Brain

SAN DIEGO, Aug. 27, 2019 -- How does ice form? Surprisingly, science hasn't fully answered that question. Differences in ice formation on various surfaces still aren't well understood, but researchers today will explain their finding that the arrangements that surface atoms impose on water molecules are the key. The work has implications for preventing ice formation where it isn't wanted (windshields, power lines) and for promoting ice formation where it is (food or organ preservation). The results could also help improve weather prediction.

The researchers will present their findings today at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Fall 2019 National Meeting & Exposition. ACS, the world's largest scientific society, is holding the meeting here through Thursday. It features more than 9,500 presentations on a wide range of science topics.

"We discovered that if we look at the liquid water structure where it contacts the surface, we can start to understand and predict whether a given surface will promote or inhibit ice formation," says Sapna Sarupria, Ph.D., the project's principal investigator. "We're working with collaborators to use this information to better understand the role of ice in weather and to design surfaces that are good or bad for ice formation. Wouldn't it be great to have a windshield that doesn't let ice stick to it in winter?"

Sarupria's team uses computers to study molecular simulations of surfaces and ice formation. Unlike the messier real world, this controlled setting gives her the ability to examine the impact of a change in just one surface parameter -- or even just one atom -- at a time. The researchers then correlate the findings with those of experimentalists who work with real-world materials, including silver iodide or minerals such as mica and kaolinite. Silver iodide is so effective at promoting ice formation that it's used for cloud seeding to stimulate rainfall during droughts.

Ice formation, or nucleation, occurs when liquid water undergoes a phase transition to solid water. Water can also undergo other phase transitions, such as changing from ice back to a liquid, or to vapor. If these transitions take place in clouds, they can form raindrops and snow. "When you want to predict the weather, you need to know how these phase transitions happen, and that's essentially an open question," says Sarupria, who is at Clemson University. Often these changes occur in the presence of particles such as mineral dust in the atmosphere. The type and amount of dust determine the type of precipitation that occurs. "We're trying to understand how different dust particle surfaces affect the transition of water from the liquid to the solid phase in clouds," she says.

Good old H2O is just that: an oxygen bound to two hydrogens. Those hydrogens are attracted to some surfaces more than others, and that affects how water molecules orient on a surface. Their arrangement with respect to surface atoms on dust particles and in relation to other water molecules is actually the most important factor in ice formation, Sarupria's team discovered. This finding also explains why silver iodide is such a good nucleator. First, its surface atoms are laid out in a way that's similar to the arrangement of water molecules in ice, so it's an effective template. Second, the positive charge of the silver ion and negative charge of the iodine orient the hydrogens and oxygens of liquid water in the right manner for it to form an ice structure. "The distances between the atoms, and this arrangement of charges, are very important for silver iodide to be a nucleator," Sarupria says.

The researchers are now collaborating with experimentalists who study atmospheric phenomena to help them explain their results. "If we can model these phenomena, we may be able to better understand the role of ice in weather," she explains.

Sarupria is also applying her understanding of water structure to design surfaces that can promote or inhibit ice formation. For example, to prevent damage during food storage or cryopreservation of organs, someone in the future could use the new knowledge to form ice at temperatures closer to 32 F, the freezing point of water, rather than at lower temperatures. This could be done by modifying the surface of the packaging or adding molecules to the solution for cryopreservation. "In other cases, such as windshields and power lines, you may not want ice to form," Sarupria says. "So we're trying to figure out how to make coatings or surfaces that won't let ice form, or if it forms, that won't let it stick." Her team is also trying to understand how natural antifreeze proteins help fish and other organisms survive in frigid conditions. "Ultimately, whether it's these proteins or dust particles, it all boils down to how they affect the water structure," she says. "We want to use this information to create a parameter that could help us quickly screen surfaces for their ice nucleation ability."

Current research findings are mixed as to whether preschool programs can improve individuals' outcomes in the long term, with some studies pointing to benefits years later and others showing a fadeout of cognitive gains as early as elementary school. A new longitudinal study explored the long-term impacts of a preschool quality improvement program for low-income children on their self-regulation and academic skills in high school.

The program, which focused on teachers' professional development and classroom management, boosted participants' grades in high school, which the researchers say was explained partly by academic gains made in preschool. The study also found some evidence of long-term effects on students' executive function skills, including their cognitive skills in impulse control and attention, which were partially explained by early improvements in math.

The study was conducted by researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and is published in Child Development, a journal of the Society for Research in Child Development.

The Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP) was an experimental, longitudinal teacher professional development and coaching intervention that took place in 35 Head Start classrooms across 18 centers in 2004 and 2005. Head Start is a federally funded program that enrolls preschool students with a focus on low-income families. Centers were recruited based on their location in high-crime, high-poverty neighborhoods in Chicago, and were randomly assigned to the intervention (treatment) group or to a control group.

Researchers sought to determine whether CSRP's effect on children's academic skills and self-regulation in preschool could account for the program's long-term effects on those skills in high school. Children's academic skills included their knowledge of math, language, and literacy. Self-regulation skills included cognitive and behavioral skills in executive function and attention, as well as impulse and effortful control.

