Brain

While COVID-19-related lockdowns may have decreased the spread of a deadly virus, they appear to have created an ideal environment for increased domestic violence.c

Data collected in surveys of nearly 400 adults for 10 weeks beginning in April 2020 suggest that more services and communication are needed so that even front-line health and food bank workers, for example -- rather than only social workers, doctors and therapists -- can spot the signs and ask clients questions about potential intimate partner violence. They could then help lead victims to resources, said Clare Cannon, assistant professor of social and environmental justice in the Department of Human Ecology and the lead author of the study.

The paper, "COVID-19, intimate partner violence, and communication ecologies," was published this month in American Behavioral Scientist. Study co-authors include Regardt Ferreira and Frederick Buttell, both of Tulane University, and Jennifer First, of University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

"The pandemic, like other kinds of disasters, exacerbates the social and livelihood stresses and circumstances that we know lead to intimate partner violence," said Cannon. She explained that increased social isolation during COVID-19 has created an environment where victims and aggressors, or potential aggressors in a relationship, cannot easily separate themselves from each other. The extra stress also can cause mental health issues, increasing individuals' perceived stress and reactions to stress through violence and other means.

"Compounding these stressors, those fleeing abuse may not have a place to get away from abusive partners," Cannon said.

Intimate partner violence is defined as physical, emotional, psychological or economic abuse and stalking or sexual harm by a current or former partner or spouse, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Crime statistics indicate that 16 percent of homicides are perpetrated by a partner. Further, the CDC says, 25 percent of women and 10 percent of men experience some form of intimate partner violence in their lifetime.

Research participants in the study completed an online survey asking about previous disaster experience, perceived stress, their current situation as it relates to COVID-19, if they experienced intimate partner violence, and what their personal and household demographics were. In all, 374 people completed the survey. Respondents, whose average age was 47, were asked about how COVID-19 had affected them financially and otherwise.

Of the respondents, 39 reported having experienced violence in their relationship, and 74 percent of those people were women.

Although only 10 percent of the sample reported experiencing intimate partner violence, the people that had experienced that violence reported more stress than the segment of the sample that had not experienced it. Furthermore, the results show that as perceived stress increased, participants were more likely to end up as victims of violence.

"Importantly," Cannon said, "these data do not suggest causality and there is no way to determine if intimate partner violence was present in those relationships prior to the pandemic. What the data do suggest, however, is that experiencing such violence is related to reporting more exposure to stress."

Researchers found that as people find themselves in a more tenuous financial situation due to COVID-19, "there are more things to worry about and subsequently argue about. In many instances, that type of situation leads to an occasion for intimate partner violence," the researchers said.

"In our sample's case, as people lost their jobs and suffered financial losses, they also likely increased their worry about eviction," Cannon said. Notably, similar findings linking financial and job loss stresses with increased intimate partner violence were reported in the 2008 recession, Cannon said.

Researchers said their findings show a need for more communication resources for families -- potentially coming from government and nongovernment sources of support and information. By increasing public awareness of resources available to the broader community, community members, trusted friends, neighbors, and family members may be better able to connect those affected by domestic violence with resources, such as shelters, treatment intervention programs and therapeutic professionals such as social workers, therapists and others, researchers said.

If you have ever gotten up on a winter morning and thrown yourself into the arduous task of scraping frost from a windshield, a Virginia Tech lab is engaging science [IS1] that could make your life much easier. In research funded by the National Science Foundation, Associate Professor Jonathan Borekyo has led a team in developing a potential solution for frost removal by way of electrostatics.

As water freezes, positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons separate. Frozen ice crystals become electrified as the top of the frost becomes warmer than the bottom of the frost. This causes charged ions to move from top to bottom (warm to cold), but it turns out that the positive ions can migrate faster. The top of the frost ends up being negatively charged while the bottom is more positively charged, a concept known as charge separation.

Charge separation in frost has been studied in the past, but the effect has never been exploited to remove the frost from its surface. Boreyko's Nature-Inspired Fluids and Interfaces Lab set out to fill that gap. The team started by artificially creating frost on a surface. They then suspended a film of water above the frost using filter paper. Opposites attract, so the negatively-charged top of the frost sheet attracted the positive ions in the water. This generated an electric field that exerted an attractive force on the frost sheet.

Using a high-speed camera, the team observed frost particles breaking off their substrate and jumping toward the opposing film of water. Frost was grown on both metal and glass surfaces, indicating that the jumping frost effect is possible regardless of the thermal and electrical properties of the object holding the water.

With this data in hand, the team is moving to larger scales in their testing. The ice particles in this experiment were very small in size, each only a few millimeters or less. Boreyko's team is working toward removing large sheets of ice by increasing the amount of charge that comes near the frost. By replacing warm water with actively charged electrodes, the small frost jumps could become large-scale ice evacuations.

"If we can amplify this electrostatic de-icing effect, such that entire sheets of ice or frost are instantly ripped away from their surface, it could be a game-changer for the aircraft and HVAC industries," said Borekyo.

