Brain

Russian companies still pursue authoritarian leadership styles, and employees often avoid articulating their concerns and complaints to management. Together with chronic stress and work-family imbalance, this can often result in emotional burnout. This is the conclusion of a study by researchers from North Dakota State University and HSE University.

Venting to Co-Workers and Friends

Russians have still not learned how to express their dissent with corporate policy to their top managers and supervisors. It is more common to discuss the annoying things with co-workers, vent to family members or friends, rather than express concerns openly to management. As a result, people experience burnout and simply don't have the inner strength to continue working.

A joint study by American and Russian researchers revealed the positive correlation between Russian's latent dissent at work and emotional burnout.

Social psychologist Christina Maslach, known for her research on emotional burnout, puts burnout symptoms into three categories:

emotional and physical exhaustion;

a sense of reduced professional accomplishment and cynical attitude to work;

feelings of alienation from the organization and co-workers.

Other signs of burnout include absenteeism and intentions to quit.

The study was conducted in Perm, Russia. It involved 237 participants, 117 males and 120 females aged from 18 to 57, who work full-time in various sectors. The responders completed questionnaires with demographic questions and several scales measuring the level of dissent with respect to their employers' policies and emotional burnout, as well as corporate support for work-family balance.

Surviving Between Family and Work

Russian employees often experience chronic stress, the study authors say. According to the available data, it can impact up to 70% of workforce.

There are global reasons for this. Russia's accession to international markets in the 1990s and the 2000s required firms to improve their competitiveness and performance indicators, which has led to increased stress at work both for managers and rank-and-file employees. Another stress factor is authoritarian leadership style, which is popular in Russian companies and does not allow employees much freedom to express their opinions or dissent in regards to organizational policies, the researchers note.

Russian managers have attributed their heightened work stress (Gorelova E, 2013) to the following reasons:

unpredictable business environment in the country;

diffculties in building trust with people;

lack of comprehensive, unifying business rules;

constant changes in legislation.

Rank-and-file employees in Russia also have contended that working life is becoming much more stressful owing to the increasing demand for skills and working time, as well as the intensified competition on the job market. Furthermore, women in Russia often face additional stress because both political and religious discourses in Russia dictate that child-rearing is essentially a female project.

As a consequence, many working Russians experience a work-family imbalance. While companies often formally stand for family values and develop programmes to support this balance, they are not always implemented in practice. The study's authors note that managers may send out mixed messages that employees are not 'really' encouraged to utilize work-family benefits, even when such programmes exist.

This results in a vicious circle, when a deficit of support from management, together with work overload, leads to emotional burnout. This, in turn, can significantly worsen one's work-life imbalance.

Furthermore, the research has demonstrated that those who get real support from managers have fewer chances of burnout. 'With both formal organizational support and informal managerial support, employees may feel more comfortable and less guilty putting family responsibilities before work,' the researchers say.

Talking Openly about Problems

One of the researchers' key conclusions is that encouraging the expression of dissent is a viable way to empower employees and this, thereby, can reduce their stress level. The more explicitly an employee expresses their 'upward dissent', the less chances for burnout they have. Moreover, it has been confirmed that feedback has a positive effect. It turns out to be statistically more important with respect to the factors of correlation with burnout levels, says Tatyana Permyakovahttps://www.hse.ru/en/org/persons/202193, one of the study authors.

Latent dissent, as the research indicates, is expressed by employees through their burnout.

Containing dissent is already one of the signs of burnout.

Employees just don't have any strength to fight. They may feel alienated from the company and lack motivation to do anything.

'In an ideal workplace, employees can complain about tiny, but frustrating events before they develop into severe stressors. In this sense, a democratic organizational climate that welcomes dissent is key in combating employee burnout in the workplace,' the researchers conclude.

Educational status appears to have positive influence on a healthy diet, particularly in low income countries, according to new research examining European nutritional data.

Using national data on 27,334 individuals from 12 European countries, researchers at the University of Leeds, in collaboration with the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe (WHO Europe), examined the interactions between socioeconomic status, education and diet.

Their study, published in PLOS ONE, shows for the first time that higher educational status appeared to have a mitigating effect on poorer diet in lower income European countries. As individual education level increased so did nutritional intake encouraged as part of a healthy diet, particularly iron and total folate.

The findings highlight the need for strong policies supporting good nutrition, prioritising lower education groups.

Poor diet and malnutrition linked to noncommunicable diseases, such as obesity, hypertension and cardiovascular disease, presents major health problems across Europe. In 2018, 59% of adults in the WHO European Region were overweight or obese and noncommunicable diseases are the leading cause of death, disease and disability in the region.

The World Health Organization encourages countries to conduct national diet surveys to gather data to inform public health policies to prevent such diseases.

This work is the first to combine national diet survey data from WHO European Member States spanning all regions of Europe. It provides the largest representative diet survey dataset across WHO Europe, providing an important source of evidence on which to base policy.

