Brain

Key players in radical Islamic and extreme right-wing groups make use of similar strategies to mobilize support on social media. The joint research project "X-Sonar" arrived at this finding. The Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (Federal Ministry of Education and Research, BMBF) funded X-Sonar's work as part of their funding line on civil security research. Over the past three years, X-Sonar researchers investigated the ways in which extremist groups build networks of support both online and offline. It is through these groups that they engage people and mobilize support for their aims. The researchers evaluated both online content and the biographies of convicted individuals who were active in extremist spheres in order to pave the way for early intervention and prevention in the future.

The project's closing conference brought together academic researchers, security authorities, justice officials and experts in civil prevention practices, who convened in Bielefeld on Thursday, 30 January, to attend X-Sonar's closing conference.

Conference participants discussed the findings of the project at Bielefeld University's Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung (Center for Interdisciplinary Research, ZiF). "Both radical Islamic and extreme right-wing groups use some of the same strategies online to attract attention and normalize extremist discourse," says Professor Dr. Andreas Zick, of the Institut für Konflikt- und Gewaltforschung (Institue for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence, IKG) at Bielefeld University. "By using social media campaigns that are accessible to non-extremist individuals and groups, extremists succeed in polarizing and emotionalizing these kinds of ideologies," as Zick explains. Prof. Zick, a social psychologist, heads X-Sonar together with Dr. Kerstin Eppert, a sociologist who is also a member of the IKG.

"Extremist groups make very strategic use of social media," says Dr. Eppert. "That said, spreading messages that glorify violence and promote racism is only part of the strategy. An equally important component includes making resources accessible in both covert and known networks of support," explains Eppert. "By this, we are referring to an open invitation to join the movement - an invitation that is tailored to the means and abilities of each and every individual." As Prof. Zick explains, radical Islamic and extreme right-wing movements are characterized by their 'division of labor.' "Extremist networks do not operate solely as engines of radicalization. They also require support, whether in disseminating ideology or acquiring funds."

How Terrorists Behave in Online Networks

Researchers from seven different sites presented their findings at the conference. Kristin Weber, of the Deutsche Hochschule der Polizei (German Police University), for instance, discussed how German jihadis to Syria become radicalized, and which means of communication and methods of networking were used in doing so. Nils Böckler, of the Institut Psychologie und Bedrohungsmanagement (Psychology and Threat Management Institute), investigated different patterns of behavior exhibited by terrorists in online social networks. "Before an attack, terrorists communicate differently than other radicalized individuals who are not planning to commit violence," says Böckler.

According to Böckler, the Internet is a space in which the processes of escalation to violence can be detected early on. This is why X-Sonar was interested in developing technological methods for detecting extremist mobilization online in order to assist researchers as well as investigators in their work. "With methods like these, authorities and researchers alike can gain insight into whether a situation threatens to escalate - by monitoring certain Twitter hashtags or relevant Facebook pages, for instance," explains Alexander Gluba, who works on X-Sonar together with the Landeskriminalamt Niedersachsen (Criminal Police Office of the Federal State of Lower Saxony). Gluba cites the example of the Chemnitz protests of August 2018, during which right-wing extremists attacked the local population, targeting primarily immigrants. "We now know that these attacks were coordinated by right-wing extremists in online chats."

Developing New Methods of Analysis

"Because X-Sonar brought together project partners from tech and the social sciences, we were able to develop new methods of analysis, such as combining the analysis of online data with information from court records," says Kerstin Eppert. This helps to shed light, for instance, on how extremist support networks are embedded in society.

During the conference, the joint project X-Sonar presented its research on how radical Islamic networks operate, in addition to other topics. "We have new findings on the structures and resources of such networks," says Eppert. "We were able to demonstrate, for example, that the radical Salafist scene in Germany is currently undergoing a process of reorganization. In social networks online, there is a web of portals and organizations whose proceeds provide financial support to the Salafist scene."

It is also with these networks that individuals who returned from territory held by the Islamic State (IS) and are now serving time in German prisons are kept active in the Salafist scene. "These online networks document the on-going legal proceedings of IS-returnees, which helps maintain the image of Germany as the enemy state." At the same time, the names and contact information of convicted IS-returnees are also published online - ostensibly out of compassion - to encourage people to write letters that will provide emotional support to convicts in prison. "This exerts a massive amount of pressure on individuals who might potentially leave the scene," as Eppert explains.

When corporate partners in the Princeton Catalysis Initiative sat down two years ago with David MacMillan, they presented him with a biological challenge at the heart of potential cancer medicines and other therapeutics: which proteins on a cell's surface touch each other?

What they wanted was analogous to a searchlight blazing into a dark cave -- something to shine a metaphorical light on a protein and its closest neighbors on the cell membrane. Large, complex molecules, proteins are the stuff of life, the very fulcrum on which everything about us turns -- the way we think, the way we grow, the diseases we get. Proteins are able to determine this by sending messages to their neighbors. But while scientists could previously tell who was inside the cave, they could not tell who was standing next to whom, and thus were lacking important knowledge about these essential protein-to-protein communications.

The Department of Chemistry's MacMillan Group announced in the current issue of Science that they have developed that searchlight.

The breakthrough technology, named μMap by the team of Princeton researchers and Merck scientists, uses a photocatalyst -- a molecule that, when activated by light, spurs a chemical reaction -- to identify spatial relationships on cell surfaces. The catalyst generates a marker that tags proteins and their molecular neighbors, which in turn enables the precise mapping of their micro-environment.

