Brain

New research shows children don't expect adults to have all the answers, and want them to understand more about the role of media messages and approval in their lives.

When 11 year old Oscar told his mum, Dr Emma Maynard that "grown-ups don't always get it right, you know" the statement struck a chord with the Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Portsmouth.

Dr Maynard and colleagues Sarah Barton and Kayleigh Rivett asked Oscar and some friends to create a series of interview questions they could ask each other, about their views on adult knowledge and decision making - the first time this is thought to have been done for a peer reviewed research paper. Although there have been many projects where children have actively participated in research, the authors are not aware of other studies where children have taken the lead from the original idea, through to peer-reviewed publication.

The results have just appeared in the Journal of Qualitative Research in Psychology (July 2020), with the children listed as co-authors of the report. It finds that children think adults spend their time worrying that they should know the answers to everything, but the young people who took part in the research don't believe they should feel like this.

The young researchers also reported feeling a huge importance in adults recognising their achievements. The group as a whole was very frustrated by knowing a right answer, but not being able to show it. They cited occasions when teachers picked other students to answer a question, and didn't give them a chance to show they had a correct response. They related this to the constant messages they receive from media and school about striving for perfection in their self image, bodies, and learning expectations. Adult acknowledgement seems to reassure children they are on the right track to meet the very high expectations surrounding them.

The entire group argued that adults complain too much about the new generation's attitude to digital devices and their online activity. They urge adults to listen more to them about what it is like to have been immersed in new technology since birth, rather than impose parental views based on a childhood without it. Dr Maynard analysed these responses, and a feeling from the group that, despite a desire to do so, they felt unable to stop constantly using their phones because they would "feel left out".

Dr Maynard said: "The children presented the concept of phones and social media as being 'just there', so now they have to use them. We interpreted this as the adult generation having created the assessment pressures, and the presence of social media and mobile phone based communication. Children did not invent these things. This led us to think that in this context, criticisms of children and young people being attached to their phones is somewhat unfair."

The paper shows that children don't always think that adult knowledge is superior, demonstrated in these quotes from the interview process:

Ben: "adults... just need to realise they might have forgotten"

Jamie: "adults can't think they're just the best because they've already been through their childhood..."

Harry: "just because they're older and they've already been to school, it doesn't mean they've paid attention in school"

Eve: "...because they say that... they were once a child too but because we're different I think we should be allowed to have our own opinions sometimes"

The report is seen as an excellent and a useful example of 'allyship' - a process of building relationships based on trust, consistency, and accountability. Dr Maynard is now recommending the approach to others in her field, noting that it has delivered rich and insightful findings from children who conclude: "If this childhood is different to yours, then listen to ours".

Geologists from Florida State University's Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science have discovered how carbon-rich molten rock in the Earth's upper mantle might affect the movement of seismic waves.

The new research was coauthored by EOAS Associate Professor of Geology Mainak Mookherjee and postdoctoral researcher Suraj Bajgain. Findings from the study were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

"This research is quite important since carbon is a crucial constituent for the habitability of the planet, and we are making strides to understand how solid earth may have played a role in storing and influencing the availability of carbon in the Earth's surface," Mookherjee said. "Our research gives us a better understanding of the elasticity, density and compressibility of these rocks and their role in Earth's carbon cycle."

Carbon, one of the primary building blocks for life, is widely distributed throughout the Earth's upper mantle and is mostly stored in forms of carbonate minerals as accessory minerals in mantle rocks. When carbonate-rich magma erupts on the surface, it is notable for its unique, mud-like appearance. These types of eruptions occur at specific locations around the world, such as at the Ol Doinyo Lengai volcano in Tanzania.

Experts believe that the presence of carbonates in rocks significantly lowers the temperature at which they melt. Carbonates that sink to the Earth's interior, via a process known as subduction, likely cause this low-degree melting of the Earth's upper mantle rocks, which plays an important role in the planet's deep carbon cycle.

"Earth's mantle has less free oxygen available at increasing depths," Mookherjee said. "As the mantle upwells through a process of mantle convection, the slowly moving rocks that were reduced, or had less oxygen, at a greater depth become progressively more oxidized at shallower depth. The carbon in the mantle is likely to be reduced deeper in the Earth and get oxidized as the mantle upwells."

This change in depth-dependent oxidation state is likely to cause melting of mantle rocks, a process called redox melting, which could produce carbon-rich molten rock, also known as melts. These melts are likely to affect the physical property of a rock, which can be detected using geophysical probes such as seismic waves, he said.

Prior to this study, geologists had poor knowledge of the elastic properties of these carbonate-induced partial melts, which made them difficult to directly detect.

One set of clues that geologists use to better understand their science are measurements of seismic waves as they move through the layers of the Earth. A type of seismic wave known as a compressional wave is faster than another type known as a shear wave, but at depths of around 180 to 330 kilometers into the Earth, the ratio of their speeds is even higher than is typical.

"This elevated ratio of compressional waves to the shear waves has been a puzzle, and using the findings from our study, we are able to explain this perplexing observation," Mookherjee said.

Minor quantities of carbon-rich melts, approximately 0.05 percent, might be dispersed pervasively through the Earth's deep upper mantle, and that may lead to the elevated ratio of compressional to shear sound velocity, researchers explained.

To conduct the study, researchers took high-pressure ultrasonic measurements and density measurements on cores of the carbonate mineral dolomite. These experiments were complemented by theoretical simulations to provide a new understanding of the fundamental physical properties of carbonate melts.

"We have been trying to understand the elastic and transport properties of aqueous fluids, silicate melt and metallic melt properties, to gain better insight into the mass of volatiles stored in the deep solid earth," Bajgain said.

These findings mean the partially molten rocks in the mantle could hold as much as 80 to 140 parts per million of carbon, which would be 20 to 36 million gigatons of carbon in the deep upper mantle region, making it a substantial carbon reservoir. In comparison, Earth's atmosphere contains just over 410 ppm of carbon, or around 870 gigatons.

