Brain

Summary:

To find life on other planets, scientists look for traces of gases produced by living things

Some stars may produce these gases in a planet without life

The SISTINE sounding rocket studies stars to find which gases are valid signs of life

In the hunt for life on other worlds, astronomers scour over planets that are light-years away. They need ways to identify life from afar -- but what counts as good evidence?

Our own planet provides some inspiration. Microbes fill the air with methane; photosynthesizing plants expel oxygen. Perhaps these gases might be found wherever life has taken hold.

But on worlds very different from our own, putative signs of life can be stirred up by non-biological processes. To know a true sign when you see it, astronomer Kevin France at the University of Colorado, Boulder, says, you must look beyond the planet itself, all the way to the gleaming star it orbits.

To this end, France and his team designed the SISTINE mission. Flying on a sounding rocket for a 15-minute flight, it will observe far-off stars to help interpret signs of life on the planets that orbit them. The mission will launch from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in the early morning hours of Aug. 5, 2019.

When Earth Is a Bad Example

Shortly after Earth formed 4.6 billion years ago, it was enveloped by a noxious atmosphere. Volcanoes spewed methane and sulfur. The air teemed with up to 200 times more carbon dioxide than today's levels.

It wasn't for another billion and a half years that molecular oxygen, which contains two oxygen atoms, entered the scene. It was a waste product, discarded by ancient bacteria through photosynthesis. But it kick-started what became known as the Great Oxidization Event, permanently changing Earth's atmosphere and paving the way for more complex lifeforms.

"We would not have large amounts of oxygen in our atmosphere if we didn't have that surface life," France said.

Oxygen is known as a biomarker: a chemical compound associated with life. Its presence in Earth's atmosphere hints at the lifeforms lurking below. But as sophisticated computer models have now shown, biomarkers on Earth aren't always so trustworthy for exoplanets, or planets orbiting stars elsewhere in the universe.

France points to M-dwarf stars to make this case. Smaller and colder than our Sun, M-dwarfs account for nearly three-quarters of the Milky Way's stellar population. To understand exoplanets that orbit them, scientists simulated Earth-sized planets circling M-dwarfs. Differences from Earth quickly emerged.

M-dwarfs generate intense ultraviolet light. When that light struck the simulated Earth-like planet, it ripped the carbon from carbon dioxide, leaving behind free molecular oxygen. UV light also broke up molecules of water vapor, releasing single oxygen atoms. The atmospheres created oxygen -- but without life.

"We call these false-positive biomarkers," France said. "You can produce oxygen on an Earth-like planet through photochemistry alone."

Earth's low oxygen levels without life were a kind of fluke - thanks, in part, to our interaction with our Sun. Exoplanet systems with different stars might be different. "If we think we understand a planet's atmosphere but don't understand the star it orbits, we're probably going to get things wrong," France said.

To Know a Planet, Study its Star

France and his team designed SISTINE to better understand host stars and their effects on exoplanet atmospheres. Short for Suborbital Imaging Spectrograph for Transition region Irradiance from Nearby Exoplanet host stars, SISTINE measures the high-energy radiation from these stars. With knowledge about host stars' spectra, scientists can better distinguish true biomarkers from false-positives on their orbiting planets.

To make these measurements, SISTINE uses a spectrograph, an instrument that separates light into its component parts.

"Spectra are like fingerprints," said Jane Rigby, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who uses the methodology. "It's how we find out what things are made of, both on our planet and as we look out into the universe."

SISTINE measures spectra in wavelengths from 100 to 160 nanometers, a range of far-UV light that, among other things, can create oxygen, possibly generating a false-positive. Light output in this range varies with the mass of the star -- meaning stars of different masses will almost surely differ from our Sun.

SISTINE can also measure flares, or bright stellar explosions, which release intense doses of far-UV light all at once. Frequent flares could turn a habitable environment into a lethal one.

The SISTINE mission will fly on a Black Brant IX sounding rocket. Sounding rockets make short, targeted flights into space before falling back to Earth; SISTINE's flight gives it about five minutes observing time. Though brief, SISTINE can see stars in wavelengths inaccessible to observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope.

Two launches are scheduled. The first, from White Sands in August, will calibrate the instrument. SISTINE will fly 174 miles above Earth's surface to observe NGC 6826, a cloud of gas surrounding a white dwarf star located about 2,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. NGC 6826 is bright in UV light and shows sharp spectral lines -- a clear target for checking their equipment.

After calibration, the second launch will follow in 2020 from the Arnhem Space Centre in Nhulunbuy, Australia. There they will observe the UV spectra of Alpha Centauri A and B, the two largest stars in the three-star Alpha Centauri system. At 4.37 light-years away, these stars are our closest stellar neighbors and prime targets for exoplanet observations. (The system is home to Proxima Centauri B, the closest exoplanet to Earth.)