The technology could impact proteomics, genomics and neuroscience, to name a few of the more obvious fields. But the applications for fundamental biology are so wide-ranging that MacMillan, who is Princeton's James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry, is hungry to get the technology "into everyone's hands" to see what scientists in other fields can come up with.

"For the technologies we have right now, the problem is not whether you can tag things," he said. "The problem is that you can tag thousands of things and so you can't tell what's way over there and what's right next door. That turns out to be really, really important because molecules or proteins or enzymes that signal each other are usually right next door to each other. Well, the state-of-the-art doesn't tell you what's close."

So they came up with a radical new approach.

"We did some critical experiments and immediately we could show that we were labeling things within a really short distance," MacMillan said. "We now know exactly what's in the neighborhood. And that's never been done before. For biology, it's going to be like turning on the light switch and suddenly seeing everything."

Merck Exploratory Science Center (MESC) scientists Rob Oslund and Olugbeminiyi Fadeyi, paper co-authors who are based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said the technology could inspire vast new developments in biology. "Given the important role of understanding protein interactions within cellular micro-environments," Oslund said, "this technology has the potential to be a game-changing tool for both academic and industry life science labs all over the world."

The μMap, pronounced micro-map, identifies neighbors within a radius of 1 to 10 nanometers around a particular protein. (For reference, a human hair is about 100,000 nanometers across.) Resolution on this level identifies the 10 or 15 closest molecules.

Jacob Geri, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Merck Center for Catalysis at Princeton University and a co-first-author on the Science paper with graduate student James Oakley and MESC scientist Tamara Reyes-Robles, said μMap does this by using blue light to power a catalytic reaction.

Here's how it works: The catalyst -- in this case, an organic metal compound -- is selectively attached to any one of some 40,000 proteins on a cell's surface, where it acts as a kind of antenna. Blue light, which has a very high photonic energy, serves as the trigger. When shone on the cell, this blue light is picked up by the antenna, which converts its photonic energy into chemical energy. That latent energy doesn't cool; it doesn't diffuse; it doesn't wander aimlessly along the cell membrane painting everything it comes across. It just sits.

Based on a paper published some 40 years ago, MacMillan's group came up with the idea of employing the use of an organic molecule called a diazirine that is particularly receptive to this latent energy. When a diazirine moves very close to the catalyst -- within 0.1 nanometers -- the chemical energy transfers to the diazirine. The diazirine in turn reacts so violently that it releases a byproduct and becomes what's referred to as a carbene, an "angry" species that attaches itself to neighboring proteins.

"The catalyst transfers so much energy that the molecule rips itself apart to expose an incredibly unstable carbon atom, which will then just stick to anything it can," explained Geri.

The catalyst can perform this chemical reaction many times, so the process repeats itself for all localized molecules, proteins and enzymes. Because carbenes are so short-lived -- just a couple of nanoseconds -- their reaction provides for a vivid, real-time snapshot of all contiguous molecules. Subsequently, researchers can quilt together a precise map of the micro-environment -- the very technology scientists were looking for.

"A lot of the mechanism of disease takes place through how these cells talk to each other, and they can only talk if they're touching," said Geri. "That's why the surface of the cell is so important. If they touch, they can communicate."

He added: "We can now figure out what's making that communication happen or what's making that communication change. It's really been an amazing experience, working on this."

MacMillan's group chose two categories of human cells to investigate. One was a class of proteins that had known interactions, selected as a kind of control group to prove that their interactions could be captured by μMap. The second group was "more interesting," said Geri. It centered on proteins called PD-L1 and PD-1, which are associated with the body's immune system and its response to cancer cells.

Normally, sick cells like cancer cells would present as molecular interlopers that need to be cleared by the immune system. But cancer cells are deceptive, said MacMillan. They send out a "don't kill me" signal through a cloaking mechanism involving the PD-L1 and PD-1 axis. Since cancer therapies are successful partly based on their capacity to block that signal, scientists want to know more about how it is transmitted. Mapping the precise neighborhood is an essential early step. When researchers put the μMap catalyst on PD-L1 and PD-1, the molecules in their micro-environment are tagged. Protein-protein interactions that had previously been hypothesized could now be directly observed. And several correlations were detected that had never been conceived of.

"Now, we don't do the cancer biology," said MacMillan. "But we've invented this tool that can give you a lot of information about these cancer cells. We think that by using this information, you can start to target those proteins as a way to also remove interfering signals. And if you can remove those signals, you make your immune system better at going after these cancer cells."

Soon after MacMillan arrived at Princeton, he began driving research in harnessing blue LED light to perform previously impossible feats of chemistry. Merck became involved in 2006, with a seed donation toward MacMillan's research. The company has since donated additional monies, and in 2019 they announced a 10-year funding commitment towards the Princeton Catalysis Initiative, which fosters interdisciplinary collaborations to accelerate the discovery of new research areas.

"Our collaboration created a novel cellular chemistry approach leveraging photoredox catalysis to activate diazirines, an important class of organic molecules, in a temporal-controlled manner," said Merck's Fadeyi. "Because of the routine use of diazirines within chemical biology and biology, this method will be in high demand not only for protein labeling, but for identifying the binding targets of other biomolecules to elucidate their functional roles."

He added: "The collaboration was successful due to the close interactions between Merck scientists and Dave's lab."

MacMillan likewise lauded the discovery as proof of the value of collaboration across academic and industry lines, like those envisioned when the Princeton Catalysis Initiative first came into being in 2018.