Forest trees play a critical role in regulating global carbon, water and energy cycles and mitigating global warming. The phenology of trees is a key to understanding the feedbacks between terrestrial vegetation and Earth's climate. Recent climate warming has changed the seasonal timing of the primary (e.g., budburst, leaf unfolding and flowering) and secondary (e.g., cambial activity, xylem tissue formation and phloem formation) growth of trees.

However, the environmental factors triggering the onset of wood formation in springtime and its underlying cellular mechanisms have been poorly understood, and this hampers an effective assessment of terrestrial forest productivity and the carbon budget under global warming.

Ecologists from the South China Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have identified multiple exogenous factors that can affect the onset of wood formation and quantified the key drivers for secondary growth resumption in Northern Hemisphere conifers.

The scientists used a unique collection of extensive datasets of wood formation for 21 coniferous species distributed over 79 sites spanning from 23°N to 67°N across subtropical to boreal biomes in the Northern Hemisphere.

They quantitatively demonstrated that the onset of xylem tissue formation in conifers of the Northern Hemisphere is primarily driven by photoperiod and mean annual temperature (MAT), and only secondarily by spring forcing, winter chilling and moisture availability. Photoperiod interacts with MAT and plays the dominant role in regulating the onset of secondary meristem growth, contrary to its as yet unquantified role in affecting the springtime phenology of primary meristems.

"These results provide unique and insightful evidence of how wood formation in Northern Hemisphere conifers is regulated by exogenous factors, which can be incorporated into state-of-the-art Earth models, improving prediction of terrestrial carbon, water and energy cycles under global change scenarios, and enforcing ground and remote sensing data," said Prof. HUANG Jianguo, first author of the study.

"Overall, this study offers a deeper understanding of how forest ecosystems respond and adapt to climate warming through phenological changes within the context of global change and mitigating atmospheric CO2. Future studies that determine how exogenous factors regulate the other phases of wood formation may generate a deeper understanding of acclimation mechanisms in forests and trees," said Prof. HUANG.

A team led by Massimo Squatrito, Head of the Seve Ballesteros Foundation Brain Tumour Group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), have made important findings of how some gliomas can acquire chemoresistance. Carried out together with the laboratory of Jiguang Wang from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and a clinical team led by Tao Jiang from Beijing Neurological Institute, and published in Nature Communications, the study provides also new clues on how to monitor the efficacy of therapy.

At present, the main, and virtually only, treatment for glioma - a very common type of tumour originating in the brain - is a combination of radiotherapy and the chemotherapy agent temozolomide. This type of treatment can improve patients' survival rates by up to 30%. Similar to most of the chemotherapy drugs, temozolomide induces DNA damage in cancer cells. Gliomas can progress by repairing this damage through an enzyme encoded by the MGMT gene. In patients whose MGMT activity is blocked because of a modification of its promoter called 'hypermethylation', cancer cells cannot repair the temozolomide-induced damage and collapse.

Unfortunately, up to 40-50% of patients are intrinsically resistant to temozolomide. These patients express high levels of MGMT and the tumour continue growing under treatment. Now, the recent study carried out by the CNIO and the HKUST team shows that a subset of patients acquires a specific genetic alteration that can evade the combined therapy.

Control changes hands

"Translocation of the MGMT gene was observed in a group of patients," says Massimo Squatrito. "These genomic rearrangements involve the fusion of MGMT with other genes, which means that MGMT is now regulated by the promoters it is fused with, that contributes to its overexpression. When this type of rearrangements take place, the temozolomide-induced DNA damage is very efficiently repaired and the glioma continues growing even under treatment."

The team at the HKUST validated the presence of the genetic rearrangement in a subset of a large cohort of recurrent tumours, coming from different hospitals, mainly from Beijing Tiantan Hospital. Using the CRISPR-Cas9 genomic editing tool, the team at CNIO replicated some of these translocations in different cell and animal models and confirmed that they can confer resistance to temozolomide. "It appears that the translocations are not present in the original tumour, only in recurrent ones, that are, tumours that emerge after the original cancer is treated," Squatrito says. "This indicates that the resistance may occur as a consequence to the treatment itself."

The findings may lead to changes in the methods to monitor therapy efficacy: "Currently, the only known therapeutic biomarker in gliomas is the analysis of MGMT promoter status. When methylated, the MGMT gene is silenced and the patient is predicted to respond to temozolomide. The study shows this method is no longer valid when there has been a genetic translocation. The promoter might still be blocked, but the gene is being overactivated by other promoters and hence could contribute to tumour recurrence."

Another relevant finding from animal models is that the MGMT translocations are present in exosomes -extracellular vesicles released by glioma cells into the bloodstream. "If this finding is validated in patients, it could become a useful tool for early resistance detection. A liquid biopsy, that is, a simple test using blood samples, could tell us when patients are developing resistance to temozolomide, and they could be advised to switch to other therapeutic options when they will become available."

The next step will be identifying novel treatment intervention for the temozolomide resistant patients.

Harsh conditions in early life are a fundamental cause of adult stress, and according to new research from the University of Notre Dame on wild baboons, this effect is not explained by a lack of social support in adulthood. The study is the first to present a comprehensive analysis of relationships between early life experiences, adult social bonds and adult stress responses within a single biological system.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research sheds light on the long-term effects of experiences such as famine, abuse, neglect or the death of a parent in early childhood. The researchers argue that dysregulated stress responses caused by those experiences -- including elevated stress hormones -- take a physiological toll on the body, and remain unaffected by healthy, supportive relationships in adulthood.

"Scientists have long believed that the link between early life adversity and adult stress could be due to a lack of social support in adulthood," said Elizabeth Archie, associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Notre Dame and co-author of the study. "But what we've found through this study is that long-term effects of childhood hardships are more powerful than the near-term effects of social support -- even if those experiences took place many years in the past. The effects of early adversity and social support on stress appear to travel along independent physiological paths -- so 'fixing' one won't necessarily fix the other."

