Brain

A new study led by Dr. Matthew Rossheim at the George Mason University College of Health and Human Services provides important findings on how labeling of secondhand emissions from e-cigarettes can help more effectively communicate the harm from e-cigarettes and build support for tobacco-free campus policies. In the study Aerosol, vapor, or chemicals? College student perceptions of harm from electronic cigarettes and support for a tobacco-free campus policy, researchers found that undergraduate students are more likely to see secondhand exposure to e-cigarettes as harmful when accurate labels like ‘chemicals’ or ‘aerosols’ are used rather than tobacco industry coined jargon like ‘vapor.’ The study was published this week in the Journal of American College Health.

When it comes to the harms caused by tobacco products, how information is framed and presented has important consequences for audience risk perception, individual behavior, and public policy-making. Tobacco marketers use a variety of framing devices to downplay the risks of cigarettes, e-cigarettes, and exposure to secondhand smoke.

Tobacco-free laws continue to play an important role in protecting everyone from harmful tobacco emissions and help reduce tobacco use in the general population. While overall rates of smoking continue to decline, e-cigarette use, particularly among youth and young adults has become very prevalent in recent years, including on college campuses. Tobacco-free campus policies have proven to play important roles in reducing the number of new users and in helping current users quit; however, one-sixth of smoke-free campus policies do not prohibit e-cigarette use. Despite mounting evidence on the harm posed by e-cigarettes (also known as “vaping”) and their emissions, they are perceived to pose a lower risk than traditional cigarettes.

Researchers sought to better understand the association between the labels used to describe the secondhand emissions from e-cigarettes and young adults’ level of perceived risks. The study aimed to determine if the terminology used to describe secondhand emissions from e-cigarettes influence undergraduate students’ perceptions of its harmfulness and to examine whether perceived harmfulness of exposure to e-cigarettes was associated with support for tobacco-free campus polices that include e-cigarettes.

“This study is the first known investigation of whether the word used for e-cigarette emissions is associated with perceived harmfulness of secondhand exposure. It is also the first to identify an association between perceptions of harmfulness from secondhand exposure to e-cigarettes and support for the implementation of a 100% tobacco-free campus policy,” said Rossheim, assistant professor in the Department of Global and Community Health.

Findings reveal that the words used to describe tobacco products and their secondhand emissions is critical in forming young adults’ perceptions of e-cigarettes and their harmfulness, and that simple wording choices can have an important impact on perceived risk. The researchers conclude that due to the severe risks associated with e-cigarettes and secondhand smoke, that communications associated with e-cigarettes and tobacco-free campuses should accurately label their emissions as “chemicals” and “aerosols”. They urge that legislation be passed to regulate the marketing practices of the e-cigarette industry so they cannot downplay the harmfulness of their products.

Students who were asked questions that used “chemicals” or “aerosols” to describe e-cigarette’s secondhand emissions were twice as likely to perceive the emissions to be “harmful” or “very harmful”, compared to students asked about e-cigarette “vapor.” Students who did not use e-cigarettes were nearly five times more likely to see e-cigarette emissions as “harmful/very harmful” compared to those who do use e-cigarettes.

“Smoke-free and tobacco-free campus environments are always a common-sense public health measure, and are especially so at this time, given the strong link between tobacco use and COVID-19 transmission among young people,” says Rossheim. “Colleges and universities are encouraged to urgently adopt tobacco-free campus policies to help prevent the spread of coronavirus.”

The study was completed at a large, public university in Virginia that does not currently have a smoke-free campus policy and included data gathered from 791 undergraduate students.

EAST LANSING, Mich. - When people say that they want to change things about their personalities, they might not know about the inadvertent consequences these changes could bring. In fact, changes in personality may also lead to changes in political ideologies, say researchers from Michigan State University and the University of Granada, who led the study.

"We found this interesting effect where people wanted to improve on things like being more emotionally connected to others -- or, becoming more empathetic," said William Chopik, assistant professor of psychology at MSU. "But we found that this leads to changes in their political souls as well, which maybe they weren't intending. We saw that in these personality changes toward greater empathy, people placed a lot more importance upon more liberal ideologies -- like how you should treat other people and take others' perspectives."

The study, published in the most recent edition of Journal of Research in Personality, is the first to look at shifts in personalities and morals due to volitional change -- or, changes one brings upon oneself.