Testing New Tech

Both SISTINE's observations and the technology used to acquire them are designed with future missions in mind.

One is NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, currently set to launch in 2021. The deep space observatory will see visible to mid-infrared light -- useful for detecting exoplanets orbiting M-dwarfs. SISTINE observations can help scientists understand the light from these stars in wavelengths that Webb can't see.

SISTINE also carries novel UV detector plates and new optical coatings on its mirrors, designed to help them better reflect rather than absorb extreme UV light. Flying this technology on SISTINE helps test them for NASA's future large UV/optical space telescopes.

By capturing stellar spectra and advancing technology for future missions, SISTINE links what we know with what we've yet to learn. That's when the real work starts. "Our job as astronomers is to piece those different data sets together to tell a complete story," Rigby said.

Cephalopods, chameleons and some fish camouflage themselves by adapting their color to their surroundings. These animals have a system to perceive color and light independently of the eyes. Some insects, such as caterpillars of the peppered moth (Biston betularia), also match their body color to the twig color of their food plant; although this color change is rather slow compared to other animals. Until now, scientists have not known how insect larvae can perceive the color of their environment and how the color change occurs. Two theories dating back more than 130 years proposed that the color change could be caused by the diet or by the animal seeing the color. As some insects are known to be able to perceive light - but not color - by the skin, researchers from Liverpool University and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology pursued three different approaches to finally solve the riddle of how caterpillars of the peppered moth match the color of their surroundings.

First, they tested if caterpillars of the peppered moth, whose eyes were painted over with black acrylic paint, could still adjust their color to the background. The blindfolded caterpillars were raised on white, green, brown and black branches and their body color observed. Even without being able to see, the caterpillars changed color to resemble the background to the same extent as caterpillars whose eyes were not covered. "It was completely surprising to me that blindfolded caterpillars could still change their color and match it to the background. I don't think my supervisor, Ilik Saccheri, believed me until he saw it by himself", says Amy Eacock, one of the lead authors of the new study and currently a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology.

In behavioral experiments, blindfolded caterpillars had the choice to move to differently colored twigs. Consistently the caterpillar rested on the twig most similar to their own color.

In a third approach, the researchers examined in which parts of the body genes related to vision were expressed. They found them not only in the head of the caterpillars, where the eyes are, but also in the skin of all body segments. One visual gene was expressed even more in the skin than in the heads of the caterpillars. "We assume that this gene is involved in the perception of background color by the skin," notes Hannah Rowland, second lead author and leader of the Max Planck Research Group, Predators and Toxic Prey.

"One of the major challenges animals face is how to avoid being eaten by predators. Numerous species have evolved camouflage to avoid being detected or recognised. A considerable problem, however, is how prey animals can match the range of visual backgrounds against which they are often seen. Color change enables animals to match their surroundings and potentially reduce the risk of predation," says Hannah Rowland, highlighting the study's ecological context. Amy Eacock adds: "We constructed a computer model that can 'see' the same way birds do, so we are able to conclude that these adaptations - color change, twig-mimicking, behavioral background-matching - likely evolved to avoid visual detection by predators." Caterpillars with better color sensing may have been eaten less by birds, while birds with improved vision may prey more upon these larvae, continuing the evolutionary predator-prey arms race.

The study expands our understanding of how lepidopteran larvae protect themselves from predation.

It appears that an influenza vaccine does not just work when it comes to influenza. A new study shows that elderly people who have been admitted to an intensive care units have less risk of dying and of suffering a blood clot or bleeding in the brain if they have been vaccinated. And this is despite the fact that they are typically older, have more chronic diseases and take more medicine then those who have not been vaccinated.

The study covers almost 90,000 surviving intensive care patients above the age of 65 during an eleven year period in Denmark. Only a few of them were admitted directly due to influenza. However, regardless of the cause of the admission, for those who were vaccinated the risk of suffering a stroke - which is the collective name for bleeding and blood clots in the brain - was 16 per cent lower. This group also has an eight per cent lower risk of dying during the first year following their hospitalisation.

"Every year, 30,000 people are admitted to the intensive care units in Danish hospitals and we know that the first year is critical. Approximately three out of four survive the hospitalisation and are discharged from hospital. But even among the patients who are discharged, almost one in five die within the first year while many others suffer complications. Our study shows that there are fewer deaths and serious complications among the patients who have been vaccinated against influenza. So this supports the current recommendation that elderly people should be vaccinated," says Christian Fynbo Christiansen, clinical associate professor at Aarhus University Hospital and consultant at Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark.

Today, less than forty per cent of elderly Europeans say yes to the vaccination.

