Brain

AMES, Iowa - Martin Thuo of Iowa State University and the Ames Laboratory clicked through the photo gallery for one of his research projects.

How about this one? There was a rose with metal traces printed on a delicate petal.

Or this? A curled sheet of paper with a flexible, programmable LED display.

Maybe this? A gelatin cylinder with metal traces printed across the top.

All those photos showed the latest application of undercooled metal technology developed by Thuo and his research group. The technology features liquid metal (in this case Field's metal, an alloy of bismuth, indium and tin) trapped below its melting point in polished, oxide shells, creating particles about 10 millionths of a meter across.

When the shells are broken - with mechanical pressure or chemical dissolving - the metal inside flows and solidifies, creating a heat-free weld or, in this case, printing conductive, metallic lines and traces on all kinds of materials, everything from a concrete wall to a leaf.

That could have all kinds of applications, including sensors to measure the structural integrity of a building or the growth of crops. The technology was also tested in paper-based remote controls that read changes in electrical currents when the paper is curved. Engineers also tested the technology by making electrical contacts for solar cells and by screen printing conductive lines on gelatin, a model for soft biological tissues, including the brain.

"This work reports heat-free, ambient fabrication of metallic conductive interconnects and traces on all types of substrates," Thuo and a team of researchers wrote in a paper describing the technology recently published online by the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

Thuo - an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Iowa State, an associate of the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory and a co-founder of the Ames startup SAFI-Tech Inc. that's commercializing the liquid-metal particles - is the lead author. Co-authors are Andrew Martin, a former undergraduate in Thuo's lab and now an Iowa State doctoral student in materials science and engineering; Boyce Chang, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, who earned his doctoral degree at Iowa State; Zachariah Martin, Dipak Paramanik and Ian Tevis, of SAFI-Tech; Christophe Frankiewicz, a co-founder of Sep-All in Ames and a former Iowa State postdoctoral research associate; and Souvik Kundu, an Iowa State graduate student in electrical and computer engineering.

The project was supported by university startup funds to establish Thuo's research lab at Iowa State, Thuo's Black & Veatch faculty fellowship and a National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research grant.

Thuo said he launched the project three years ago as a teaching exercise.

"I started this with undergraduate students," he said. "I thought it would be fun to get students to make something like this. It's a really beneficial teaching tool because you don't need to solve 2 million equations to do sophisticated science."

And once students learned to use a few metal-processing tools, they started solving some of the technical challenges of flexible, metal electronics.

"The students discovered ways of dealing with metal and that blossomed into a million ideas," Thuo said. "And now we can't stop."

And so the researchers have learned how to effectively bond metal traces to everything from water-repelling rose petals to watery gelatin. Based on what they now know, Thuo said it would be easy for them to print metallic traces on ice cubes or biological tissue.

All the experiments "highlight the versatility of this approach," the researchers wrote in their paper, "allowing a multitude of conductive products to be fabricated without damaging the base material."

A new study on a Bahamian bat makes the case for using the species' unusual parasites to reveal details about the species' populations on the archipelago. Using parasites to glean information about their hosts isn't a new concept, but typically scientists have focused only on parasites that exhibit tight links with individual hosts in a species over tens of thousands of years. The new research, published today in the Journal of Parasitology, provides evidence for extending this concept based on information provided by blood-feeding bat flies that spend a large percentage of their lives independent of their hosts and switch among host individuals of the same species.

"For many years, parasites like lice have been used to learn more about their hosts. They never leave their host individuals, and that makes for a really good model," said lead author Kelly Speer, a comparative biology Ph.D. candidate in the American Museum of Natural History's Richard Gilder Graduate School. "But we've found that we can also use micropredator parasites--like bat flies--to give us details about their hosts, as long as the parasites are host-specific and use their host to be dispersed."

The study focused on the buffy flower bat (Erophylla sezekorni), a Caribbean species that the researchers selected because of its ability to cross a narrow ocean channel in the Bahamas. This channel is thought to be a geographic barrier for other bats in the area, and physical barriers can lead to different populations of the same species--and over long periods of time, because the separate populations are unable to mate, two different species altogether. To learn more about the buffy flower bat's Bahamian populations, the researchers examined the parasitic flies (Trichobius frequens) that live on the bats on both sides of the ocean channel.