"As chemists, we don't know any good questions in biology -- zero," he said. "So, you're taking these people who know everything about biology, and they have this problem that they're trying to solve. And it's ultimately a great problem for a chemistry group. At the same time, it's not a problem that a chemistry group would ever think about because they don't know biology. You have these two different areas and you put them together and you start to realize there all these great things you can do.

"This is what I love about the social science of science," he added. "It is absolutely a beautiful example of how it took a village to solve a problem."

TUCSON, Ariz. – Multiple past studies have reported that, compared to whites, Native Americans have relatively high cigarette use, and this has contributed to speculation that Native Americans might be inherently prone to such use.

A new study at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson, however, found that after adjusting for differences in the income and education levels of the two groups, whites were more likely than Native Americans to use cigarettes daily, to consume larger numbers of cigarettes per month and to be nicotine dependent.

In these adjusted comparisons, the estimated percentage of daily cigarette users among whites was 15.3%, compared to 13.0% for Native Americans; the percentage of individuals consuming more than 300 cigarettes in the past month was 13.6% for whites, compared to 9.9% for Native Americans; and nicotine dependence was 10.3% for whites, compared to 7.1% for Native Americans.

The study, conducted by the Native American Research and Training Center (NARTC) in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, was published today in Drug and Alcohol Dependence (DAD). NARTC researchers analyzed data from a survey of more than 4,000 Native Americans and 160,000 whites from 2013 through 2017. Called the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the survey was administered by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

The research team included lead author James K. Cunningham, PhD, associate professor, Department of Family and Community Medicine and NARTC member; Teshia Arambula Solomon, PhD, associate professor, Department of Family and Community Medicine and NARTC member; and Jamie Ritchey, PhD, MPH, director, Tribal Epidemiology Center, Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, Inc.

Previous research, both in the United States and throughout the world, has shown that lower income and educational attainment are among the factors most strongly associated with cigarette use. Native Americans have the highest poverty rate of any major U.S. ethnic group, but their cigarette use levels typically have been reported without adjusting for income and education. This can leave the mistaken impression that being Native American itself means higher use.

“Tobacco use and tobacco-related disease and deaths are intertwined with the poverty facing many Native Americans,” Dr. Solomon said. “A critical need exists to increase and improve Native American tobacco prevention and treatment programs, while also addressing poverty.”

“Despite lower cigarette use when income and education are considered, Native Americans are dying from cigarettes at a much higher rate than whites,” Dr. Ritchey said.

The study noted that the smoking-attributable death rate for Native Americans has been estimated at 414 per 100,000, substantially higher than that for whites – 264 per 100,000.

“Beliefs such as Native Americans being distinctly prone to cigarette use are widespread but rarely tested,” Dr. Cunningham said. In 2016, the study’s research group debunked the “Native American elevated alcohol use” belief when they found that alcohol use among Native Americans was comparable to or less than that of whites.

“The consequences of substance misuse are too serious to allow for myths and misinformation,” Dr. Cunningham said.

Journal

Drug and Alcohol Dependence

DOI

10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2020.107836

While quantum physics is usually concerned with the basic building blocks of light and matter, for some time scientists have now been trying to investigate the quantum properties of larger objects, thereby probing the boundary between the quantum world and everyday life. For this purpose, particles are slowed down with the help of electromagnetic waves and the motional energy is drastically reduced. Therefore, one also speaks of "motional cooling". Quantum properties occur when particles are cooled to their fundamental quantum ground state, that is to the lowest possible energy level. While so far the only way to cool particles to the ground state has been to make them interact with photons trapped in an electromagnetic resonator, theoretical physicists led by Carlos Gonzalez-Ballestero and Oriol Romero-Isart from the Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Innsbruck and the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in collaboration with experimentalist Jan Gieseler from Harvard University and ICFO in Barcelona now propose to make the motion of magnetic particles interact with the internal acoustic waves that are confined inside every particle.

Sound waves in micro-magnets

In analogy to photons - the quanta of light - vibrations in a solid body can be described as so-called phonons. These small sound wave packets propagate through the crystal lattice of the solid. "The phonons are very isolated and interact with the movement of the particle motion only through magnetic waves," explains Carlos Gonzalez-Ballestero. "In our work we now show that this interaction can be controlled by a magnetic field." This allows to realize quantum experiments without photons, and therefore even with light-absorbing particles. "Conversely, we also show that the strong interaction between motion and phonons provides a path to probe and manipulate the elusive and exotic dynamics of acoustic and magnetic waves in very small particles," adds Oriol Romero-Isart. The new method also opens up new possibilities for quantum information processing, for example, by using phonons as a quantum memory.

WASHINGTON, DC, March 5, 2020--At a time when there's been a sharp uptick in partisan critiques of the credibility of the news media and growing concern among educators about student media literacy, a new study finds a strong connection between high school social studies teachers' political ideology and how credible they find various mainstream news outlets. The finding, the study authors say, debunks any notion that social studies teachers are "above the fray" in how they present and discuss the credibility of news sources in their classrooms.

The study was published today in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.

"We find that social studies teachers are just as likely to be influenced by the current controversies and debates about news media credibility as the general public," said study coauthor Christopher H. Clark, an assistant professor at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma. "Social studies teachers are the educators most likely to bring the news into their classrooms on a regular basis, so understanding their choices and perceptions of news media is particularly important."

The study, conducted by Clark and University of Georgia researchers Mardi Schmeichel and H. James Garrett, drew from a survey of 1,065 high school social studies teachers from across six states--Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, and Texas. The researchers identified five additional states to include in their survey but were not able to obtain teacher contact information from those states' education departments.

The study is the first to document the relationship between the ideology and media preferences of social studies teachers, despite the importance of linking to current events in social studies classrooms and using news media to help students understand political and social issues.