To come into being, galaxies need a steady diet of cold gases to undergo gravitational collapse. The larger the galaxy, the more cold gas it needs to coalesce and to grow.

Massive galaxies found in the early universe needed a lot of cold gas--a store totaling as much as 100 billion times the mass of our sun.

But where did these early, super-sized galaxies get that much cold gas when they were hemmed in by hotter surroundings?

In a new study, astronomers led by the University of Iowa report direct, observational evidence of streams of cold gas they believe provisioned these early, massive galaxies. They detected cold gas pipelines that knifed through the hot atmosphere in the dark matter halo of an early massive galaxy, supplying the materials for the galaxy to form stars.

About two decades ago, physicists working with simulations theorized that during the early universe, cosmic filaments ferried cold gas and embryonic, node-shaped galaxies to a dark matter halo, where it all clumped together to form massive galaxies. The theory assumed the filaments would need to be narrow and densely filled with cold gas to avoid being peeled off by the hotter surrounding atmosphere.

But the theory lacked direct evidence. In this study, scientists studied a gaseous region surrounding a massive galaxy formed when the universe was about 2.5 billion years old, or just 20% of its present age. The galaxy was previously unstudied, and it took the team five years to pinpoint its exact location and distance (through its redshift). The team needed a specially equipped observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array, because the target galaxy's environment is so dusty that it can only be seen in the submillimeter range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

"It is the prototype, the first case where we detected a halo-scale stream that is feeding a very massive galaxy," says Hai Fu, associate professor in Iowa's Department of Physics and Astronomy and the study's lead and corresponding author. "Based on our observations, such streams can fill up the reservoir in about a billion years, which is far shorter than the amount of time that was available to the galaxy at the epoch that we were observing."

Crucially, the researchers located two background quasars that are projected at close angular distances to the target galaxy, much like how Jupiter and Saturn's motion drew them closer to each other when viewed from Earth during the Great Conjunction last December. Due to this unique configuration, the quasars' light penetrating the halo gas of the foreground galaxy left chemical "fingerprints" that confirmed the existence of a narrow stream of cold gas.

Those chemical fingerprints showed the gas in the streams had a low concentration of heavy elements such as aluminum, carbon, iron, and magnesium. Since these elements are formed when the star is still shining and are released into the surrounding medium when the star dies, the researchers determined the cold gas streams must be streaming in from outside, rather than being expelled from the star-making galaxy itself.

"Among the 70,000 starburst galaxies in our survey, this is the only one associated with two quasars that are both nearby enough to probe the halo gas. Even more, both quasars are projected on the same side of the galaxy so that their light can be blocked by the same stream at two different angular distances." Fu says. "So, I feel extremely fortunate that nature
provided us this opportunity to detect this major artery leading to the heart of a phenomenal galaxy during its adolescence."

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - New technology from Purdue University and Indiana University School of Medicine innovators may one day help patients who suffer devastating vocal injuries from surgery on the larynx.

A collaborative team consisting of Purdue biomedical engineers and clinicians from IU has tissue-engineered component tissue replacements that support reconstruction of the larynx. The team's work is published in The Laryngoscope.

The larynx is a very complex human organ consisting of outer cartilage for structural support, inner muscle that contracts to permit voicing, swallowing, and breathing, and inner vibratory lining.

Currently, thousands of patients each year with laryngeal cancer or trauma require a procedure called total laryngectomy in which the entire larynx is removed, and patients are left without a human voice and breathing through a hole in their neck called a stoma.

"There are very few options for laryngeal reconstruction and no options for restoration of laryngeal appearance, structure and function," said Stacey Halum, a fellowship-trained laryngologist specializing in head and neck surgery. "While surgeons occasionally use local or free tissue transfers to repair laryngeal defects, these local or regional tissues just 'plug holes' or close the defects without really restoring function because the transferred tissues are not dynamic - they do not move or contract. They also tend to lose bulk and scar over time."

Halum, along with Sherry Harbin, a professor in Purdue's Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, led the innovation team.

The innovators used a patented collagen polymer developed by Harbin's lab to fabricate the three regenerative replacement tissues for the laryngeal reconstruction procedure.

"Our approach is unique in that we are using customized engineered tissue replacements, with the muscle component fabricated using the patient's own muscle progenitor cells," Harbin said. "We believe these engineering approaches will provide patients with better options for reconstruction so that total laryngectomies become something of the past."

Harbin and Halum believe the technology has widespread applications for custom fabrication of engineered tissue replacements for tissue restoration in other parts of the body.

Harbin founded GeniPhys, a Purdue startup focused on the commercialization of the collagen polymer technology.

New York, February 24, 2021 - Graduate Center, CUNY/Brooklyn College professor was part of a discovery of the first fossil evidence of any primate, illustrating the earliest steps of primates 66 million years ago following the mass extinction that wiped out all dinosaurs and led to the rise of mammals.