"It can be really difficult to measure the connectivity between populations of bats because they are highly mobile, and they are often too small for GPS trackers," said study co-author David Reed, from the Florida Museum of Natural History. "To get around this, researchers generally rely on genetic estimates of gene flow as a proxy for measuring how well connected two populations are. The problem with this is that certain types of dispersal aren't reflected in genome of the bat, or are reflected but result in very low genetic signal. In this study, we found that bat flies can act as an alternate way to get at this information."

These particular bat flies, which are part of the group that includes tsetse flies--known for transmitting trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, in humans--have a unique life cycle. Unlike most flies, which lay their eggs and leave them to develop on their own, female bat flies nurture their larvae internally, even feeding the larvae with "milk" glands inside of their bodies. Once the larvae are mature, the female flies deposit them in a bat's roost, shortly after which they form a puparium, similar to a cocoon, develop into an adult, and find a host to feed upon. T. frequens only feed on the blood of the buffy flower bat, moving among individual bats. Female flies leave their host every 10 days to deposit larvae.

The researchers looked at the genetics of the buffy flower bats and their associated flies on four islands in the Bahamas, two on each side of the ocean channel. They found evidence for a single population of the bats, but two populations of its flies. The results indicate that the ocean channel is likely not a universal barrier for bats.

"There is a lot more connectivity than we expected longterm across this barrier in both the host and the parasite," Speer said.

However, the results also indicate that there has been very little, if any, dispersal of the bats over the last two generations, or about two years. This finding was not evident from the host genetics alone and only became clear with genetics from the flies. Ultimately, the study suggests that something besides the ocean channel might be stymieng the bats' gene flow.

"Changes in roost and foraging habitat availability could be playing the largest role here," said coauthor Nancy Albury, from the National Museum of The Bahamas. "In the northern islands we surveyed, many of these bats roost in abandoned buildings, and in the southern islands, many of the caves are being filled with trash. As the population in the Bahamas continues to increase and tension builds between the natural habitat and altered habitat for human use, it's important to know what the baseline is for this bat and this parasite."

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A new study of racial and ethnic disparities in school discipline found that black middle school students were significantly less likely than their white peers to receive verbal or written warnings from their teachers about behavioral infractions.

"While at first glance, disparities in teacher warnings seem less concerning than being expelled or sent to the principal's office, warnings represent opportunities for students to correct their behavior before the consequences escalate and they're removed from the learning environment," said University of Illinois social work professor Kate M. Wegmann, who led the study.

Wegmann and her co-author, graduate student Brittanni Smith, examined data from more than 4,100 students at 17 schools. The students were sixth- through ninth- graders at schools in two North Carolina communities.

Students were surveyed about the various types of misconduct they had engaged in at school over the prior 30 days - including tardiness, turning in homework late, arguing with teachers and physical fights with other students - and the frequency of these infractions.

Students also were asked about the types of discipline they received, including verbal warnings from their teachers, written warnings sent to their homes or phone calls to their parents. They also reported on exclusionary forms of discipline they may have experienced, such as being sent to the principal's office and school suspensions.

Although the researchers found as hypothesized that black students were more likely than their white peers to experience exclusionary forms of discipline, some of the most significant differences were in black students' likelihood of receiving written or verbal warnings.

Wegmann and Smith analyzed the data using two techniques. First, they calculated and compared the percentages of black or white students reporting each type of misbehavior and any disciplinary consequences they experienced. This method has been used in previous studies to identify discipline disparities.

Using this technique, they found that while black students composed only 23% of the study population, these students accounted for 37% of the school suspensions and more than 35% of the office referrals.

Likewise, about half of those students who reported three or more suspensions or who had at least three warnings sent or called to their homes were black, according to the study.

Using a second data analysis technique called binary logistic regression, the researchers investigated disparities by race and sex among the behavioral infractions and the forms of discipline. Unlike the traditional percentage comparison method, binary logistic regression accounts for individual characteristics like the number and frequency of infractions reported when estimating the odds of receiving a form of discipline.

Regardless of the number or frequency of their infractions, black students were less likely than their white peers to be warned about their behaviors in the classroom or in messages to their parents, the researchers found. Even among those students who reported three or more incidents of misbehavior, black males were less likely than white males to be warned by their teachers about misconduct.

