Brain

Washington, DC-- A 10-year effort by China to improve air quality and reduce pollution-related health risks has caused warming in areas across the northern hemisphere, according to new work published in Environmental Research Letters.

Aerosols are tiny particles that are spewed into the atmosphere by human activities, such as burning coal and wood, or by geological phenomena, like volcanos. Their negative effects on air quality can damage human health and agricultural productivity.

Similar to how the aerosols emitted in a volcanic eruption can cause global temperatures to drop, some aerosols from human activity also have a cooling effect on the climate. Unlike greenhouse gases, which induce global warming by trapping heat in the atmosphere, aerosol particles can cause sunlight to be reflected away from the planet either directly or by interacting with clouds.

"This means that some of the effects of global warming are being masked by aerosol pollution," explained lead author, Carnegie's Yixuan Zheng.

Between 2006 and 2017, the Chinese government implemented clean-air policies to reduce the public health risks of aerosol pollutants like sulfate, a cooling agent. These efforts have possibly saved as many as half a million lives a year.

Zheng, along with Carnegie colleague Ken Caldeira, UC Irvine's Dan Tong and Steven Davis, and Qiang Zhang of Tsinghua University, set out to investigate how these aerosol reductions have affected the global climate.

They applied a sophisticated model based on atmospheric and oceanic systems over a 100-year period, which revealed that China's pollution-reduction policies might have unmasked about 0.1 degrees Celsius (0.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of greenhouse-gas-induced warming throughout the northern hemisphere--not just in China itself.

"The health risks associated with particulate pollution are very serious and mitigation efforts are unquestionably a good thing," Caldeira said. "But it's also important to understand how ongoing and future efforts to improve air quality will create additional challenges in the international fight against climate change."

Through the development of new technology, University of Minnesota researchers have developed a method that allows scientists to understand how a fruit fly's brain responds to seeing color. Prior to this, being able to determine how a brain responds to color was limited to humans and animals with slower visual systems. A fruit fly, when compared to a human, has a visual system that is five times faster. Some predatory insects see ten times faster than humans.

"If we can understand how seeing color affects the brain, we will be able to better understand how different animals react to certain stimuli," said Trevor Wardill, the study's lead author and assistant professor in the College of Biological Sciences. "In doing so, we will know what interests them most, how it impacts their behavior, and what advantages different color sensitivities may give to an individual's or a species' survival."

Published in Scientific Reports, Wardill and Rachel Feord -- a University of Cambridge Ph.D. student in Wardill's laboratory -- developed the new approach by:

developing a filter-based optics system for a two-photon microscope that divided the visible spectrum in a way that allowed the fruit flies to see light without interfering with the brain imaging by partnering Semrock, an optical filter manufacturer;

testing high-speed projectors and screen materials to identify a screen that maintained a near-constant brightness of each wavelength band at all points of the screen from UV to red light; and

producing transgenic fly strains of the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) that differed in one or more of the following ways: screening pigment density, photoreceptor function and calcium activity indicator.

Through this, researchers developed a method that allows for a fly to be presented with more than 50 different types of high intensity wavelength bands across the visual spectrum, while allowing for simultaneous, uninterrupted brain imaging with maximum sensitivity (i.e., able to collect photons for the full imaging duty cycle) when compared to previous methods. As a result of this testing, they found strain-specific sensitivities to colors among the fruit flies, with orange-eyed flies exhibiting a decreased sensitivity to light in the blue range and increased sensitivity in the green range when compared to their red-eyed counterparts.

"This work brings us one step closer to understanding which neurons react to which colors, the next step toward understanding how color sensitivities affect behavior and what advantages, if any, it can give an individual or species," said Wardill.

SALT LAKE CITY--Scientists from the John A. Moran Eye Center at the University of Utah have achieved another first in the field of connectomics, which studies the synaptic connections between neurons.

Moran's Marclab for Connectomics was the first to complete a map of the circuitry of the retina, or connectome, in 2011. Now, the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded lab has produced the first pathoconnectome, showing how eye disease alters retinal circuitry.

The implications of the published research, A pathoconnectome of early neurodegeneration: Network changes in retinal degeneration, extend far beyond eye diseases. The eye holds lessons applicable to a host of neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, epilepsy, and Lou Gehrig's disease.

"The components of neurodegeneration we see in the eye seem to mimic those we see in the brain," explained the paper's lead author, Moran's Rebecca L. Pfeiffer, PhD. "So this pathoconnectome is allowing us to learn fundamental rules of how neurodegenerative diseases alter neural networks in general. The ultimate goal is to identify how we might develop new therapies based on preventing or interfering with the network rewiring prompted by disease."

The Marclab developed the pathoconnectome from a model of early-stage retinitis pigmentosa (RP), an inherited retinal disease that can lead to blindness. The immense data set compiled to construct the pathoconnectome has taken years to assemble and is open for use by other scientists. The Marclab is working on a second and third pathoconnectome that will show how the retina rewires itself in later stages of RP.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Can't stop checking social media for the latest COVID-19 health information? You might want to take a break, according to researchers at Penn State and Jinan University who discovered that excessive use of social media for COVID-19 health information is related to both depression and secondary trauma.