Lead author Dr Holly Rippin began this research while a postgraduate researcher in the School of Food Science and Nutrition at Leeds, she is now a WHO consultant. She said: "Our study shows that national income and diet quality appear to be linked, and education could protect against some of the long-term negative effects of poor nutrition on population health.

"Strategies supporting education in lower education groups and lower income countries could be effective in improving nutrition, particularly in disadvantaged groups."

Co-author Janet Cade, professor of nutritional epidemiology and public health at Leeds, said: "This was a great collaborative effort between 12 European countries - we hope that policymakers across Europe will use this information to inform their nutrition policies in the future and prioritize these vulnerable groups."

Selective powder sintering for 3D printing has recently become an increasingly affordable solution for manufacturing made-to-order elements of almost any shape or geometry. This technique involves heating a bed of powder (such as polyamide, PA12) to just below its melting point, using an IR light source to selectively melt a cross section of the powder, then adding more powder and repeating to form a 3D object. To reduce costs and increase printing speed, a photothermal sensitizer is often added to the powders. Typically carbon-based, with a strong broadband absorption, adding these sensitizers to the polymer powders increases the conversion of incident light to heat, which means greater print speeds. However, carbon-based sensitizers can only produce black or gray objects. To create white or colorful prints, visibly transparent equivalents are needed.

A study conducted a few years ago by a team of researchers at ICFO, first authored by Alexander Powell and led by ICREA Professors at ICFO Gerasimos Konstantatos, and Romain Quidant, reported on a solution for overcoming color restrictions in this method using plasmonic nanoparticles. The researchers designed gold nanoparticles coated with silica as a photothermal sensitizer to allow a rapid sintering of polymer powders into 3D objects by having these nanoparticles strongly absorb in the near-infrared, while only minimally interacting with visible light. At resonance, these composites showed greatly improved light-to-heat conversion compared with equivalent composites and could be sintered using low-power light sources. While these particles showed to be very efficient for the rapid fabrication of colored 3D objects, they proved to have certain limitations when trying to print 3D objects in pure white color or multicolor with high color fidelity across a large hue range affecting the quality of the coloration of prints in high concentrations.

Thus, in a recent study published in NanoLetters, the ICFO researchers Alexander Powell, Alexandros Stavrinadis, and Sotirios Christodoulou, led by ICREA Professors at ICFO Gerasimos Konstantatos, and Romain Quidant, have now reported on the use a new sensitizer that has proven to easy overcome these problems.

In their study, the team of researchers has reported on using nanoparticles made of tungsten oxide (WO3) as the photothermal sensitizers for polymer powders. These nanoparticles comprise low cost elements, which make them easy and cheap to fabricate. They are colorless at high concentrations and have a strong absorption in the near infrared region, proving their capability of turning light into heat at a fast rate, and thus enabling them as fast fusing agents. In addition, they can be efficiently turned on or off with electricity or ultraviolet radiation. Even more, they are stable at very high temperatures and demonstrate a heating-to-color change rate superior when compared to other available sensitizers. Finally, when mixed with other color inks, these nanoparticles have been able to reproduce the same shades of color as the original powders, maintaining the color purity of the pristine samples.

The results of the study open a new pathway for the use of plasmonic nanoparticles that can be used to produce high color quality 3D-multicolor objects for advanced manufacturing processes.

Over the past quarter-century, changes in Antarctic sea-ice cover have had profound impacts on life on the ocean floor. As biologists from the Alfred Wegener Institute report in the latest issue of the journal Nature Communications, between 1988 and 2014, total benthic biomass on the continental shelf of the northeast Weddell Sea declined by two thirds. In addition, the composition of the benthos changed drastically, and the ecosystem's productivity suffered. This period coincides with a significant increase in sea-ice cover in the region, a trend that peaked in 2014.

The Antarctic is home to a unique variety of benthic fauna, with an extraordinarily diverse range of species, and many groups of organisms that are rarely if ever found in other marine regions. Predators like large crabs are nowhere to be seen; as a result, sponges and gorgonians (soft corals), which normally have to hide in the sediment to avoid predators, can grow in denser clumps. In fact, in some areas of the Antarctic continental shelf these species cover the ocean floor like a carpet. They have adapted to conditions of extreme cold and scarce food, and grow slowly, which allows them to reach unusual sizes and ages. "Due to their slow growth, changes in the structure and composition of benthic communities in the Antarctic are extremely difficult to detect," explains Prof. Claudio Richter, a biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). "Consequently, to date it's been impossible to predict how benthic communities in the Antarctic would react to climate-based changes in their environment," says the co-author, who is a Professor of Marine Animal Ecology at the University of Bremen.