Black males were 95% less likely than white males to receive verbal warnings directly from teachers, and black students of either sex were 84% less likely to have multiple warnings directed to their parents, according to the study.

Black males were more likely than all other students to have been suspended from school three or more times, according to the study.

"These findings point toward a trend of heightened consequences with little or no forewarning for black male students, even when behavioral infractions are accounted for," the researchers wrote.

Although black females were not more likely to be suspended than white females, they were more likely to be warned verbally or in writing and to be sent to the principal's office for similar types and frequency of misbehavior.

A breakthrough new drug is providing hope to tiny babies at risk of dying from an aggressive form of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia and could help all cancer patients.

A team from Children's Cancer Institute in Sydney has proven a ferocious form of the blood cancer that kills half the infants who contract it, became undetectable in mice treated with chemotherapy and the new drug CBL0137.

But Children's Cancer Institute researcher Dr Klaartje Somers says it has even greater promise because it can be used in all types of cancer including solid tumours like breast and bowel cancer.

Trials underway in adults in America have found the drug to be very well tolerated.

It is hoped children in Australia whose cancer has returned will get the chance to take part in the first trial of the new drug in minors next year.

Unlike expensive new treatments like CAR T cell therapies that direct a patient's immune system towards the cancer cells, this drug works by reactivating the body's P53 pathway so it kills off damaged cells. This pathway is commonly mutated in cancer patients and cancer cells suppress it so they can stay alive and keep spreading.

Dr Somers reported in the International Journal of Cancer this week that by itself the drug delayed the progression of cancer but when it was combined it with chemotherapy it worked even better.

Mice avatars were injected with blood and bone marrow samples from patients who had untreatable cancers in the study.

"When we used the molecule or the chemotherapy by themselves there was no a small response but when combined, the treatments were highly effective and deleted all the cancer cells in the mouse," Dr Somers said.

Dr Somers' work, under the lead of Dr Michelle Henderson and Professor Michelle Haber, focuses on a deadly blood cancer that devastates tiny babies.

One out of ten acute leukaemia patients have a mutation in the MLL gene which means they get a very aggressive form of the disease.

Half the babies with this gene mutation will die from the disease and the aggressive chemotherapy required to treat it.

Those who survive are at risk of heart problems, mental retardation, growth problems and thyroid and breast cancer as adults, caused by the aggressive chemotherapy required to kill the cancer.

Dr Somers hopes by combining the new treatment with chemotherapy, doctors will be able to dial down the amount of chemotherapy required and reduce these side effects.

Nearly half of American women having a baby in the last decade received a prescription for a powerful opioid painkiller as part of their birth experience, a new study shows.

And one or two in every hundred were still filling opioid prescriptions a year later - especially those who received birth-related opioid prescriptions before the birth, and those who received the largest initial doses.

In a study of records from more than 308,000 women who gave birth from 2008 to 2016, researchers from the University of Michigan find the percentage of women filling opioid prescriptions in the days and months after giving birth declined over time. This may have resulted from growing awareness of the broader national epidemic.

But they note that there is still ample room for providers to adopt effective pain control strategies - for both vaginal and Caesarean births - that don't include giving new mothers opioid pills if other pain treatments work for them.

Writing in JAMA Network Open, U-M obstetrician and health services researcher Alex Friedman Peahl, M.D., and her colleagues explore opioid prescribing to women with private insurance who hadn't received opioids for a year before delivering. They limited the study to women who didn't suffer major birth complications or have any other procedures in the year after a birth.

"Overall, we see rates of opioid persistence higher than previously documented for women having C sections, at about two percent," says Peahl. "For women who delivered vaginally, one-quarter received opioid prescriptions, although current guidelines call for a step-wise approach to pain management, starting with non-narcotic medications such as ibuprofen and acetaminophen. One percent of vaginal birth mothers were still receiving opioids months later."

Peahl and her colleagues hope their findings bolster efforts by national groups to help birth care teams adopt opioid-sparing pain care methods. Birth care at Von Voigtlander Women's Hospital, part of the U-M academic medical center Michigan Medicine, already includes such approaches.

Peahl says she tells her birthing patients, "Pain after birth is like a mountain: once you're at the peak, it is harder to get down. Using non-narcotic pain medications before opioids can help better manage your pain by preventing you from reaching that peak."