CSRP's participants were 466 low-income, racially and ethnically diverse 3- to 4-year-olds from south and west neighborhoods of Chicago. About half attended Head Start in centers randomly assigned to receive CSRP; the others went to traditional Head Start programs. The study measured children's self-regulation and academic skills using direct assessments at the start and end of their preschool year, then followed up 10 years later, when most of the participants were beginning high school.

"Our results point to the sustained impacts of interventions that provide quality enhancements to existing preschool programming," says Dana Charles McCoy, assistant professor of human development and psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who led the study. "In disadvantaged contexts, efforts to improve the well-being of preschool teachers and classroom management appeared to result in long-term benefits for children's academic outcomes, even in the absence of additional supports for instruction."

Unlike many of the comprehensive preschool programs that have been studied (e.g., the Perry Preschool Project and Abecedarian, which compared intensive early childhood education programming to parental care in the 1970s), CSRP represents a new generation of early interventions that aim to test the benefits of services that supplement or maximize the impact of existing preschool programs. CSRP was a teacher professional development and coaching intervention with additional, targeted supports for students with significant behavioral challenges. It focused on helping teachers implement positive disciplinary strategies and manage their own experiences of stress in the classroom.

The study found that the long-term positive impact of the program on participants' high school grades--which amounted to approximately one-quarter of a letter grade--could be explained, in part, by gains they made in preschool in vocabulary and math skills. However, the program's effects on early self-regulatory skills did not predict improvements in executive function when the participants were in high school. Based on previous findings from the CSRP study, the study's authors hypothesize that providing teachers with positive classroom management and stress reduction strategies may have led to a more positive classroom climate, which in turn resulted in immediate improvements in students' self-regulatory and academic skills.

This study suggests that the short-term improvements in children's basic vocabulary and math skills, in particular, laid the groundwork for children's development of more advanced academic competencies over time.

The study also found that long-term impacts of the CSRP intervention on executive function might have been partially attributable to improvements in math skills when the participants were in preschool. These gains in math, the authors surmise, could have laid the foundation not only for accelerated academic development but also for improvements in domain-general skills such as executive function.

The study's authors acknowledge several limitations to their study, including that the findings varied slightly depending on the statistical modeling approach they used and should therefore be considered suggestive and not conclusive. In addition, they note that their measures of self-regulation and academic outcomes reflect a relatively narrow representation of participants' skills and that self-reported grades as a measure of academic skill in high school could have been biased.

"Given recent increases in state and federally funded preschool participation, it's important that we understand both the short- and the long-term impacts of early interventions, as well as the skills that may account for these effects," according to Stephanie Jones, Gerald S. Lesser Professor of Early Child Development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a coauthor of the study.

The availability of Head Start and Early Head Start in New Jersey, federal programs designed to serve low-income families' childcare needs, reduces the likelihood that a community will experience a severe childcare supply gap, a Rutgers-led study found.

A community with a severe childcare supply gap has more than five children for each available spot in a daycare or childcare center. The study, published in Children and Youth Services Review, found that the presence of Head Start and Early Head Start reduces the likelihood of a severe gap by 14 percent - but that needs remain in lower-income areas such as Atlantic, Burlington and Camden counties.

The review of 430 New Jersey school districts found that 43 had severe gaps and 47 had minor supply gaps with three to five children per childcare spot. Most of the districts with gaps were in less urbanized and populous areas in southern and northwestern New Jersey. The researchers examined whether and to what extent the availability of Head Start programs helped diminish a supply gap of available childcare centers in the school districts.

"Childcare in New Jersey can be expensive and can run $1,600 a month for the care of an infant or $1,200 a month for a toddler," said lead researcher Jeounghee Kim, an associate professor in Rutgers University-New Brunswick's School of Social Work. "Head Start and Early Head Start provide a crucial role for low-income families particularly in areas with low-population density. State and local governments should look at establishing more of these programs where needs persist."

Quality daycare and pre-school programs are critical to early childhood development. In 2017, approximately 65% of families with children under age 6 participated in the labor force across the United States, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. For those families, the availability of childcare service is critical for their employment and financial well-being, the researchers explained.

In New Jersey, 225 Head Start programs across the state served about 15,943 children under age 6 in 2017, representing nearly 5% of the approximately 350,000 slots in licensed centers in the year. Head Start and Early Head Start programs promote school readiness of low-income children from birth to age 5 with educational, health, nutritional, social and other services. Head Start programs focus on preschool-age children, and Early Head Start programs are geared towards infants and toddlers.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Two new studies from MIT suggest that mindfulness -- the practice of focusing one's awareness on the present moment -- can enhance academic performance and mental health in middle schoolers. The researchers found that more mindfulness correlates with better academic performance, fewer suspensions from school, and less stress.

"By definition, mindfulness is the ability to focus attention on the present moment, as opposed to being distracted by external things or internal thoughts. If you're focused on the teacher in front of you, or the homework in front of you, that should be good for learning," says John Gabrieli, the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

The researchers also showed, for the first time, that mindfulness training can alter brain activity in students. Sixth-graders who received mindfulness training not only reported feeling less stressed, but their brain scans revealed reduced activation of the amygdala, a brain region that processes fear and other emotions, when they viewed images of fearful faces.