Teachers identifying as "very conservative" rated Fox News as the most credible news source from a set of 12 mainstream news sources, with a 2.03 credibility rating on a 0-to-3 scale. The only other news sources that these teachers gave an above-average credibility rating were the BBC and the Wall Street Journal.

On the other end of the political spectrum, liberals at all points on the continuum rated Fox News as least credible. "Very liberal" teachers gave Fox News a 0.39 rating, the lowest average credibility rating of any resource among the results. MSNBC received the next lowest rating from the "very liberal" group, but still earned an above-average rating 1.61.

When the researchers compared teachers who self-identified broadly as conservative to those who self-identified broadly as liberal--looking beyond those in very conservative or very liberal categories--they found some commonality. Both groups rated the BBC and NPR/PBS among the top three most trusted news sources, although liberals rated both higher on the credibility scale.

"Overall, however, there's a great deal of divergence between liberal and conservative teachers," said Clark. "In particular, conservative social studies teachers found most news sources not credible, while liberal social studies teachers found most sources credible," said Clark. "That reflects what other research has found in the general population."

The three news outlets with the widest gaps in credibility between liberal and conservative teachers were Fox News, the New York Times, and CNN.

"It is noteworthy that these three outlets, in particular, have been frequently and consistently mentioned by President Trump in his comments regarding news media outlets and their relative trustworthiness," said Schmeichel, an associate professor at the University of Georgia.

Clark and his colleagues asked social studies teachers how they defined credibility. Teachers who used a static definition--credibility as the absence of bias or having "just the facts"--were more likely to demonstrate a strong relationship between their ideological viewpoint and their assessment of news outlet trustworthiness.

Teachers who relied on a dynamic definition--credibility as adherence to fact checking, in-depth research, and other journalistic principles and practices--had a weaker relationship between ideology and credibility ratings for most of the news sources.

"Viewing credibility as a dynamic--or process-driven--characteristic seems to reduce the influence of ideology in teachers' judgments," said Garrett, an associate professor at the University of Georgia. "This suggests that by reframing the definition of credibility we could broaden exposure to a variety of news sources and perspectives on current events in the classroom."

"Our findings add support to making news media literacy a curricular mandate in schools and in teacher certification," Clark said. "They also make clear that we should not treat news stories as just conveying a neutral truth. Rather, we should understand the processes journalists use to provide fair representations of the news to their viewers, and note when they fail to follow those processes."

Parts of tumor tissue, which is normally discarded in cancer surgery, bear information about the disease. So far, as studies at the University of Gothenburg show, this has been unexploited. This research forms the basis for a new experimental platform for cancer diagnostics, prognoses and testing cancer drugs.

The study published by the research group to date, in the journal Biomaterials, relates to breast cancer. Ongoing studies of colon, ovarian and other cancers also show positive results for the new technological platform and strategy.

In traditional cancer diagnostics, tumor cells in the extracted tissue are the targets of investigation. Depending on the form of cancer involved, more or less extensive molecular analyses and investigations of prognostic markers are performed.

For the patients with breast cancer in the current study, this was carried out routinely. The scientists then proceeded to apply the new technology, in cases where tumor tissue that had been removed was still available for them to analyze. Instead of looking at tumor cells, they studied the supporting structure (the "extracellular matrix", ECM). This is composed partly of protein fibers around the cells and determining the structure of the tissue, like a kind of scaffold for tumor cells.

Anders Stahlberg, Associate Professor of Molecular Medicine, is one of the two people primarily responsible for the study and platform.

"Normally," he says, "we investigate tumor cells and get rid of the rest. Here, we do the reverse. What we look at are the extracellular matrices, and early on we found major differences among tumors from different patients. These differences were discoverable only from analyses of the ECMs."

The scientists were able, for instance, to predict the risk of a recurrence of breast cancer, by studying the properties of the ECMs in various patients' tissues. This was done by allowing cancer cell lines to grow in the matrices and then analyze how the scaffold affects them.

Goran Landberg, Professor of Pathology, is the other driving force for the research.

"Our results have clear connections with clinical parameters, such as how aggressive a tumor is. We're now working on finding out which parts of the ECMs affected specific cancer-specific properties. The technology works, and we've been able to show that this is a superb experimental platform with major clinical potential," he says.

Besides diagnostics and prognoses for the course of a cancer disease, the scientists see drug testing as an important area for the new platform. A drug candidate can then be tested in several individuals' surgically removed tissue, to explore its potential efficacy in various patients with cancer.

The purpose of the model is to ascertain which patients will benefit from a treatment before it is commenced. Another advantage is that the use of animal testing can decrease.

A piece of research work conducted by the Spectroscopy Group of the UPV/EHU's Department of Physical Chemistry, and the Biofisika Institute provides the cover of the latest issue of the ACS Central Science journal, which is one of the three leading journals in all areas of Chemistry. This research group has managed to determine the structure of the sugars that form part of DNA, 2-deoxyriboside, with atomic-level resolution. What has been achieved here is "unprecedented resolution; we have managed to spatially position each of the atoms of this sugar", as described by the group's leader Emilio J. Cocinero.

Cocinero regards this outcome as the culmination of a piece of work that has taken them over ten years: "This outcome has been made possible thanks to the increase in the sensitivity of the microwave spectrometer that we have in our group, which we designed, built and adapted ourselves and which right now is among the 3 best devices of this type in the world."