In the current issue of the journal Nature Communications, the AWI biologists show that, over a 26-year-long timeframe, benthic biomass on the continental shelf of the Antarctic Weddell Sea steadily declined. The team began their work back in the 1980s, collecting samples from the seafloor when the research icebreaker Polarstern first visited the region. One of the study's authors, Dieter Gerdes, was among the pioneers, and developed a sample-gathering device specifically for this type of research: the two-metric-ton multibox corer, which can simultaneously collect nine seafloor samples every time it is deployed. From 1988 to 2014, the behemoth was used 59 times in the Kapp Norvegia/Auståsen research area, located 81 miles southwest of Germany's Neumayer research station. In the course of eight Polarstern expeditions, the experts gathered more than 300 seafloor samples, sifted through 45 metric tons of sediment, and sorted and counted tens of thousands of marine organisms. "The side effects of our study were aching limbs and ending up covered in mud from head to toe on the freezing working deck, not to mention a good deal of eye strain from too much time behind the microscope," reports Claudio Richter, offering a tongue-in-cheek portrayal of the demanding working conditions on the Antarctic expeditions.

The study's first author, Santiago Pineda-Metz, an Argentinean student from the Universidad de Magallanes in Chile, dedicated a major section of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Bremen to developing the statistics needed in order to analyse the diverse range of data. In addition, he compared the data gathered by the team with that from global archives in order to map their biological findings to changes in the Antarctic environment during the research period. The researchers analysed how various factors, e.g. iceberg 'keels' scraping along the seafloor, collapsing ice shelves, the amount of sea-ice cover and snow atop it, as well as the prevalence of icebergs in a 'whitening Antarctic' affect benthic fauna and ecosystem productivity. What they found: though icebergs adversely affect productivity, there were no major changes in their abundance during the research period. In contrast, the increased sea-ice cover and thicker snow cover produced concrete negative effects.

"We had always suspected that the sea ice might be the key," says project leader Claudio Richter. "The Antarctic is quite different from the Arctic: in the Arctic, the sea ice is disappearing. But in the vast majority of the Antarctic, until recently the sea ice was growing. More snow-covered ice floes means: less light to support the growth of tiny algae (phytoplankton) at the water's surface, and less dead phytoplankton that drifts down to the bottom. In this 'whitening Antarctic', benthic organisms can sometimes go hungry." Pineda-Metz, Gerdes and Richter have succeeded in finding evidence of precisely this trend: they confirmed a substantial loss in both the frequency and biomass of Antarctic benthos in the research area. In addition, they determined that there was a shift in the community, from suspension feeders to deposit feeders.

The year 2014 marked both the end of data gathering and a possible turning point for the Antarctic sea-ice cover, which has since dropped from its all-time maximum back then to roughly the same levels as in the 1980s. The AWI team is currently preparing for an expedition in early 2021, where they will investigate whether sea-ice retreat has reversed the above-mentioned effects on the benthos. They plan to return to past sample-gathering sites in order to see if benthic organisms have bounced back under the recent ice-poor conditions. "Exploring the benthic reaction is extremely important since carbon storage in the benthos represents an important feedback for the climate system," says Pineda-Metz, who intends to focus on this reaction in his postdoctoral thesis. "Our study also shows how important long-term ecological monitoring is when it comes to a region that is vulnerable to rising temperatures," Richter adds.

Australian and US researchers have made a breakthrough in understanding the structure of a key genetic molecule, called RNA, and revealing for the first time how these changes impact RNA's function.

Publishing in the journal Nature, the research team developed a bioinformatics technique to resolve separate structures of RNA rather than viewing them as a 'blur' that averaged multiple structures. This underpinned their discovery that the structure of RNA can influence how cells function.

RNA is a DNA-like molecule that encodes genetic information. Certain viruses - including HIV and SARS-CoV2 - use RNA as their genetic material. The team were able to apply the techniques they developed to reveal how the structure of HIV's RNA genome influences which proteins the virus produces.

The international collaborative team was led by Walter and Eliza Hall Institute researcher Dr Vincent Corbin together with Mr Phil Tomezsko and Professor Silvi Rouskin at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Boston (US). The research team also included the Institute's Computational Biology Theme Leader Professor Tony Papenfuss and mathematician and PhD student Mr Lachlan McIntosh.

At a glance

- RNA is a molecule that carries genetic information, controlling how cells function.

- A collaborative research team has used advanced computational methods to detect different structures of RNA, which until now could not be distinguished.

- Using HIV as a model system, the team discovered that different structures of RNA influenced how the virus behaved. This is the first time changes in RNA structure have been shown to influence how this molecule controls cells' function.

RNA's shifting shapes

RNA is a molecule found in all living things that carries genetic information. RNA is an important regulator of how cells function, directly controlling which proteins are produced in cells, and can also switch genes on and off.

RNA molecules have a two-dimensional structure which influences how the genetic information contained within them can be accessed, said Dr Corbin, who led the project's bioinformatics research.

"The big question in RNA biology has been whether RNA molecules have a single, constant structure, or whether they can shift between different structures - and what this means for the function of a particular RNA molecule," he said.

"Our collaborators, led by Professor Silvi Rouskin, developed a technique for deciphering the structure of RNA molecules. We wanted to understand whether what we were detecting was a single structure of RNA, or an 'average' structure that blurs multiple different structures together.

"It's a bit like seeing red and yellow stripes, or blurring them together and thinking you can see orange," he said.