"We can't say with one hundred per cent certainty that the risk of a stroke and dying is lower solely because of the vaccine. But we can see that the elderly people who have been vaccinated do better in the event of critical illness. This suggests that it would be good if more elderly people received the vaccine. Not least because the vaccine is both safe and inexpensive," says Christian Fynbo Christiansen.

This is the first time that researchers have looked into the effect of the vaccine specifically on elderly critically ill patients. Other researchers have previously shown that the influenza vaccine lessens the risk of bacterial infections and heart attacks. However, the study shows that this is not the case for the elderly intensive care patients.

"Surprisingly, the vaccine didn't reduce the number of pneumonia cases in our study. We had otherwise expect that it would, as some previous studies have shown that the vaccine has this effect on younger and healthy individuals. Neither was there any clear difference in the number of blood clots in the heart. This raises new research questions about what effect of the vaccine on the immune system and whether there were other differences between the patients," says Christian Fynbo Christiansen.

The research results - more information:

The study is a register-based cohort study that covers 89,818 patients who have survived hospitalisation in intensive care departments in Denmark during the period 2005-2015. Patients have been identified in the Danish Intensive Database along with associated information from other health registers.

Satellite imagery showed that Tropical Storm Flossie's structure didn't change much overnight from July 31 to August 1. NOAA's GOES-West satellite provided a view of the storm early on Aug. 1.

At 11 a.m. EDT (5 a.m. HST/1500 UTC), on August 1, NOAA's National Hurricane Center (NHC) said the center of Tropical Storm Flossie was located near latitude 15.1 degrees north and longitude 131.6 degrees west. That's about 1,580 miles (2,540 km) east of Hilo, Hawaii. Flossie is moving toward the west-northwest near 16 mph (26 kph), and this general motion is expected to continue through early Sunday. Maximum sustained winds are near 65 mph (100 kph) with higher gusts. Little change in strength is anticipated for the next couple of days. The estimated minimum central pressure is 996 millibars.

NOAA's GOES-West satellite captured a visible image of Tropical Storm Flossie on August 1 at 11:30 a.m. EDT (1530 UTC) and the storm's structure had not really changed overnight. However, recent SSMI microwave data indicate that the center of the tropical storm is displaced to the northwest of all of its strongest storms.

NOAA manages the GOES series of satellites and the NASA builds and launches the satellites for NOAA. The NASA/NOAA GOES Project is located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland

NHC said, on the forecast track, Flossie should cross into the central Pacific basin late Friday or early Saturday. Flossie is forecast to begin slowly weakening on Saturday.

For updated forecasts, visit: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov

Digital games, typical of those used on smartphones, may relieve stress after a day's work more effectively than mindfulness apps, according to a study by UCL in London and the University of Bath.

In the study, published in JMIR Mental Health, participants were given a 15-minute maths test and then asked to either play a shape-fitting game or use a mindfulness app. Those in a control group were given a fidget-spinner toy.

Participants who played the shape-fitting game ("Block! Hexa Puzzle") reported feeling more energised and less tired afterwards, while those in the mindfulness and fidget-spinner groups reported the opposite: their level of "energetic arousal" appeared to decline.

In a second part of the study, participants who played a shape-fitting game after arriving home from work for five days reported feeling more relaxed by the end of the week than those who were asked to use a mindfulness app.

Study co-author Professor Anna Cox (UCL Interaction Centre) said: "Far from feeling guilty about being absorbed by their phone, people who play such games after a stressful day at work should know they are likely to be gaining a real benefit."

Lead author Dr Emily Collins, of the University of Bath, who started the research while at UCL, said: "To protect our long-term health and well-being, we need to be able to unwind and recuperate after work. Our study suggests playing digital games can be an effective way to do this."

The authors noted that digital games appear to fulfil four criteria necessary for post-work recovery: they tend to be relaxing, they provide opportunities for mastering a new skill, they are highly immersive and distracting, and they allow people to feel in control.

While previous research has found an association between playing games and improved recovery after work, the authors attempted to establish a causal connection.

The first part of the study was a lab experiment in which 45 students aged between 19 and 36 were given a series of maths questions to induce a sense of work strain and then spent ten minutes either on the digital game, fidget spinner or the Headspace mindfulness app.

In a survey before and after using the game, app or toy, they rated on a four-point scale how tired and energetic they felt.

In the second part of the study, a different group of 20 participants were asked either to play the shape-fitting game or use a mindfulness app after arriving home from work for five days in a row. The game and app were installed on participants' phones. After completing the activities, the participants were asked to fill in an online survey.

While no differences were found between the two groups in terms of how energised participants felt, the shape-fitting game appeared to offer increasing benefits throughout the week in terms of "recovery experience" - that is, to what degree participants felt relaxed, detached, in control and able to improve their skills.