One of the challenges to fully understanding how early childhood adversity can manifest in adulthood is that it requires measuring and tracking experiences from birth over the course of several decades.

Archie's team analyzed data collected from 192 female baboons who were studied from birth through the Amboseli Baboon Research Project, an ongoing longitudinal effort that has been conducting research on the behavior of wild baboons in Kenya for almost 50 years. The animals are close evolutionary relatives to humans, and on average, they share a genetic similarity of 94 percent. Like many primates, baboons are highly social. They live in groups of around 20 to 150 animals, including several adult females, adult males and many offspring.

For the study, researchers measured life experience against levels of glucocorticoids (fGCs) -- hormones that regulate physiological functions such as metabolism and immune function, and moderate the body's response to stress.

"Dysregulations in stress hormones or stress response are major risk factors for depression, anxiety, chronic inflammation and other health problems, so the experience of early life adversity is thought to contribute to global health disparities," said Archie, who also serves as associate director of the Amboseli project.

Levels of fGCs in subjects who experienced three or more forms of childhood adversity were 9 percent higher than in those who experienced no hardships. Those who experienced two or more types of adversity showed fGC levels 14 percent higher than in peers who had endured only one form of hardship, and 21 percent higher than in peers who had experienced no hardship at all.

While previous research has shown experiencing hardships in childhood can make it harder to form strong, supportive relationships as adults, the Notre Dame study found that even when social bonds were developed in adulthood, it had a minor effect on fGC levels and physiological responses to stress.

"Social bonds can have a significant effect on adult health, stress and survival," Archie said, "but they cannot make up for the effects of early life adversity -- which means targeting early life adversity itself is crucial for improving adult health."

BEER-SHEVA, Israel...August 3, 2020 - Instead of relying on customers to protect their vulnerable smart home devices from being used in cyberattacks, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and National University of Singapore (NUS) researchers have developed a new method that enables telecommunications and internet service providers to monitor these devices.

According to their new study published in Computers & Security, the ability to launch massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks via a botnet of compromised devices is an exponentially growing risk in the Internet of Things (IoT). Such massive attacks, possibly emerging from IoT devices in home networks, impact the attack target, as well as the infrastructure of telecommunication service providers (telcos).

"Most home users don't have the awareness, knowledge, or means to prevent or handle ongoing attacks," says Yair Meidan, a Ph.D. candidate in the BGU Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering (SISE). "As a result, the burden falls on the telcos to handle. Our method addresses a challenging real-world problem that has already caused challenging attacks in Germany and Singapore, and poses a risk to telco infrastructure and their customers worldwide."

Each connected device has a unique IP address. However, home networks typically use gateway routers with NAT (network address translation) functionality, which replaces the local source IP address of each outbound data packet with the household router's public IP address. Consequently, detecting connected IoT devices from outside the home network is a challenging task.

The researchers developed a method to detect connected, vulnerable IoT models before they are compromised by monitoring the data traffic from each smart home device. This enables telcos to verify whether specific IoT models, known to be vulnerable to exploitation by malware for cyberattacks are connected to the home network. It helps telcos identify potential threats to their networks and take preventive actions quickly.

By using the proposed method, a telco can detect vulnerable IoT devices connected behind a NAT, and use this information to take action. In the case of a potential DDoS attack, this method would enable the telco to take steps to spare the company and its customers harm in advance, such as offloading the large volume of traffic generated by an abundance of infected domestic IoT devices. In turn, this could prevent the combined traffic surge from hitting the telco's infrastructure, reduce the likelihood of service disruption, and ensure continued service availability.

"Unlike some past studies that evaluated their methods using partial, questionable, or completely unlabeled datasets, or just one type of device, our data is versatile and explicitly labeled with the device model," Meidan says. "We are sharing our experimental data with the scientific community as a novel benchmark to promote future reproducible research in this domain." This dataset can be found here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3924770

This research is a first step toward dramatically mitigating the risk posed to telcos' infrastructure by domestic NAT IoT devices. In the future, the researchers seek to further validate the scalability of the method, using additional IoT devices that represent an even broader range of IoT models, types and manufacturers.

"Although our method is designed to detect vulnerable IoT devices before they are exploited, we plan to evaluate the resilience of our method to adversarial attacks in future research," Meidan says. "Similarly, a spoofing attack, in which an infected device performs many dummy requests to IP addresses and ports that are different from the default ones, could result in missed detection."

Infertility is a worldwide clinical problem for human health that affects 8 to 12 percent of couples. A new study from Washington University in St. Louis has implications for understanding some age-related aspects of male reproductive health in primates, including humans.

Older male rhesus monkeys sire fewer offspring, even though they appear to be mating as much as younger monkeys with similarly high social status. Sperm quality or quantity, or the survival of infants, may decline with the age of the would-be father, the new study suggests.

Researchers tracking a colony of free-ranging rhesus macaques in Puerto Rico reported their findings Aug. 3 in the journal Scientific Reports.

"There have been a number of studies that explore female reproductive senescence in humans and other primates, but comparatively little work on male reproductive senescence," said Krista Milich, assistant professor of biological anthropology in Arts & Sciences.

"In fact, male reproductive success is thought to be primarily impacted by access to fertile females, but in this paper, we challenge that assumption."

About the study

Cayo Santiago is a small primate research island in Puerto Rico. It is home to a colony of rhesus macaques that was established in 1938 with approximately 400 wild-caught animals from India. At the time of this study, more than 1,200 monkeys lived on the island.

Researchers followed 21 adult males -- the highest ranking individuals in their social groups -- through breeding and birth seasons in a single year. All babies born that year were genotyped to determine both maternal and paternal lineage.

"We found that older, high-ranking males who were mating with females and who we would normally expect to produce a lot of offspring in a given mating season were actually producing very few or no offspring," Milich said.