Together, the findings suggest that offering mindfulness training in schools could benefit many students, says Gabrieli, who is the senior author of both studies.

"We think there is a reasonable possibility that mindfulness training would be beneficial for children as part of the daily curriculum in their classroom," he says. "What's also appealing about mindfulness is that there are pretty well-established ways of teaching it."

In the moment

Both studies were performed at charter schools in Boston. In one of the papers, which appears today in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience, the MIT team studied about 100 sixth-graders. Half of the students received mindfulness training every day for eight weeks, while the other half took a coding class. The mindfulness exercises were designed to encourage students to pay attention to their breath, and to focus on the present moment rather than thoughts of the past or the future.

Students who received the mindfulness training reported that their stress levels went down after the training, while the students in the control group did not. Students in the mindfulness training group also reported fewer negative feelings, such as sadness or anger, after the training.

About 40 of the students also participated in brain imaging studies before and after the training. The researchers measured activity in the amygdala as the students looked at pictures of faces expressing different emotions.

At the beginning of the study, before any training, students who reported higher stress levels showed more amygdala activity when they saw fearful faces. This is consistent with previous research showing that the amygdala can be overactive in people who experience more stress, leading them to have stronger negative reactions to adverse events.

"There's a lot of evidence that an overly strong amygdala response to negative things is associated with high stress in early childhood and risk for depression," Gabrieli says.

After the mindfulness training, students showed a smaller amygdala response when they saw the fearful faces, consistent with their reports that they felt less stressed. This suggests that mindfulness training could potentially help prevent or mitigate mood disorders linked with higher stress levels, the researchers say.

Evaluating mindfulness

In the other paper, which appeared in the journal Mind, Brain, and Education in June, the researchers did not perform any mindfulness training but used a questionnaire to evaluate mindfulness in more than 2,000 students in grades 5-8. The questionnaire was based on the Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale, which is often used in mindfulness studies on adults. Participants are asked to rate how strongly they agree with statements such as "I rush through activities without being really attentive to them."

The researchers compared the questionnaire results with students' grades, their scores on statewide standardized tests, their attendance rates, and the number of times they had been suspended from school. Students who showed more mindfulness tended to have better grades and test scores, as well as fewer absences and suspensions.

"People had not asked that question in any quantitative sense at all, as to whether a more mindful child is more likely to fare better in school," Gabrieli says. "This is the first paper that says there is a relationship between the two."

The researchers now plan to do a full school-year study, with a larger group of students across many schools, to examine the longer-term effects of mindfulness training. Shorter programs like the two-month training used in the Behavioral Neuroscience study would most likely not have a lasting impact, Gabrieli says.

"Mindfulness is like going to the gym. If you go for a month, that's good, but if you stop going, the effects won't last," he says. "It's a form of mental exercise that needs to be sustained."

CHICAGO--August 26, 2019--Going off to college, while stressful for any student, poses risks to those with diabetes, according to a study in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association.

Researchers found people who worked at or attended universities had high levels of diabetes distress, a condition of feeling worried and frustrated about living with diabetes that is associated with fewer self-care behaviors, suboptimal glycemic control and lower quality of life.

"Anyone with diabetes will experience diabetes distress at some point, and it is often triggered by major life events or upheaval," says Elizabeth Beverly, PhD, associate professor of family medicine at Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine and lead researcher on this study. "Going to college certainly qualifies, so we should be able to anticipate that in students with diabetes and offer support."

The study surveyed 173 people with type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), who worked at or attended a university. High levels of diabetes distress were reported by 27% of those with T1DM and 30% of those with T2DM.

Participants who reported high diabetes distress also indicated a lower diabetes quality of life. Researchers found 19% of those with T1DM and 17% of those with T2DM screened positive for severe depression.

"The findings highlight just how difficult it is to live with diabetes," says Beverly. "It requires daily management and despite a person's best efforts, diabetes remains a chronic, progressive disease that can decline over time."

New environments can significantly disrupt a person's self-care plan, especially when it comes to diet and managing blood glucose. For students moving away from home, where routines are set, getting access to the right foods may prove difficult.

Heightened diabetes distress comes from uncertainty of being able to effectively maintain one's health in the face of major life changes or disease complications. Consequences of not managing diabetes can be severe, including loss of eyesight and limbs.

The best intervention for combatting uncertainty is information, according to Beverly, who recommends referring patients with high distress for diabetes education. Patients can speak to diabetes educators and dieticians to problem solve barriers to better eating habits, learn about treatment options, or get mental health care from a clinician trained in diabetes distress.

"The good news is universities are really well positioned to offer these resources," says Beverly. "They have a wealth of specialized subject matter experts on campus, myriad lines of communication to students, faculty and staff, as well as facilities like kitchens and gyms that are ideal settings for education."

As an example, Ohio University provides sharps containers for storing needles and refrigerators for insulin in dorm rooms, and hypoglycemia treatment kits can be found throughout campus. Faculty is also flexible with test schedules and absences that result from health complications.

Students with diabetes qualify for accommodations under the American Disabilities Act; however, they have to self-identify as having diabetes in order to have access.