Alternatives to opioids

Peahl's experience treating birth pain with fewer opioids extends back to her training in Rhode Island, where birthing women once routinely went home from the hospital with prescriptions for 20 to 40 opioid painkiller pills. Then, the state legislature passed a limit of 20 pills for acute pain prescriptions, and she worked with the birth team where she trained to develop alternate pain care approaches.

Using long-lasting opioids for the height of birth pain as part of an epidural, and reserving oral opioids for "breakthrough" post-birth pain, is possible, says Peahl.

Acetaminophen, and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen can provide effective pain relief in the days after birth, Peahl says, especially if women receive education during birth preparation about their proper use. She recently presented data at a conference showing such an approach can reduce post-discharge opioid painkiller use.

A team of U-M obstetric clinicians also recently published a paper in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology that laid out the case for opioid-sparing approaches to pain care after C-section births. Such an approach, called Enhanced Recovery After Surgery or ERAS, has already risen in popularity for other OB/Gyn procedures such as hysterectomy.

Building on surgical opioid studies

Peahl, a National Clinician Scholar at the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation, teamed up with IHPI members from the Michigan Opioid Prescribing and Engagement Network for the new study. Senior author Jennifer Waljee, M.D., M.P.H., M.S., helped Peahl adopt an approach already used to study opioid prescriptions after inpatient surgery.

Using IHPI-purchased data, they looked at women who filled an opioid prescription in the immediate week before giving birth, up to the third day afterward. This allowed them to include women whose doctors wrote a prescription to have on hand before they went to the hospital.

They defined persistent use as those women who filled at least one more opioid prescription within three months of delivering, and another up to a year after delivering.

In addition to excluding women with prior opioid use and those in treatment for substance abuse, the study left out women who had any sort of medical procedure within a year of having a baby, including readmission for additional surgical procedures, and women whose birth hospitalization lasted more than a month.

"The silver lining in these data is that we see drops of several percentage points in filling of initial prescriptions over time, although nearly 24 percent of women who delivered vaginally in 2016, and nearly 73 percent of those who had a C-section, still had these pills on hand," says Peahl.

Women most at risk of persistent use

While the researchers could not tell from the data how many opioid pills the women actually took, they note that unused pills can pose a risk of their own. Excess opioids can be misused by others, diverted for illicit sale, or discovered by curious children.

Looking more closely at the data, they showed that risk of opioid persistence was higher in certain groups of women.

Women who had their babies in their teens or early 20s, and those with more medical issues at the time of birth, especially diagnoses related to pain or mental health, had higher rates of persistence. So did mothers in the South and Midwest and women who used tobacco during pregnancy.

But the biggest factors - and the one that health care providers can actually modify - was the size of the initial prescription for opioids that the women filled and the timing of when that prescription was given. The larger the vial, the more likely they were to refill multiple prescriptions in the months after giving birth. Similarly, women who filled prescriptions prior to birth were more likely to develop new persistent use.

This is similar to what Waljee and her colleagues have seen in surgical patients, which has led them to create prescribing guidelines for surgical teams that are based on what patients say they actually needed to take for pain control. The guidelines for C-section published on the Michigan-OPEN site recommend that women receive between zero and 20 five-milligram oxycodone tablets or the equivalent.

Next steps

Peahl and her colleagues are currently contacting new mothers who received opioid painkillers to find out how many pills they took, out of the total number they were prescribed and given. This could inform more evidence-based recommendations in the near future. They are also assessing the impact of a new ERAS protocol that was launched on July 8, which includes more robust patient education and shared decision making about opioid prescriptions at the time of discharge.

They also hope to study Medicaid data on a national level, expanding on the single-state analysis others have done. And, they hope to study data on the half of women who couldn't be included in the current study because they had received opioid prescriptions in the year before they had their baby.

"No matter which way they deliver, women should be able to get up and spend time with their new baby," says Peahl. "Pain, and the effects of pain control medications, should not get in the way of their birth experience and bonding with their infant."

Washington, DC - July 26, 2019 - Genetics has a greater impact on the microbiome than maternal birth environment, at least in mice, according to a study published this week in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. Vaginal birth, known to transfer microbiota to a newborn, failed to make a lasting microbial imprint on offspring.