"These are males that we know sired many offspring in their younger years, based on genetic records," she said. "We know from our behavioral data that they had access to mating partners at rates that were similar to or even higher than other males of similar social status.

"Yet, they were producing far fewer offspring than would be expected given their mating effort -- and fewer offspring than similarly ranked males that were younger."

Their conclusion: Age brings fertility or mortality issues.

"These findings provide evidence of post-copulatory reproductive senescence -- in other words, the sperm quality or quantity or infant survival may decline with age [of the male]," Milich said.

Who's your daddy?

At Washington University, Milich leads the Reproductive Ecology and Behavioral Endocrinology Laboratory (REBEL). She and her research team members use ecological, behavioral, hormonal and genetic data to investigate certain long-held beliefs within the areas of sexual selection and sexual strategies.

This new research can help fill a number of important gaps in understanding reproductive success in primates, Milich said.

First, most research on aging and infertility in humans has focused on women.

In addition, while some studies on age-related changes to men's sperm have been conducted, they provide contradictory evidence. And cross-cultural variations make the issues of aging and reproductive success difficult to understand through human studies.

In other studies with different monkey species, declines in reproductive output for older males have been associated with a loss of dominance status, loss in attractiveness, and/or loss in body condition leading to a decline in mating activity.

But the older rhesus monkeys in this study maintained high rates of mating behaviors while still experiencing the same decline in reproductive output.

"In populations where individuals are successfully mating and producing offspring, researchers should not use behavioral observations of mating patterns to determine paternity," Milich said. "As we saw in this study, those data do not necessarily match with the genetic paternity data."

Conservation implications

Future studies should continue to gather long-term data on variation in male reproductive health, and how social and physiological factors can impact a male's ability to sire offspring, said the study authors. Milich was joined by Angelina Ruiz-Lambides and Elizabeth Maldonado of the University of Puerto Rico plus Dario Maestripieri of the University of Chicago.

"Unfortunately, we have reached a level of deforestation and habitat destruction that impairs successful reproduction within some populations of wild animals," Milich said.

"In efforts to try to understand why certain populations have not been successful at producing any infants for years, sometimes even over a decade, researchers should take into consideration not only the age and stressors to females, but also the age of males," she said.

Aug. 3, 2020-- More than 30 years after the last guidance on the clinical evaluation of hypersensitivity pneumonitis (HP), the American Thoracic Society - in collaboration with the Asociación Latinoamericana de Tórax or ALAT and the Japanese Respiratory Society- has developed new guidelines for clinicians. The guidelines are available online ahead of print in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

Hypersensitivity pneumonitis manifests as interstitial lung disease. It is difficult to diagnose and until now, there has been little consensus in terms of disease definition, diagnostic criteria and diagnostic approach.

"The clinician is often unable to distinguish features of fibrotic HP (f-HP) from those of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), and some patients meeting the criteria for the diagnosis of IPF may in fact have f-HP with pulmonary fibrosis," said Ganesh Raghu, MD, professor of medicine, University of Washington and director of the Center for Interstitial Lung Disease at University of Washington Medical center. "The high rate of screen failures in patients participating in IPF clinical trials highlights this diagnostic challenge, as pulmonologists may be misdiagnosing patients with f-HP as having IPF, overlooking environmental factors that can contribute to the disease."

The guideline committee categorized HP into two clinical phenotypes, namely nonfibrotic and fibrotic HP, and made recommendations for reach. Their priority was to help clinicians make a confident and accurate diagnosis of HP.

The following is a summary of the panel's recommendations, which were formulated using the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation approach (GRADE):

Recommendation 1

For patients with newly identified ILD whose differential diagnosis includes non-fibrotic HP or fibrotic HP, the guideline committee makes no recommendation or suggestion for or against the use of a specific questionnaire to identify potential inciting agents of HP; instead, the guideline committee recommends the development and validation of a questionnaire. Remark: Pending the availability of a validated questionnaire, the guideline committee advocates that clinicians take a thorough history to identify potential exposures and sources in the patient's environment that are known to be associated with HP.

Recommendation 2

For patients with newly identified ILD whose differential diagnosis includes non-fibrotic HP, the guideline committee suggests performing serum IgG testing that targets potential antigens associated with HP (suggestion, very low confidence in the estimated effects).

For patients with newly identified ILD whose differential diagnosis includes fibrotic HP, the guideline committee suggests performing serum IgG testing that targets potential antigens associated with HP (suggestion, very low confidence in the estimated effects).

Recommendation 3

For patients with newly identified ILD whose differential diagnosis includes non-fibrotic HP, the guideline committee recommends bronchoalveolar lavage with lymphocyte cellular analysis (recommendation, very low confidence in the estimated effects).

For patients with newly identified ILD whose differential diagnosis includes fibrotic HP, the guideline committee suggests bronchoalveolar lavage with lymphocyte cellular analysis (suggestion, very low confidence in the estimated effects).

Recommendation 4

For patients with newly identified ILD whose differential diagnosis includes non-fibrotic HP, the guideline committee suggests transbronchial forceps lung biopsy (suggestion, very low confidence in the estimated effects).

For patients with newly identified ILD whose differential diagnosis includes fibrotic HP, the guideline committee makes no recommendation or suggestion for or against transbronchial forceps lung biopsy.

Recommendation 5

For patients with newly identified ILD whose differential diagnosis includes non-fibrotic HP, the guideline committee makes no recommendation or suggestion for or against transbronchial cryobiopsy.

For patients with newly identified ILD whose differential diagnosis includes fibrotic HP, the guideline committee suggests transbronchial cryobiopsy (suggestion, very low confidence in estimated effects).

Recommendation 6

For patients with newly identified ILD whose differential diagnosis includes non-fibrotic HP, the guideline committee suggests surgical lung biopsy; this recommendation is intended for after alternative diagnostic options have been exhausted (suggestion, very low confidence in estimated effects).

