benefited most when they wore a custom headset delivering transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) for 20 minutes before training sessions.

Dr Mark Campbell, director of Lero's Esports Science Research Lab (ESRL) and senior lecturer in sports psychology at UL, said their work showed that neurostimulation could accelerate motor performance improvements specifically in novice esports participants and that this effect was confined to more complex sensory-motor actions.

"One of the original and most prominent esports over the past 20 years has been the first-person shooter (FPS) game, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO). We asked participants to shoot and eliminate enemy targets as quickly and accurately as possible during their training sessions in the study," added researcher Dr Adam Toth.

Participants wore a custom headset (HALO Neuroscience™) designed to deliver transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS). However, some received no stimulation, others just a 'sham' treatment, while the remainder received a 20-minute exposure.

"Our study found that novice gamers who received tDCS over their motor cortex before training improved their performance on the specific task over five days, significantly more than novices who trained following no such stimulus," explained Dr Campbell.

Curiously, according to Dr Toth, when they examined the effect of tDCS on training compared to non-stimulated groups, they observed a significant effect of tDCS on training for left and right targets, but not centre targets.

"The fact that tDCS exerted an influence on training performance specifically for targets requiring a larger controlled movement (left and right targets) corroborates the assertion that tDCS may be better able to accelerate performance improvements for complex motor movements rather than simple reactions," Dr Toth added.

The Lero team, whose work has just been published in Computers in Human Behavior, a scholarly journal dedicated to examining the use of computers from a psychological perspective, believes their work could lead to benefits outside the world of esports.

Dr Campbell said that in light of the team's findings, tDCS may be especially beneficial during the initial stages of task learning.

"Stroke patients, for example, could benefit from tDCS at the start of their rehabilitation process when re-learning complex movements that were once automatic", concluded Dr Campbell.

Professor Brian Fitzgerald, Director of Lero, stated: "Connected health and human performance is an area of enormous growth and software has a key role to play within that. At Lero, our research in this sector extends from using artificial intelligence to improve cancer detection to the delivery of software as a medical device. It is an area in which we are continually expanding our capabilities and our industry partnerships".

The uneven distribution of school closures in the US since September 2020 threatens to exacerbate regional, racial and class-based divides in educational performance, according to research by Zachary Parolin, of Bocconi University's Department of Social and Political Science, recently published in Nature Human Behavior. For example, in October, only 35% of White students were on distance learning, compared with 52% of Black students, 60% of Hispanic students and 65% of Asian students. And schools recording the lowest math scores were 15% more likely to be closed.

Professor Parolin and Emma Lee (Columbia University) found in fact that exposure to distance learning from September through December 2020 was more common among schools with lower academic performance (measured with third-grade math scores), a higher share of students experiencing homelessness, more students eligible for free/reduced-price lunches and from racial/ethnic minorities.

"If the schools and students with the greatest pre-COVID disadvantages are also those most exposed to school closures and distance learning, inequalities in learning outcomes may worsen," Professor Parolin says. Recent studies have demonstrated, in fact, that distance learning is less effective than traditional schooling, and that reductions in test scores appear to be particularly steep for students with less educated parents.

The authors measured in-person attendance using an anonymized mobile-phone database able to track traffic around locations, which covers 94% of US school districts and 98% of counties. A school was identified as "closed" or "mostly closed" if it experienced a 50% year-over-year decline in in-person visits during a given month.

"The race/ethnicity and math score gaps are particularly striking," Parolin and Lee write. "In October, 35% of White students were exposed to distance learning, compared with 52% of Black students, 60% of Hispanic students and 65% of Asian students. Moreover, schools recording the lowest third-grade math scores prior to the pandemic were, on average, around 15 percentage points more likely to be closed during September to December 2020 relative to schools with average test scores."

Disparities seem to be mainly driven by geography: larger and denser cities are both at greater risk of COVID spread and more diverse in population, while rural and less populated areas are more frequently white. Politics can also play a role, as Democrats (in power in denser, race-mixed areas, such as California or Washington DC) tended to be more rigorous in COVID restrictions than Republicans.

"The results of the study don't imply we are taking position on whether schools should close", Prof. Parolin warns. "School closures may save lives if they prevent the spread of COVID and the decision to turn to distance learning is undoubtedly difficult. Our study only observes that closures may be widening the educational gap."

A medical device that has been shown to manage pain among babies born preterm can also help keep their brain oxygen levels steady during medical procedures, finds new analysis by researchers at UBC.

The device, called Calmer, is a pillow-sized therapeutic bed covered in soft fabric and inserted into the incubator. It can be programmed to mimic a parent's heartbeat and breathing rate-- providing a soothing presence by moving up and down gently to simulate a breathing motion and heartbeat sound for the baby when their parent cannot be present.