By developing a computational algorithm, the team were able to detect and measure the amount of different RNA structures. "We could detect these both in a test tube and in living cells, so we next looked at whether these structures influenced how RNA functioned," Dr Corbin said.

Changing RNA function

When RNA is produced in cells, it starts in a longer form that is 'spliced' or trimmed to remove unwanted parts.

"RNA splicing can influence how it encodes proteins," Dr Corbin said. "There are many examples of how altered RNA splicing influences how a cell functions - and in some cases, changes in RNA splicing have been associated with cancer or neurodegenerative diseases."

Certain viruses use RNA for their genome, including HIV and SARS-CoV2 (the coronavirus that causes COVID-19). In the case of HIV, RNA splicing influences which protein the virus produces - which changes at different stages of the virus's lifecycle.

"Using the HIV genome as a model system, we looked at whether RNA structure influences how HIV's RNA is spliced. We discovered that RNA structure was a critical determinant of RNA splicing in HIV, and influenced which viral proteins were produced," Dr Corbin said.

"This is the first clear evidence of how RNA structure can control RNA function. The techniques we have developed have opened up a new field of research into the role of RNA structure in regulating the function of cells."

Professor Papenfuss said the research showed how finely tuned biological systems are. "This study how very subtle changes in one tiny molecule can have big implications for the function of a virus. By using computational biology to unravel these changes, we've made a significant discovery about how viruses - and potentially human cells - function, which may underpin future discoveries about health and disease."

The human gut microbiota consists of trillions of bacteria, fungi and virus constituting an inner chemical factory producing a multitude of microbial compounds affecting immunity, neurobiology and metabolism of the human host.

It has for long been known that imbalances in the composition of gut microbes link with a variety of chronic human disorders spanning from obesity, diabetes inflammatory bowel diseases to depression, schizophrenia, autism and Parkinson. In addition, it is known that unhealthy dieting and use of some medications, for instance stomach acid neutralizers, the so-called proton pump inhibitors, are associated with a further disruption of the microbial communities of the gut.

Now, in a new paper in the scientific journal Nature, The MetaCardis investigators explore gut bacteria in almost 900 individuals from Denmark, France and Germany.

The intestinal microbiota in obese individuals had previously been shown to differ from those in lean subjects with a poor bacterial diversity, a relative depletion of health promoting bacteria and the remaining bacteria dominated by an inflammatory tone.

In their Nature article, the researches now define a cluster of bacteria called Bact2 enterotype, which is found in 4% of lean and overweight people but in 18% of obese individuals who did not use statin drugs, a group of cholesterol lowering medications.

However, in other obese study participants who were treated with statins, the prevalence of the unhealthy Bact2 enterotype was significantly lower (6%) than in their non-treated counterparts (18%) - comparable to levels observed in non-obese participants (4%). The same trend was validated in a Flemish study sample of about 2000 participants.

Statins are commonly prescribed to reduce risk of developing cardiovascular diseases like myocardial infarction and stroke. It is estimated that more than 200 million people worldwide are prescribed statins. Besides their cholesterol-lowering effects, statins also tend to appease patients' systemic inflammation levels which in part may be related to a disrupted gut microbiota.

The results suggest that statins could potentially modulate the disrupted gut microbiota and linked inflammation in obesity. Previous experiments in rodents have shown an impact of statins on bacterial growth, which might benefit non-inflammatory bacteria and underlie the anti-inflammatory effects of statin therapy. Obviously, clinically controlled human trials are needed to address whether statins mediate some of their anti-inflammatory effect via an improvement of the Bact2 enterotype of an aberrant gut microbiota.

Undergraduate arts and music departments may represent untapped resources for building up the workforce needed to care for older adults, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

In the study, an undergraduate course curriculum brought 52 students to meet with people living with dementia, build personalized music playlists, co-produce short films about living dementia, and write reflective essays.

Music helped undergraduate students connect with people with dementia in meaningful ways, filmmaking offered students the opportunity to share stories about dementia and music, and reflective writing enabled students to process their experiences. More than half of the students continued engaging with the participants who were living with dementia in their careers, families, and communities after the course was completed.

The findings reveal that arts and music courses can affect students' perceptions about dementia and create new educational opportunities about this condition.

"By teaching students to view aging through creative, intercultural and interdisciplinary frames, we have the opportunity to shape a new generation of health care professionals, artists, and community members who will be motivated to collaboratively work towards addressing the needs of our rapidly aging populations," said lead author Jennie Gubner, PhD, ethnomusicologist at the University of Arizona and Atlantic Fellow at the Global Brain Health Institute. "Whether studying classical guitar, nursing, anthropology, public health, or business and marketing, everyone has something to offer to conversations about brain health and aging."

For patients undergoing surgery, smoking is linked with a higher risk of experiencing complications following their procedure, and quitting smoking before surgery may help reduce this risk. A new BJS (formerly British Journal of Surgery) study examined whether a smoking cessation intervention before surgery is economically worthwhile when funded by the National Health System (NHS) in Spain.