Chopik and co-authors from Southern Methodist University and the University of Illinois asked 414 volunteer participants to take a weekly questionnaire. Such questions included how they would react in certain situations, if they wanted to improve or change themselves, how they felt about helping others and other personality-related queries. Additionally, the researchers measured participants' "empathic concern" -- or, feelings that would arise when they saw someone in need or doing poorly. The researchers continued the weekly questionnaire for four months.

"Among the questions, we asked participants how they felt about five broad moral foundations: care, fairness, loyalty, authority and purity. We tracked sentiments week-to-week," Chopik said. "While these are common for personality-related assessments, individual moral foundations can also help explain attitudes toward various ideologies, ethical issues and policy debates."

Generally, liberal and progressive people tend to prioritize two of the five moral foundations: care and fairness; whereas, conservatives draw from all five -- including the more binding foundations: loyalty to the ingroup, respect for authority, and observance of purity and sanctity standards, Chopik said.

"Our study shows that when people are motivated to change, they can successfully do so," he said. "What we were surprised to find was that an upward trajectory for something like perspective-taking aligned with the person's shift towards the more liberal foundations."

The researchers did not intend for their study to generalize personality traits of one political party or another, but rather to see if -- and how -- a person could change themselves and what might be a result of their "moral transformation."

"Being a better perspective-taker exposes you to all sorts of new ideas, so it makes sense that it would change someone because they would be exposed to more diverse arguments," Chopik said. "When you become more empathic, it opens up a lot of doors to change humans in other ways, including how they think about morality and ideology -- which may or may not have been intended."

A team of researchers from North Carolina State University has demonstrated a way to use low-energy, visible light to produce polymer gel objects from pure monomer solutions. The work not only poses a potential solution to current challenges in producing these materials, it also sheds further light on the ways in which low energy photons can combine to produce high energy excited states.

Polymer products - primarily plastics - are used in everything from water bottles to medical applications, with billions of pounds of these materials being produced annually. Select polymers can be produced via a process called free radical polymerization, in which a monomer solution is exposed to ultraviolet (UV) light. The high energy of UV light enables the reaction, forming the polymer. The advantages of this method include fewer chemical waste byproducts and less environmental impact.

However, this method is not without drawbacks. The high energy UV light used in generating these polymers can also degrade plastics and is unsuitable for producing certain materials.

Felix N. Castellano, Goodnight Innovation Distinguished Chair of Chemistry at NC State, had previously shown that it was possible to combine lower energy molecules' excited states to achieve more potent excited states. In a new contribution, Castellano and his team applied a process - called homomolecular triplet-triplet annihilation - to polymer production, by using lower energy yellow or green light to create polymer gels.

The team dissolved zinc(II) meso-tetraphenylporphyrin (ZnTPP) into two different pure monomers - trimethylolpropane triacrylate (TMPTA) and methyl acrylate (MA) - then exposed the solutions to yellow light. Energy from the light creates the homomolecular triplets in ZnTPP, and when those triplets combine, they create an extremely short-lived S2 excited state that has enough energy to power the polymerization process.

"While triplets are really long lived in chemical terms - they live for milliseconds - the S2 excited state only lives for picoseconds, which is nine orders of magnitude less," Castellano says. "One of the important facets of this work is demonstrating that if you have a pure liquid you can utilize this potent, short-lived excited state to facilitate important transformations. The neat liquid ensures that electrons are transferred efficiently."

The team conducted spectroscopic analysis of the solution, establishing the existence of the S2 excited state in the presence of yellow and green light. "We used ZnTPP because it allows you to see light emission from two different excited states and we could differentiate between lower energy S1 and higher energy S2 states," Castellano says. "We know that polymer formation is a direct result of the S2 excited state, but we can also show that's what happening spectroscopically."