One of the main hurdles they had to overcome was the huge variability and flexibility between the various forms or conformations that may be adopted by 2-deoxyriboside molecules. The atoms that form these sugar molecules can be organised by forming five-membered or six-membered rings. "In nature, biological forms display five-membered rings, but in the experiments when the sugar is completely isolated and removed from any solvent and without it interacting with the remaining elements that make up the DNA and determine its configuration, the most stable form of sugars that we were achieving were six-member rings," explained Cocinero.

To resolve this situation they had the collaboration of researchers from the Department of Chemistry at Oxford University who helped them to synthesise the four forms that 2-deoxyribosides may adopt, both in their biological forms and in those that do not appear in nature, and they blocked them, "by adding a methyl group to the sugars to prevent some forms from interconverting into others, and to be able to study each of them individually", specified the researcher.

That way, they were able to characterise in an isolated way the structure of each of them on an atomic scale, and afterwards with the help of researchers at the University of La Rioja they were able to analyse how the structure of these forms changes when they come into contact with the solvent, "which is more akin to the natural medium in which they are usually found. We saw the differences between some forms and others and characterised them".

This analysis also enabled them to hypothesise "why the form that is observed in nature is the one that is observed and not another one. As we saw, the five-membered ring form is more flexible and the conformation it adopts in the DNA chain encourages the bonding of the consecutive nucleotides", he said.

Now, armed with the instruments developed they are going to tackle "the study of larger molecules and try to build systems that are increasingly closer to actual biological forms to provide better responses. We are seeking the limit of technical instruments", concluded Emilio J. Cocinero.

The damaging impact of poverty on children and their families and the growing problem of exploitation are revealed in a new report by researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and University of Warwick.

In cases of neglect they found a cumulative risk of harm to a child when different parental and environmental risk factors are present in combination or over periods of time. For example, the complex ways in which the links between domestic abuse, substance misuse and poverty are often inter-dependent, so that addressing a single issue does not deal with the underlying causes or other issues present.

The triennial analysis of serious case reviews (SCR) also found an increase in the number involving adolescents, which produced new insights into the threats some of these young people, both those living at home and in care, were experiencing from various aspects of exploitation.

Criminal exploitation covers a range of activities that victimise the child, including moving drugs, violence, gangs, sexual exploitation, missing children, and trafficking. Some children were both victims and perpetrators of harm to other children and all needed support and safeguarding.

A SCR takes place after a child dies or is seriously injured and abuse or neglect is thought to be involved. It looks at lessons that can help prevent similar incidents from happening in the future. Commissioned by the Department for Education, this latest triennial analysis is based on 368 SCRs carried out in England from April 2014 to March 2017.

Of these 206 related to fatal cases, with 78 directly caused by the parents or carers of the child - equivalent to 26 cases per year which is consistent with previous analyses. A further 106 deaths related to but were not directly caused by maltreatment, including sudden unexpected deaths in infancy, suicides in adolescents, and deaths from accidents or medical causes where neglect was a contributory factor. Ten children were killed by people outside the family, and for 12 the cause was not clear or not related to maltreatment.

While the number of SCRs fluctuates year on year, the number of children who die as a direct consequence of maltreatment has remained relatively stable at around 28 a year. This is despite a steady year on year increase in child protection activity nationally.

During the time frame of this review, just 54 of the children who died or were seriously harmed were on a child protection plan (15%), suggesting that children with a child protection plan in place are generally well protected from the most severe harm. Complexity and cumulative harm were almost invariably features of families where children experienced neglect.

The analysis was led by Marian Brandon, professor of social work and director of the Centre for Research on Children and Families at UEA, and Peter Sidebotham, emeritus professor of child health at Warwick Medical School. It is the sixth consecutive national analysis of SCRs carried out for the government by the research team.

Prof Sidebotham said: "As we looked into the reviews of children affected by serious and fatal child maltreatment over these three years, we were struck by the complexity of the lives of these children and families, and the challenges - at times quite overwhelming - faced by the practitioners seeking to support them in such complexity."

Pressure points were found at the boundaries into and out of the child protection system, and the need, in many cases, for ongoing support and monitoring of vulnerable children and families. The majority of children in SCRs were known to children's social care (55%), although most were not directly involved with the child protection system.

Infancy and adolescence represent the periods of greatest vulnerability to serious or fatal child maltreatment. The researchers say working with vulnerable adolescents requires openness and opportunities for young people to explore their concerns with practitioners without fear of criminalisation, for example, in relation harmful sexual behaviour.

Prof Brandon said: "Practitioners can feel unprepared for working with adolescents vulnerable to exploitation and need ongoing training and support. Likewise, even if practitioners feel confident and knowledgeable about technology use, they may still struggle to support a young person's usage in an ever-changing digital world and relevant, up-to-date training is essential."

She added: "Children in care or going through court processes have particular needs that require careful assessments, monitoring and support. Assessments should not only look at what has happened to the child in the past and what that implies for their needs now, but also look to the future and what help will be needed as the child grows."

A recurring theme among the reviews that identify good practice is the quality of relationships with families. A good relationship with families is the primary vehicle for protective practice when it is based on a sound grasp of the family context, circumstances, and roles and relationships as an effective way of managing the complexity of compound and cumulative risk over time.

"Effective protective practice requires an ability to contextualise the lives of vulnerable children, understand the experience and perspectives of their parents or carers and engage with them through meaningful interactions and relationships with the professionals that are involved in their lives," said Prof Sidebotham. "This includes hearing the voice and understanding the lived experience of the child."

In relation to effective multi-agency working, he added: "The language we use to talk about children's circumstances can both support and hinder effective safeguarding. Vague, stock phrases and jargon can minimise or obscure the reality of a child's life. Fragmentation of services, with different front-line providers within the same agency, can lead to silo-working within as well as between agencies."