The intervention was a combination of medical counselling and use of a smoking cessation drug 12 weeks before surgery, and the benefits were the costs avoided by averting postoperative complications if cessation was successful.

When investigators compared the net economic outcome (benefit minus cost of the intervention) and the return on investment for the intervention funded by the NHS versus the current situation without funding, they found that the benefit of funding the programme greatly outweighs the costs.

Smoking cessation increased by 21.7% with funding. The cost per averted smoker was €1,753 with a net benefit of €503. Given the annual cost of the intervention, the return on investment was 28.7%, equivalent to €1.29 per €1 of investment.

"There is no published study, as far as we can find, about the efficiency of health programmes or policies aimed at smoking cessation prior to planned surgery with hospitalization. Thus, this work is unique," said senior author Javier Rejas, MD, PhD, of Pfizer SLU, in Spain.

A recent analysis of published studies examined the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among nurses and identified factors associated with work-related PTSD among nurses. The findings are published in the Journal of Clinical Nursing.

For the analysis, investigators identified 24 relevant studies. The researchers found that PTSD is a world-wide issue affecting nurses and that the reported prevalence of PTSD in nurses varied greatly, likely due to different methods of measuring PTSD or its symptoms.

Factors associated with PTSD related to the workplace (such as exposure and organization support), relationships at work and home, the witnessing of suffering, and coping behaviors, among others.

"Through this article, we want to bring attention to the phenomenon of PTSD within the nursing profession. We hope this article brings greater awareness and insight into what nurses might be experiencing," said corresponding author Michelle Schuster, MSN, RN, CPHON, of Boston Children's Hospital. "A better understanding of the factors influencing PTSD can provide insight into ways to potentially mitigate the harmful impact of PTSD in order to promote nurse wellbeing."

Scientists in Australia and Europe have taken an important step towards removing 'hot' electrons from the data chips that are a driving force in global telecommunications.

Researchers from the University of Sydney Nano Institute and Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light say that chips using light and sound, rather than electricity, will be important for the development of future tech, such as high-speed internet as well as radar and sensor technology. This will require the low-heat, fast transmission of information.

"As demand for high bandwidth information systems increase, we want to get ahead of the curve to ensure we can invent devices that don't overheat, have low energy costs and reduce the emission of greenhouse gases," said Dr Moritz Merklein from the Eggleton Research Group in the School of Physics and Sydney Nano.

The idea is to use sound waves, known as phonons, to store and transfer information that chips receive from fibre-optic cables. This allows the chips to operate without needing electrons, which produce heat. The team was the first in the world to successfully manage this process on chip.

However, information transferred from fibre-optic cables onto chips in the form of sound waves decays in nanoseconds, which is not long enough to do anything useful.

"What we have done is use carefully timed synchronised pulses of light to reinforce the sound waves on-chip," said Dr Birgit Stiller, who has moved from the University of Sydney to lead an independent research group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Germany.

"We have shown for the first time that refreshing these phonons is possible and that information can therefore be stored and processed for a much longer time," she said.

The scientists carefully timed pulses of light to extend the lifetime of the information stored in sound waves on the chip by 300 percent, from 10 nanoseconds to 40 nanoseconds.

The research, published in the journal Optica, was done in collaboration with the Laser Physics Centre at the Australian National University and the Centre for Nano Optics at the University of Southern Denmark.

"We plan to use this method to extend how long the information remains on-chip," said Dr Merklein, also from the Institute of Photonics and Optical Science at the University of Sydney.

Dr Stiller said: "Acoustic waves on chips are a promising way to store and transfer information.

"So far, such storage was fundamentally limited by the lifetime of the sound waves. Refreshing the acoustic waves allows us to overcome this constraint."

Associate Professor Christian Wolff, a project collaborator from the University of Southern Denmark, said: "Theoretically, this concept can be extended to the microsecond regime."

This proof-of-principle demonstration opens many possibilities for optical signal processing, fine filtering, high-precision sensing and telecommunications.

TAMPA, Fla. (May 4, 2020) -- Necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), a rare inflammatory bowel disease, primarily affects premature infants and is a leading cause of death in the smallest and sickest of these patients. The exact cause remains unclear, and there is no effective treatment. No test can definitively diagnose the devastating condition early, so infants with suspected NEC are carefully monitored and administered supportive care, such as IV fluids and nutrition, and antibiotics to fight infection caused by bacteria invading the gut wall. Surgery must be done to excise damaged intestinal tissue if the condition worsens.

A new preclinical study by researchers at the University of South Florida Health (USF Health) Morsani College of Medicine and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine offers promise of a specific treatment for NEC, one of the most challenging diseases confronting neonatologists and pediatric surgeons. The team found that inhibiting the inflammatory and blood-clotting molecule thrombin with targeted nanotherapy can protect against NEC-like injury in newborn mice.