Ling Gao and colleagues have developed a strategy that uses exosomes - tiny membrane-bound sacs secreted by cells - to mimic the heart-regenerating effects of cardiac cell transplants, while potentially avoiding risks associated with whole-cell transplants. Their approach, which accelerated recovery from heart attack in pigs, could address issues with safety and effectiveness that have prevented whole-cell heart therapies from reaching clinical adoption. In recent years, researchers have explored the possibility of using transplants of heart cells grown from induced pluripotent stem cells to heal cardiac tissue in the aftermath of events such as heart attacks. However, transplanted heart cells often fail to engraft within the recipient and perish after a few days. Clinicians also remain worried that the cells that do engraft could cause severe health issues like arrythmia and even contribute to the formation of tumors in the long run. Instead of transplanting whole cells, Gao et al. tackled these issues by only administering exosomes, or tiny containers for proteins and DNA that are secreted by cells. Specifically, they isolated exosomes from three types of human heart cells - smooth muscle cells, cardiomyocytes, and endothelial cells - and injected them into the hearts of pigs after heart attack. Pigs that received the exosomes recovered more heart function and showed smaller scars compared with untreated animals and improved as well as pigs that received whole cell transplants. Gao et al. say that the acellular exosomes "could enable physicians to exploit the cardioprotective and reparative properties of hiPSC-derived cells while avoiding complexities associated with cell storage, transportation, and immune rejection."

Leesburg, VA, September 16, 2020--According to ARRS' American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), ultrasound-guided carpal tunnel release (UGCTR) quickly improves hand function and reduces hand discomfort, making UGCTR a safe, effective, and less invasive alternative to traditional open or endoscopic surgery.

Because ultrasound guidance allows carpal tunnel release to be performed with smaller incisions and quicker recovery, five researchers from Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania set out to evaluate UGCTR's long-term efficacy in improving function and discomfort in patients with carpal tunnel syndrome.

Sixty-one UGCTR procedures performed in 46 patients (25 women and 21 men; mean age 60.6 years) with clinically diagnosed carpal tunnel syndrome were retrospectively reviewed. All procedures were performed under local anesthetic at an outpatient radiology office using the SX-One MicroKnife® (Sonex Health).

As first AJR author Sarah I. Kamel explained: "Patients answered three questionnaires (Quick-Disabilities of the Arm, Shoulder, and Hand [QDASH] and two parts of the Boston Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Questionnaire: symptom severity [BCTSQ-SS] and functional status [BCTSQ-FS] scales) assessing the affected wrist's function and discomfort immediately pre-procedure, 2 weeks post-procedure, and at least one year post-procedure."

Median pre-procedure scores were 45.4 for QDASH, 3.2 for BCTSQ-SS, and 2.5 for BCTSQ-FS. Median 2 week post-procedure scores were 22.5 for QDASH, 1.7 for BCTSQ-SS, and 1.9 for BCTSQ-FS--all decreased (p

Follow-up questionnaires were obtained for 90% (55/61) of wrists, a median of 1.7 years post-procedure, with further declines (p

Although no immediate postoperative complications occurred, the authors of this AJR article detailed several response modifications for two patients who required surgery for complications experienced 8-10 days postoperatively (one for infection following injury and one for post-traumatic compartment syndrome).

"The procedure now includes more extensive preprocedural cleaning that extends to the forearm circumferentially prior to draping. A TegadermTM (3M Company, St. Paul, MN) is now placed at the distal third of the forearm to act as an additional sterile barrier at the edge of the sterile field. In addition, two passes of the ligament transection are performed routinely on all patients to potentially decrease the risk of remnant tissue that may contribute to incomplete release," Kamel et al. added.

A research team from Caltech and the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering has demonstrated a promising way to efficiently convert carbon dioxide into ethylene -- an important chemical used to produce plastics, solvents, cosmetics and other important products globally.

The scientists developed nanoscale copper wires with specially shaped surfaces to catalyze a chemical reaction that reduces greenhouse gas emissions while generating ethylene -- a valuable chemical simultaneously. Computational studies of the reaction show the shaped catalyst favors the production of ethylene over hydrogen or methane. A study detailing the advance was published in Nature Catalysis.

"We are at the brink of fossil fuel exhaustion, coupled with global climate change challenges," said Yu Huang, the study's co-corresponding author, and professor of materials science and engineering at UCLA. "Developing materials that can efficiently turn greenhouse gases into value-added fuels and chemical feedstocks is a critical step to mitigate global warming while turning away from extracting increasingly limited fossil fuels. This integrated experiment and theoretical analysis presents a sustainable path towards carbon dioxide upcycling and utilization."

Currently, ethylene has a global annual production of 158 million tons. Much of that is turned into polyethylene, which is used in plastic packaging. Ethylene is processed from hydrocarbons, such as natural gas.