"Universities that understand their students' needs can provide appropriate supports that allow for better health and academic outcomes," says Beverly.

Water electrolysis could provide high-quality hydrogen gas that can be used in fuel cells directly. However, since noble metals, such as platinum and iridium, are currently needed to initiate such a reaction, the cost is very high. "Obviously, catalysts that are low-cost with high-activity are needed to make hydrogen energy more competitive with traditional technologies," says Guowei Li at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, who studied the surface reactions of several topological materials.

It was obviously a great challenge to find alternatives beyond noble metals. "Topology may be the key to unlocking the barrier in the search for ideal catalysts," says Prof. Claudia Felser, director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids. "We studied the surface properties of materials with topological order, from topological insulators to topological semimetals and metals, all these materials have non-trivial surface states that are protected by symmetries"

"In other words, these surface states are very stable and robust against surface modifications such as impurity scattering and even oxidation: the question we're asking is can we find such a perfect system that combines topological order, lost-cost, high efficiency, and high stability."

The team from the Max Planck Institute Chemical Physics of Solids, Dresden together with colleagues from the TU Dresden and the Max Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics and Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung, Mülheim published a breakthrough result in Science Advances concerning a topological material, namely a magnetic Weyl-semimetal, that is a superior oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalyst. The magnetic weyl semimetal that the team identified is Co3Sn2S2, a Kagome-lattice Shandite compound.[1]

High-quality bulk single crystals of Co3Sn2S2with sizes of up to centimeters can be exfoliated into thin-layers with defined crystal surfaces. The team showed that these surfaces act as superior catalysts for water splitting, even though the surface area is several orders of magnitudes smaller than today´s conventional nano-structured catalysts. In collaboration with Yan Sun's theory group from the Max Planck Institute Chemical Physics of Solids, they found that there are cobalt-derived topological surface states just above the Fermi level. In the water oxidation process, these surface states can accept electrons from the reaction intermediates, acting as an electron channel whose resistance is not affected by the harsh electrochemical environment.

Inspired by this strategy, the team then investigated the catalytic performance of a Dirac nodal arc semimetal PtSn4, a compound that has much lower percentage of expensive platinum.[2] Such crystals showed superior electrocatalytic stability for periods of time exceeding one month.

"The work serves as an interesting lens into the chemistry of these reaction processes and could be a pathway towards understanding the chemistry itself by clear knowledge of the topological nature of the semimetal catalyst," says one of the expert reviewers of the paper.

Reintroducing beavers to their native habitat is an important step towards solving the freshwater biodiversity crisis, according to experts at the University of Stirling.

New research from the Faculty of Natural Sciences has provided further support to previous work that has shown beavers have an important impact on the variety of plant and animal life.

The latest study, led by Dr Alan Law and Professor Nigel Willby, found that the number of species only found in beaver-built ponds was 50 percent higher than other wetlands in the same region.

Dr Law, Lecturer in Biological and Environmental Sciences, said: "Beavers make ponds that, at first glance, are not much different from any other pond. However, we found that the biodiversity - predominantly water plants and beetles - in beaver ponds was greater than and surprisingly different from that found in other wetlands in the same region.

"Our results also emphasise the importance of natural disturbance by big herbivores - in this case, tree felling, grazing and digging of canals by beavers - in creating habitat for species which otherwise tend to be lost.

"Reintroducing beavers where they were once native should benefit wider biodiversity and should be seen as an important and bold step towards solving the freshwater biodiversity crisis."

Beavers are one of the only animals that can profoundly engineer the environment that they live in - using sticks to build dams across small rivers, behind which ponds form. Beavers do this to raise water levels to avoid predators, such as wolves and bears: however, numerous other plants and animals also benefit from their work.

The research team surveyed water plants and beetles in 20 wetlands in a small area of southern Sweden - 10 created by beavers and 10 that were not - to understand whether beavers might provide a solution to the current biodiversity crisis by creating novel habitats.

Professor Willby added: "The loss of large mammals from modern landscapes is a global conservation concern. These animals are important in their own right, but our research emphasises the added biodiversity benefits that go with them.

"We are best reminded of this effect when large herbivores, such as beavers, are reintroduced to places where they have been lost."

This research follows the team's 2018 study that found that 33 percent more plant species and 26 percent more beetles were living in wetlands created by beavers, compared to those that were not. Another previous study, from 2017, showed that - over a period of 12 years - local plant richness in a Tayside wetland rose by 46 percent following the introduction of beavers. They created 195 metres of dams, 500 metres of canals and a hectare of ponds.

From his geology lab at the University of Houston, Jonny Wu has discovered that a chain of volcanoes stretching between Northeast Asia and Russia began a period of silence 50 million years ago, which lasted for 10 million years. In the journal Geology, Wu, assistant professor of structural geology, tectonics and mantle structure, is reporting that one of the most significant plate tectonic shifts in the Pacific Ocean forced the volcanoes into dormancy.