This was measured by asking participants to what extent they agreed with statements such as "During the activity, I forgot about work."

Surprisingly, participants who followed a beginners' course on the Headspace mindfulness app scored progressively less well on this measure throughout the five days.

The authors also noted that the level of enjoyment of the digital game was correlated with the amount of benefit it offered in terms of post-work recovery.

Selective catalysis plays a key role in various applications, such as fine chemical industry and oil refining, hence, developing catalysts with high efficiency and excellent chemoselectivity has become a research hotspot. Compared with other materials, noble metals, especially ultrathin two-dimensional (2D) noble metal nanomaterials, have drawn tremendous research interest owing to their superior catalytic activity in many catalytic reactions.

In recent years, phase engineering is emerging as a promising and challenging research field in noble metal-based nanomaterials. In particular, as one kind of heterophase nanostructures, amorphous/crystalline heterophase nanostructures have been prepared and demonstrated promising catalytic performance. The random atomic arrangement in amorphous phase results in highly unsaturated coordination and abundant active sites for catalytic applications. In addition, the amorphous/crystalline interfaces can also benefit the catalytic activity.

However, so far, it is still very challenging for wet-chemical synthesis of ultrathin 2D noble metal-based nanoalloys with amorphous/crystalline heterophase. The thermodynamically stable phases for noble metals are close-packed crystalline structures due to the strong atomic interaction, thus it is thermodynamically unfavored to form amorphous phase, which has random atomic arrangement. In addition, the atomic isotropy of amorphous phase also makes it very challenging to obtain the 2D structure.

Herein, Prof Zhang Hua's group has prepared two types of amorphous/crystalline heterophase PdCu nanosheets, of which one is amorphous phase-dominant (a-PdCu) and the other one is crystalline phase-dominant (c-PdCu). Since amorphous phase in metals tends to transform into crystalline phase under ambient conditions, the phase transformation behavior of the synthesized hereophase PdCu nanosheets and the heterophase-dependent properties have been systematically studied. During the aging process, the crystallinity of a-PdCu gradually increased, which was accompanied with changes in some other physicochemical properties, including electronic binding energy and surface ligand adsorption. Consequently, the chemoselectivity and catalytic activity of the heterophase PdCu nanosheets also changed in the hydrogenation of 4-nitrostyrene. It is found that in the first 2 days of the aging process, the a-PdCu showed very high chemoselectivity, while the c-PdCu did not show chemoselectivity. After 3-day aging, the a-PdCu lost the chemoselectivity, but its catalytic activity gradually increased, while the catalytic activity of c-PdCu gradually decreased and eventually became lower than that of the a-PdCu after aging for 14 days. This work demonstrates the intriguing properties of heterophase nanostructures, providing a new platform for future studies on the regulation of functionalities and applications of nanomaterials by phase engineering.

Alkynes are a group of organic compounds that are used to manufacture industrial reagents and polymers. Photolysis of a cyclopropenone with UV-light is a useful method to generate a highly reactive alkyne. However, if the reaction mix contains accompanying compounds that are sensitive to UV light, they will degenerate. Therefore, performing this reaction in the presence of visible light instead will keep such compounds intact. A research team at Kanazawa University has identified catalysts that can facilitate the photolysis of visible-light-stable cyclopropenones under visible-light conditions.

The team first screened a panel of six potential catalysts to identify those yielding the highest proportion of aminoalkynes from aminocyclopropenones in the presence of visible light. To assess this, a phototriggered dehydration condensation reaction was set up. This is one of the few reactions wherein the aminoalkyne synthesized from the aminocyclopropenone directly undergoes a series of intermediate steps to yield chemical compounds known as amides.

When this reaction mixture was irradiated with a household fluorescence lamp, two catalysts showed the highest yield of the amide. In the presence of these two catalysts more than 90% of the cyclopropenone was consumed, suggestive of their efficiency under visible light. These observations were not seen under dark conditions, further suggesting the dependence of these two catalysts on light within the visible spectrum. Interestingly, the researchers also noticed that these two catalysts seemed to have the high reduction potential at their excited states and low reduction potential at their ground states. This redox potential possibly causes the excited catalysts to snatch an electron away from cyclopropenone, initiating the reaction chain. The oxidized cyclopropenone would be unstable and decompose to the ring-opened radical cation. The radical cation would receive one-electron from the photocatalyst and then generate carbon monoxide and the active alkyne. The mechanism of visible-light activated catalysts is thus thought to be different from catalysts that function under UV light.

To test the practical application of these catalysts, the reaction was then performed in the presence of tetrazole, a highly UV-sensitive molecule. As expected, under UV light conditions, tetrazole decomposed, yielding only 46% of the amide. On the other hand, under visible light not only was the tetrazole found to be intact, but the yield of the amide was much higher: almost 75%.