"The idea of using copper to catalyze this reaction has been around for a long time, but the key is to accelerate the rate so it is fast enough for industrial production," said William A. Goddard III, the study's co-corresponding author and Caltech's Charles and Mary Ferkel Professor of Chemistry, Materials Science, and Applied Physics. "This study shows a solid path towards that mark, with the potential to transform ethylene production into a greener industry using CO2 that would otherwise end up in the atmosphere."

Using copper to kick start the carbon dioxide (CO2) reduction into ethylene reaction (C2H4) has suffered two strikes against it. First, the initial chemical reaction also produced hydrogen and methane -- both undesirable in industrial production. Second, previous attempts that resulted in ethylene production did not last long, with conversion efficiency tailing off as the system continued to run.

To overcome these two hurdles, the researchers focused on the design of the copper nanowires with highly active "steps" -- similar to a set of stairs arranged at atomic scale. One intriguing finding of this collaborative study is that this step pattern across the nanowires' surfaces remained stable under the reaction conditions, contrary to general belief that these high energy features would smooth out. This is the key to both the system's durability and selectivity in producing ethylene, instead of other end products.

The team demonstrated a carbon dioxide-to-ethylene conversion rate of greater than 70%, much more efficient than previous designs, which yielded at least 10% less under the same conditions. The new system ran for 200 hours, with little change in conversion efficiency, a major advance for copper-based catalysts. In addition, the comprehensive understanding of the structure-function relation illustrated a new perspective to design highly active and durable CO2 reduction catalyst in action.

Huang and Goddard have been frequent collaborators for many years, with Goddard's research group focusing on the theoretical reasons that underpin chemical reactions, while Huang's group has created new materials and conducted experiments. The lead author on the paper is Chungseok Choi, a graduate student in materials science and engineering at UCLA Samueli and a member of Huang's laboratory.

For many people who are struggling to conceive, in-vitro fertilization (IVF) can offer a life-changing solution. But the average success rate for IVF is only about 30 percent. Investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital are developing an artificial intelligence system with the goal of improving IVF success by helping embryologists objectively select embryos most likely to result in a healthy birth. Using thousands of embryo image examples and deep-learning artificial intelligence (AI), the team developed a system that was able to differentiate and identify embryos with the highest potential for success significantly better than 15 experienced embryologists from five different fertility centers across the United States. Results of their study are published in eLife.

"We believe that these systems will benefit clinical embryologists and patients," said corresponding author Hadi Shafiee, PhD, of the Division of Engineering in Medicine at the Brigham. "A major challenge in the field is deciding on the embryos that need to be transferred during IVF. Our system has tremendous potential to improve clinical decision making and access to care."

Currently, the tools available to embryologists are limited and expensive, and most embryologists must rely on their observational skills and expertise. Shafiee and colleagues are developing an assistive tool that can evaluate images captured using microscopes traditionally available at fertility centers.

"There is so much at stake for our patients with each IVF cycle. Embryologists make dozens of critical decisions that impact the success of a patient cycle. With assistance from our AI system, embryologists will be able to select the embryo that will result in a successful pregnancy better than ever before," said co-lead author Charles Bormann, PhD, MGH IVF Laboratory director.

The team trained the AI system using images of embryos captured at 113 hours post-insemination. Among 742 embryos, the AI system was 90 percent accurate in choosing the most high-quality embryos. The investigators further assessed the AI system's ability to distinguish among high-quality embryos with the normal number of human chromosomes and compared the system's performance to that of trained embryologists. The system performed with an accuracy of approximately 75 percent while the embryologists performed with an average accuracy of 67 percent.

The authors note that in its current stage, this system is intended to act only as an assistive tool for embryologists to make judgments during embryo selection.

"Our approach has shown the potential of AI systems to be used in aiding embryologists to select the embryo with the highest implantation potential, especially amongst high-quality embryos," said Manoj Kumar Kanakasabapathy, one of the co-lead authors.