For patients with newly identified ILD whose differential diagnosis includes fibrotic HP, the guideline committee suggests surgical lung biopsy; this recommendation is intended for after alternative diagnostic options have been exhausted (suggestion, very low confidence in estimated effects).

"These guidelines create a framework that we hope will standardize clinical care and facilitate research," said Kevin C. Wilson, MD, professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Wilson also oversees development of clinical practice guidelines for the ATS.

The ATS has published nearly 20 clinical practice guidelines on various conditions, ranging from allergy and asthma to TB, other pulmonary infections and including IPF, a disease often mistaken for f-HP. For ATS guideline implementation tools and derivatives, go here.

Italian high schools have reported success with a South Australian program to help victims of bullying and aggression.

The Preparation, Education, Action, Coping, Evaluation (PEACE) antibullying program, developed at Flinders University, has been adapted by several state education systems in Europe, with the intervention used in 22 Italian classes in a 2019-20 study.

More than 550 students questioned about the program found it especially useful in giving victims of severe bullying support with their self-confidence and fewer experiences of aggression from other pupils, University of Bologna and Bolzano researchers say.

It produced a significant and sustained reduction in bullying and significant improvements in student wellbeing - also taking pressure off teachers and the schools to manage and intervene with claims of bullying, they report in an international journal.

"Despite the considerable efforts of schools to address bullying issues, much of the work undertaken in schools remains at the level of broadly based, and not necessarily research-informed interventions," concludes the lead author Professor Annalisa Guarini, from the University of Bologna. "Few teacher-delivered interventions have shown positive changes in the victims."

The effectiveness of the program was analysed through an observational study (pre/post-intervention), involving 551 Italian high school students who completed a questionnaire on bullying victimisation, self-efficacy, and bystander behaviour.

Like other analysis in Australia, Malta and Greece - in schools where the PEACE Pack program is also used - the Italian study suggests it can be used to effectively intervene with bullying in schools by:

increasing self-efficacy in bullied students

raising the perception of classmates to be more likely to intervene when a bullying episode occurs

reducing severe victimisation.

"Programs like the P.E.A.C.E. pack should be part of daily classroom activities, because they are effective and can be delivered entirely by teachers, representing a valid solution for schools with limited financial and time resources," the paper concludes.

Co-authors and PEACE Pack program developers - Flinders University experts Professor Phillip Slee and Dr Grace Skrzypiec - say the translation and joint venture in Italy, which received support from the Italian Ministry of Education, was further validation of the program.

"School bullying is a serious public issue and the negative consequences for the victims can have life-long consequences," the directors of Flinders Centre for Student Wellbeing and Prevention of Violence (SWAPv) say.

"Supporting the responsibility of educators, as reported by the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child, we have developed the PEACE pack program to protect children's quality of life and their rights to be educated in a safe environment, free from all forms of violence, victimization, harassment, and neglect."

The research article, 'The P.E.A.C.E. pack program in Italian high schools: An intervention for victims of bullying' (2020) by A Guarini, L Menabò, D Menin, C Mameli, G Skrzypiec, P Slee and A Brighi has been published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health DOI: 10.3390/ijerph17145162

The Flinders SWAPv joint research laboratory with the University of Bologna and Bolzano presented initial findings at an international conference in Italy last year.

The Flinders PEACE pack is being translated for trials in Taiwan and Indonesia and negotiations with US and Indian education centres are continuing.

Mindfulness could help trainee GPs to build their resilience and reduce burnout, helping to reduce the number of newly qualified GPs leaving the profession, according to University of Warwick researchers.

A new study of GP trainees in Coventry and Warwickshire shows that they are experiencing similar levels of burnout to experienced GPs, but that the majority were willing to use mindfulness as a method to reduce its impact.

The study is published in the journal BJGP Open and surveyed 47 GP trainees working in Coventry and Warwickshire on their experiences of stress and burnout. The results informed a new Mindful Practice Curriculum that the researchers are currently piloting as a method of helping doctors to manage stress and burnout issues in themselves.

Recent evidence has shown that doctors who fully qualify as a GP have a very high rate of leaving the profession within the first five years.

Lead author Dr Petra Hanson of Warwick Medical School, and a Clinical Research Fellow at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust, said: "That is quite worrying because it will mean that there is a crisis in the workforce, especially amongst GPs.

"We know that, in general, doctors suffer from relatively high levels of burnout and for patients that could result in poorer care. But it's also bad for individual doctors because it could result in those doctors leaving the profession."

The researchers recruited 47 GP trainees in their second or third year of training to take part in a survey assessing their wellbeing, resilience and burnout, using well established measures. They found that 64% of the trainees were experiencing burnout, defined as issues relating to excessive stress at work. This was broken down into those experiencing emotional exhaustion and disengagement, with 77% of trainees experiencing exhaustion and 80% experiencing disengagement. This is not dissimilar to the rates seen in fully qualified GPs from previous research, which are 94% and 85% respectively.

The researchers were also surprised to find lower resilience among GPs in training, having assumed that doctors were more likely to have greater resilience, with an average value 3.02 where the normal range would be 3 - 4.3.

The survey showed that a third of the GP trainees were already practicing some sort of mindfulness technique, often in the form of an app. Over 80% wanted to try mindfulness, but wanted to see more evidence for its effectiveness and were concerned about the demands on their time.

Mindfulness is defined as a capacity for enhanced and sustained moment-to-moment awareness of one's own mental and emotional state and being, in the context of one's own immediate environment.

The Mindful Practice Curriculum is an intervention designed for doctors. It has been widely tested in the United States but the researchers are currently evaluating its effectiveness in the UK for the first time. The key differences with this type of mindfulness course are that it is very structured and addresses issues that are specific to doctors.

Dr Hanson adds: "In general, the GP trainees were very open to it, and they knew that it was not only going to be benefitting patients but also themselves.