"The powerful effect of genetics, as compared to environment, was surprising," said Yechezkel Kashi, Head of the Applied Genomics and Microbiology Lab, Technion--Israel Institute of Technology. "It was also disappointing since it suggested that the benefits of probiotics might last only as long as one takes them."

In the study, the investigators determined the microbiomes of two different inbred laboratory strains of mice, black mice (C57BL/6J), and white mice (BALB/c). The investigators then crossed the black and white mice. In one set of crosses, the mother was black, while in the other the mother was white. In both cases, the offspring were the same shade of gray, and had similar genetics, regardless of which parent was black and which was white.

The crosses were conducted because in mammals, during birth, mothers transfer microbes from their birth canals to offspring. Thus, during birth, black mothers and white mothers would pass different microbiota to their offspring. The maternal environmental influence on the microbiomes of the offspring turned out to be trivial. The microbiomes of the offspring were similar to each other regardless of whether their mothers were black or white, showing that the maternal seeding during birth didn't take.

A third experiment tested a different environmental influence - food source - on microbiome. In this experiment, black mice and white mice were kept together.

"Mice are coprophages," explained coauthor Hila Korach-Rechtman, PhD, Senior Scientist, The Applied Genomics and Microbiology Lab, Technion--Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa. "They eat feces, and in captivity, they eat their cage mates' feces." Since feces contain the microbiome, in this experiment white mice were exposed to black mice' microbes, and vice versa.

This made some difference in the microbiomes, but that difference persisted only as long as the mice occupied the same cages. Once the different strains of mice were separated, their microbiomes reverted to their original composition, said Dr. Korach-Rechtman.

"Obviously, we can't imply that the same model would apply to humans," said Dr. Kashi. Nonetheless, other evidence supports that hypothesis. Studies have found that in both mice and humans, certain genetic loci, or genes correlate with specific microbial species.

Genetic variation could influence the gut microbiome through mechanisms such as "differences in the mucosal gut structure... differences in metabolism such as bile acids secretion... potentially olfactory receptor activity... and antimicrobial peptides and other genetic determinants of the immune system," the investigators wrote.

To analyze the influence of both the mother's strain, and of the coprophagy, the investigators collected feces from the different inbred mouse lines, and analyzed their microbiomes using DNA extraction and sequencing, and bioinformatics analysis of the resulting sequences. The conclusion from both experiments: genetics had major influence on microbiome. Maternal environment and coprophagy had only minor influence.

Camera performance on mobile devices has proven to be one of the features that most end-users aim for. The importance of optical image quality improvement, and the trend to have thinner and thinner smartphones have pushed manufactures to increase the number of cameras in order to provide phones with better zoom, low-light exposure high quality photography, portraits, to name a few. But adding additional lenses to a miniaturized optical configuration and driving light focusing with an electronic device is not as easy as it seems, particularly at small scales or in such confined spaces.

The integration of an adjustable-dynamic zoom lens in a mm-thick cell phone, in a miniaturized microscope, or at the remote end of a medical endoscope requires complex lenses that can handle the full optical spectrum and be reshaped electrically within milliseconds. Until now, a class of soft materials known as liquid crystal spatial light modulators have been the tool of choice for high-resolution light shaping, but their implementation has proven to have limits in terms of performance, bulkiness and cost.

In a study recently published in Nature Photonics, fruit of a close collaboration between Pascal Berto, Chang Liu and Gilles Tessier from Institut de la Vision, and Laurent Philippet, Johann Osmond, Adeel Afridi, Marc Montagut, and Bernat Molero, led by ICREA Prof. at ICFO Romain Quidant, the researchers demonstrate an adjustable technique to manipulate light without any mechanical movement. In this approach, coined Smartlens, a current is passed through a well-optimized micrometer-scale resistor, and the heating locally changes the optical properties of the transparent polymer plate holding the resistor. In much the same way as a mirage bends light passing through hot air to create illusions of distant lakes, this microscale hot region is able to deviate light. Within milliseconds, a simple slab of polymer can be turned into a lens and back: small, micrometer-scale smartlenses heat up and cool down quickly and with minimal power consumption. They can even be fabricated in arrays, and the authors show that several objects located at very different distances can be brought into focus within the same image by activating the Smartlenses located in front of each of them, even if the scene is in colours.