Their findings were reported May 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Our data identified the inflammatory molecule thrombin, which plays a critical role in platelet-activated blood clotting, as a potential new therapeutic target for NEC," said coauthor Samuel Wickline, MD, professor of cardiovascular sciences at Morsani College of Medicine and director of the USF Health Heart Institute. "We showed that anti-thrombin nanoparticles can find, capture and inactivate all the active thrombin in the gut, thereby preventing or reducing the small blood vessel damage and clotting that accelerates NEC."

The PNAS paper's senior author is Akhil Maheshwari, MD, professor of pediatrics and director of neonatology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Before joining Johns Hopkins Medicine (Baltimore) in 2018, Dr. Maheshwari's group at USF Health was the first to demonstrate that platelet activation is an early, critical event in causing NEC, and therapeutic measures to block these platelets might be a new way to prevent or reduce intestinal injury in NEC.

The nanotherapy platform created by Dr. Wickline and USF Health biomedical engineer Hua Pan, PhD, delivers high drug concentrations that specifically inhibit thrombin from forming blood clots on the intestinal blood vessel wall without suppressing the (clotting) activity needed to prevent bleeding elsewhere in the body. This localized treatment is particularly important for premature infants, Dr. Wickline said, because the underdeveloped blood vessels in their brains and other vital organs are still fragile and susceptible to rupture and bleeding.

For this study the researchers used a model they created -- infant mice, or pups, induced to develop digestive tract damage resembling human NEC, including the thrombocytopenia commonly experienced by premature infants with NEC. Thrombocytopenia is characterized by low counts of blood cell fragments known as platelets, or thrombocytes, which normally stop bleeding from a cut or wound by clumping together to plug breaks injured blood vessels.

The molecule thrombin plays a key role in the bowel inflammation driven by overactive platelets. While investigating role of platelet depletion in NEC-related thrombocytopenia, the USF-Johns Hopkins researchers were surprised to find that thrombin mediates platelet-activated blood clotting early in the pathology of NEC-like injury - before bacteria leaks from inside the gut to circulating blood or other organs. This clotting clogs small blood vessels and restricts blood flow to the inflamed bowel. Eventually, the lining of the damaged intestinal wall can begin to die off.

The investigative therapy essentially works "like a thrombin sponge" that is exponentially more potent than current agents used to inhibit clotting, Dr. Wickline explained. "It literally puts trillions of nanoparticles at that damaged (intestinal wall) site to sponge up all the overactive thrombin, which tones down the clotting and inflammation processes promoted by thrombin."

"We are so excited about finding this new way to attenuate intestinal injury in NEC," Dr. Maheshwari said.

The same approach has also been shown in preclinical studies to inhibit the growth of atherosclerotic plaques and certain kidney injuries without causing systemic bleeding problems. Dr. Wickline added. "The nanoparticles can be tailored to other inflammatory diseases highly dependent on thrombin for their progression."

The study authors conclude that their experimental targeted treatment for NEC merits further evaluation in clinical trials.

Scientists have published highly-detailed images of lab-grown neurons using Extreme Ultraviolet radiation that could aid the analysis of neurodegenerative diseases.

The international study, led by the University of Southampton's Dr Bill Brocklesby and Professor Jeremy Frey, used coherent Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) light from an ultrafast laser to create images of the samples by collecting scattered light, without the need for a lens.

The technique produced extraordinary detail compared to traditional light microscope images, raising the possibility of potential applications in medicine including the study of Alzheimer's disease.

Researchers have published their findings in Science Advances.

The team performed the work at Southampton and at the Artemis facility in the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell. The small-scale demonstration reveals that extra detail can be sampled without large, expensive facilities such as synchrotrons and free electron lasers.

Dr Bill Brocklesby, of the Zepler Institute for Photonics and Nanoelectronics, says: "The ability to take detailed images of delicate biological structures like neurons without causing damage is very exciting, and to do it in the lab without using synchrotrons or other national facilities is a real innovation.

"Our way of imaging fills an important niche between imaging with light, which doesn't provide the fine details we see, and things like electron microscopy, which require cryogenic cooling and careful sample preparation."

The collaborative research combined Southampton expertise with Dr Richard Chapman and his team at the Central Laser Facility, and research partners from Germany and Italy.

The EUV imaging technique processes multiple scatter patterns from a sample using a computer algorithm. The project compared EUV images of lab-grown neurons originating from mice with traditional light microscope images, revealing its much finer details. Unlike hard x-ray microscopy, no damage was observed of the delicate neuron structure.

Professor Jeremy Frey, Head of Computational Systems Chemistry, says: "It has been a long and sustained effort but highly rewarding. In April 2003, we started a journey with the award of an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Basic Technology grant for New Technology for nanoscale X-ray sources: Towards single isolated molecule scattering.

"Some 17 years later, almost to the day, our paper in Science Advances demonstrates that the effort was well worth the hard work of our interdisciplinary team, obtaining the first ultra-high resolution images of a real biological sample using coherent soft-x-ray microscopy (ptyography). We are looking forward to applying our microscope to many biological, chemical and material problems.

"We continue to pursue even higher resolution with the ultimate aim of singe molecule imaging, a goal that now seems very much in view."