At the end of the Cretaceous Period, shortly after dinosaurs disappeared, the Pacific Plate, the largest tectonic plate on Earth, mysteriously changed direction. One possible result was the formation of a prominent bend in the Hawaiian Islands chain, and another, just discovered by Wu, was the volcanic dormancy along a 900-mile stretch between Japan and the remote Sikhote-Alin mountain range in Russia in what is known as the Pacific Ring of Fire, where many volcanoes form.

"Around the time of the volcano dormancy, a crack in the Pacific Ocean Plate subducted, or went below, the volcanic margin. The thin, jagged crack in the seafloor was formed by plates moving in opposing directions and when they subduct, they tend to affect volcanic chains," reports Wu.

When the volcanoes revived 10 million years later, the radiogenic isotopes within the magma were noticeably different.

"The productivity of magma within the once-violent chain of volcanoes was only one-third its previous level," said Wu, who has linked this phenomenon to the subduction of the Pacific-Izanagi mid-ocean ridge, an underwater mountain.

Scientists have long understood that volcanic activity above subduction zones, where one tectonic plate converges towards and dives beneath another, is driven by water brought deep within the Earth by the diving subducting plate. When the water reaches depths of around 65 miles, it causes the solid mantle to partially melt and produces magma that may rise and feed volcanoes.

"However, in the case of the East Asian volcanoes, subduction of the immense seafloor crack interrupted its water-laden conveyor belt into the deep Earth. As a result, the volcanoes turned off," said Wu.

Wu and UH doctoral student Jeremy Tsung-Jui Wu, who is not related to Jonny Wu, discovered the dormancy - and the reason for it - after examining a magmatic catalog of 900 igneous rock radio-isotopic values from the Cretaceous to Miocene eras. They also found evidence that the crack in the Pacific Plate was about 50% shorter than originally believed.

LOS ANGELES - Nearly one in 30 Americans over the age of 40 experience low vision -- significant visual impairment that can't be corrected with glasses, contact lenses, medication or surgery.

In a new study of patients with retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited degenerative eye disease that results in poor vision, Keck School of Medicine of USC researchers found that adapted augmented reality (AR) glasses can improve patients' mobility by 50% and grasp performance by 70%.

"Current wearable low vision technologies using virtual reality are limited and can be difficult to use or require patients to undergo extensive training," said Mark Humayun, MD, PhD, director of the USC Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg Institute for Biomedical Therapeutics, codirector of the USC Roski Eye Institute and University Professor of Ophthalmology at the Keck School.

"Using a different approach -- employing assistive technology to enhance, not replace, natural senses -- our team adapted AR glasses that project bright colors onto patients' retinas, corresponding to nearby obstacles," Humayun said.

Patients with retinitis pigmentosa wore adapted AR glasses as they navigated through an obstacle course based on a U.S. Food and Drug Administration-validated functional test. Using video of each test, researchers recorded the number of times patients collided with obstacles, as well as the time taken to complete the course. Patients averaged 50% fewer collisions with the adapted AR glasses.

Patients also were asked to grasp a wooden peg against a black background -- located behind four other wooden pegs -- without touching the front items. Patients demonstrated a 70% increase in grasp performance with the AR glasses.

"Patients with retinitis pigmentosa have decreased peripheral vision and trouble seeing in low light, which makes it difficult to identify obstacles and grasp objects. They often require mobility aids to navigate, especially in dark environments," said Anastasios N. Angelopoulos, study project lead in Humayun's research laboratory at the Keck School.

"Through the use of AR, we aim to improve the quality of life for low vision patients by increasing their confidence in performing basic tasks, ultimately allowing them to live more independent lives," Angelopoulos says.

How the AR system works

The AR system overlays objects within a 6-foot wireframe with four bright, distinct colors. In doing so, the glasses provide visual color cues that help people with constricted peripheral vision interpret complex environments, such as avoiding obstacles in dimly lit environments.

To accomplish this, researchers used a process called simultaneous location and mapping, allowing the AR glasses to fully render the 3D structure of a room in real time. The glasses then translated this information into a semitransparent colored visual overlay, which highlighted potential obstacles with bright colors to help patients with spatial understanding and depth perception. This technology can work on commercially available devices.

According to Humayun, while major cost and technical issues remain, this type of assistive technology could eventually become more practical for everyday use in the near future.

A University of Queensland-led international team of researchers say they have discovered "a new kind of quantum time order".

UQ physicist Dr Magdalena Zych said the discovery arose from an experiment the team designed to bring together elements of the two big - but contradictory - physics theories developed in the past century.

"Our proposal sought to discover: what happens when an object massive enough to influence the flow of time is placed in a quantum state?" Dr Zych said.

She said Einstein's theory described how the presence of a massive object slowed time.

"Imagine two space ships, asked to fire at each other at a specified time while dodging the other's attack," she said.

"If either fires too early, it will destroy the other."

"In Einstein's theory, a powerful enemy could use the principles of general relativity by placing a massive object - like a planet - closer to one ship to slow the passing of time."

"Because of the time lag, the ship furthest away from the massive object will fire earlier, destroying the other."

Dr Zych said the second theory, of quantum mechanics, says any object can be in a state of "superposition"

"This means it can be found in different states - think Schrodinger's cat," she said.

Dr Zych said using the theory of quantum mechanics, if the enemy put the planet into a state of "quantum superposition", then time also should be disrupted.