"We found that social media use was rewarding up to a point, as it provided informational, emotional and peer support related to COVID-19 health topics," said Bu Zhong, associate professor of journalism, Penn State. "However, excessive use of social media led to mental health issues. The results imply that taking a social media break may promote well-being during the pandemic, which is crucial to mitigating mental health harm inflicted by the pandemic."

The study, which published online on Aug. 15 in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, included 320 participants living in urban districts of Wuhan, China. In February 2020, the team gave the participants an online survey that investigated how they accessed and shared health information with family members, friends and colleagues on social media, specifically WeChat, China's most popular social media mobile app.

The team used an instrument created to measure Facebook addiction to assess participants' use of WeChat. Using a 5-point Likert-type scale, ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree, the survey assessed participants' views of WeChat in providing them with informational, emotional and peer support. The survey also assessed participants' health behavior changes as a result of using social media.

Statements related to informational support included, "I use WeChat to gain information about how to manage the coronavirus epidemic," and "If I have a question or need help related to the coronavirus epidemic, I can usually find the answers on WeChat." Statements related to emotional support included, "My stress levels go down while I'm engaging with others on WeChat," and "The health information on WeChat helps me alleviate feelings of loneliness." Statements related to peer support included, "I use WeChat to share practical advice and suggestions about managing the coronavirus epidemic," and "I have used some of the information I learned from WeChat friends as part of my management strategies for coping with the coronavirus epidemic."

The survey also investigated participants' health behavior changes related to the use of WeChat, asking them to rate statements such as, "The health information on WeChat has changed many of my health behaviors, such as but not limited to wearing face masks, using sanitizer, or washing hands."

To assess depression, the researchers used a 21-item Depression Anxiety Stress Scale in which participants rated statements such as, "I couldn't seem to experience any positive feeling at all," and "I felt that life was meaningless."

According to Zhong, secondary trauma refers to the behaviors and emotions resulting from knowledge about a traumatizing event experienced by a significant other. Using the Secondary Trauma Stress Scale, the researchers asked respondents to rate statements such as, "My heart started pounding when I thought about the coronavirus epidemic," and "I had disturbing dreams about the coronavirus epidemic."

"We found that the Wuhan residents obtained tremendous informational and peer support but slightly less emotional support when they accessed and shared health information about COVID-on WeChat," said Zhong. "The participants also reported a series of health behavior changes, such as increased hand washing and use of face masks.

More than half of the respondents reported some level of depression, with nearly 20% of them suffering moderate or severe depression. Among the respondents who reported secondary trauma, the majority reported a low (80%) level of trauma, while fewer reported moderate (13%) and high (7%) levels of trauma. None of the participants reported having any depressive or traumatic disorders before the survey was conducted.

"Our results show that social media usage was related to both depression and secondary trauma during the early part of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan," said Zhong. "The findings suggest that taking a social media break from time to time may help to improve people's mental well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic."

An African millet crop could be improved for growth in the dry, arid lands of Saudi Arabia by using information about its genome. Fonio is already well-adapted to this environment but has not had as much domestication as the major cereal crops, such as wheat, rice and maize. Gene targeting could lead to higher yields and larger grains.

"The Arabian Peninsula is home to 80 million people and needs to import 90 percent of its food," says KAUST plant scientist, Simon Krattinger, who led the study. "The major cereal crops that provide 50 percent of our daily calories cannot be grown sustainably in this region due to a lack of fresh water, poor soils and high temperatures."

"Fonio is an amazing, nutritious plant that thrives in dry and hot regions with poor soils. Our long-term goal is to improve fonio millet while maintaining its extraordinary properties," explains Krattinger.

KAUST researchers, with an international team of scientists, analyzed the genomes of domesticated and wild fonio millet plants from across Africa and then compared them with the genomes of other major cereal crops.

The analyses found two genes that had undergone selection in fonio. One of these two genes, called DeGs5-3A, is very similar to a rice gene that regulates grain width and weight. It showed a complete loss of diversity in domesticated fonio, suggesting that plants with this active gene had been artificially selected for their larger grains.

The other gene, called DeSh1-9A, was found to be mutated in some fonio domesticated varieties, and is similar to another mutation in domesticated African rice. The mutation reduces seed loss through a process called shattering: this is beneficial for wild varieties because it ensures seed dispersal and natural planting in the environment but reduces yield in cultivated crops.

Other gene variants that have been selected for in major cereal crops were also found to show a wild-plant-like nucleotide sequence in fonio. "Modifying these genes, for example with genome editing, could significantly improve fonio by producing larger seeds with no seed shattering," says KAUST postdoc Michael Abrouk. "Our next aim is to produce a fonio cultivar that has all the properties of a modern cereal but that retains drought tolerance, fast maturation and the ability to grow in sandy soils."