This study proposed a novel method of alkyne synthesis without dependence on UV light. "[We] have developed a novel phototriggered active alkyne generation reaction with a visible-light-responsive-photocatalyst. The method would be especially useful when UV light cannot be used for alkyne generation due to the UV light-sensitivity of other coexisting substrates," conclude the researchers.

WASHINGTON -- Latino children who experience the immigration-related arrest of a family member report more severe levels of depression than those who don't have such an experience, especially if one or both parents are undocumented, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

For the study, a team of researchers from Oklahoma State University surveyed 611 Latino seventh graders from a public school district in Oklahoma. The research was published online in the journal Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology.

"We were shocked that 29% of the students reported an immigration-related arrest of a family member," said lead researcher Zachary Giano, PhD, a post-doctoral fellow at Oklahoma State University. "These arrests often are a distant abstract fear or urban legend for many Latino kids, but it becomes very real and frightening when it happens to their family, which can have serious repercussions for their mental health."

The level of depressive symptoms for all of the Latino students in the study already was higher than average, possibly because of discrimination against the Latino community, Giano said. Those symptoms increased to clinical levels of depression for students who experienced the immigration-related arrest of a family member. The reported depressive symptoms increased further when a student had one undocumented parent and kept rising if both parents were undocumented.

While 85% of the students in the study were U.S. citizens because they were born here, one-fifth of them stated they had one undocumented parent, while almost one-third reported that both of their parents were undocumented. Giano said those numbers are probably higher because some children wouldn't want to reveal that information. Levels of depression also were higher for girls and students who were older than the mean age of 13 among the participants.

"Middle school is already a tumultuous time, and kids in the seventh grade aren't supposed to experience these high levels of stress and trauma," Giano said. "It makes school a lower priority, which is really detrimental at this age. Studies have shown that if you fall behind academically in middle school, it's really hard to catch up later."

That stress can lead to Latino children acting out or becoming withdrawn at school since depression manifests in different ways. School counselors, teachers and administrators need to be aware of these issues instead of suspending or expelling Latino students for behavioral problems, Giano said.

Oklahoma has a large immigrant population, but it isn't a typical entry point like southern Texas, Florida or California, so it has fewer school resources and support services for the Latino community, Giano said. Since the study was conducted in one city in Oklahoma, the findings might vary in other parts of the country based on available resources, state immigration policies or other factors.

Due to the wording of the survey, the researchers did not know which family members were arrested or whether they were released, jailed or deported. The study also couldn't determine if children had witnessed the arrest or just heard about it. The survey was conducted in 2009 as part of a larger study, but researchers analyzed the arrest data more recently because of the growing crisis facing immigrants who have been jailed, separated from their children or deported.

Giano said rates of depression among Latino children may be even higher now as administration officials and others make xenophobic comments indicating that Latino immigrants aren't welcome in the United States and need to be kept out with a border wall.

"This discriminatory rhetoric has really evolved in a more sinister way, and it's impacting the Latino community," Giano said. "I think kids in middle school usually aren't interested in politics, but there is this cascading effect of dangerous rhetoric that's coming down from the top and reaching all the way down to middle school."

Recent studies have shown that even second graders are now using more racial slurs, Giano said. "They don't come up with that by themselves," he said. "They hear it from adults and repeat it."

Other studies also have found negative effects when children experience immigration-related arrests of family members, including eating and sleeping disturbances, distrust of law enforcement, and increased levels of fear, anxiety and aggression. Those children also are more likely to suffer long-term emotional and behavioral consequences extending into adulthood, including substance abuse and unemployment.

(Hoboken, N.J. – July 31, 2019) – Play contact sports for any length of time and at one point or another you’re probably going to have your ‘bell rung’ by a powerful blow to the head from a hard hit or fall. Now, researchers from Stevens Institute of Technology and colleagues have bioengineered simulations that track how the brain behaves upon impact, reconstructing the inertial stresses and strains that prevail inside a brain that’s just been hit hard from the side and rotates rapidly.

The work, led by Mehmet Kurt, a mechanical engineer at Stevens who studies the biomechanics of the brain and the skull at rest and during rapid head movements, not only raises awareness of the severe, abiding repercussions of strong impacts to the head that lead to concussions, mild traumatic brain injury, neurological disorders, but also has implications for sports helmet makers in search of measurable parameters that can simply distinguish ‘concussion’ from ‘no concussion’ to help the industry set safety standards.

“The brain not only rings, but it has a distinct pattern of ringing when the head is hit from the side and experiences rotational acceleration,” said Kurt, whose paper appears in the July 30 advanced online issue of Physics Review Applied.