The researchers conclude that demonstrating the impact of SCRs on practice or outcomes for children is challenging, and that a preoccupation with process, tick-box responses, and organisational change can all present barriers to effective learning and impact.

However, strengths in delivering impact included the positive elements that come from providing opportunities for reflection on practice and particularly from the story of the child at the centre of the review.

Most scorpions glow a blue-green color when illuminated by ultraviolet light or natural moonlight. Scientists aren't sure how this fluorescence benefits the creatures, but some have speculated that it acts as a sunscreen, or helps them find mates in the dark. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Natural Products have identified a new fluorescent compound from scorpion exoskeletons. The team says that the compound could protect these arachnids from parasites.

More than 60 years ago, scientists first recognized scorpions' propensity to glow under UV light. Until now, only two fluorescent compounds, β-carboline and 7-hydroxy-4-methylcoumarin, had been identified in scorpions' hard outer shell, or exoskeleton. Masahiro Miyashita and colleagues wondered if there might be other fluorescent molecules with different chemical properties that were missed in previous studies.

To find out, the researchers extracted compounds from molted exoskeletons of the scorpion Liocheles australasiae, using chemical conditions different from those used in prior experiments. They purified the compound showing the most intense fluorescence and identified its structure, which was a phthalate ester previously shown to have antifungal and anti-parasitic properties in other organisms. This finding suggests that the new molecule, which the researchers found in several additional scorpion species, could help guard against parasitic infections in these creatures. Compared with the two previously identified fluorescent compounds, the new molecule likely contributes more weakly to scorpion fluorescence, the scientists say.

It's no secret that babies generally smell pleasant to their mothers - and teenagers not so much. A team of researchers investigating how body odors affect the mother-child relationship found that a mom's olfactory sense may be capable of detecting her child's developmental stage. The research was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

The ability of a mother's nose to know when her child is at certain stages of life through its body odor could play an important role in signaling key changes in the mother-child relationship, according to the authors.

"This study reveals that children's body odors ... are an important factor affecting the mother-child relationship, and hints toward its importance for affection and caregiving," said Laura Schäfer, lead author of the study and a team member of Ilona Croy's lab at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany.

The researchers tested the olfactory accuracy of 164 German mothers by presenting them with body odor samples of their own and four unfamiliar, sex-matched children who varied in age, from infants to 18 years old. The samples consisted of cotton T-shirts and onesies that the children slept in for one night.

Overall, mothers classified the developmental status of the child with an accuracy of about 64 percent. Mothers generally scored higher when identifying what the researchers called prepubertal odors versus postpubertal odors. More pleasant odors were classified as prepubertal even when they came from older children, while higher intensity body odor samples were identified as coming from postpubertal children.

"This suggests that infantile body odors can mediate affectionate love towards the child in the crucial periods of bonding," Schäfer said, while postpubertal classifications "could be interpreted as a mechanism for detachment, when the child becomes more independent and separates itself from parental care."

Previous research done by Croy's lab used functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to see how maternal brains react to baby odors. That study found that neural responses to baby odors were similar to other MRI brain studies that tested for facial cuteness.

While the current paper did not explicitly compare body odor to other forms of sensory stimulation, it does add further evidence that olfactory stimuli are an important factor in the mother-child bond.

The team's ongoing investigation into the effects of body odor on the psychological relationship between mother and child could have long-term clinical implications. Schäfer said it could lead to the "development of methods such as neurofeedback with olfactory stimuli or olfactory training to promote the rewarding component of body odors."

In turn, those techniques could be used to treat conditions such as postpartum bonding disorders, she added, perhaps as part of an intervention that combines affective touch and olfactory stimulation.

While the research suggests that a child's body odor does convey developmental cues, how the human nose is actually capable of sniffing out that information remains a mystery. For instance, hormonal levels did not appear to be a factor in how a mother classified samples.

Schäfer said the study is limited in that not all the factors that influence body odor, such as food or culture, can be accounted for in the current design.

In the future, she said, "intraindividual changes should be tracked in a longitudinal study to find further evidence for these results, to map indicators of the transition to puberty, and to find out whether this is reflected in the maternal perception of body odor."

In addition to Croy and Schäfer, co-authors on the Frontiers in Psychology paper include Kerstin Weidner, also with the University of Dresden, and Agnieszka Sorokowska at the University of Wroc?aw in Poland.

The CAS Key Laboratory of Quantum Information makes a significant progress in nanomechanical resonators. A group led by Prof. GUO Guo-Ping, SONG Xiang-Xiang, DENG Guang-Wei (now at UESTC) in collaboration with Prof. TIAN Lin from University of California, Merced, and Origin Quantum Company Limited realized coherent phonon manipulations within spatially separated mechanical resonators. The research results were published online on March, 2nd, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

With the rapid development of nanotechnology, devices like surface acoustic wave resonators and nanomechanical resonators are found to be suitable for generation, storage, and manipulation of few or even single phonon, which can be further applied in both classical and quantum information process. The realization of the various applications requires coherent manipulation between different phonon modes. Coherent manipulations within neighbouring phonon modes have been reported previously, while controllable coherent information transfer between spatially separated phonon modes, remains technically challenging. Focusing on this goal, the researchers designed a novel device based on their previous achievements (Nano Lett.16, 5456 (2016)?Nano Lett.17, 915 (2017); Nat. Commun. 9, 383 (2018)). Taking advantages of the extraordinary electronic and mechanical properties of graphene, they realized tunable strong coupling between non-neighbouring phonon modes, mediated by the center phonon mode. By improving sample structure design and measurement technique, the coupling strengths and quality factors are enhanced by one and two orders of magnitude, respectively, comparing to their previous work. The cooperativity reaches 107, which is several orders of magnitude higher than other works. With combined properties of high tunablitiy, large coupling strength, and excellent coherence, the researchers demonstrated electrically tunable Rabi oscillations and Ramsey interferences between non-neighbouring phonon modes in this system.