Strata completeness refers to "the fraction of time intervals of some specified length (t) that have been preserved". Since the 1780s, it has been widely accepted that most stratigraphic sections are riddled with gaps and are discontinuous over a range of temporal scales. Recognizing stratal disconformities or hiatal surfaces, and quantifying the stratal completeness of carbonate/clastics are essential for: (1) adequately constructing time series of palaeoclimatic and palaeobiologic changes, (2) understanding the impact of orbital forcing and sea-level changes on the geochemical signals within the strata, (3) enhancing interpretations of time series of depositional settings and sedimentary processes, and (4) hydrocarbon explorations. Although many researchers have attempted to delineate strata completeness using different approaches, such as statistical method, dating techniques, physical modeling, stochastic modeling and stratigraphic forward modeling, there are still some unresolved issues relating to the topics, and especially regarding quantitative determination of strata completeness and key factors affecting it.

Researchers from China University of Petroleum (East China) investigated carbonate deposition with different depositional environments. They firstly constructed a three-dimensional basin-fill model using sedimentary process-based stratigraphic forward modelling and then extracted crucial information of both "depth domain" and "time domain" from the 3D model to probe sedimentary evolution process, delineate hiatus surfaces and quantitatively determine the completeness of strata in the platform margin, slope and basin facies (Figure 1).

Through sensitivities analysis, the researchers have also demonstrated that the stratal completeness appears to be controlled by sea level changes, depositional environments, carbonate growth rates and tectonic subsidence patterns in various ways (Figure 2).

This study concludes that the sedimentary process-based SFM approach is quite effective in determining stratal completeness and its characters within a stratigraphic sequence by taking the full advantage of information from both the depth domain and corresponding time domain information in a 3D SFM model. It enables the reconstruction of sedimentary evolution by considering various geological processes (e.g., deposition, erosion or hiatus) holistically and provides a novel approach for interpreting palaeo-depositional environments. Knowledge on the completeness of a stratigraphic sequence is also crucial for reservoir quality assessment and predicting hydrocarbon migration and entrapment.

Just how stressed are teachers? A recent Gallup poll found teachers are tied with nurses for the most stressful occupation in America today. Unfortunately, that stress can have a trickle-down effect on their students, leading to disruptive behavior that results in student suspensions.

One of those overburdened teachers is Jennifer Lloyd, a high school English teacher in Maryland and a graduate student at the University of Missouri. She has noticed how perceptive her students are to her mood and their ability to feed off of her energy, for better or worse.

"If I come into class from a rough meeting or a stressful morning and I bring those feelings into the classroom environment, the kids notice," Lloyd said. "Sometimes they will give that negative energy right back to me, and we all end up having a bad day."

To examine the impact of teacher burnout on student behavior outcomes, Lloyd's sister, Colleen Eddy, a doctoral student in the MU College of Education, and her colleagues with the Missouri Prevention Science Institute, conducted teacher surveys and classroom observations in nine Missouri elementary schools. They found when teachers are highly stressed and emotionally exhausted, students in their classrooms are at a higher risk of being suspended or disciplined by school administrators.

"Removing students from the classroom environment as a form of punishment can be really harmful, as research has shown it not only reduces student achievement but also increases the risk of dropout," Eddy said. "If we want to make schools a positive place for student learning, we first need to ensure it is a positive workplace for teachers. By giving teachers strategies to better manage disruptive student behavior, they will have more time for instruction and building those positive relationships with students."

Strategies for managing teacher stress include personal coping mechanisms, such as reflecting on things to be grateful for, as well as collaborating with school administrators to identify ways to reduce some of the demands placed on overburdened and under supported teachers.

"Teachers have the potential to impact the lives of so many students in their classrooms," Eddy said. "Therefore, supporting them with the skills they need in classroom management and stress management is really important because it will have a positive impact on their students in the long run."

As the sister of a teacher, Eddy has seen firsthand the influence Lloyd can have on her students and their long-term life trajectories.

"The students have told me that it is so helpful to know they have someone who is in their corner and supporting them, and when students don't have that, we have seen higher absence rates and lower assignment completion," Lloyd said. "They don't want to be engaged if they feel like no one in the building cares about them, so if they do feel cared for and supported in the school environment, they are much more likely to remain in school and be a part of the learning experience."

Since nearly half of all new teachers leave the profession within their first five years, creating a support system to help manage teacher stress can reduce teacher burnout and improve student outcomes.

"Our research is focused on identifying what we can shift in students' environments to improve their learning and behavioral outcomes," Eddy said. "Teachers are so important and their influence on students is immense. They are superstars and deserve all the support we can give them."

INDIANAPOLlS - In a novel study the authors hope will contribute to improved patient care, Richard L. Roudebush Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Regenstrief Institute researchers examine how Black patients with mental health concerns evaluate verbal and non-verbal communication during treatment.