EUV microscopy provides many advantages over optical, hard x-ray or electron-based techniques, however traditional EUV sources and optics have until now required large associated scale and cost.

This new approach has focused on nonlinear optical techniques and, in particular, from high harmonic generation (HHG) using intense femtosecond lasers. Following these results, the Artemis team in Oxford is working towards being able to offer regular access to this technique in the future.

The combination of tomographic imaging techniques with these latest advances in laser technologies and coherent EUV sources also has the potential for high-resolution biological imaging in 3D.

BUFFALO, N.Y. - Many states have policies that attempt to help formerly incarcerated people find work by limiting an employer's ability to access or use criminal records as part of the hiring process.

But there is little evidence that these restrictions are helping non-resident fathers provide financial support to their children, according to Allison Dwyer Emory, a University at Buffalo sociologist and co-author of a new study by an interdisciplinary team of researchers from UB, Rutgers University, Cornell University and Boston University.

"We find fathers with a history of incarceration provide less support to their children and accrue greater arrears," says Dwyer Emory. "Further, in states with more limited access to records, fathers who have never been incarcerated provide less formal support and accrue more arrears, though they seem to compensate with more informal support, possibly due to racial discrimination against black men in the hiring process."

The findings were published in The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, which provides open access to the study.

States that limit access to online criminal record databases may reduce the costs of incarceration for fathers, but at the same time, they may be creating opportunities for a different kind of discrimination if employers, in the absence of information, default to racial stereotypes.

"It's difficult to separate discrimination on the basis of a criminal record from discrimination on the basis of race, and policies that address one without the other may not be able to fully achieve their ends," says Dwyer Emory, an expert on family demography, criminology and social policy.

"Fathers work hard to provide for their kids. When discriminatory labor markets make it difficult for them to pay formal child support, they provide informal cash support to their kids instead -- even as they get in debt for unpaid formal support.

"We have to be careful to ensure that policies support fathers' ability to be there for their kids.

Policy context is critical, according to Dwyer Emory.

"We want to know if these policies are helping fathers to be better parents or making it harder for them to be better parents," she says. "These policies don't seem to be associated with fathers who have a history of incarceration paying more support, but they do seem to be associated with fathers, particularly African American fathers, who have never been incarcerated, providing less formal child support."

The researchers used data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study, a sample of predominantly unmarried parents who had a child in a large U.S. city in the 1990s followed over time.

The innovative research also includes state information from every year of the dataset, including which policies were in place for specific states at specific times, while also breaking out both formal and informal support that fathers provide for their child.

Formal child support is a court order that specifies an amount owed each month to a custodial parent. But some couples have informal arrangements, made outside of the courts, where fathers contribute when they have the money either instead of or in addition to formal support.

The researchers also included arrears in their study, which is the debt fathers build up when they don't pay formal child support in full.

"Arrears are particularly important when thinking about fathers with a history of incarceration, because in some states arrears can continue to accrue while a father is incarcerated," says Dwyer Emory. "These fathers start out behind in their payments immediately upon release, which can cause a cycle where high enough arrears puts fathers at greater risk of being incarcerated in the future."

The results, says Dwyer Emory, suggest a cautionary approach.

"These policies are ideally designed to help fathers provide for themselves and their families, but we have to ask and study if they might actually be getting in the way, especially for those likely to encounter discrimination in the labor market. We may instead have to consider different policy approaches that address racial discrimination in hiring directly, removing barriers faced by fathers with criminal records like licensing restrictions, or change the incentives employers have to hire or avoid people with records," she says. "We worry that this could contribute intergenerational cycles of disadvantage and discrimination."

Incarceration and its consequences after prison affect millions of families in the United States, according to Dwyer Emory, who worked with Lenna Nepomnyaschy, an associate professor, and Alexandra Haralampoudis, a PhD candidate, at the Rutgers School of Social Work; Maureen R. Waller, an associate professor at Cornell University; and Daniel P. Miller, an associate professor at the Boston University School of Social Work.

The authors stress the need for additional research if we're to better understand the mechanisms through which these associations operate to determine how policies could better support fathers' ability to provide for their children.

Microscopically small cages can be produced at TU Wien (Vienna). Their grid openings are only a few micrometers in size, making them ideal for holding cells and allowing living tissue to grow in a very specific shape. This new field of research is called "Biofabrication".

In a collaboration with Stanford University, nerve cells have now been introduced into spherical cage structures using acoustic bioprinting technology, so that multicellular nerve tissue can develop there. It is even possible to create nerve connections between the different cages. To control the nerve cells, sound waves were used as acoustic tweezers.

Football Shaped Cages

"If you present living cells with a certain framework, you can strongly influence their behavior," explains Prof. Aleksandr Ovsianikov, head of the 3D-Printing and Biofabrication research group at the Institute for Materials Science and Materials Technology at TU Wien. "3D printing enables the high-precision production of scaffolding structures, which can then be colonized with cells to study how living tissue grows and how it reacts".

In order to grow large numbers of nerve cells in a small space, the research team decided to use so-called "buckyballs" - geometric shapes made of pentagons and hexagons that resemble a microscopic football.