This work is the first experimental realization of tunable coherent phonon dynamics between non-neighbouring phonon modes. It shows new possibilities towards information storage and processing using phonon modes in nanomechanical resonators, and hybrid devices based on nano-phononics. Reviewers highly evaluated this work: "These results clearly go beyond what has been achieved thus far on the coherent manipulation of resonators in the classical regime." Taking advantages of the cooling technologies, this work also shed lights on coherent manipulations of phonons in the quantum regime and development of phonon-based novel quantum devices.

You may have heard of a 2016 study linking cognitive enhancement in babies with eating more fruit during pregnancy. But how strong is that link? That's the question scientists at the University of Alberta asked as they set out to verify the findings in a new study.

"Our research followed up on results from the original CHILD Cohort Study, which found that fruit consumption in pregnant mothers influences infant measures of cognition up to one year after birth," said Claire Scavuzzo, co-lead author of the study and postdoctoral researcher in the Faculty of Science's Department of Psychology, "Although the findings from this study were exciting, they could not establish that fruit consumption, rather than other factors, caused the improvements on infant cognition."

In order to settle the record and determine if fruit was truly the factor influencing infant cognition, the scientists began a study with the goal to replicate the effects in an experimental mammalian model.

"Our findings replicated what was found in humans and fruit flies. In a controlled, isolated way we were able to confirm a role for prenatal fruit exposure on the cognitive development of newborns," explained Scavuzzo. "We see this as especially valuable information for pregnant mothers, as this offers a nonpharmacological, dietary intervention to boost infant brain development."

Results show that infant animal models of mothers who had their diets supplemented with fruit juice performed significantly better on tests of memory--consistent with the previous study.

"Our results show that there is significant cognitive benefit for the offspring of mothers that ingest more fruit during pregnancy," said Rachel Ward-Flanagan, co-lead author and PhD student studying under the supervision of Professor Clayton Dickson, who embarked on the follow-up study with Scavuzzo in collaboration with Francois Bolduc and Piushkumar Mandhane, both associate professors in the Department of Pediatrics of the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry and members of the Women and Children's Health Research Institute, which helped support the original study through funding provided by the Stollery Children's Hospital Foundation and supporters of the Lois Hole Hospital for Women.

Dickson, Scavuzzo, Ward-Flanagan, and Bolduc are part of the University of Alberta's cross-faculty Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute (NMHI), a consortium dedicated to the exploration of how the nervous system functions, the basis for disease, and the translation of discoveries into improved prevention and treatment options.

"The idea that nutrition may also impact mental health and cognition has only recently started to gain traction," said Ward-Flanagan. "People want to be able give their kids the best possible start in life, and from our findings, it seems that a diet enriched with fruit is a possible way to do so."

After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook began putting warning tags on news stories fact-checkers judged to be false. But there's a catch: Tagging some stories as false makes readers more willing to believe other stories and share them with friends, even if those additional, untagged stories also turn out to be false.

That is the main finding of a new study co-authored by an MIT professor, based on multiple experiments with news consumers. The researchers call this unintended consequence -- in which the selective labeling of false news makes other news stories seem more legitimate -- the "implied-truth effect" in news consumption.

"Putting a warning on some content is going to make you think, to some extent, that all of the other content without the warning might have been checked and verified," says David Rand, the Erwin H. Schell Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the study.

"There's no way the fact-checkers can keep up with the stream of misinformation, so even if the warnings do really reduce belief in the tagged stories, you still have a problem, because of the implied truth effect," Rand adds.

Moreover, Rand observes, the implied truth effect "is actually perfectly rational" on the part of readers, since there is ambiguity about whether untagged stories were verified or just not yet checked. "That makes these warnings potentially problematic," he says. "Because people will reasonably make this inference."

Even so, the findings also suggest a solution: Placing "Verified" tags on stories found to be true eliminates the problem.

The paper, "The Implied Truth Effect," has just appeared in online form in the journal Management Science. In addition to Rand, the authors are Gordon Pennycook, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Regina; Adam Bear, a postdoc in the Cushman Lab at Harvard University; and Evan T. Collins, an undergraduate researcher on the project from Yale University.

BREAKING: More labels are better

To conduct the study, the researchers conducted a pair of online experiments with a total of 6,739 U.S. residents, recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform. Participants were given a variety of true and false news headlines in a Facebook-style format. The false stories were chosen from the website Snopes.com and included headlines such as "BREAKING NEWS: Hillary Clinton Filed for Divorce in New York Courts" and "Republican Senator Unveils Plan To Send All Of America's Teachers Through A Marine Bootcamp."

The participants viewed an equal mix of true stories and false stories, and were asked whether they would consider sharing each story on social media. Some participants were assigned to a control group in which no stories were labeled; others saw a set of stories where some of the false ones displayed a "FALSE" label; and some participants saw a set of stories with warning labels on some false stories and "TRUE" verification labels for some true stories.

In the first place, stamping warnings on false stories does make people less likely to consider sharing them. For instance, with no labels being used at all, participants considered sharing 29.8 percent of false stories in the sample. That figure dropped to 16.1 percent of false stories that had a warning label attached.