"For newborns and particularly for preterm babies, it's critical to keep overall blood oxygen levels steady, especially in the brain. The more stable their brain oxygenation is, the better for their brain development," says researcher Dr. Manon Ranger, a UBC nursing professor who studies the health of vulnerable infants.

The team conducted a randomized clinical trial with 29 premature babies admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU, at BC Women's Hospital + Health Centre. Half the participants received the usual care--facilitated tucking, where a caregiver holds the infant in a flexed position, plus a soother--during a painful procedure (a blood draw). The other half were placed on Calmer.

When their brain oxygen levels were measured, both groups showed similar results: their brain oxygen levels stayed largely steady during the procedure.

"A parent's touch, generally speaking, is ultimately the most soothing presence for an infant. It relieves pain, helps them gain weight and promotes brain growth while reducing stress," said Ranger, who is also an investigator at BC Children's Hospital and Women's Health Research Institute.

"However, this option is not always available in NICUs. Our research shows that when a parent or caregiver cannot be physically present, Calmer is an effective alternative. This is especially relevant in the current COVID-19 pandemic context, where many hospital settings must restrict contact with visitors."

Calmer was developed by Dr. Liisa Holsti, a professor in the department of occupational science and occupational therapy at UBC, and an investigator at BC Children's Hospital and Women's Health Research Institute; and Dr. Karon Maclean, a UBC professor of computer science. Other researchers from BC Children's Hospital, the British Columbia Institute of Technology and the BC Women's Hospital and Health Centre also contributed to its development.

"We were very pleased that our preliminary trial results showed that Calmer has the potential to benefit these infants whose brains are particularly vulnerable to pain and stress," said Holsti. "We are expanding our evaluation of this device in more rigorous real-world conditions, and we're in the process of redesigning it to be used in low- and middle-income countries, so that infants worldwide who need it can have the benefit of Calmer treatment."

For their next step, the team is planning to test longer-term use of Calmer on preterm infants' physical growth and brain development in the NICU. This project recently received funding from UBC's Health Innovation Funding Investment (HIFI) awards.

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., March 25, 2021--A new class of quantum dots deliver a stable stream of single, spectrally tunable infrared photons under ambient conditions and at room temperature, unlike other single photon emitters. This breakthrough opens a range of practical applications, including quantum communication, quantum metrology, medical imaging and diagnostics, and clandestine labeling.

"The demonstration of high single-photon purity in the infrared has immediate utility in areas such as quantum key distribution for secure communication," said Victor Klimov, lead author of a paper published today in Nature Nanotechnology by Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists.

The Los Alamos team has developed an elegant approach to synthesizing the colloidal-nanoparticle structures derived from their prior work on visible light emitters based on a core of cadmium selenide encased in a cadmium sulfide shell. By inserting a mercury sulfide interlayer at the core/shell interface, the team turned the quantum dots into highly efficient emitters of infrared light that can be tuned to a specific wavelength.

"This new synthesis allows for highly accurate, atomic-level control of the thickness of the emitting mercury sulfide interlayer. By changing it in increments of a single atomic layer, we can tune the wavelength of the emitted light in discrete quantized jumps, and further adjust it in a more continuous fashion by tuning the cadmium selenide core size," said Vladimir Sayevich, the lead chemist on this project.

Far superior to existing near-infrared quantum dots, these new structures show "blinking-free" emission at a single-dot level, nearly perfect single-photon purity at room temperature (which produces "quantum light"), and fast emission rates. They behave extremely well with both optical and electrical excitation.

Single photons can be used as qubits in quantum computing. In a cybersecurity application, single photons can protect a computer network through quantum key distribution, which provides ultimate security through "unbreakable" quantum protocols.

Bio-imaging is another important application. The emission wavelength of the newly developed quantum dots is within the near-infrared bio-transparency window, which makes them well suited for deep tissue imaging.

People can't see infrared light, but many modern technologies rely on it, from night-vision devices and remote sensing to telecommunications and biomedical imaging. Infrared light is also a big player in emerging quantum technologies that rely on the duality of light particles, or photons, which can also behave as waves. Exploiting this quantum property requires sources of "quantum light" that emit light in the form of individual quanta, or photons.

"There is also a cool chemical element in achieving single-atomic layer accuracy in making these dots," said Zack Robinson, the project member focusing on quantum dot spectroscopy. "The thickness of the emitting mercury sulfide interlayer is identical across all dots in the samples. That's very unique, especially for a material made chemically in a beaker."

Klimov added, "However, this is just the first step. In order to take full advantage of 'quantum light' one needs to achieve photon indistinguishability, that is, to make sure that all emitted photons are quantum-mechanically identical. This is an extremely difficult task, which we will tackle next in our project."