The researchers also identified factors that have impacted fonio's genetic diversity across Africa. "Adaptations to climate were not a big surprise," says Ph.D. student Hanin Ahmed. "A fonio cultivar grown in the Sahel zone of Mali requires different properties from a cultivar grown in the subtropical regions of southern Togo." Surprising, however, was the link identified between fonio's genetic patterns and ethnolinguistic groupings in Africa. For example, there were striking genetic differences between fonio cultivars collected from northern and southern Togo. Although partially related to climate, this diversity is also probably caused by cultural differences that have limited seed sharing between farmers of the two regions.

"Fonio is a semidomesticated crop that shows some adaptation to agricultural practices," says Krattinger. "Improvements to fonio could lead to a new cereal that can be widely and sustainably grown in dry and hot environments."

Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute have shown that blocking the construction of nuclear pores complexes--large channels that control the flow of materials in and out of the cell nucleus--shrank aggressive tumors in mice while leaving healthy cells unharmed. The study, published in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, reveals a new Achilles heel for cancer that may lead to better treatments for deadly tumors such as melanoma, leukemia and colorectal cancer.

"Nuclear pore complexes are the 'doors' that all materials pass through to gain entry to the cell's nucleus. Because cancer cells are rapidly growing and dividing they need and create more nuclear pore complexes than normal cells," says Maximiliano D'Angelo, Ph.D., associate professor in the Development, Aging and Regeneration Program at Sanford Burnham Prebys. "Our study is the first to demonstrate that by blocking the formation of these nuclear 'doors' we can selectively kill cancer cells."

A promising new way to treat cancer

Because cancer cells are highly dependent on the nuclear transport process--the movement of molecules through nuclear pores--targeting the nuclear transport machinery is a promising strategy for cancer therapies. D'Angelo is hopeful that targeting the formation of nuclear pore complexes, which only impacts dividing cells and thus would likely only kill cancer cells, may offer a safe way to treat many cancer types. However, until now this hypothesis had not yet been tested.

In the study, D'Angelo and his team tested this hypothesis by transplanting human tumor cells that are unable to form nuclear pore complexes into mice. Three different tumor cell types were tested--melanoma, leukemia and colorectal cancer--which are known to be especially reliant on nuclear pore complexes. The scientists found that all of these mice had smaller tumors and slower tumor growth.

"We showed that the inability to build nuclear pore channels is devastating for rapidly-growing cancer cells, but doesn't seem to have an impact on healthy cells--which simply halt their growth, and then recover," says Stephen Sakuma, a graduate student in the D'Angelo lab and first author of the study. "Our findings provide an important proof of concept that this approach could lead to a new type of cancer treatment, which might be especially beneficial for aggressive or metastatic cancers that are difficult to treat."

From discovery to drug

Now that the scientists have demonstrated that their approach works, they are working to find a drug that can block the formation of nuclear pore complexes. This work is ongoing at the Conrad Prebys Center for Chemical Genomics at Sanford Burnham Prebys, one of the most advanced drug discovery centers in the nonprofit world.

"In addition to one day helping people with tough-to-treat cancers, we envision this drug candidate might be used to prevent drug resistance, which happens when tumors adopt properties to resist therapy," says D'Angelo. "Tumors would have a hard time adopting to an environment where their 'doors' are removed, so this drug might help certain treatments, such as targeted therapies, remain effective for longer periods of time."

When nerve cells aren't busy exchanging information, they're supposed to keep quiet. If they're just popping off at random, like in a noisy classroom, it obscures the signals they're supposed to be transmitting.

But in the most common genetic cause of schizophrenia, it seems that nerve cells won't shut up, Stanford University School of Medicine investigators have found. And they think they know why.

One in every 3,000 people carries the genetic defect called 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, or 22q11DS. It's one of the most widespread chromosomal deletions known to occur in humans. People carrying 22q11DS are at an astonishing 30-fold risk for schizophrenia compared with the general population, dwarfing the magnitude of all other known genetic or environmental risk factors. Plus, some 30%-40% of individuals with this deletion receive a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder early in their lives.

Until now, nobody understood why this deletion so profoundly elevates the risk for these conditions.

But experiments performed in a study to be published Sept. 28 in Nature Medicine have pinpointed a change in an electrical property of cortical neurons among carriers of the deletion that may explain how they develop schizophrenia, which is characterized by hallucinations, delusions and cognitive decline.

The scientists identified a single gene that appears to be largely responsible for the electrical abnormality.

Instead of describing psychiatric disorders as collections of behavioral symptoms, Sergiu Pasca, MD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, envisions defining these psychiatric diseases in terms of their molecular underpinnings -- what he calls molecular psychiatry.

"Oncologists can learn a lot about the underlying drivers of a patient's cancer by studying a tumor biopsy," Pasca said. "But probing the underlying biological mechanisms driving psychiatric disorders is hard, because we don't ordinarily have access to functional brain tissue from living patients." But a new technology circumvents that difficulty.

"We've been working from behavior down," he said. "Here, we're working from molecules up."