Drawing upon information gathered in interviews with 85 Black patients that revealed significant fear of being negatively judged based on stereotypes, the authors evaluate how perceptions of racial bias influence patient engagement with their providers. The researchers also provide suggestions on how to create environments for Black and other patients in racial and ethnic minority groups that foster delivery of person-centered care as well as outlining organizational structures that reduce providers' burnout.

"This study is one of the first to explore the actual perceptions of Black patients with mental health concerns and provides a new lens to help identify and address biases," said Johanne Eliacin, PhD, a research scientist with Regenstrief Institute and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, who led the research. "Nuanced verbal and non-verbal cues - for example, a patient's perception that a physician is subtly talking down to him or her because of the patient's race or social class -- can generate patient negativity resulting in damaging consequences.

"There is a long history of hurt, distrust and perceived injustice in this country, so it's normal for minority patients to have their guard up when interacting with the healthcare system," said Dr. Eliacin. "This paper is significant because of its subject matter and especially relevant as we work to provide equitable healthcare for all."

Patients' perceptions of bias in healthcare are known to be associated with suboptimal care, delays in obtaining medical care, underutilization of preventive and mental health care, less adherence to recommended therapy and poorer treatment outcomes

Perceptions of bias also negatively impact the patient-provider relationship, a relationship that influences both patients' engagement in care and quality of healthcare outcomes.

"Most healthcare providers are committed to providing good and equitable treatment to all patients regardless of their race or sexual-orientation but doctors, nurses and other clinicians are not immune to social and cultural influences that can lead to stereotyping and implicit racial bias -- major contributors to healthcare disparities," said Dr. Eliacin. "We aren't asking providers to walk on egg shells, we are encouraging them to engage in two-way communication in order to better understand the people they serve and, ultimately, to promote health equity."

Ultraviolet light endangers the integrity of human genetic information and may cause skin cancer. For the first time, researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have demonstrated that DNA damage may also occur far away from the point of incidence of the radiation. They produced an artificially modeled DNA sequence in new architecture and succeeded in detecting DNA damage at a distance of 30 DNA building blocks. The results are reported in Angewandte Chemie (DOI: 10.1002/anie.202009216).

"So far, we have thought that it is impossible for light energy to be transmitted so far in the DNA and cause damage there," says Professor Dr. Hans-Achim Wagenknecht from KIT's Institute of Organic Chemistry. The research results are presented in Angewandte Chemie and are ranked as extraordinarily important and in the best ten percent by the journal. For the study, a synthetically produced, modified DNA of a certain architecture was used. At certain points of this short gene section, researchers inserted a xanthone molecule as photoenergy injector. To specify where the UV radiation produced by LEDs was to cause damage in the experiment, scientists inserted pairs of thymines at defined distances from this light injector. Thymine is one of four nucleobases and, hence, one of the major building blocks of DNA. The most frequent damage of DNA caused by light results from linking neighboring thymines: Due to the light energy, they form solid compounds of cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers (CPD).

Having defined the positions of CPD formation, the team succeeded in proving migration of photoenergy over 30 DNA building blocks corresponding to a distance of up to 10.5 nanometers. "This surprisingly long range is crucial to the understanding of DNA photodamage," Wagenknecht says. CPD damage is considered the molecular cause of skin cancer, because genetic information can no longer be read or cannot be read correctly.

The question of how far energy can migrate is still open. Above all, the scientists wanted to find out where photodamage develops. Another important aspect is that xanthones artificially introduced into the DNA as light injectors may be contained in many common substances, such as antibiotics, and may increase light sensitivity of the skin after intake.

Kanazawa, Japan - A team of scientists led by Kanazawa University proposed a new mathematical framework to understand the properties of the fundamental particles called neutrinos. This work may help cosmologists make progress on the apparent paradox of the existence of matter in the Universe.

The Standard Model of particle physics that outlines the basic constituents of matter and the forces that act between them has seen remarkable experimental success, culminating in the discovery of the last predicted particle, the Higgs boson, in 2012. However, the Standard Model does not resolve some of the long-standing issues in cosmology, such as the identity of "dark matter" that we know must be there but we cannot see, and why there is so much matter in the Universe compared with antimatter. Many scientists believe that the ghost-like particles called neutrinos may be an important part of the answer.