Stephen Chester, an assistant professor of anthropology and paleontologist at the Graduate Center, CUNY and Brooklyn College, was part of a team of 10 researchers from across the United States who analyzed several fossils of Purgatorius, the oldest genus in a group of the earliest-known primates called plesiadapiforms. These ancient mammals were small-bodied and ate specialized diets of insects and fruits that varied across species.

This discovery is central to primate ancestry and adds to our understanding of how life on land recovered after the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago that wiped out all dinosaurs, except for birds. This study was documented in a paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

"This discovery is exciting because it represents the oldest dated occurrence of archaic primates in the fossil record," Chester said. "It adds to our understanding of how the earliest primates separated themselves from their competitors following the demise of the dinosaurs."

Chester and Gregory Wilson Mantilla, Burke Museum Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology and University of Washington biology professor, were co-leads on this study, where the team analyzed fossilized teeth found in the Hell Creek area of northeastern Montana. The fossils, now part of the collections at the University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, are estimated to be 65.9 million years old, about 105,000 to 139,000 years after the mass extinction event.

Based on the age of the fossils, the team estimates that the ancestor of all primates (the group including plesiadapiforms and today's primates such as lemurs, monkeys, and apes) likely emerged by the Late Cretaceous--and lived alongside large dinosaurs.

"Stephen Chester's high-caliber impactful research in this area with Brooklyn College students has significantly contributed to our understanding of the environmental, biological, and social dependencies that ultimately led to the evolution of primates," said Peter Tolias, dean of the School of Natural and Behavioral Sciences.

This is not the first big find Chester has been involved with. While this latest discovery is unique in that it focused on one group of mammals--primates--in 2019, Chester, along with current collaborator Wilson Mantilla, was a key member of a groundbreaking discovery that revealed in striking detail how many life forms--including mammals, turtles, crocodiles, and plants--recovered after the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. Chester, who specializes in the early evolutionary history of primates and other placental mammals, was also a co-author of that peer-reviewed scientific paper in Science magazine with Denver Museum of Nature & Science researchers.

In 2015, while at Brooklyn College, Chester was also the lead author on a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on this same genus of primate, Purgatorius. His co-authored paper described the ankle bones of Purgatorius, which is still the oldest fossil evidence that primates lived in the trees shortly after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Chester did some of the research for this project at his Evolutionary Morphology Laboratory, where he trains undergraduate students in all aspects of paleontological research at Brooklyn College. While students were not directly involved in this latest discovery and subsequent paper, Chester has brought many lucky students from his paleoanthropological fieldwork classes to Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota to a region essentially known as the "paleontological mecca of the West" to dig for primate fossils from 66 million years ago. These trips connected Brooklyn College students with Chester's scientific collaborators and other students from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the Yale Peabody Museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Marmarth Research Foundation.

Peer review/Experimental study/Animals

Propranolol, a drug that is efficacious against infantile haemangiomas ("strawberry naevi", resembling birthmarks), can also be used to treat cerebral cavernous malformations, a condition characterised by misshapen blood vessels in the brain and elsewhere. This has been shown by researchers at Uppsala University in a new study published in the scientific journal Stroke.

"Up to now, there's been no drug treatment for these patients, so our results may become hugely important for them," says Peetra Magnusson of the University's Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, who headed the study.

Cerebral cavernous malformations (CCMs, also called cavernous angiomas or cavernomas) are vascular lesions on blood vessels in the brain and elsewhere, caused by genetic changes that may be hereditary or arise spontaneously. Today, an operation to remove these lesions is the only possible treatment. However, surgical interventions in the brain are highly risky. Since the vascular malformations, moreover, recur in the hereditary form of the condition, a drug treatment for CCMs is urgently required instead.

The uses of propranolol, a beta blocker, include treating cardiovascular diseases and conditions, such as high blood pressure. But it can also be used to treat a haemangioma ("strawberry naevus"), a common blood-vessel malformation in children. There are some indications that the preparation might work against CCMs as well.

The new study is a collaboration involving researchers at Uppsala University, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and, in Italy, IFOM - The FIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology and the Mario Negri Institute of Pharmacological Research. The researchers have been investigating how propranolol affects the emergence of vascular lesions in the form of CCMs.

"We examined mice with vascular malformations in the brain - cavernomas or CCMs, as they're called - that corresponded to the hereditary form of the condition in humans. The mice were given propranolol in their drinking water, and we were able to see that the cavernomas were becoming fewer and smaller. The blood vessels functioned better, too, with less leaking and improved contacts between their cells," Magnusson says.

The propranolol dose administered to the animals was equivalent to the dose used to treat diseases in humans. Using an electron microscope, the researchers were able to study in detail how the drug affected the cavernomas.

The results show that propranolol can be used to shrink and stabilise vascular lesions, and may be a potential medicine for treating CCMs.

"What makes the study especially interesting is that right now, in Italy, a clinical study is under way in which CCM patients are to get two years' treatment with propranolol. During this period, they're being monitored by means of magnetic resonance imaging of the blood vessels, to see how the malformations are developing," says Professor Elisabetta Dejana of Uppsala University's Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology and IFOM in Italy.