"There would be a new way for the order of events to unfold, with neither of the events being first or second - but in a genuine quantum state of being both first and second," she said.

UQ researcher Dr Fabio Costa said although "a superposition of planets" as described in the paper -- may never be possible, technology allowed a simulation of how time works in the quantum world - without using gravity.

"Even if the experiment can never be done, the study is relevant for future technologies," Dr Costa said.

"We are currently working towards quantum computers that - very simply speaking - could effectively jump through time to perform their operations much more efficiently than devices operating in fixed sequence in time, as we know it in our 'normal' world."

DURHAM, N.C. -- Children of incarcerated parents are six times more likely than other children to develop a substance use disorder as adults and nearly twice as likely to have diagnosable anxiety, according to new research from the Center for Child and Family Policy at the Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy.

In addition, children whose parents were incarcerated are more likely to encounter significant hurdles transitioning into adulthood, including being charged with a felony (35% vs. 11.5%), dropping out of high school (25.5% vs. 5.0%), becoming a teenage parent (14.3% vs. 2.8%), experiencing financial strain (37.2% vs. 17.5%), and being socially isolated (24.5% vs. 9.4%), the study found.

"The increased risk for adverse adult outcomes remained after accounting for childhood psychiatric status and other adversities, suggesting that parental incarceration is associated with profound and long-lasting effects for children," said co-author William E. Copeland of the University of Vermont, who conducted the research while at Duke. "This increased risk persisted whether the incarcerated parent was biologically related to the child or not. Risk for adverse adult outcomes increased further with each additional incarcerated parent figure."

The United States has among the highest incarceration rates in the world. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that over half of those who are incarcerated are parents of children under age 18.

With more than 2.7 million children experiencing a parent being sent to jail or prison, understanding the long-term health and social implications of incarceration for children is critical, the researchers say.

The study was published Friday in JAMA Network Open. Lead author Beth Gifford of Duke University and Copeland, principal investigator for the Great Smoky Mountains Study, along with colleagues from Duke, the University of Vermont and the University of Zurich, analyzed data gathered between 1993 and 2015 on the life experiences of children from the Appalachian Mountains in western North Carolina from age nine until age 30.

Researchers considered all adults who had significant responsibility for the child's discipline or care to be "parental figures." They also interviewed families as many as eight times during childhood. Using those methods, researchers identified a higher prevalence of incarceration by parental figures (23.9 percent) than the 8 to 11 percent previously documented in other population-based studies.

Incarceration rates for parental figures were higher among racial and ethnic minorities: 47.9 percent among American Indians and 42.7 percent among African-Americans, compared with 21.4 percent among whites. Parental incarceration cases overwhelmingly involved fathers (87.9 percent).

"Our findings point to the potentially high societal costs of incarcerating children's caregivers -- potentially for generations to come," said Gifford. "From a public health perspective, preventing parental incarceration could improve the well-being of children and young adults, as could aiding children and families once a parent figure has been incarcerated."

Steadily and relentlessly, the bacterium that causes gonorrhea has slipped past medicine's defenses, acquiring resistance to once-reliable drugs, including penicillin, tetracycline, and ciprofloxacin. These former stalwarts are no longer used to treat the sexually transmitted disease.

In 2010, after some strains of Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bacterium responsible for gonorrhea, began showing resistance to one of the last remaining classes of antibiotics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began recommending "dual therapy," meaning that doctors now prescribe two drugs at the same time to fight gonorrhea. Currently, those two drugs are ceftriaxone, a member of the cephalosporin class of antibiotics, and azithromycin.

With fears increasing that gonorrhea could breach these last defenses, the work of researchers like crystallographer Christopher Davies, Ph.D., is crucial.

"We're looking at a molecular level at the events that have got everybody worried out there in the clinics," said Davies, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and director of the MUSC Center for Structural Biology.

Davies' team has just published a paper showing how cephalosporins bind and inactivate a gonococcal protein dubbed penicillin-binding protein 2 (PBP2). Led by postdoctoral fellow Avinash Singh, Ph.D., the researchers showed the protein undergoes key structural changes, including twisting and rolling of a loop to bind the antibiotic, that enhance the reaction with cephalosporins. Without these changes, the protein would react much more slowly with the antibiotic.

Davies explained that all antibiotics work by targeting essential functions in a particular bug. Cephalosporins work by attacking the bacterial cell wall.

Normally, PBP2 moves along the bacterial cell's cytoplasmic membrane, reaching out into the space between the cytoplasmic membrane and the outer membrane, looking for peptides to bind to. The protein joins peptides together to create a mesh - just like an onion bag at the grocery store, Davies said. But antibiotics jump in to bind to the protein before it can get to a peptide.

"The protein is walking around the membrane layer as normal, but its active site is blocked by antibiotic, so all those potential interactions with the peptide substrate are fruitless," Davies said.

With the protein out of commission and not building the mesh, holes start to appear in the cell wall. Cytoplasm starts to leak out, and the cell bursts and dies, Davies said.

Yet the resistant strains, which have been identified in Japan, France, Spain and most recently in Canada, evade the lethal action of cephalosporins by preventing the antibiotic from binding to the protein target. How they achieve this is a major focus of Davies' research.