By analyzing a combination of simulated and human data of brain movement that have led to concussions, Kurt and his group, including Stevens graduate student Javid Abderezaei, digitally reveal that side impacts to the head lead to rotational accelerations that cause mechanical vibrations to concentrate in two brain regions: the corpus collosum, the bridge that links the hemispheres, and the periventricular region, white matter lobes at the brain's root that help speed muscle activation.

Kurt and Abderezaei, with Kaveh Laksari of University of Arizona and Songbai Ji of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, found that the skull's internal geometry and the gelatinous nature of the brain cause these two regions to resonate at certain frequencies and receive more mechanical energy in the form of shearing forces than the rest of the brain. More shear strain presumably yields more tissue and cell damage, particularly since shear, opposing motions tend to deform brain tissue more readily than other biological tissues.

"A hit to the head creates non-linear movement in the brain," said Abderezaei. "That means that small increases in amplitude can lead to unexpectedly big deformations in certain structures."

These non-linear vibrations are not surprising in a complex organ featuring a range of tissue densities. Add in the restraining effects of the tough protective membranes, particularly the falx and the tentorium, that hold the brain in place from both above and below, and certain regions are bound to come off worse in side hits.

Identifying the parts of the brain that are most at hazard in side impacts makes them prime targets for further investigation in quest of insights into concussions and detailed brain behavior in collisions. Such knowledge can't come soon enough more than 300,000 American children and teenagers suffer sports-related concussions every year.

In 2018, Kurt and his colleagues won a Vizzies people's choice award for video showing how the brain moves at rest with every heartbeat.

Wild gibbons living in the peat swamps of southern Borneo require between 20 and 50 hectares of forest territory for each group, making their populations particularly vulnerable to habitat loss, according to a study publishing July 31 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Dr. Susan Cheyne at the Borneo Nature foundation, and colleagues.

Gibbons are highly territorial creatures, whose habitat is threatened by deforestation and wildfires, however, little is known about the size of their territories or how they use the space for feeding and social activities. The researchers monitored four groups of wild Bornean southern gibbons (Hylobates albibarbis) in Sebangau in Borneo, Indonesia between 2010 and 2018, recording the GPS location of the group, as well as observations of the creatures' behaviour at five-minute intervals from dawn till dusk.

They found that the Gibbons' territory included a core area of between 21 and 52 hectares where they sleep, socialise, and perform call 'duets' to each other, and which they defend fiercely. However, the apes also forage over a larger home range of up to 148 hectares that they share with neighboring groups - the largest home range recorded among Gibbons in the Hylobates genus.

The territories of three of the groups remained approximately the same throughout the 9-year study, but one group was forced to shift their range west when part of their habitat was damaged by forest fires in 2015, which destroyed forests across the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. Their large home ranges and territorial behaviour may make Gibbons particularly vulnerable to habitat loss, as they are squeezed into fragments of forest too small to accommodate multiple competing groups.

Dr. Cheyne adds: "Gibbons show high site fidelity for specifoc areas of forest and maintain these territories over many years. Understanding how Gibbons use the forest is critical to their conservation. These data can feed into creating protected areas of suitable size and habitat quality to maintain viable populations of the singing, swinging small apes."

Wearable devices fitted to harbor seals reveal their movements around the Oregon coast, for a population that has been increasing following the implementation of marine reserves and protection acts. The study publishes July 31, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Sheanna Steingass from Oregon State University, USA, and colleagues.

Approximately 10,000-12,000 harbor seals, Phoca vitulina richardii, make the Oregon coast their home year-round--but there's little data on these seal populations. The authors of the present study investigated the ranges and habitats of these seals.

Steingass and colleagues fitted external satellite transmitters to 24 adult harbor seals from Alsea Bay and Netarts Bay in Oregon between September 2014 and April 2015. They collected location data every other month (in order to extend battery life) to evaluate and model the seals' movements, calculating each seal's home range (the area within which they spent 95 percent of their time) and core area (the smaller area where they were especially likely to stay). They also examined how seals used specific habitat and how frequently the seals spent time in five newly-established Oregon marine reserves.

The authors found the average home range for these seals was approximately 364 km2, though individual seals' home ranges varied greatly. The average calculated core area for seals encompassed on average 29.41 km2, though this also varied greatly.

Seals spent approximately 50 percent of their time in rivers, estuaries and bays, and were in the water (versus dry land) about 70 percent of the time. While they generally stayed close to the shore, when they did make open ocean trips, these lasted an average of around 22 hours. The seals in this study tended to use the marine reserve areas within their range only rarely, visiting them less than 2 percent of the time--the authors suspect this is due to the reserves' specific habitats.

As the first major documentation of space use of Oregon coast harbor seals in the last 30 years, this study enables further hypotheses and modelling of harbor seals in a future where marine areas are subject to frequent change.