By modelling the diffusion of heat and the propagation of light and using algorithms inspired by the laws of natural selection the authors show they can go way beyond simple lenses: a properly engineered resistor can shape light with a very high level of control and achieve a wide variety of optical functions. For instance, if the right resistor is imprinted on it, a piece of polymer could be activated or deactivated at will to generate a given "freeform" and correct specific defects in our eyesight, or the aberrations of an optical instrument.

As Prof. Romain Quidant points out, "remarkably, the Smartlens technology is cost effective and scalable, and has proven to have the potential to be applied to high-end technological systems as well as simple end-user-oriented imaging devices". The results of this study open a new window for the development of low-cost dynamically tuneable devices that could have a high impact on current existing optical systems.

(New York, NY) - Age is not a relevant factor in judging the fitness of presidential candidates to hold the nation's highest office, according to the first-ever study that estimates the longevity and survival probabilities of candidates seeking the White House.

"Age is just a number," says study author S. Jay Olshansky, PhD, a leading researcher on aging at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health and board member of the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR). "This research for the first time provides science-based calculations that show that the age of a candidate should not be considered at all."

In a new AFAR-published white paper, Longevity and Health of U.S. Presidential Candidates for the 2020 Election, Olshansky and his colleagues used data from national vital statistics to estimate lifespan, healthspan (years of healthy living), disabled lifespan, and four- and eight-year survival probabilities for U.S. citizens with attributes matching those of all 27 current candidates for the next two election cycles.

The study's science-based estimates, which are referred to as "intentionally conservative," suggest that nearly all of the candidates meet the criteria to live in health, and without disability, not only through a first term, but through a second term as well.

"Nevertheless, the estimates provided here (favorable or unfavorable) should not be interpreted as destiny for any of the candidates," Olshansky wrote.

A Matter of Health, Not Age

Four of the leading contenders in both parties are in their 70s: U.S. senators Joe Biden (76), Bernie Sanders (77) and Elizabeth Warren (70) on the Democratic side, and Republican incumbent Donald Trump (73), who became the oldest American elected president at age 70 in 2016. Overall, seven of the 27 candidates currently in the race would be aged 70 and older on inauguration day in January 2021, increasing the odds that the oldest person ever elected president could be sworn into office that day.

That fact has given rise to considerable discussion and media attention regarding the question of the role age plays in deciding whether a candidate is fit to be president. Almost four in 10 people surveyed in a June 2019 Economist/YouGov Poll said they considered anyone in their 70s "too old to be president."

The scientific answer, according to the study, is that "chronological age itself should not be used as a sole disqualifier to run for or become president."

AFAR Executive Director Stephanie Lederman, Ed.M, says the number of candidates in their 70s is in part a result of "the revolution in healthy aging that has occurred over the past century. Life expectancy has increased by an astounding 30 years. More of us are living healthier and longer than ever before. And biomedical research continues to open new paths for all of us to extend not only how long we live, but how many of those years we live independently, in good health, and contributing in significant ways to society."

The study also took note of a suggestion by Dr. David Scheiner, former President Obama's personal physician, calling on presidential candidates to make their medical records public. Olshansky wrote: "The voting public and legal scholars need to weigh in on whether or not medical records should be required to be disclosed by candidates or a sitting president."

Lederman notes: "The question, Dr. Olshansky's study reminds us, shouldn't be, 'How old is too old?' It should be, 'How healthy is the candidate, regardless of their age?'"

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Like to unwind with a glass of red wine after a stressful day? Don't give alcohol all the credit.

New research has revealed that the plant compound resveratrol, which is found in red wine, displays anti-stress effects by blocking the expression of an enzyme related to the control of stress in the brain, according to a University at Buffalo-led study.

The findings shed light onto how resveratrol impacts neurological processes. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, depression and anxiety disorders affect 16 and 40 million people respectively in the United States.

"Resveratrol may be an effective alternative to drugs for treating patients suffering from depression and anxiety disorders," says Ying Xu, MD, PhD, co-lead author and research associate professor in the UB School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

The study, published on July 15 in the journal Neuropharmacology, was also led by Xiaoxing Yin, PhD, professor at Xuzhou Medical University in China.

Protection Against Extreme Stress

Resveratrol, which has been linked to a number of health benefits, is a compound found in the skin and seeds of grapes and berries. While research has identified resveratrol to have antidepressant effects, the compound's relationship to phosphodiesterase 4 (PDE4), an enzyme influenced by the stress hormone corticosterone, was unknown.