According to a 2017 UCLA study, students with ADHD make up about 6% of the college student population and represent the most common type of disability supported by college disability offices. But are these students receiving enough academic support from their institutions? Despite ADHD being prevalent among college students, there has been little research focused on how having ADHD impacts the transition to college and ongoing academic success. Until now.

New research from George DuPaul, professor of school psychology and associate dean for research in Lehigh University's College of Education, and colleagues confirms students with ADHD face consequential challenges in succeeding and completing college and predicts ways academic success can be improved.

The paper, "Academic Trajectories of College Students with and without ADHD: Predictors of Four-Year Outcomes," by DuPaul and colleagues from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, University of Rhode Island, and University of Nebraska-Lincoln, was published in the Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology.

The study, which is one of largest and most comprehensive investigations of college students with ADHD ever conducted, is the first to systematically examine the functioning of ADHD students across four years of college.

"College students with ADHD are likely to experience significant academic difficulties throughout their college years, are at higher than average risk for dropping out of college and require academic support prior to and throughout their college years," said DuPaul.

Through annual psychological and educational evaluations of more than 400 college students, half of whom were identified with ADHD, the researchers assessed multiple academic outcomes including GPA by semester, progress toward graduation by academic year, self-reported study skills by academic year and college drop-out status. The four-year study involved student participants from colleges in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, including Lehigh University, and Rhode Island.

The researchers found that on average, college students with ADHD received grades that were half a grade level below their peers and that this deficit was present across all four years. Additionally, results showed that college students with ADHD were significantly less likely to stay enrolled across semesters.

"It was somewhat surprising to see the magnitude of the academic deficits experienced by college students with ADHD because these were students who had the skills to successfully graduate from high school and matriculate in a four-year college or university," explained DuPaul. "We expected smaller declines in their educational performance in college."

Although medication did not substantially improve academic outcomes, the researchers found that there were several variables that predicted academic success for students with ADHD, including having fewer depression symptoms, possessing better executive functioning skills like planning and time management, and having received educational accommodations in high school as well as academic support services in college.

DuPaul hopes the findings will be of interest to college disabilities offices, health care and mental health professionals who work with college-aged students, higher education faculty and administrators, as well as individuals with ADHD and their families.

"Our findings highlight the importance of providing academic support services for students with ADHD prior to college matriculation, the vital need to improve executive functioning skills in these students, and necessity to screen for and treat depressive symptoms experienced by college students with ADHD," said DuPaul.

Doha, Qatar - (February 23, 2021) - A group of researchers at Qatar Foundation have reported the first and largest genetic association study in the Middle East, that has been published online in Nature Communications - a leading a peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journal published by Nature Research.

The study titled "Whole genome sequencing in the Middle Eastern Qatari population identifies genetic associations with 45 clinically relevant traits" highlights a vital piece of information wherein now there is a better understanding of the genetic risk factors that are specific to the Arab population, including those that are shared with other ethnicities.

Qatar was among the first countries to launch its own large-scale, national genome project. Qatar Genome combines whole genome sequencing data with comprehensive phenotypic resource collected at Qatar Biobank, and is considered the first, largest and most ambitious population-based projects of its kind in the Middle East.

This kind of studies can be considered as experiments conducted by nature, where the natural variation found in the genomes of thousands of Qataris is linked to variations in their respective blood tests. The results from this project are shared publicly, ensuring that the specificities of the Arab genomes will be taken into consideration in future research on new treatments and therapies.

The study - led by researchers at Qatar Foundation's (QF's) Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) and QF's partner university Weill Cornell Medicine - Qatar (WCM-Q), along with other scientists from the Qatar Genome Research Consortium - includes over 6,000 Qatari individuals with whole genome sequence data.

By performing detailed assessments of genetic variants across the whole genome in 6,218 individuals, comprising data from 45 clinically relevant traits, this study identified about 300 independent genetic signals. Some of these signals were predominantly found in the Qatari population. This observation was then confirmed in a further 7,768 subjects from QF's Qatar Biobank.

Omar Albagha, Professor of Genomic and Precision Medicine from HBKU's College of Health and Life Sciences, says: "The study provides new insights into the genetic architecture of clinical laboratory tests and identifies for the first time genetic variations that are specific to the population of Qatar. The study also shows that findings from genetic studies in European populations don't translate well when applied to our population in the Middle East. This argues for further studies to define the genetic architecture of diseases in our region. We are excited because the study represents a foundation for the implementation of precision medicine in the Middle East."

Karsten Suhre, Director of Bioinformatics Core at Weill Cornell Medicine - Qatar and joint senior author on the paper, says: "It has been a long but successful journey from the first patient recruitments to Qatar Biobank to analyzing the resulting enormous genetic data set for associations with clinically relevant traits, and we as a consortium are proud to contribute with this paper to the international effort of obtaining an even better understanding of our human genome."