"We found evidence showing that mindfulness was used among doctors to improve resilience and wellbeing, but we wanted to use something that was structured and specifically designed for doctors. Mindfulness doesn't have a well-standardised definition of how it can be used as an intervention amongst different groups of people or professionals.

"This course covers areas such as making mistakes in clinical practice, compassion fatigue, mindful listening, things that every doctor, regardless of their expertise, will at some point in their career have issues with. I'd like to see this programme incorporated into the training of doctors, regardless of speciality. I don't think there's any difference between doctors in training."

After graduating from medical school, doctors undergo two years of foundation training at the end of which they can choose which speciality they want to go into. If they choose to become a GP they have a three year long training programme, where by their final year they are working at a similar level to a fully-qualified GP. Although by their third year they are working with patients in a similar manner to a fully-qualified GP, they have additional stresses such as exams and maintaining a portfolio.

Professor Jeremy Dale, GP in Coventry and Head of the Unit of Academic Primary Care at Warwick Medical School, said: "This study casts light on the importance of addressing the wellbeing of doctors as part of their GP training. With such high levels of emotional exhaustion and disengagement being experienced by trainees, this is likely to be adversely affecting their wellbeing, their career plans and of course the care of their patients. The interest shown in incorporating mindfulness training as part of GP training suggests that this could be an important life skill that GP trainees are keen to develop to help them cope with the pressures of working in general practice."

Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology explore a novel and simplistic method to synthesize manganese dioxide with a specific crystalline structure called β-MnO2. Their study sheds light on how different synthesis conditions can produce manganese dioxide with distinct porous structures, hinting at a strategy for the development of highly tuned MnO2 nanomaterials that could serve as catalysts in the fabrication of bioplastics.

Materials engineering has advanced to a point at which not only are we concerned about the chemical composition of a material, but also about its structure at a nanometric level. Nanostructured materials have recently drawn the attention of researchers from a variety of fields and for good reason; their physical, optical, and electrical characteristics can be tuned and pushed to the limit once methods to tailor their nanostructure are available.

Manganese dioxide (chemical formula MnO2) nanostructured metal oxide that can form many different crystalline structures, with applications across various engineering fields. One important use of MnO2 is as a catalyst for chemical reactions, and a particular crystalline structure of MnO2, called β-MnO2, is exceptional for the oxidation of 5-hydroxymethylfurfural into 2,5-furandicarboxylic acid (FDCA). Because FDCA can be used to produce environment-friendly bioplastics, finding ways to tune the nanostructure of β-MnO2 to maximize its catalytic performance is crucial.

However, producing β-MnO2 is difficult compared with other MnO2 crystalline structures. Existing methods are complicated and involve the use of template materials onto which β-MnO2 "grows" and ends up with the desired structure after several steps. Now, researchers from Tokyo Institute of Technology led by Prof. Keigo Kamata explore a template-free approach for the synthesis of different types of porous β-MnO2 nanoparticles.

Their method, described in their study published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, is outstandingly simple and convenient. First, Mn precursors are obtained by mixing aqueous solutions and letting the solids precipitate. After filtration and drying, the collected solids are subjected to a temperature of 400°C in a normal air atmosphere, a process known as calcination. During this step, the material crystallizes and the black powder obtained afterwards is more than 97% porous β-MnO2.

Most notably, the researchers found this porous β-MnO2 to be much more efficient as a catalyst for synthesizing FDCA than the β-MnO2 produced using a more widespread approach called the "hydrothermal method." To understand why, they analyzed the chemical, microscopic, and spectral characteristics of β-MnO2 nanoparticles produced under different synthesis conditions.

They found that β-MnO2 can take on markedly different morphologies according to certain parameters. In particular, by adjusting the acidity (pH) of the solution in which the precursors are mixed, β-MnO2 nanoparticles with large spherical pores can be obtained. This porous structure has a higher surface area, thus providing better catalytic performance. Excited about the results, Kamata remarks: "Our porous β-MnO2 nanoparticles could efficiently catalyze the oxidation of HMF into FDCA in sharp contrast with β-MnO2 nanoparticles obtained via the hydrothermal method. Further fine control of the crystallinity and/or porous structure of β-MnO2 could lead to the development of even more efficient oxidative reactions."

What's more, this study provided much insight into how porous and tunnel structures are formed in MnO2, which could be key to extending its applications, as Kamata states: "Our approach, which involves the transformation of Mn precursors into MnO2 not in the liquid-phase (hydrothermal method) but under an air atmosphere, is a promising strategy for the synthesis of various MnO2 nanoparticles with tunnel structures. These could be applicable as versatile functional materials for catalysts, chemical sensors, lithium-ion batteries, and supercapacitors." Further studies like this one will hopefully allow us to one day harness the full potential that nanostructured materials have to offer.

Ancient sediment found in a central Texas cave appears to solve the mystery of why the Earth cooled suddenly about 13,000 years ago, according to a research study co-authored by a Texas A&M University professor.

Michael Waters, director of The Center for The Study of the First Americans and Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University, and colleagues from Baylor University and the University of Houston have had their work published in Science Advances.

Some researchers believed the event - which cooled the Earth by about 3 degrees Centigrade, a huge amount - was caused by an extraterrestrial impact with the Earth, such as a meteor collision.

But Waters and the team found that the evidence left in layers of sediment in Hall's Cave were almost certainly the result of volcanic eruptions.

Waters said that Hall's Cave, located in the Texas hill country, has a sediment record extending over 20,000 years and he first began researching the cave in 2017.

"It is an exceptional record that offers a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary cooperation to investigate a number of important research questions," he said.

"One big question was, did an extraterrestrial impact occur near the end of the last ice age, about 13,000 years ago as the ice sheets covering Canada were melting, and cause an abrupt cooling that thrust the northern hemisphere back into the ice age for an extra 1,200 years?"

Waters and the team found that within the cave are layers of sediment, first identified by Thomas Stafford (Stafford Research Laboratories, Colorado), that dated to the time of the proposed impact that could answer the question and perhaps even identify the trigger that started the ancient cold snap.