Neutrinos, which hardly interact with other matter, are created by nuclear reactions such as those that power our sun, and trillions of them pass through your body every second. Experiments have shown that, while not massless, neutrinos are much lighter than other particles. This has led physicists to hypothesize that neutrinos get their mass from a different process compared with other particles, called the "Seesaw mechanism."

Now, a research team led by Kanazawa University has developed a new theory to explain the unusual properties of neutrinos.

"We used the seesaw mechanisms with five- or seven-dimensional operators to describe the interaction of a neutrino with two lepton particles and two force-carrying W bosons," explains Mayumi Aoki.

Leptons are a class of elementary particles that include neutrinos, electrons, and so on. Solving these equations showed violations of the Standard Model's prediction that the number of leptons is always conserved.

"To move beyond the Standard Model, we have to explain why lepton conservation is sometimes violated, albeit to a very small degree," says Aoki. "A tiny imbalance of one part in a trillion may explain the why all matter didn't get annihilated by antimatter after the Big Bang."

"Our work explains the origin of the neutrino mass and also provides predictions directly testable by the Large Hadron Collider," says Aoki. The very light masses of neutrinos might hold the key to solving the big questions that have challenged humanity for millennia.

Superconducting wires can transport electricity without loss. This would allow for less power production, reducing both costs and greenhouse gasses. Unfortunately, extensive cooling stands in the way, because existing superconductors only lose their resistance at extremely low temperatures. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, scientist have now introduced new findings about hydrogen sulfide in the H(3)S form, and its deuterium analogue D(3)S, which become superconducting at the relatively high temperatures of -77 and -107 °C, respectively.

This is even true in comparison with the current front-runners, copper-containing ceramics with transition temperatures that start at about -135 °C. Despite extensive research into sulfur/hydrogen systems, many important questions remain. Most importantly, superconducting hydrogen sulfide was previously produced from "normal" hydrogen sulfide, H(2)S, which was converted into a metal-like state with a composition of H(3)S under pressures of about 150 GPa (1.5 million bar). Such samples were inevitably contaminated by hydrogen-depleted impurities that can distort experimental results. To avoid this, researchers led by Vasily S. Minkov have now produced stoichiometric H(3)S by heating elemental sulfur directly with an excess of hydrogen (H(2)) with a laser, under pressure. They also produced samples made with deuterium (D(2))--an isotope of hydrogen.

The cause of the relatively high transition temperature of H(3)S is its hydrogen atoms, which resonate with an especially high frequency within the crystal lattice. Because deuterium atoms are heavier than hydrogen, they resonate more slowly, so lower transition temperatures were expected for D(3)S. The team at the Max-Planck Institute for Chemistry (Mainz, Germany), the University of Chicago (USA), and the Soreq Nuclear Research Center (Yavne, Israel) used a variety of analytical methods to refine the phase diagrams for H(3)S and D(3)S in relation to pressure and temperature, and to shed additional light on their superconducting properties.

At 111 to 132 GPa and 400 to 700 °C, the syntheses produced nonmetallic, electrically isolating structures (Cccm phases) that do not become a metal when cooled or pressurized further. They contain H(2) (or D(2)) units within the crystal structure, which suppress superconductivity. The desired superconducting structures, cubic Im-3m phases, were obtained by syntheses above 150 GPa at 1200 to 1700 °C. They are metallic and shiny with low electrical resistance. At 148 to 170 GPa, samples of Im-3m-H(3)S had transition temperatures around -77 °C. The D(3)S analogues had a transition temperature of about -107 °C at 157 GPa, which is significantly higher than expected. Decrease of pressure reversibly leads to an abrupt reduction of the transition temperature and loss of metallic properties. This is caused by rhombohedral distortions in the crystal structure (R3m phase). Heating under pressure irreversibly transforms the R3m phase into the Cccm phase. R3m is clearly a metastable intermediate phase that only occurs during decomposition.

In the future, the researchers hope to find other hydrogen-rich compounds that can be converted to metals without high pressures and become superconducting at room temperature.

LAWRENCE -- "She was totally flirting with you," my friend told me after the hosts left our table.

"No, she wasn't. She was just being polite," said another friend.

Misunderstandings about flirting can potentially result in awkwardness or even accusations of sexual harassment. How can we figure out what other people mean when they smile at us? Is there a unique, identifiable facial expression representing flirting -- and if there is, what does it convey, and how effective is it?