"Qatar Genome Research Consortium gave research groups the platform to study whole genome sequencing and other omics data to empower the genetic discoveries in this part of the world, which otherwise would be under-represented," said Professor Said Ismail, Director of QF's Qatar Genome, part of QF Research, Development, and Innovation.

Prion diseases are a group of rapidly progressive, fatal and infectious neurodegenerative disorders affecting both humans and animals: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) or 'mad cow' disease is one of the most famous since in 1996 scientists found that the agent responsible for the disease in cows, is the same agent responsible for the so-called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), a disease affecting humans.

A new study carried out by SISSA - Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati in collaboration with other institutions including Genos Glycoscience Research Laboratory from Zagreb, Croatia and Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste, provides important information on the differences in structures of the prions, proteins responsible for diseases that at the state of the art are incurable.

One of the main unanswered problems revolving around prion diseases is the existence of strains, leading to a wide range of disorders with different symptoms, incubation time, histopathology, etc. "For a better understanding of the mechanism of the diseases and the existence of strains, resolving the structure of the prion protein is necessary" neuroscientist Natali Naki?, first author of the paper "Site-specific analysis of N-glycans from different sheep prion strains", just published in PLOS Pathogens, says. The prion protein is a glycoprotein, meaning polysaccharides called glycans encompass a large part of the protein structure. The new study is the first one of its kind as it focuses on comparing glycan structures from different strains.

Professor Giuseppe Legname, co-author of the paper, is the Director of SISSA Prion Biology Laboratory and has been collaborating with Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste since 2006: "Carbohydrate of the glycoproteins were sequenced for the first time thanks to the collaboration with Genos Glycoscience Research Laboratory, using a highly sensitive technique called Liquid

Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry" he says. "It has long been questioned whether the diversity in prion strains may depend on the glycans that compose them as well as on protein folding. Our results led us to an answer for the first time".

"In this study, glycans from two different sheep prion strains were compared"

Natali Naki adds. "After an extensive analysis, no major differences in glycan structures were found between the two strains, suggesting that glycans may not be responsible for the biochemical and neuropathological differences". A remarkable goal as it represents another step toward the fully understanding of prion glycoproteins and the cellular mechanism of prion diseases.

Even in the world of the smallest particles with their own special rules, things cannot proceed infinitely fast. Physicists at the University of Bonn have now shown what the speed limit is for complex quantum operations. The study also involved scientists from MIT, the universities of Hamburg, Cologne and Padua, and the Jülich Research Center. The results are important for the realization of quantum computers, among other things. They are published in the prestigious journal Physical Review X, and covered by the Physics Magazine of the American Physical Society.

Suppose you observe a waiter (the lockdown is already history) who on New Year's Eve has to serve an entire tray of champagne glasses just a few minutes before midnight. He rushes from guest to guest at top speed. Thanks to his technique, perfected over many years of work, he nevertheless manages not to spill even a single drop of the precious liquid.

A little trick helps him to do this: While the waiter accelerates his steps, he tilts the tray a bit so that the champagne does not spill out of the glasses. Halfway to the table, he tilts it in the opposite direction and slows down. Only when he has come to a complete stop does he hold it upright again.

Atoms are in some ways similar to champagne. They can be described as waves of matter, which behave not like a billiard ball but more like a liquid. Anyone who wants to transport atoms from one place to another as quickly as possible must therefore be as skillful as the waiter on New Year's Eve. "And even then, there is a speed limit that this transport cannot exceed," explains Dr. Andrea Alberti, who led this study at the Institute of Applied Physics of the University of Bonn.

Cesium atom as a champagne substitute

In their study, the researchers experimentally investigated exactly where this limit lies. They used a cesium atom as a champagne substitute and two laser beams perfectly superimposed but directed against each other as a tray. This superposition, called interference by physicists, creates a standing wave of light: a sequence of mountains and valleys that initially do not move. "We loaded the atom into one of these valleys, and then set the standing wave in motion - this displaced the position of the valley itself," says Alberti. "Our goal was to get the atom to the target location in the shortest possible time without it spilling out of the valley, so to speak."

The fact that there is a speed limit in the microcosm was already theoretically demonstrated by two Soviet physicists, Leonid Mandelstam and Igor Tamm more than 60 years ago. They showed that the maximum speed of a quantum process depends on the energy uncertainty, i.e., how "free" the manipulated particle is with respect to its possible energy states: the more energetic freedom it has, the faster it is. In the case of the transport of an atom, for example, the deeper the valley into which the cesium atom is trapped, the more spread the energies of the quantum states in the valley are, and ultimately the faster the atom can be transported. Something similar can be seen in the example of the waiter: If he only fills the glasses half full (to the chagrin of the guests), he runs less risk that the champagne spills over as he accelerates and decelerates. However, the energetic freedom of a particle cannot be increased arbitrarily. "We can't make our valley infinitely deep - it would cost us too much energy," stresses Alberti.

Beam me up, Scotty!