Experimenting on balls of brain cells

The Stanford scientists, collaborating with researchers from other institutions, uncovered the electrical defect in nerve cells, or neurons, by generating and manipulating tiny spherical clusters of brain cells in a dish. Each cluster contained hundreds of thousands of cells. These so-called cortical spheroids, composed of neurons and other important brain cells, were first developed by Pasca several years ago. Derived from skin cells and suspended in laboratory glassware, the spheroids self-organize to recapitulate some of the architecture of the human cerebral cortex, a brain region often associated with schizophrenia symptoms. The spheroids continue to develop for months and even years in a dish.

In the study, Pasca and his colleagues generated cortical spheroids from skin cells taken from 15 different 22q11DS carriers and 15 healthy control subjects. Pasca, the Bonnie Uytengsu and Family Director of the Stanford Brain Organogenesis Program, is the study's senior author. Lead authorship is shared by Stanford graduate student Themasap Khan; Stanford postdoctoral scholar Omer Revah, DMV, PhD; and Aaron Gordon, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA.

Not all the 22q11DS donors had manifested schizophrenia's hallmark symptoms. Whereas schizophrenia usually reveals itself in late adolescence or early adulthood, even asymptomatic 22q11DS carriers remain at elevated risk of developing schizophrenia throughout their lifetimes.

The neurons generated from every 22q11DS carrier in the study demonstrated a consistently less-than-normal voltage difference between the inner-facing and outer-facing sides of the cell membranes when the cells weren't firing. A quiescent neuron's cross-membrane voltage difference is called its resting membrane potential; it keeps the neuron poised to fire while preventing it from firing at random.

Cortical neurons derived from people with 22q11DS were more excitable, the study found. This is likely because of their abnormal resting membrane potential, Pasca said. The 22q11DS-derived neurons spontaneously fired four times as frequently as neurons derived from people in the control group. This altered resting membrane potential also led to abnormalities in calcium signaling in the 22q11DS neurons. Treating these neurons with any of three different antipsychotic drugs effectively reversed the defects in resting membrane potential and calcium signaling, and prevented these neurons from being so excitable.

The researchers also studied a gene called DGCR8, which has been suspected of being tied to schizophrenia. DGCR8 is one of scores of genes normally residing along a stretch of chromosomal DNA that's deleted in a person with 22q11DS.

Knocking down DGCR8's activity levels in the control neurons reproduced the weakened resting membrane potential and associated malfunctions seen in the 22q11DS neurons. Boosting the activity of the gene through genetic manipulation or by applying antipsychotic drugs to 22q11DS neurons largely restored that potential.

"DGCR8 is probably the main player in the cellular defects we observed," Pasca said. Some of these defects are probably also present in some other forms of schizophrenia, he added.

"We can't test hallucinations in a dish," Pasca said. "But the fact that the cellular malfunctions we identified in a dish were reversed by drugs that relieve symptoms in people with schizophrenia suggests that these cellular malfunctions could be related to the disorder's behavioral manifestations."

There are undoubtedly many types of schizophrenia, he said. "But clinically, 22q11DS-related schizophrenia isn't very different from other forms of schizophrenia. Some of the mechanisms we've identified here may turn out to apply to those more genetically or environmentally complex types of schizophrenia."

Helium atom precision measurements and calculations have a history of nearly a century. In the 1960s, theorists discovered that the fine-structure split (23P0-23P2) of the 23P energy level of helium is the best atomic system for measuring the fine structure constant α (approximately 1/137), which is the key parameter in the Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) theory. QED is the basic theory describing the quantum properties of electromagnetic interactions. It covers almost all physical systems from microscopic particles to macroscopic solids, and is currently the most accurate theory in physics. Such a measurement of α from precision spectroscopy of helium, compared with values determined from totally different methods, presents a perfect test of the consistency of physics. After 50 years of hard work, theorists have develoed different approaches to calculate the QED correction of helium to the 7th power series of α.

Experimental precision measurements of helium atoms have been carried out in many international research institutions. Recent experimental progresses obtained in several groups worldwide are introduced, including the 2S-2P transition frequency of He-4 and the 23P0-23P2 fine structure interval determined by the authors' research group, which are the most accurate results to date.

At present, the accuracy of calculated results of helium is limited by the very complicated QED correction of the 8th order of α. On the one hand, it may be developed through theoretical development, and on the other hand, it may be explored through precision measurements of other helium-like ions. This will be an extremely strict test of QED.

In addition, precision measurement of helium also has a broad impact to various important studies.

Spectroscopy of the helium atom has been applied to determine the radius of helium nuclei. At present, there is still a significant deviation between the measured results of the difference between the nuclear radius of helium-3 and helium-4. The reason for this deviation has not been explained, and the solution of this problem will provide an important reference to solve the "puzzle of proton radius".

The polarizability of helium atoms can be accurately calculated and the refractive index of helium gas can be derived. Since the refractive index of a gas can be precisely measured by optical methods, this becomes a metrology method for optically determining the density (pressure) of gases. Related technical methods are developing at NIST in the United States and at PTB in Germany, and the authors' research team has also undertaken related research.