The authors add: "Satellite tracking reveals at-sea habitat use for the first time for Pacific harbor seals in Oregon. Results from 24 seals demonstrate individual differences in behavior, with some study animals ranging hundreds of miles and few spending time within Oregon's marine reserves."

Goal-oriented, motivational physical and occupational therapy helps older patients recover more fully from broken hips, strokes and other ailments that land them in skilled nursing facilities for rehabilitation, according to new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Enhanced Medical Rehabilitation -- an approach in which physical and occupational therapists work to engage patients more fully during therapy sessions -- helped patients recover function better than standard physical and occupational therapy that was provided to others in the same skilled nursing facilities, the researchers found.

Their findings are published July 31 in the journal JAMA Network Open.

"We found that when you engage and motivate people, they do better," said the study's first author, Eric J. Lenze, MD, a professor of psychiatry.

Patients receiving enhanced rehab did not get more or longer therapy sessions. Instead, therapists focused on specific goals important to individual patients, and they delivered, on average, 24 motivational messages about those goals during every therapy session. That approach resulted in a 25 percent improvement in functional recovery.

The research team studied 229 patients -- 114 of whom randomly were chosen to receive enhanced intervention and 115 of whom received standard therapy. Each was in a skilled nursing facility while recovering from an injury or illness, such as hip fracture, stroke or major surgery.

The enhanced rehab in this study involved the use of motivation during therapy sessions, and the key was centering therapy on goals that were meaningful to the patient.

"It's more than just getting people home; everyone wants to go home," said co-author and study coordinator Emily Lenard. "In enhanced rehab, therapists focus on concrete goals. For example, if a patient had taken care of grandchildren on Wednesdays before the problems began, then the therapists might focus on the grandchildren to motivate the patient, a goal that patient can visualize in his or her head while doing exercises that might otherwise seem mundane."

Added Lenze: "Now the question is whether those gains will last over the long term. We believe extending enhanced rehab from skilled nursing facilities into the home setting will be the next critical step."

Lenze said one challenge is that therapy can be expensive, and some insurers balk at the expense. But with an aging population, he argues that enhanced therapy could save money for older patients recovering from injury, particularly if the therapy makes them more likely to get back into their homes and stay there.

"Avoiding rehospitalizations and long-term care in a nursing home has a huge economic benefit," he said. "We already pay a great deal for what's called post-acute rehabilitation, and it's unclear whether the health-care system has the appetite to continue paying for more and more care. I think, however, that we need to get past the idea of providing more care and focus more on providing better, more bang-for-the-buck care. I think Enhanced Medical Rehabilitation does that."

As populations boom and chronic droughts persist, coastal cities like Carlsbad in Southern California have increasingly turned to ocean desalination to supplement a dwindling fresh water supply. Now scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) investigating how to make desalination less expensive have hit on promising design rules for making so-called "thermally responsive" ionic liquids to separate water from salt.

Ionic liquids are a liquid salt that binds to water, making them useful in forward osmosis to separate contaminants from water. (See Berkeley Lab Q&A, "Moving Forward on Desalination") Even better are thermally responsive ionic liquids as they use thermal energy rather than electricity, which is required by conventional reverse osmosis (RO) desalination for the separation. The new Berkeley Lab study, published recently in the journal Nature Communications Chemistry, studied the chemical structures of several types of ionic liquid/water to determine what "recipe" would work best.

"The current state-of-the-art in RO desalination works very well, but the cost of RO desalination driven by electricity is prohibitive," said Robert Kostecki, co-corresponding author of the study. "Our study shows that the use of low-cost "free" heat - such as geothermal or solar heat or industrial waste heat generated by machines - combined with thermally responsive ionic liquids could offset a large fraction of costs that goes into current RO desalination technologies that solely rely on electricity."

Kostecki, deputy director of the Energy Storage and Distributed Resources (ESDR) Division in Berkeley Lab's Energy Technologies Area, partnered with co-corresponding author Jeff Urban, a staff scientist in Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry, to investigate the behavior of ionic liquids in water at the molecular level.

Using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and dynamic light scattering provided by researchers in the ESDR Division, as well as molecular dynamics simulation techniques at the Molecular Foundry, the team made an unexpected finding.

It was long thought that an effective ionic liquid separation relied on the overall ratio of organic components (parts of the ionic liquid that are neither positively or negatively charged) to its positively charged ions, explained Urban. But the Berkeley Lab team learned that the number of water molecules an ionic liquid can separate from seawater depends on the proximity of its organic components to its positively charged ions.

"This result was completely unexpected," Urban said. "With it, we now have rules of design for which atoms in ionic liquids are doing the hard work in desalination."