There are 60-some mutations on the PBP2 protein in the resistant strains of gonorrhea. Davies' team has identified six mutations that are at the root of the resistance and is looking at how the mutations change the way the protein reacts to antibiotics.

Once researchers understand how the mutations are preventing antibiotics from doing their work, new drugs can be developed, Davies said. Knowing which mutations are important may also allow a diagnostic test to be developed to tell doctors whether a particular patient has a resistant strain and, therefore, which drugs to prescribe.

Davies said it appears that the mutations restrict the protein's flexibility, preventing the structural changes needed to bind the antibiotic. That triggers a new mystery. If those movements are critical to its job of binding to peptides and building the mesh that keeps the cell wall intact, how can the mutations block the antibiotic but still allow the normal reaction? "This is the most fascinating aspect of our research," Davies said.

"It's an essential function, so the mutations can't change the protein too much. It must be able to discriminate. Discriminating against an antibiotic while still retaining the normal binding and reaction with their substrate is a delicate balancing act they have to negotiate," he said.

This balancing act might be the reason that antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea hasn't spread as quickly as anticipated.

"There's a fitness cost. They don't function quite as well as their susceptible counterparts, and it's probably for that reason they're not spreading as fast as people feared they would," Davies said.

Although the resistant-type gonorrhea isn't spreading as quickly as public health officials feared, there have been increases in the number of cases of susceptible gonorrhea, as well as other sexually transmitted diseases.

Gonorrhea diagnoses increased by 67% between 2013 and 2017, according to the CDC.

"We expect gonorrhea will eventually wear down our last highly effective antibiotic, and additional treatment options are urgently needed," said Gail Bolan, M.D., director of the CDC's Division of STD Prevention, when it released those figures.

South Carolina has the fourth highest rate of gonorrhea, according to an analysis of CDC numbers by Health Testing Centers, a lab testing service.

MUSC infectious disease specialist Eric Meissner, M.D., Ph.D., said it's not entirely clear why the rates of STDs are increasing.

"We know that there are proven interventions that individuals can use, including regular use of condoms, that markedly reduce the odds of acquiring a sexually transmitted disease. So the rise in STD rates suggests there's a need for more public health interventions and education," he said.

Although gonorrhea isn't fatal, it can cause lifelong problems if left untreated, including infertility and susceptibility to other sexually transmitted diseases, like HIV.

"An important thing for people to know is you can have gonorrhea and not have symptoms, so you can't rely upon the absence of symptoms alone to provide reassurance that you or your sexual partner do not have gonorrhea," Meissner said. "Sexually active people at risk for gonorrhea exposure should get regular testing".

Meanwhile, Davies and his team are continuing their work in the lab. The next step is understanding how the protein can still perform its normal essential function while eluding the antibiotics. The group has some ideas that it will put to the test, he said.

Meissner said antibiotic resistance is concerning to doctors in the clinic.

"Even though the specific strain Dr. Davies is studying is rare, it is important to note that the emergence of resistance in gonorrhea is a real concern," Meissner said.

Paris, France - 23 Aug 2019: Teacher training followed by classroom education with information, activities, and emotional support improves lifestyles in teachers and students, according to research to be presented at ESC Congress 2019 together with the World Congress of Cardiology.(1) The study suggests that knowledge alone is insufficient to change behaviour.

"Numerous studies have addressed health issues in the school setting, but most have focused on physical activity and nutrition, with little attention to emotional issues such as self-esteem, depression and eating behaviours," said study author Dr Carolinne Santin Dal Ri, a paediatrician at the Institute of Cardiology of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil.

The Happy Life, Healthy Heart programme randomly allocated ten public schools in the city of Frederico Westphalen, Brazil, to the intervention group (five schools) or control group (five schools). The study included 473 students aged 6 to 12 and 32 teachers. Baseline assessments included weight, height, physical activity, food intake, and health knowledge in children; and physical activity and food consumption in teachers. Measurements were repeated after the intervention was completed.

The intervention had two stages: teacher training followed by students in the classroom. Teachers attended four meetings over a four-month period, were given a booklet, and had access to video lessons. The material was in seven chapters:

1) risk factors for cardiovascular diseases in childhood;

2) choice of healthy foods;

3) food labelling;

4) sodium, sugars and fats;

5) emotional health and quality of life;

6) physical activity; and

7) healthy practices and changes in habits.

Each section contained theory plus suggestions for classroom activities based on the theme, age of the children, and intended goals.

In the classroom, teachers covered one theme per week, including at least one activity.(2) Teachers were free to choose or amend the activities and could incorporate them into projects based on the school's syllabus. To encourage teacher participation, a group was created on a social network where they received messages and reminders from the researcher on the topic they were supposed to work on. Teachers also shared their own experiences. The researcher visited the intervention schools to stimulate teachers and offer guidance.

For the control group schools, teachers did not participate in the training course and students attended the school's usual classes about health and healthy eating based on the curriculum.

Both students and teachers benefitted from the intervention. The proportion of students following Brazilian Food Guide advice to avoid pizza/hamburgers and soft drinks increased significantly by 15% and 20%, respectively. In addition, there was a 28% increase in the number of teachers who were physically active.