The debate about when dinosaurs developed feathers has taken a new turn with a paper refuting earlier claims that feathers were also found on dinosaurs' relatives, the flying reptiles called pterosaurs.

Pterosaur expert Dr David Unwin from the University of Leicester's Centre for Palaeobiology Research, and Professor Dave Martill, of the University of Portsmouth have examined the evidence that these creatures had feathers and believe they were in fact bald

They have responded to a suggestion by a group of his colleagues led by Zixiao Yang that some pterosaur fossils show evidence of feather-like branching filaments, 'protofeathers', on the animal's skin.

Dr Yang, from Nanjing University, and colleagues presented their argument in a 2018 paper in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. Now Unwin and Martill, have offered an alternative, non-feather explanation for the fossil evidence in the same journal.

While this may seem like academic minutiae, it actually has huge palaeontological implications. Feathered pterosaurs would mean that the very earliest feathers first appeared on an ancestor shared by both pterosaurs and dinosaurs, since it is unlikely that something so complex developed separately in two different groups of animals.

This would mean that the very first feather-like elements evolved at least 80 million years earlier than currently thought. It would also suggest that all dinosaurs started out with feathers, or protofeathers but some groups, such as sauropods, subsequently lost them again - the complete opposite of currently accepted theory.

The evidence rests on tiny, hair-like filaments, less than one tenth of a millimetre in diameter, which have been identified in about 30 pterosaur fossils. Among these, Yang and colleagues were only able to find just three specimens on which these filaments seem to exhibit a 'branching structure' typical of protofeathers.

Unwin and Martill propose that these are not protofeathers at all but tough fibres which form part of the internal structure of the pterosaur's wing membrane, and that the 'branching' effect may simply be the result of these fibres decaying and unravelling.

Dr Unwin said: "The idea of feathered pterosaurs goes back to the nineteenth century but the fossil evidence was then, and still is, very weak. Exceptional claims require exceptional evidence - we have the former, but not the latter."

Professor Martill noted that either way, palaeontologists will have to carefully reappraise ideas about the ecology of these ancient flying reptiles. He said, "If they really did have feathers, how did that make them look, and did they exhibit the same fantastic variety of colours exhibited by birds. And if they didn't have feathers, then how did they keep warm at night, what limits did this have on their geographic range, did they stay away from colder northern climes as most reptiles do today. And how did they thermoregulate? The clues are so cryptic, that we are still a long way from working out just how these amazing animals worked.

A new study in PNAS shows that bees share a capacity for automatic learning the complex statistical properties often experienced in natural environments. Previously this was thought to be a visual capacity only present in humans and higher-level species, and the discovery in bees with a miniature brain inspires further improvements in AI. The study also reports that bees and humans use fundamentally different computational methods for this kind of learning, which might be one of the key reasons why humans' superior learning abilities emerged.

The international team led by Dr Aurore Avargue?s-Weber (University of Toulouse, France), Dr József Fiser (Central European University, Hungary) and Dr Adrian Dyer (RMIT University, Australia) used for the first time an identical test to compare automatic learning in humans and bees. They exposed humans and honeybees to the same multi-element scenes composed of a set of abstract shapes in an unrelated easy categorization task (Fig 1). In the following test phase, both species had to perform a number of tests by choosing between two novel multi-element scenes in each trial. The scenes in these tests were composed to measure whether the participants became spontaneously sensitive to various statistical properties of the visual scenes that they saw during the exposure phase without any dedicated training.

Dr Avargue?s-Weber says " Learning automatically by analyzing the statistical properties of a large set of previously experienced images to identify their underlying structure is a strategy that has been demonstrated in humans and in a few higher-level species. It is also the concept behind "deep learning", which fueled the immerse recent progress in Artificial Intelligence. Our results show that this is also the strategy used by bees, which suggests the universality and efficiency of this kind of automatic statistical learning."

Dr Dyer adds "People have often been amazed at wonderful navigation and recognition capabilities of honeybees, and now we know that they achieve complex tasks using a simplified version of statistical learning that is the basis of human visual problem solving, and essentially the basis of deep learning for AI."

And Dr Fiser says "We were very surprised to see that, similar to humans, honeybees developed a complex internal representation of the statistics of their new visual experience, and they could use this information in subsequent tests. We were even more astonished to realize that bees and humans achieved this feat by different computational strategies. Bees never become automatically sensitive to the predictability of visual elements that is, to how much the appearance of one element predicted the appearance of another element. In contrast, humans use this information from early infancy. This is exiting because access to predictability among pieces of information has long been implicated as a key computational requirement for acquiring effectively any highly complex knowledge. Thus our study demonstrates both how far one can get with simple methods and tiny brains to solve difficult tasks, and at the same time, what is crucial for reaching the next level of learning abilities."

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- The pandemic doesn't seem to be changing parents' minds about the importance of the flu vaccine.

It could be a double whammy flu season this year as the nation already faces a viral deadly disease with nearly twin symptoms. And while public health experts have emphasized the importance of people of all ages receiving seasonal flu vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic, many parents may not be getting that message.