However, the researchers also saw the implied truth effect take effect. Readers were willing to share 36.2 percent of the remaining false stories that did not have warning labels, up from 29.8 percent.

"We robustly observe this implied-truth effect, where if false content doesn't have a warning, people believe it more and say they would be more likely to share it," Rand notes.

But when the warning labels on some false stories were complemented with verification labels on some of the true stories, participants were less likely to consider sharing false stories, across the board. In those circumstances, they shared only 13.7 percent of the headlines labeled as false, and just 26.9 percent of the nonlabeled false stories.

"If, in addition to putting warnings on things fact-checkers find to be false, you also put verification panels on things fact-checkers find to be true, then that solves the problem, because there's no longer any ambiguity," Rand says. "If you see a story without a label, you know it simply hasn't been checked."

Policy implications

The findings come with one additional twist that Rand emphasizes, namely, that participants in the survey did not seem to reject warnings on the basis of ideology. They were still likely to change their perceptions of stories with warning or verifications labels, even if discredited news items were "concordant" with their stated political views.

"These results are not consistent with the idea that our reasoning powers are hijacked by our partisanship," Rand says.

Rand notes that, while continued research on the subject is important, the current study suggests a straightforward way that social media platforms can take action to further improve their systems of labeling online news content.

"I think this has clear policy implications when platforms are thinking about attaching warnings," he says. "They should be very careful to check not just the effect of the warnings on the content with the tag, but also check the effects on all the other content."

Tasmania's ancient rainforest faces a grim future as a warming climate and the way people used the land have brought significant changes to the island state off mainland Australia's southeastern coast, according to a new Portland State University study.

The study holds lessons not only for Australia - whose wildfires have been dominating headlines in recent months - but for other areas of the world that are seeing drying conditions and increased risk of wildfires.

Andrés Holz, the study's lead author and associate professor of geography at PSU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, studied the population decline of King Billy pine trees (Athrotaxis selaginoides), a coniferous species native to Tasmania that dates back to when Australia was part of a supercontinent called Gondwana. This paleoendemic tree species occupies large tracks of the UNESCO World Heritage Area in Tasmania and is considered a vulnerable species by the World Conservation Union.

The study found that increasingly frequent fires caused by regional dry and warming trends and increased ignitions - by humans during the early arrival of Europeans to Tasmania and more recently due to increases in lightning -- are breaching fire refugia. Refugia are protected areas that don't burn or, if they do, are areas where trees survive most wildfires.

"The areas that have survived are in these very protected refugia," Holz said. "The refugia can be a bit of a buffer, but how long is that going to last? We might be witnesses of a whole lineage of a very ancient plant species that is going to go extinct."

Holz said that the changes in how wildfires function, due to both management and climate change, are driving analogous ecosystem transformations not only in Australia, but also western North America and South America's Patagonia region.

Untangling the complex relationships between landscape, fire disturbance, human fire usage, climate variability and anthropogenic climate change is key to understanding the rapid population declines of King Billy pines.

The study found that the trees regenerated continuously before 1800AD under indigenous land management, but population declines followed European colonization as they cleared land for logging and mining. This coincided with a period of more fire-prone climate and weather conditions.

"Fires co-occur with dry, warm periods and those periods are more and more frequent now," Holz said, adding that the Billy King pines need wet and cool conditions to thrive. "We're moving away, climatically speaking, from the drivers that help the species."

Holz and the research team also found few seedlings or saplings in the study area, meaning that recovery of the original forest is unlikely. Instead, the replacement forest has become a tall-shrubland ecosystem with lower species diversity that in turn are more flammable and recover more quickly following fire.

"The next time there are the same climate conditions and there's a spark, a lightning strike or an accidental fire, the plants themselves are now more dense in space and more flammable than before and have a higher change of burning again," Holz said. "It becomes a vicious cycle that is hard to break."

The study said that as these critical climate-fire associations increase in strength, the survival of King Billy pines may require increasingly targeted fire management, including rapid attack of uncontrolled fires.

Scientists have been interested in superconductors - materials that transmit electricity without losing energy - for a long time because of their potential for advancing sustainable energy production. However, major advances have been limited because most materials that conduct electricity have to be very cold, anywhere from -425 to -171 degrees Fahrenheit, before they become superconductors.

A new study by University of Illinois at Chicago researchers published in the journal Nature Communications shows that it is possible to manipulate individual atoms so that they begin working in a collective pattern that has the potential to become superconducting at higher temperatures.

"This successful proof of concept opens unprecedented opportunities to engineer new smart materials, and ultimately, a room-temperature superconductor," said Dirk Morr, corresponding author and UIC professor of physics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Morr and his colleagues, including Stanford University's Hari Manoharan, used a technique known as atomic manipulation, to place single cobalt atoms on a metallic copper surface in a perfectly ordered hexagonal pattern, called a Kondo droplet.

"We had theoretically predicted that for certain distances between the cobalt atoms, this nanoscopic system should start to exhibit collective behavior, while for other distances, it should not," Morr said.

The predictions were confirmed by experiments that showed that collective behavior appears in Kondo droplets containing as little as 37 cobalt atoms.

"This is an important step forward, as the creation of collective behavior is the fundamental building block from which superconductivity emerges. It allows us to move one step closer to developing the theory that describes the process of how materials could become superconducting at room temperature," Morr said. "This work is an example of thinking outside of the box and using principles from other research fields to promote innovation. We hope this discovery will lead to new superconductors and improve sustainable energy systems."