The event also likely helped cause the extinction of large mammals such as mammoth, horse and camel that once roamed North America.

"This work shows that the geochemical signature associated with the cooling event is not unique but occurred four times between 9,000 and 15,000 years ago," said Alan Brandon, professor of geosciences at University of Houston and head of the research team.

"Thus, the trigger for this cooling event didn't come from space. Prior geochemical evidence for a large meteor exploding in the atmosphere instead reflects a period of major volcanic eruptions.

"I was skeptical," Brandon said. "We took every avenue we could to come up with an alternative explanation, or even avoid, this conclusion. A volcanic eruption had been considered one possible explanation but was generally dismissed because there was no associated geochemical fingerprint."

After a volcano erupts, the global spread of aerosols reflects incoming solar radiation away from Earth and may lead to global cooling post eruption for one to five years, depending on the size and timescales of the eruption, the team said.

"The Younger Dryas, which occurred about 13,000 years ago, disrupted distinct warming at the end of the last ice age," said co-author Steven Forman, professor of geosciences at Baylor.

The Earth's climate may have been at a tipping point at the end of Younger Dryas, possibly from the ice sheet discharge into the North Atlantic Ocean, enhanced snow cover and powerful volcanic eruptions that may have in combination led to intense Northern Hemisphere cooling, Forman said.

"This period of rapid cooling coincides with the extinction of a number of species, including camels and horses, and the appearance of the Clovis archaeological tradition," said Waters.

Brandon and fellow University of Houston scientist Nan Sun completed the isotopic analysis of sediments collected from Hall's Cave. They found that elements such as iridium, ruthenium, platinum, palladium and rhenium were not present in the correct proportions, meaning that a meteor or asteroid could not have caused the event.

"The isotope analysis and the relative proportion of the elements matched those that were found in previous volcanic gases," said Sun, lead author of the report.

Volcanic eruptions cause their most severe cooling near the source, usually in the year of the eruption, with substantially less cooling in the years after the eruption, the team said.

The Younger Dryas cooling lasted about 1,200 years, "so a sole volcanic eruptive cause is an important initiating factor, but other Earth system changes, such as cooling of the oceans and more snow cover were needed to sustain this colder period, "Forman said.

Waters added that the bottom line is that "the chemical anomalies found in sediments dating to the beginning of the Younger Dryas are the result of volcanism and not an extraterrestrial impact."

Deep-sea anglerfishes employ an incredible reproductive strategy. Tiny dwarfed males become permanently attached to relatively gigantic females, fuse their tissues and then establish a common blood circulation. In this way, the male becomes entirely dependent on the female for nutrient supply, like a developing fetus in the womb of her mother or a donor organ in a transplant patient. In anglerfishes, this unusual phenomenon is referred to as sexual parasitism and contributes to the reproductive success for these animals living in the vast space of the deep sea, where females and males otherwise rarely meet.

The permanent attachment of males to females represents a form of anatomical joining, which is otherwise unknown in nature except for the rare occurrence in genetically identical twins. The immune system represents an estraordinary obstacle here. It attacks foreign tissue as it would destroy cells infected by pathogens. Just witness the difficulties surrounding organ transplantation in humans, which requires the careful cross-matching of donor and recipient tissue characters, together with immunosuppressive drugs, to ensure the long-term survival of the organ graft. But how is it possible then that, in case of anglerfishes, that individuals of the same species accept each other so readily when tissue-rejection is the usual and expected result of any such union?

The phenomenon of sexual parasitism has posed an enigma that has existed for 100 years, ever since the first attached couple was discovered by an Icelandic fisheries biologist in 1920. Now, scientists from Germany and the USA have solved this century-old conundrum and report their findings in the scientific journal Science.

Key functions of the immune system eliminated

A few years ago, Thomas Boehm, a medical doctor and immunologist working at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, Germany, and Theodore W. Pietsch, an ichthyologist and a internationally renowned expert on anglerfishes working at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, set out to study the genomes of different anglerfish species. They began by looking at the structure of major histocompatibility (MHC) antigens. These molecules are found at the surface of the body's cells and signal alarm to the immune system, when the cells are infected by a virus or a bacterium. To make sure that all pathogens are efficiently recognized, the MHC molecules are extremely variable, so much so that it is hard to find identical or near-identical forms in any two individuals of a species. This feature is at the root of the tissue-matching problem that plagues human organ and bone marrow transplantation.

Interestingly, the researchers found that anglerfishes that utilize permanent attachment are largely depauperate in genes that encode these MHC molecules, as if they had done away with immune recognition in favor of tissue fusion. "Apart from this unusual constellation of MHC genes, we discovered that the function of killer T cells, which normally actively eliminate infected cells or attack foreign tissues during the organ rejection process, was also severely blunted if not lost entirely. These findings hinted at the possibility that the immune system of anglerfishes was very unusual among the tens of thousands of vertebrate species", says Jeremy Swann from the MPI of Immunobiology and Epigenetics and first author of the study.

Survival without acquired immune facilities

After these unexpected discoveries, the scientists suspected that the re-organization of the immune system of anglerfishes might be even more extensive than expected. And indeed, further research indicated that antibodies, which are the second powerful weapon in the arsenal of immune defence are also missing in some of the anglerfish species. "For humans, the combined loss of important immune facilities observed in anglerfishes would result in fatal immunodeficiency", says Thomas Boehm, Director at the MPI of Immunobiology and Epigenetics and lead scientist of the project.

However, anglerfishes are obviously able to survive without essential adaptive immune functions. Thus, the researchers concluded that the animals use much improved innate facilities to defend themselves against infections, a most unexpected solution to a problem that is faced by all living things. Indeed, until now it was thought that a partnership of acquired and innate immunity, once it was formed in evolution, cannot be disentangled with severe consequences.