Just a third of parents believe that having their child get the flu vaccine is more important this year, a national poll suggests.

And as schools reopen for the first time since the novel coronavirus outbreak, one in three parents don't plan to vaccinate children against the flu, according to the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health at Michigan Medicine.

"We may see peaks of flu and COVID-19 at the same time, which could overwhelm the health care system, strain testing capacity and potentially reduce our ability to catch and treat both respiratory illnesses effectively," says Mott Poll co-director Sarah Clark.

"Our report finds that even during the pandemic, some parents don't see the flu vaccine as more urgent or necessary. This heightens concerns about how the onset of flu season may compound challenges in managing COVID-19."

Influenza has led to between 9 to 45 million illnesses, 140,000 to 810,000 hospitalizations and 12,000 to 61,000 deaths a year since 2010, according to estimates by the Centers for Disease Control.

Children younger than five, and especially those younger than two, are at high risk of developing serious flu-related complications. The CDC reported 188 pediatric flu deaths during the 2019-2020 flu season.

The nationally representative Mott Poll report includes 1,992 responses from parents of children age 2-18 years who were surveyed in August.

Families who were least likely to get children vaccinated against the flu were those who didn't do so last year - less than a third of those parents say their child will probably get a flu vaccine this year.

In contrast, among parents who said their child got flu vaccine last year, nearly all (96%) intend to have their child get flu vaccine this year.

"A key challenge for public health officials is how to reach parents who do not routinely seek seasonal flu vaccination for their child," Clark says. "When getting a yearly flu vaccine is not a pattern, parents need to be prompted to think about why it's essential for their child to get vaccinated."

And according to the Mott Poll report, families whose provider strongly recommends vaccination are more likely to get children vaccinated against the flu.

Still, less than half of parents say their child's regular health care provider strongly recommends that their child get the flu vaccine this year.

Clark notes that this may be due to the impact of COVID on the health care delivery system, as many child health providers have limited the number of patients seen for in-person visits, with increased use of telehealth visits. This may reduce opportunities for providers to give a strong recommendation about flu vaccination for children and to answer parents' questions about flu vaccine safety and effectiveness.

Given the decrease in in-person visits, child health providers should look for other strategies, such as reminder postcards or website banners to emphasize the importance of children getting the flu vaccine during this pandemic year, Clark says.

Among the 32% of parents who say their child is unlikely to get a flu vaccine this year, the most common reasons include concerns about side effects or beliefs that it isn't necessary or effective.

But experts say these notions are often based in misconceptions about the flu vaccine, which still offers the best protection against both contracting the virus and also developing severe influenza-related illness.

"There is a lot of misinformation about the flu vaccine, but it is the best defense for children against serious health consequences of influenza and the risk of spreading it to others," Clark says.

Fourteen percent of parents said they will not seek the flu vaccine because they are keeping children away from health care sites due to the risk of COVID exposure, according to the Mott Poll.

"Most child health providers have made changes to their office environment to keep children safe during office visits and vaccinations," says Clark. "Parents who are concerned about COVID exposure should contact their child's provider to learn about what types of precautions have been put in place."

Nine percent of parents also say their child is afraid of needles or does not want to the get flu vaccine, which prevents them from scheduling an immunization. Mott teams recommend several strategies, including using books and comfort positions to help alleviate fears and anxiety among young children.

Parental intention regarding flu vaccine this year is also slightly lower for parents of teens compared to younger children (73% for children ages 2-4, 70% for ages 5-12 and 65% for ages 13-18.)

Teens sometimes receive the flu vaccine outside of their usual health care provider office. Some of those options may be limited by COVID, Clark notes, including schools, health fairs, and walk-in clinics at a local health department. However, many retail pharmacies are also expanding their flu vaccine services to children during the pandemic.

Reports from the state health department and CDC indicate that during the pandemic, the overall rates of childhood vaccinations dropped significantly in states like Michigan. Children appeared to be falling behind on vaccinations for diseases like measles and pertussis (whooping cough), magnifying public health concerns about kids potentially catching vaccine-preventable diseases.

Experts say the flu vaccine will help limit the stress on health care systems during the pandemic by reducing the number of influenza-related hospitalizations and doctor visits, and decreasing the need for diagnostic tests to distinguish flu from COVID, which has similar symptoms.

"Children should get the flu vaccine not only to protect themselves but to prevent the spread of influenza to family members and those who are at higher risk of serious complications," Clark says.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- With the worldwide spike in unemployment caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, many people may turn to volunteerism as a way to pass their newly found free time. But new research suggests that volunteers who also receive government aid are often judged negatively as "wasting time" that could be used to find paid employment.

"We found that aid recipients are scrutinized to a greater extent than those who are working, including the underemployed, with observers demonstrating a strong bias toward believing that aid recipients should be using their time to pursue employment opportunities above all else," said Jenny Olson, an assistant professor of marketing at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business and corresponding author of the research forthcoming in the International Journal of Research in Marketing. "This is beyond education, personal leisure, and spending time with family and friends.