Although flirting is mentioned a lot in the general media, and examples are everywhere, there is relatively little scientific work on the topic of flirting, its underlying mechanisms and function.

Now, a new paper by researchers based at the University of Kansas has been published in the Journal of Sex Research examining if flirting has a particular facial cue effectively used by women to indicate interest in a man.

"There are very few scientific articles out there that have systematically studied this well-known phenomenon," said Omri Gillath, professor of psychology at KU, who co-wrote the paper. "None of these studies have identified the flirting facial expression and tested its effects."

Gillath's collaborators were lead author Parnia Haj-Mohamadi, a doctoral student in psychology at KU, and Erika Rosenberg of the University of California-Davis.

The researchers found internal states -- such as being romantically or sexually interested in someone -- can be conveyed to others nonverbally through facial expression.

In other words -- flirting works.

"Across our six studies, we found most men were able to recognize a certain female facial expression as representing flirting," Gillath said. "It has a unique morphology, and it's different from expressions that have similar features -- for example, smiling -- but aren't identified by men as flirting expression."

In the studies, women -- some professional actresses and some volunteers from the community -- were asked either to spontaneously pose a flirting expression (similar to what they'd use at a bar to get attention from a potential mate) or to follow instructions based on existing anthropological literature for what researchers define as flirting.

The team found some women are more effective than others in effectively conveying a flirtatious facial cue, while some men are better at recognizing this cue. Beyond these individual differences, a few expressions were identified by most (if not all) men as flirting.

The researchers used the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to classify the morphology of highly recognized flirtatious facial expressions. The coding showed the most effective flirting cues include a head turned to one side and tilted down slightly, a slight smile, and eyes turned forward toward the implied target.

After identifying these most recognized expressions of flirting, the researchers used them in experimental studies.

"Our findings support the role of flirtatious expression in communication and mating initiation," Gillath said. "For the first time, not only were we able to isolate and identify the expressions that represent flirting, but we were also able to reveal their function -- to activate associations related with relationships and sex."

The new paper puts flirting in the same category as other well-studied emotions and provides researchers with tools to further study the functions of flirting. It can also give sometimes-clueless men, like the one in the example above, a more concrete way to figure out if a woman is truly flirting.

A potential response of river fish to environmental changes is to colonize new habitats. But what happens when dams and weirs restrict their movement? And are native and alien species similarly affected? Researchers from the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) and the Spanish University of Girona (UdG) have addressed these questions in a recent study.

River ecosystems are frequently fragmented by dams and weirs. As a result, native fish are often restricted in their movement along the river course and are unable to colonize new habitats. Thus, barriers impede native species from adjusting their distributions in response to the effects of climate change such as changes in water temperature and quality.

On the other hand, river fragmentation might also limit the further spread of invasive alien species. Using the Ebro River in Spain as an example, the research team has investigated how habitats of native and alien fish species change under different climate scenarios and how dams mediate habitat accessibility.

"The Ebro River is particularly vulnerable and threatened by climate change and species invasions. In addition, the Ebro River is fragmented by over 300 dams and many smaller barriers, which makes it even worse for the native fish species", said Emili García-Berthou, Professor at the University of Girona and co-author of the study.

By applying a spatial modelling framework, the authors showed that losses of native species and gains of alien species and consequentially most pronounced biodiversity changes are particularly expected in the lower and mid reaches of larger Ebro River tributaries. According to their results, the majority of species are projected to shift their range in upstream direction with alien species such as eastern mosquitofish, wels catfish and common carp showing especially large habitat gains.

"The Ebro River system is home to several endemic species that exclusively occur on the Iberian Peninsula. These species are particularly imperilled by barriers that limit movements in response to climate change. Whether dams can effectively prevent the spread of alien species is questionable. In fact, the establishment of alien fishes is often facilitated by the changed flow and habitat conditions that result from damming rivers", said IGB researcher Johannes Radinger, lead author of the study.

The results clearly show that fish communities in highly fragmented rivers affected by climate change will be particularly affected by biodiversity changes and species loss in the future. "Effective conservation of fishes should focus on the restoration of habitats and the natural flow regime, improvements of connectivity for native species and the control of alien species, particularly the prevention of further introductions", concluded the authors.