The speed limit of Mandelstam and Tamm is a fundamental limit. However, one can only reach it under certain circumstances, namely in systems with only two quantum states. "In our case, for example, this happens when the point of origin and destination are very close to each other," the physicist explains. "Then the matter waves of the atom at both locations overlap, and the atom could be transported directly to its destination in one go, that is, without any stops in between - almost like the teleportation in the Starship Enterprise of Star Trek."

However, the situation is different when the distance grows to several dozens of matter wave widths as in the Bonn experiment. For these distances, direct teleportation is impossible. Instead, the particle must go through several intermediate states to reach its final destination: The two-level system becomes a multi-level system. The study shows that a lower speed limit applies to such processes than that predicted by the two Soviet physicists: It is determined not only by the energy uncertainty, but also by the number of intermediate states. In this way, the work improves the theoretical understanding of complex quantum processes and their constraints.

The physicists' findings are important not least for quantum computing. The computations that are possible with quantum computers are mostly based on the manipulation of multi-level systems. Quantum states are very fragile, though. They last only a short lapse of time, which physicists call coherence time. It is therefore important to pack as many computational operations as possible into this time. "Our study reveals the maximum number of operations we can perform in the coherence time," Alberti explains. "This makes it possible to make optimal use of it."

A chemist from RUDN University, working with a group of colleagues, synthesized three new chalcogenides (compounds that contain metals and elements from group 16 of the periodic table). The team suggested an unusual approach to synthesis that was based on iodine. An article about the work was published in the Dalton Transactions journal.

Chalcogens are elements of group 16 of the periodic table that include oxygen, sulfur, selenium, tellurium, polonium, and livermorium--an artificial radioactive element. Chalcogenides are compounds of chalcogens with metals that are used as photosensitive materials. Today, scientists are looking for ways to obtain new stable chalcogenide structures. A group of chemists including a scientist from RUDN University was the first to use iodine in the synthesis of new stable crystalline chalcogenides and to confirm its efficiency.

"Ordered metal compounds and their derivatives are a broad and exciting field of research. They are being studied both theoretically (because of complex crystalline structures and unusual binding schemes) and practically, due to their useful physical properties. We have obtained three new chalcogenides using iodine-based high-temperature synthesis", said Viktor Khrustalev, a Doctor of Chemistry and the Head of the Inorganic Chemistry Department, RUDN University.

Of the three new chalcogenides obtained by the team, two were based on tellurium (Ni5.80GaTe2 and Ni5.78InTe2) and one on sulfur (Ni9.39Ga2S2). These are rare structures in which nickel fragments alternate with nickel-sulfur or nickel-tellurium ones. Besides iodine, the scientists used nickel, gallium, indium, elemental sulfur, and tellurium for synthesis. Crystalline iodine and nickel powder were purified and then mixed. After that, the mix was put in a silicon dioxide capsule and subject to 600? heat for several days until it was completely dried.

As a result, monocrystals of the first two compounds and small crystal flakes of the third one were obtained. To study the new compounds, the scientists used X-ray structural analysis. It turned out that the new chalcogenides formed rhombic system crystals, unlike other similar compounds that usually form their chrystals in the tetragonal system. In the former case, an elementary cell of a crystal system is a parallelepiped with different side lengths, while in the latter it is a cube stretched along the tetrad axis. The rhombic crystal system in the new compounds is stable, and in Ni5.80GaTe2 it is preserved even under pressure or at high temperature.

"It is essential to mention the key role of iodine in the synthesis of the new chalcogenides. Because of iodine, we managed to obtain new synthesis products, only one of which would be available with traditional methods. Apparently, the reactions that cause the formation of new triple bonds require the presence of iodine," added Viktor Khrustalev from RUDN University.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Duke researchers have been studying something that happens too slowly for our eyes to see. A team in biologist Philip Benfey's lab wanted to see how plant roots burrow into the soil. So they set up a camera on rice seeds sprouting in clear gel, taking a new picture every 15 minutes for several days after germination.

When they played their footage back at 15 frames per second, compressing 100 hours of growth into less than a minute, they saw that rice roots use a trick to gain their first foothold in the soil: their growing tips make corkscrew-like motions, waggling and winding in a helical path.

By using their time-lapse footage, along with a root-like robot to test ideas, the researchers gained new insights into how and why plant root tips twirl as they grow.

The first clue came from something else the team noticed: some roots can't do the corkscrew dance. The culprit, they found, is a mutation in a gene called HK1 that makes them grow straight down, instead of circling and meandering like other roots do.

The team also noted that the mutant roots grew twice as deep as normal ones. Which raised a question: "What does the more typical spiraling tip growth do for the plant?" said Isaiah Taylor, a postdoctoral associate in Benfey's lab at Duke.

Winding movements in plants were "a phenomenon that fascinated Charles Darwin," even 150 years ago, Benfey said. In the case of shoots, there's an obvious utility: twining and circling makes it easier to get a grip as they climb towards the sunlight. But how and why it happens in roots was more of a mystery.

Sprouting seeds have a challenge, the researchers say. If they're to survive, the first tiny root that emerges has to anchor the plant and probe downwards to suck up the water and nutrients the plant needs to grow.