"As a result, they are given less latitude in how they use their time, and can even be seen as more moral for choosing not to engage in prosocial behaviors, when such behaviors take time away from gaining paid employment," Olson added. "The simple act of volunteering among aid recipients -- versus not mentioning volunteering -- not only shapes judgments of the individual aid recipients, but this information can also impact views toward federal tax policy more broadly."

Although volunteering is a positive activity that partially combats the negative stereotype of a welfare beneficiary, Olson and her colleagues found that it also sparks anger among observing consumers, with aid recipients being perceived as being "less moral for choosing to volunteer." Factors that minimize these judgments include being perceived as taking strides toward gaining employment via education and being perceived as unable to work.

Other co-authors of the paper, "How Income Shapes Moral Judgments of Prosocial Behavior," are Andrea Morales of Arizona State University, Brent McFerran of Simon Fraser University in Canada and Darren Dahl of the University of British Columbia. The research was supported in part by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

According to a 2019 report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, public spending on government assistance averaged more than 20 percent across 36 countries in 2018. Many countries -- including those in Asia, Europe, and the Americas -- have seen a rise in the number of people receiving benefits over the years, a total now reaching into the billions.

The extent to which the welfare state is supported depends, in no small part, on public sentiment. Previous research has shown that support for government spending on welfare programs is directly related to how the voting public perceives the beneficiaries. This is the first paper to document a link between prosocial behavior and support for federal spending on welfare programs.

"Given that individuals perceive opportunity costs for their own time, it stands to reason that they perceive them for others as well," Olson said. "Because government programs are supported by 'their' taxpayer dollars, observers often feel justified in suggesting how aid recipients spend their time."

The research shows that consumers prefer different patterns of tax redistribution as a function of viewing aid recipients making nonfinancial choices. Specifically, consumers support allocating fewer tax dollars toward supporting government assistance programs after hearing about an aid recipient who volunteers his time.

Researchers conducted nine studies across three countries. They randomly presented participants with scenarios about hypothetical aid recipients and asked them to offer judgment about how the recipients used their time, such as engaging in volunteer activities or sending out resumes. Participants were asked how they viewed target individuals on a morality index and how they felt about them emotionally.

Gravitational wave detectors have opened a new window to the universe by measuring the ripples in spacetime produced by colliding black holes and neutron stars, but they are ultimately limited by quantum fluctuations induced by light reflecting off of mirrors. LSU Ph.D. physics alumnus Jonathan Cripe and his team of LSU researchers have conducted a new experiment with scientists from Caltech and Thorlabs to explore a way to cancel this quantum backaction and improve detector sensitivity.

In a new paper in Physical Review X, the investigators present a method for removing quantum backaction in a simplified system using a mirror the size of a human hair and show the motion of the mirror is reduced in agreement with theoretical predictions. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Despite using 40-kilogram mirrors for detecting passing gravitational waves, quantum fluctuations of light disturb the position of the mirrors when the light is reflected. As gravitational wave detectors continue to grow more sensitive with incremental upgrades, this quantum backaction will become a fundamental limit to the detectors' sensitivity, hampering their ability to extract astrophysical information from gravitational waves.

"We present an experimental testbed for studying and eliminating quantum backaction," Cripe said. "We perform two measurements of the position of a macroscopic object whose motion is dominated by quantum backaction and show that by making a simple change in the measurement scheme, we can remove the quantum effects from the displacement measurement. By exploiting correlations between the phase and intensity of an optical field, quantum backaction is eliminated."

Garrett Cole, technology manager at Thorlabs Crystalline Solutions (Crystalline Mirror Solutions was acquired by Thorlabs Inc. last year), and his team constructed the micromechanical mirrors from an epitaxial multilayer consisting of alternating GaAs and AlGaAs. An outside foundry, IQE North Carolina, grew the crystal structure while Cole and his team, including process engineers Paula Heu and David Follman, manufactured the devices at the University of California Santa Barbara nanofabrication facility.

"By performing this measurement on a mirror visible to the naked eye--at room temperature and at frequencies audible to the human ear--we bring the subtle effects of quantum mechanics closer to the realm of human experience," said LSU Ph.D. candidate Torrey Cullen. "By quieting the quantum whisper, we can now listen to the more subtle notes of the cosmic symphony."

"This research is especially timely because the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, just announced last month in Nature that they have seen the effects of quantum radiation pressure noise at the LIGO Livingston observatory," said Thomas Corbitt, associate professor in the LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy.

The effort behind that paper, "Quantum correlations between light and the kilogram-mass mirrors of LIGO," has been led by Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science, as well as postdoctoral scholar Haocun Yu and research scientist Lee McCuller, both at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

"Quantum radiation pressure noise is already poking out of the noise floor in Advanced LIGO, and before long, it will be a limiting noise source in GW detectors," Mavalvala said. "Deeper astrophysical observations will only be possible if we can reduce it, and this beautiful result from the Corbitt group at LSU demonstrates a technique for doing just that."