Corticosterone regulates the body's response to stress. Too much stress, however, can lead to excessive amounts of the hormone circulating in the brain and, ultimately, the development of depression or other mental disorders.

These unknown physiological relationships make drug therapy complex. Current antidepressants instead focus on serotonin or noradrenaline function in the brain, but only one-third of patients with depression enter full remission in response to these medications, says Xu.

In a study on mice, researchers revealed that PDE4, induced by excessive amounts of corticosterone, causes depression- and anxiety-like behavior.

The enzyme lowers cyclic adenosine monophosphate -- a messenger molecule that signals physiological changes such as cell division, change, migration and death -- in the body, leading to physical alterations in the brain.

Resveratrol displayed neuroprotective effects against corticosterone by inhibiting the expression of PDE4. The research lays the groundwork for the use of the compound in novel antidepressants.

Although red wine contains resveratrol, consumption of alcohol carries various health risks, including addiction.

Evolution is actually a Sadie Hawkins dance, as new research shows females not only determine whether male animals develop bright colors, but also how fast new species develop.

Research led by David Reznick, a UC Riverside biology professor, used fish often seen in pet stores, like guppies and swordtails, to test a hypothesis proposed by David and Jean Zeh at the University of Nevada, Reno. They predicted that the way mothers nurture their young influences the evolution of male traits, and Reznick's team is the first to find that the prediction was correct.

A paper describing the research was published online today in Nature Communications.

Reznick was inspired to test the hypothesis while wandering the aisles of a pet store. Having spent more than a decade studying fish in the guppy family, he knew the ones in the store had a few things in common.

"The fish I saw that day all belong to the Poeciliidae family, which give birth to live young, rather than lay eggs. Some of them even have placentas, like mammals," Reznick said. "The ones offered for sale were only species with colorful males and all of those species had mothers that lack placentas. I wanted to know how having this type of mother might relate to the evolution of male traits."

To answer his question, the team constructed a family tree using the DNA from more than 170 species in the Poeciliidae family of freshwater fish. They then mapped male and female traits on to the tree, reconstructing how male and female traits evolved throughout the fish family.

For the fish without placentas, choosing a mate can be higher stakes.

"When mothers lack a placenta, they've already invested all they've got to give into the eggs prior to fertilization," Reznick said. "So, the mothers are picky about the males they choose."

In fish where the mothers do have a placenta, it's a different game. In these species the eggs are smaller, and the mother hasn't invested a lot in them yet. A mother with a placenta has the ability to choose the father after mating, by influencing which sperm fertilize the eggs or possibly by aborting eggs she doesn't want.

Analyzing the DNA tree of the fish family, the team found that the branches of the family tree with mothers who lack placentas are also those that give rise to the flashier males.

The team then investigated a second prediction by David and Jean Zeh: that animals with placentas would diverge faster from one species into two. Here, Reznick's team proved this prediction wrong.

Fish species with fancy males formed new species twice as fast as those with plain males. What this means is that in these fish, there is a connection between the way mothers nurture offspring, how they choose mates, and how fast their kind is destined to multiply into a new species.

Members of the international research team included Andrew Furness of the University of Hull in the U.K., Bart Pollux of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, Robert Meredith of Montclair State University in New Jersey, as well as UC Riverside's Mark Springer.

Though this analysis was performed using fish, Reznick says the underlying principles are broadly applicable throughout the animal kingdom. Many animals have evolved the ability to produce live young and many of these have evolved something like a placenta. He expects that the same connections between evolution of male and female traits and speciation rate are waiting to be discovered.

"I wasn't expecting to learn what we did about these connections between mothering and evolution, but I'm so pleased to have provided here a better understanding of how and why organisms evolve the way they do and how that evolution can affect the formation of new species," Reznick said.

Researchers have completed a successful clinical trial, managing to detect and image radioactive tracers used in PET and in SPECT scans at the same time, with the hope of enabling doctors to scan patients for abnormalities in shorter times while reducing the amount of radiation patients would be exposed to.