A decades-old membrane-based reverse osmosis technology originally developed at UCLA in the 1950s, is experiencing a resurgence - currently there are 11 desalination plants in California, and more have been proposed. Berkeley Lab scientists, through the Water-Energy Resilience Research Institute, are pursuing a range of technologies for improving the reliability of the U.S. water system, including advanced water treatments technologies such as desalination.

Because forward osmosis uses heat instead of electricity, the thermal energy can be provided by renewable sources such as geothermal and solar or industrial low-grade heat.

"Our study is an important step toward lowering the cost of desalination," added Kostecki. "It's also a great example of what's possible in the national lab system, where interdisciplinary collaborations between the basic sciences and applied sciences can lead to creative solutions to hard problems benefiting generations to come."

Also contributing to the study were researchers from UC Berkeley and Idaho National Laboratory. The Molecular Foundry is a DOE Office of Science User Facility that specializes in nanoscale science. This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

Attending a health check as part of the England National Health Services "Health Check" programme is associated with increased risk management interventions and decreased risk factors for cardiovascular disease in the six years following the check, according to a new study published this week in PLOS Medicine by Samah Alageel of King Saud University, Saudi Arabia, and colleagues from King's College London, UK.

In 2009, the NHS introduced the Health Check programme, designed to provide checkups to adults in England aged 40-74 and spot early signs of stroke, kidney disease, heart disease, type 2 diabetes or dementia. One review, however, found that the programme did not decrease morbidity or mortality among participants. In the new study, researchers studied data from 127,891 participants who completed the health check between 2010 and 2016, as well as data from 322,910 matched controls over six years' follow-up.

The authors found that health check participants had slightly lower baseline body mass index (BMI), blood pressure (SBP) and fewer were smokers (21% in health check participants vs. 27% in controls). Health check participants were five times more likely to receive weight management advice, three times more likely to receive smoking cessation advice, and their use of statins was 24% higher.

Six years after taking part in health checks, people who had a health check had net reductions in body mass index, systolic blood pressure, and smoking status. The authors acknowledge that lack of randomization as well as missing data in electronic medical records could have introduced bias into the results.

"These results show that the NHS Health Check programme carries a potential for reducing cardiovascular risk through the early assessment and management of risk factors. However, the programme could benefit from and should be supported with population-wide interventions to improve its outcomes" comments lead author Samah Alageel.

"People who take up a health check may be healthier than controls but are more likely to receive risk factor interventions. Reductions in risk up to six years following a health check may be of public health importance but we need to be sure these benefits are shared by those most at risk" notes Professor Martin Gulliford, School of Population Health and Environmental Sciences, King's College London.

"While net changes in risk factor values were generally of small magnitude these were sustained for up to six years following the health check and the cumulative impact of these changes could be of public health importance across the population at risk," the authors say.

ITHACA, N.Y. - A measure to conserve groundwater in northwestern India has led to unexpected consequences: added air pollution in an area already beset by haze and smog.

A new study reveals how water-use policies require farmers to transplant rice later in the year, which in turn delays harvests and concentrates agricultural burnings of crop residues in November - a month when breezes stagnate - leading to increased air pollution.

The perfect storm of conditions during November has created almost 30 percent higher atmospheric concentrations of fine particulate matter, small particles that are especially concerning for human health.

The study, "Tradeoffs Between Groundwater Conservation and Air Pollution From Agricultural Fires in Northwest India," published in Nature Sustainability, is a collaboration between researchers from Cornell and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).

The scientists analyzed groundwater conservation policies and their effect on the timing of farmers' planting and harvesting crops and burning crop residues. They also connected this information with meteorological and air pollution data.

"This analysis shows that we need to think about sustainable agriculture from a systems perspective, because it's not a single objective we're managing for - it's multidimensional, and solving one problem in isolation can exacerbate others ," said Andrew McDonald, associate professor of soil and crop sciences and a co-author of the paper. Balwinder Singh, a cropping systems simulation modeler at CIMMYT in New Delhi, India, is the paper's first author.

Northwest India suffers from two critical sustainability issues: air pollution and groundwater depletion. Almost 1.1 million Indians died from air pollution in 2015, adding up to costs equaling 3 percent of the country's gross domestic product, according to the study.

Groundwater depletion is an ongoing issue, and rice cultivation is particularly water-intensive. News reports in June shed light on water scarcity in Chennai, in the south; in the northwest, two groundwater conservation measures enacted in 2009 delayed groundwater use by farmers until later in the season. The acts ultimately prohibited transplanting rice into paddies until after June 20.

Farmers must quickly clear residues immediately following rice harvests in this area, known as India's bread basket, to prepare fields for planting wheat that grows in the winter.

Solutions could include new agronomic technologies such as the tractor-mounted Happy Seeder, a device that allows farmers to drill through heavy crop residues and plant seeds without burning. They might couple such advances with shorter-duration rice varieties that offer flexibility in planting and harvesting dates.