Immune system affects the reproductive strategy

The study thus shows that despite several hundred million years of co-evolutionary partnership of innate and adaptive functions, vertebrates can survive without the adaptive immune facilities previously considered to be irreplaceable. We assume that as yet unknown evolutionary forces first drive changes in the immune system, which are then exploited for the evolution of sexual parasitism", says Thomas Boehm.

Interestingly, the scientists believe that, among their collection of fishes, they have even captured one species en route to developing sexual parasitism. "We find it remarkable that the unusual mode of reproduction was invented several times independently in this group of fishes", says Ted Pietsch from the University of Washington.

Although the details of the improved innate immune facilities in anglerfishes remain to be discovered, the results of this study point at potential strategies that enhance innate immune facilities in human patients who suffer the consequences of inborn or acquired impairment of immune facilities. Hence, the scientific journey that began with an obscure observation on board a fishing vessel out in the mid-Atlantic unexpectedly opens up new avenues for the treatment of immune disorders in humans.

Advanced fuels and new engine designs could reduce emissions and water use over the next 30 years, according for a new study led by Argonne scientists.

Advanced fuel blends, along with new engine designs, could reduce greenhouse gases, air pollutants and water use over the next three decades, according to a study led by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory.

The paper, published last month in the journal Energy & Environmental Science, examined the potential impact of diversifying the U.S. fuel mix to include increased proportions of biofuels and engines designed to use these fuel blends. Doing so, the authors write, could make engines 10 percent more efficient compared to those running on conventional fuel.

“It is very exciting that biomass holds the potential to produce blendstocks that can boost fuel economy,” said the study’s lead author, Jennifer Dunn, who is a chemical engineer at Argonne. “This reduces fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions by two routes: less fuel consumption overall and an increased share of fuel that has a lower carbon footprint than conventional gasoline because it is made from renewable biomass.”

The research is supported by the Co-Optimization of Fuels & Engines (Co-Optima) initiative, which is jointly led by DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Bioenergy Technologies Office and its Vehicle Technologies Office. As part of Co-Optima, researchers are exploring fuels and engines as dynamic design variables that can work together to boost efficiency and performance in both light-duty vehicles and trucks.

The current study used computer models to analyze the economic and environmental impacts of broadly adopting three different bio-blendstocks, or biomass-derived fuels that can be blended with conventional ones: ethanol, isopropanol, and furan. The team included researchers from Argonne, DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Lexidyne, a data analysis firm based in Colorado.

The results showed that from 2025 to 2050, cumulative greenhouse gas emissions would be 4 to 7 percent lower for the light-duty transportation sector compared to a business-as-usual case. Beginning in 2050, emission reductions could reach the range of 7 to 9 percent. Water consumption declined by 3 to 4 percent and levels of the small, hazardous particulate matter known as PM2.5 dropped 3 percent in the 2025 to 2050 period.

“This analysis showed us vehicles with engines co-designed with these fuels that enhance fuel economy can be attractive to drivers and make their way onto our roads,” Dunn said, given that they will lead not only to lower levels of greenhouse gases, air pollutants and water use, but also to lower spending at the gas pump. 

Evolving the U.S. fleet to include more advanced engine designs co-optimized to take advantage of bio-blendstocks could support anywhere from 278,000 to 1.7 million more jobs annually, the analysis found, depending on the speed and scope of the scale-up. This transformation will take time, Dunn said, “So we have to stay the course with development of these technologies and their introduction into the vehicle choices consumers have.”

Coastal flooding across the world is set to rise by around 50 per cent due to climate change in the next 80 years, endangering millions more people and trillions of US dollars more of coastal infrastructure, new research shows.

The study, led by the University of Melbourne and involving the University of East Anglia (UEA), shows the land area exposed to an extreme flood event will increase by more than 250,000 square kilometres globally, an increase of 48 per cent or over 800,000 square kilometres.

This would mean about 77 million more people will be at risk of experiencing flooding, a rise of 52 per cent to 225 million. The economic risk in terms of the infrastructure exposed will rise by up to $US14.2 trillion, which represents 20 per cent of global GDP.

The analysis, published today in Springer Nature's Scientific Reports, is based on a climate scenario where carbon dioxide (CO?) concentrations in the atmosphere continue to rise rapidly.

"A warming climate is driving sea level rise because water expands as it warms, and glaciers are melting. Climate change is also increasing the frequency of extreme seas which will further increase the risk of flooding," lead author and University of Melbourne PhD candidate Ebru Kirezci said.

"What the data and our model is saying is that compared with now, what we see as a 1-in-100-year extreme flood event will be ten times more frequent because of climate change."

Lead UK author Prof Robert Nicholls, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at UEA, said: "This analysis shows the urgency of action to address sea-level rise via both climate mitigation to reduce the rise and adaptation such as better coastal defences, as some of the rise is unavoidable."

University of Melbourne infrastructure engineering researcher and co-author of the report, Prof Ian Young said that while northwest Europe is particularly exposed to rising flood risk, the study shows other major risk areas in every continent with hotspots in Australia, New Zealand, China, India, South-East Asia, south-east Africa and north America.

"This is critical research from a policy point of view because it provides politicians with a credible estimate of the risks and costs we are facing, and a basis or taking action," said Prof Young. "This data should act as a wake-up call to inform policy at global and local government levels so that more flood defences can be built to safeguard coastal life and infrastructure."

The analysis does not take account of existing flood defences that in places like northern Europe already provide significant protection. But researchers warn that the extent of the increased risk highlighted by the study shows just how vulnerable large parts of the world will become unless action is taken both to mitigate the effects of climate change and expand flood defences.

"Our research shows that large parts of communities residing in low-lying coastal areas are at risk of being devastated so we need urgent action. Vulnerable areas need to start building coastal defences, we need to increase our preparedness, and we need to be following strategies to mitigate climate change," said Ms Kirezci.

The study was led by researchers from Melbourne School of Engineering at the University of Melbourne in collaboration with IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, UEA and the Global Climate Forum in Germany.