Dr Santin Dal Ri said: "Children in both the intervention and control groups increased their level of health knowledge during the study. But only those in the intervention group changed their eating behaviours. This suggests that information on its own does not lead to lifestyle improvements. In our study, a programme that combined information with playful activities and emotional support was beneficial for children and teachers."

Tissue engineers create artificial organs and tissues that can be used to develop and test new drugs, repair damaged tissue and even replace entire organs in the human body. However, current fabrication methods limit their ability to produce free-form shapes and achieve high cell viability.

Researchers at the Laboratory of Applied Photonics Devices (LAPD), in EPFL's School of Engineering, working with colleagues from Utrecht University, have come up with an optical technique that takes just a few seconds to sculpt complex tissue shapes in a biocompatible hydrogel containing stem cells. The resulting tissue can then be vascularized by adding endothelial cells.

The team describes this high-resolution printing method in an article appearing in Advanced Materials. The technique will change the way cellular engineering specialists work, allowing them to create a new breed of personalized, functional bioprinted organs.

Printing a femur or a meniscus

The technique is called volumetric bioprinting. To create tissue, the researchers project a laser down a spinning tube filled with a stem-cell-laden hydrogel. They shape the tissue by focusing the energy from the light at specific locations, which then solidify. After just a few seconds, a complex 3D shape appears, suspended in the gel. The stem cells in the hydrogel are largely unaffected by this process. The researchers then introduce endothelial cells to vascularize the tissue.

The researchers have shown that it's possible to create a tissue construct measuring several centimeters, which is a clinically useful size. Examples of their work include a valve similar to a heart valve, a meniscus and a complex-shaped part of the femur. They were also able to build interlocking structures.

"Unlike conventional bioprinting - a slow, layer-by-layer process - our technique is fast and offers greater design freedom without jeopardizing the cells' viability," says Damien Loterie, an LAPD researcher and one of the study's coauthors.

Replicating the human body

The researchers' work is a real game changer. "The characteristics of human tissue depend to a large extent on a highly sophisticated extracellular structure, and the ability to replicate this complexity could lead to a number of real clinical applications," says Paul Delrot, another coauthor. Using this technique, labs could mass-produce artificial tissues or organs at unprecedented speed. This sort of replicability is essential when it comes to testing new drugs in vitro, and it could help obviate the need for animal testing - a clear ethical advantage as well as a way of reducing costs.

"This is just the beginning. We believe that our method is inherently scalable towards mass fabrication and could be used to produce a wide range of cellular tissue models, not to mention medical devices and personalized implants," says Christophe Moser, the head of the LAPD.

The researchers plan to market their groundbreaking technique through a spin-off.

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- Researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York have discovered the mechanism through which ultraviolet radiation, given off by the sun, damages our skin.

What kind of ultraviolet radiation is the worst for our skin? And how exactly does the sun damage it? Those two questions are at the heart of a new study by Zachary W. Lipsky, a biomedical engineering PhD candidate at Binghamton University. The study was overseen by Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering Guy K. German.

"The cosmetics industry is a huge multibillion-dollar business, and they're all trying different things to add to their sunscreens to make them better at protecting skin," German said. "Up until this point, however, there have been a lot of studies about skin damage, but none that properly look at how UV affects the mechanical integrity of skin."

Ultraviolet radiation - which the human eye can't perceive - is broken down into four categories depending on wavelength and photon energy. Previous studies have documented how each type of UV radiation penetrates to different depths into the skin and that prolonged exposure can lead to skin cancer, but exactly how it damages human skin in other ways has received less attention. Researchers from the cosmetics industry have debated for years whether UVA is worse than UVB for causing photodamage, which leads to the early onset of wrinkles and increased tissue fragility.

The Binghamton study used samples of female breast skin - chosen because it is typically exposed only to low levels of sunlight - that were subjected to various wavelengths of UV radiation. What Lipsky and German found is that no UV range is more harmful than another - rather, the damage scales with the amount of UV energy that the skin absorbs. A more significant discovery, however, is the mechanism for how exactly UV damages skin. The study shows that UV weakens the bonds between cells in the stratum corneum - the top layer of skin - by affecting proteins in corneodesmosomes that help the cells to adhere together. That's why sunburn leads to skin peeling.

"What we noticed when we applied more and more UV radiation is that the dispersion of these corneodesmosomes was increasing," Lipsky said. "They're supposed to be these nice little distinct points surrounding cells, but with more irradiation, they essentially look exploded, moving away from their position. We conclude that because of the disruption of these corneodesmosomes, it damages the skin's structural integrity."

Building on the findings of this study, Lipsky and German are doing further research about how UV radiation affects deeper layers of the skin.

As those experiments continue, Lipsky said the most important takeaway for now is that skin protection is important no matter what season of the year it is.

"We're trying to push the message to use sunscreen not just for preventing skin cancer, but also to keep the integrity of your skin so you don't get infections or other problems," he said.

"The stratum corneum is the first barrier to the outside environment, so we need to protect it against all these different bacteria and nasty stuff that can get into our bodies."