Which got them thinking: perhaps in root tips this spiral growth is a search strategy -- a way to find the best path forward, Taylor said.

In experiments performed in physics professor Daniel Goldman's lab at Georgia Tech, observations of normal and mutant rice roots growing over a perforated plastic plate revealed that normal spiraling roots were three times more likely to find a hole and grow through to the other side.

Collaborators at Georgia Tech and the University of California, Santa Barbara built a soft pliable robot that unfurls from its tip like a root and set it loose in an obstacle course consisting of unevenly spaced pegs.

To create the robot, the team took two inflatable plastic tubes and nested them inside each other. Changing the air pressure pushed the soft inner tube from the inside out, making the robot elongate from the tip. Contracting opposing pairs of artificial "muscles" made the robot's tip bend side to side as it grew.

Even without sophisticated sensors or controls, the robotic root was still able to make its way past obstacles and find a path through the pegs. But when the side-to-side bending stopped, the robot quickly got stuck against a peg.

Finally, the team grew normal and mutant rice seeds in a dirt mix used for baseball fields, to test them out on obstacles a root would actually encounter in soil. Sure enough, while the mutants had trouble getting a toehold, the normal roots with spiral-growing tips were able to bore through.

A root tip's corkscrew growth is coordinated by the plant hormone auxin, a growth substance the researchers think may move around the tip of a growing root in a wave-like pattern. Auxin buildup on one side of the root causes those cells to elongate less than those on the other side, and the root tip bends in that direction.

Plants that carry the HK1 mutation can't dance because of a defect in how auxin is carried from cell to cell, the researchers found. Block this hormone and roots lose their ability to twirl.

The work helps scientists understand how roots grow in hard, compacted soil.

While most adults over 50 understand that overuse of antibiotics is a problem, and say they're cautious about taking the drugs, a sizable minority have used antibiotics for something other than their original purpose, and appear to think the drugs could help treat colds, which are caused by viruses not bacteria.

These findings, contained in a new paper in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, come from a national poll of people between the ages of 50 and 80 carried out as part of the National Poll on Healthy Aging.

The authors, from the University of Michigan's Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation, say their findings highlight the importance of careful guidance from health care providers to older adults, about the proper use and disposal of antibiotics prescribed to outpatients.

The paper expands on the findings first shared in an NPHA report in late 2019. The national poll included responses from more than 2,200 adults who were asked if they had received a prescription for an antibiotic at least once in the last two years, and also about their past practices before the two-year window.

Key data from the new paper:

More than 91% of older adults said they are cautious about using antibiotics, and nearly 89% agreed that overuse can lead to antibiotics not working the next time they're needed.

Nearly 56% agreed that doctors overprescribe antibiotics, but 41% said that if they had a cold or flu that lasted long enough to cause them to see a doctor, they would expect to receive a prescription for an antibiotic.

34% said they believe antibiotics can help them get better if they get a cold or the flu; these conditions are viral illnesses that do not respond to antibiotics, which aim to kill infectious bacteria.

Nearly 48% of older adults had received at least one prescription for antibiotics in the past two years, and half of these said at least one prescription was for a respiratory condition.

Nearly 13% of those who filled an antibiotic prescription said they had leftover medication, even though antibiotics are typically prescribed as "courses" that are intended to be taken until no medication remains. Stopping a prescription early can increase the chance that the surviving bacteria will evolve resistance to future treatment by antibiotics.

65% of those with leftover antibiotics said they kept them, and nearly 60% of these respondents said they did so in case they needed the medication in the future. This practice is not recommended; experts say individuals should seek medical attention for new signs of infection, and obtain a new prescription if antibiotics are warranted.

Nearly 19% of all respondents said that they had taken antibiotics without talking to a health care professional at least once in the past, and most said they had taken their own leftover antibiotics.

Among those who said they had had leftover antibiotics from a prescription in the past two years, just over 50% said they had taken the leftovers without talking to a healthcare professional.

Cracow, 18 February 2021

Creation of matter in an interaction of two photons belongs to a class of very rare phenomena. From the data of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, collected with the new AFP proton detectors at the highest energies available to-date, a more accurate - and more interesting - picture of the phenomena occurring during photon collisions is emerging.

If you point a glowing flashlight towards another one, you do not expect any spectacular phenomena. The photons emitted by both flashlights simply pass by each other. However, in certain collisions involving high-energy protons the situation is different. The photons emitted by two colliding particles may interact and create a pair of matter and antimatter particles. Traces of processes such as these have just been observed in the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva. Precise observations were carried out using the new AFP (ATLAS Forward Proton) spectrometer, developed with significant participation of scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow. The Polish physicists, funded by the National Science Centre and the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, have been involved in the development of AFP detectors since the conception of these devices.

"Observations of the creation of particles of matter and antimatter from electromagnetic radiation go back to the beginnings of nuclear physics", says Prof. Janusz Chwastowski, head of the team of physicists at the IFJ PAN involved in the AFP detectors.