Meteorologists track hurricanes over the oceans, forecasting where and when landfall might occur so residents can prepare for disaster before it strikes. What if they could do the same thing for droughts?

Stanford scientists have now shown that may be possible in some instances - the researchers have identified a new kind of "landfalling drought" that can potentially be predicted before it impacts people and ecosystems on land. They found that these droughts, which form over the ocean and then migrate landward, can cause larger and drier conditions than droughts that occur solely over the land. Of all the droughts affecting land areas worldwide from 1981 to 2018, roughly one in six were landfalling droughts, according to the study published Sept. 21 in Water Resources Research.

"We normally don't think about droughts over the ocean - it may even sound counterintuitive. But just as over land, there can be times where large regions in the ocean experience less rainfall than normal," said lead author Julio Herrera-Estrada, a research collaborator with Water in the West who conducted research for the study while he was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). "Finding that some droughts start offshore will hopefully motivate conversations about the benefits of monitoring and forecasting droughts beyond the continents."

Droughts can harm or destroy crops, as well as impact water supplies, electricity generation, trade and ecosystem health. Historically, droughts have displaced millions of people and cost billions of dollars. Yet the climate processes that lead to drought are not fully understood, making accurate predictions difficult.

In order to pinpoint the large-scale landfalling droughts that originated over the ocean, the researchers used an object tracking algorithm to identify and follow clusters of moisture deficits all over the world, going back decades in time. They found that the landfalling droughts grew about three times as fast as land-only droughts, and usually took several months to reach a continent.

"Not all of the droughts that cause damage to humans and ecosystems are going to be these landfalling droughts," said study senior author and climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, the Kara J. Foundation Professor at Stanford Earth. "But there is something about the droughts that start over the ocean that makes them more likely to turn into large, intense events."

The researchers analyzed the physical processes of landfalling droughts in western North America, where a high frequency of them occur. They found that droughts that make landfall in the region have been associated with certain atmospheric pressure patterns that reduce moisture, similar to the "Ridiculously Resilient Ridge" pattern that was one of the primary causes of the 2012-2017 California Drought.

The authors state that further analyses may reveal similar or new explanations for the landfalling droughts that they identified in other areas of the world, including Chile, Argentina, New Zealand and Eastern Australia.

"Our paper shows that landfalling droughts are a global phenomenon that affects every continent," Herrera-Estrada said. "There will definitely be a need for other studies to focus more on the physical processes relevant for each individual region."

Because of the large humanitarian and economic impacts of severe droughts, the potential for forecasting landfalling droughts may warrant further investigation, according to the researchers.

"This is an important finding because these landfalling droughts are statistically likely to be larger and more severe relative to non-landfalling droughts," said Diffenbaugh, who is also the Kimmelman Family Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. "Because they usually take a number of months to migrate onto land, there is a potential that tracking moisture deficits over the ocean could provide advance warning to help protect against at least some of the most severe droughts."

Physicist Reinhold Bertlmann of the University of Vienna, Austria has published a review of the work of his late long-term collaborator John Stewart Bell of CERN, Geneva in EPJ H. This review, 'Real or Not Real: that is the question', explores Bell's inequalities and his concepts of reality and explains their relevance to quantum information and its applications.

John Stewart Bell's eponymous theorem and inequalities set out, mathematically, the contrast between quantum mechanical theories and local realism. They are used in quantum information, which has evolving applications in security, cryptography and quantum computing.

The distinguished quantum physicist John Stewart Bell (1928-1990) is best known for the eponymous theorem that proved current understanding of quantum mechanics to be incompatible with local hidden variable theories. Thirty years after his death, his long-standing collaborator Reinhold Bertlmann of the University of Vienna, Austria, has reviewed his thinking in a paper for EPJ H, 'Real or Not Real: That is the question'. In this historical and personal account, Bertlmann aims to introduce his readers to Bell's concepts of reality and contrast them with some of his own ideas of virtuality.

Bell spent most of his working life at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and Bertlmann first met him when he took up a short-term fellowship there in 1978. Bell had first presented his theorem in a seminal paper published in 1964, but this was largely neglected until the 1980s and the introduction of quantum information.

Bertlmann discusses the concept of Bell inequalities, which arise through thought experiments in which a pair of spin-½ particles propagate in opposite directions and are measured by independent observers, Alice and Bob. The Bell inequality distinguishes between local realism - the 'common sense' view in which Alice's observations do not depend on Bob's, and vice versa - and quantum mechanics, or, specifically, quantum entanglement. Two quantum particles, such as those in the Alice-Bob situation, are entangled when the state measured by one observer instantaneously influences that of the other. This theory is the basis of quantum information.

And quantum information is no longer just an abstruse theory. It is finding applications in fields as diverse as security protocols, cryptography and quantum computing. "Bell's scientific legacy can be seen in these, as well as in his contributions to quantum field theory," concludes Bertlmann. "And he will also be remembered for his critical thought, honesty, modesty and support for the underprivileged."