"The openings of the buckyballs are large enough to allow cells to migrate into the cage, but when the cells coalesce, they can no longer leave the cage," explains Dr. Wolfgang Steiger, who worked on high-precision 3D printing for biofabrication applications as part of his dissertation.

The tiny buckyball cages were manufactured using a process known as two-photon polymerization: a focused laser beam is used to start a chemical process at specific points in a liquid, which causes the material to harden at precisely these points. By steering the focal point of the laser beam through the liquid in a well-controlled way, three-dimensional objects can be produced with extremely high precision.

Acoustic Waves as Tweezers

Not only creating the buckyballs, but also assembling cells into these balls through microscale openings is very challenging. An innovative 3-D acoustic bioprinting technology developed at the Stanford School of Medicine, successfully addressed this challenge. Prof. Utkan Demirci co-directs the Canary Center at Stanford for Early Cancer Detection and his research group, i.e., the Biosensing and Acoustic MEMS in Medicine (BAMM Lab) uses acoustic waves in biomedical applications from sensing cancer biomarkers to bioprinting 3-D tissue models to sensing.

"We generate acoustic oscillations in the solution in which the cells are located. The cells follow the sounds waves like rats follow the Pied Piper of Hamelin as in the legend In the process, nodes of oscillation form at certain points - similar to a vibrating string", says Prof. Demirci. At these nodal points, the liquid is comparatively static. If cells are located at these points, they remain there; everywhere else they are moved away by the acoustic wave. The cells therefore move to the spots where they are not whirled around - and that is where the buckyballs were placed. The sound wave can thus be used in a very well-controlled way, almost like tweezers, to direct the cells to the desired location.

"The acoustic waves enabled us to fill the scaffold structures much more densely and efficiently than would have been possible with conventional methods of cell colonization," reports Tanchen Ren, PhD, from Prof. Demirci's research group.

Once the buckyballs had been successfully colonized with nerve cells in this way, they formed connections with neurons of neighboring buckyballs. "We see enormous potential here for using 3D printing to create and study neural networks in a targeted manner," says Aleksandr Ovsianikov. "In this way, important biological questions can be investigated to which one would otherwise have no direct experimental access."

Researchers from Kazan Federal University and the Institute of Cytology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Saint-Petersburg) have detailed novel non-trivial intramolecular interactions for the small heat shock protein (sHSP) from Acholeplasma laidlawii, a phytopathogen of rice, seed and pea seed.

These proteins (sHSPs) are present in most of the living cells and are responsible for their survival under stress conditions and, therefore, serve as objects of interest for new infection treatment strategies.

Protection against diseases is crucial for the preservation and growth of crop yields. Plant diseases caused by mycoplasmas, cell-wall free pathogenic bacteria, lead to crop damage and represent a great challenge in agriculture. To date, more than 700 diseases caused by mycoplasmas have been described. One of the common and stress-resistant mycoplasmas is Acholeplasma laidlawii, a phytopathogen affecting rice, seed and pea seed.

Acholeplasma is sensitive to a comparatively narrow spectrum of antimicrobials, such as tetracycline and gentamicin. However, they are only capable of stifling the bacteria's growth, not eliminate it. As soon as the influence of an antibiotic stops, bacterial growth can resume. Acholeplasma is also resistant to low temperatures and can infect nutrient media powders for bacteria and eukaryotic cell cultures. Thus, the suppression of infections caused by Acholeplasma laidlawii and phytoplasmas poses a serious problem for research. Therefore, uncovering the molecular mechanisms of mycoplasmas' survival under stress conditions could help discover novel strategies for the ongoing fight against them.

One of the key elements of the chaperone protective network in A. laidlawii and phytoplasma cells, as it seems to the researchers, is the so-called small heat shock protein. Under stress conditions, its fraction can reach up to 7% of the total protein in A. laidlawii cells.

The mechanism of how heat shock proteins work is clearly visible when the external temperature rises above the optimum. After being heated, some proteins unfold, lose structure, and form aggregates, and when temperature lowers, they can fold back, but incorrectly, which results in their abnormal work and toxicity for the cell. HSPs play the role of intracellular assistants, which save the ability to restore the structure of other proteins after a stress and, if this fails, send the "broken" protein for recycling. Small heat shock proteins (sHSPs) are "paramedic" proteins in multi-chaperone networks and are first to respond to stress. Their disruption makes bacteria vulnerable.

In this paper, the team described roles of various functional parts of sHSP from A. laidlawii in its chaperone activity. In particular, it was shown that several parts of the protein are responsible for the formation of various supramolecular structures via intramolecular interactions. This mechanism is different from the other ones of known sHSPs and will help to understand the basic principles of protecting mycoplasmas from stress, as well as potentially find out new ways to block it in the future. Moreover, some data obtained on modified sHSP showed its increased ability to prevent the heat-induced denaturation of other proteins, for example, insulin, and thus can be used as a tool for protection of various proteins in healthcare, biotechnology, and life sciences.