Indeed, it was February 1933 when Patrick Blackett (Nobel 1948) and Giuseppe Occhialini reported an observation of the creation of an electron-positron pair initiated by a quantum of cosmic radiation. The creation of matter and antimatter was therefore noticed earlier than the reverse process, i.e. the famous and spectacular positron annihilation. The first observations of the latter were made in August 1933 by Theodor Heiting, and three months later by Frédéric Joliot.

"In the most commonly recorded events of creation, one photon transforms into a particle and an antiparticle. In contrast, the phenomenon we are studying is of a different nature. The particle-antiparticle pair arises here due to the interaction of two photons. The possibility of such processes was first reported by Gregory Breit and John A. Wheeler in 1934," continues Prof. Chwastowski.

As a charged particle, the proton moving inside the LHC beam pipe is surrounded by an electric field. Since the carriers of electromagnetic interactions are photons, the proton can be treated as an object surrounded by photons.

"In the LHC beam pipe, protons reach velocities very close to the speed of light. A proton and the surrounding field undergo the Lorentz contraction along the direction of motion. Thus, from our point of view, a proton moving at almost the speed of light is associated with particularly violent oscillations of the electromagnetic field. When such a proton approaches another one accelerated in the opposite directions - and this is the situation we are dealing with at the LHC - an interaction between the photons may occur", explains Dr. Rafal Staszewski (IFJ PAN).

At the LHC, collisions of highly energetic proton beams occur in several places, including the one located inside the giant ATLAS detector. If two photons collide, the result could be an electron-positron pair or a muon-antimuon pair (a muon is about 200 times more massive than an electron). These particles, which belong to the lepton family, produced at large angles with respect to the proton beams, are recorded inside the main ATLAS detector. Such phenomena have been observed at the LHC before.

"The point is, we have two more protagonists of two-photon processes! These are, naturally, the photon sources, i.e. the two passing protons. Thus we get to the essence of our measurement," says Dr. Staszewski and explains: "As a result of the photon emission, each proton loses some energy but, importantly, it practically does not change the direction of its motion. So, it escapes the detector together with other protons in the beam. However, the proton that emitted the photon has a slightly lower energy than the beam protons. Therefore, the accelerator magnetic field deflects it more, and this means that it gradually moves away from the beam. These are the protons we are hunting for with our AFP spectrometers".

Each of the four AFP tracking units contains four sensors: 16x20 mm semiconductor pixel plates, placed one behind the other. A proton that passes through the sensors deposits some energy and thus it activates the pixels on its path. By analysing all the activated pixels, the proton path and properties can be reconstructed.

The need to record protons only slightly deflected from the main beam means that the AFP spectrometers have to be inserted directly inside the LHC beam pipe, just a few millimetres away from the circulating beams.

"When you are operating so close to a particle beam with such high energies, you have to be aware of the risks. The smallest error in the positioning of the spectrometer could result in burning a hole in it. It would be very upsetting, but that would really be the least of our problems. The resulting debris would contaminate at least a part of the accelerator causing its shut down for some time," notes Prof. Chwastowski.

The measurements described here were carried out with AFP spectrometers placed at a distance of about 200 m from the point at which the protons collided.

"Protons interact at the LHC in many ways. As a result, the protons observed in the AFP spectrometers may originate from processes other than those associated with photon-photon interactions. To search for the right protons, we needed to have precise knowledge about the properties of each particle," emphasises PhD student Krzysztof Ciesla (IFJ PAN), who dealt with the initial analysis of the raw data collected by the AFP spectrometers in 2017 and converting them into information about the energies and momenta of the registered protons. The results of the proton energy measurements were then juxtaposed with the energies of the created lepton pair and, based on conservation principles, it was determined whether the observed proton could be the source of the interacting photon.

The measurements using the AFP spectrometers proved to be highly statistically significant, at nine standard deviations (sigma). For comparison, a five-sigma measurement is usually sufficient to announce a scientific discovery. So, the AFP spectrometers have successfully passed the test, proved usefulness of the method and provided very interesting, though still unclear, results. It turned out that theoretical predictions do not fully agree with the determined characteristics of the investigated interactions. Clearly there are hidden nuances in the two-photon processes observed in high energy proton-proton collisions that require better understanding and further measurements.

An analysis published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society indicates that while adults aged 75 years and older do not benefit from taking aspirin to prevent cardiovascular disease, many do so on a regular basis. Also, although statins are known to help prevent heart problems in older adults who have experienced a cardiovascular event, many of these individuals do not take a statin.

The analysis included data on 11,392 U.S. adults aged 50 years and older who were surveyed from 2011 to 2018. Investigators found that more than half of participants took aspirin or a statin.

"Healthcare providers should inform their older patients about appropriate aspirin use so that they can avoid misuse of aspirin, which can be easily purchased over the counter. Ultimately, safer prescribing practice, patient education, and patient-oriented effectiveness research should be continually encouraged to reduce potential harms and improve cardiovascular health in older adults," said lead author Greg Rhee, PhD, of the University of Connecticut School of Medicine.