In today's technology, patients who might have life-threatening illnesses are required to undergo a number of tests such as a PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scan or a SPECT (Single-Photon Emission Computed Tomography) scan in order to look for a particular disease, or check if their organs are functioning properly respectively. Both PET and SPECT scanners require exposing the patient to a small amount of radiation, which enables devices to capture an image of the patient's internal organs that are then analyzed by medical specialists. PET scans detect gamma rays with a specific energy of 511 keV, while SPECT can only detect gamma rays at relatively lower energies because collimators used in SPECT become transparent for high energy gamma-rays. Performing separate PET and SPECT scans is both time consuming and exposes the patient to increased levels of radiation.

A team led by Gunma University Heavy Ion Medical Center Special Professor Takashi Nakano, a pioneer in heavy particle beam therapy in Japan, has been working to combine these procedures. They worked in collaboration with teams at Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU), led by Professor Tadayuki Takahashi, the National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology, led by Naoki Kawachi, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), led by Assistant Professor Shin Watanabe, and completed a successful clinical trial using a newly-developed imaging diagnosis device called a Compton camera that makes it possible to detect gamma rays in both low and high energy ranges.

This is the first time a research group has managed to move onto carrying out the procedure on human patients.

During the trial, patients were given with two of the most commonly used radioactive tracers in PET and in SPECT; 18F-FDG radioactive tracer?fludeoxyglucose? used in PET, and 99mTc-DMSA, or 2,3-dimercaptosuccinic acid used in SPECT. These tracers accumulate in the patient's liver and kidney after being consumed, where they emit concentrated amounts of gamma rays with differing energies. Using the Compton camera, the researchers were able to simultaneously create two-dimensional images from different radio isotopes of the patient's organs.

One of the characteristics of this medical camera is its adaptation of silicon/cadmium telluride (Si/CdTe), originally developed by Takahashi's team at Japan's space agency JAXA in order to study cosmic gamma rays. The silicon and cadmium telluride semiconductors are capable of accurately detecting gamma ray energies emitted from radioactive elements over a wider range of energies without the need of collimators.

A new image reconstruction algorithm for nearby objects was also developed by Kavli IPMU Project Assistant Professor Shinichiro Takeda, which analyzes the image data.

After several more trials, the researchers are optimistic that their imaging system will lead to new forms of medical analysis. Furthermore, it could help create completely new radioactive tracers. Details of their study were published online in Physics in Medicine and Biology on July 20.

New Rochelle, NY, July 25, 2019-- Group medical visits are exceptional methods delivering critical components of integrative health care for treating and reducing the risk of a wide variety of chronic diseases, particularly in underserved populations. A Special Focus Issue on Innovation in Group-Delivered Services is published in JACM, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers, dedicated to paradigm, practice, and policy advancing integrative health. Click here to read the Special Issue free on the JACM website through August 25, 2019.

The Special Issue was developed in partnership with Integrative Medicine for the Underserved (IM4US) and Centering Healthcare Institute. The issue was led by Guest Editors Paula Gardiner, MD, MPH, University of Massachusetts Medical School (Worcester), Maria Chao, DrPH, MPA, University of California San Francisco, and Marena Burnett, Centering Healthcare Institute (Boston, MA).

The Special Issue on Innovation in Group-Delivered Services includes two editorials, four commentaries, a systematic review and eight original research articles. The broad diversity of contexts that are conducive to review are featured, from applications in federally qualified health centers to integrative oncology, and with themes ranging from the growing movement for community acupuncture to a commentary exploring the special ingredient that group brings.

A broad-sweeping review by Gardiner and colleagues from University of Massachusetts Medical School and Boston Medical Center includes in-depth data from 55 unique published studies on the characteristics of medical group visits for multiple chronic health conditions. Integrative modalities are well-represented components with mindfulness, meditation, and yoga being the most common. Detailed findings are published in the article entitled "Characteristics and Components of Medical Group Visits for Chronic Health Conditions: A Systematic Scoping Review."

Researchers Inger Burnett-Zeigler et al., from Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University (Chicago, IL), coauthored the article "A Mindfulness-Based Intervention for Low-Income African American Women with Depressive Symptoms Delivered by an Experienced Instructor Versus a Novice Instructor." They describe a streamlined protocol for training staff at federally qualified health centers to provide mindfulness to patients and compare outcomes in groups led by an experienced instructor or an instructor who underwent streamlined training. They reported comparable positive outcomes on measures of depressive symptoms, stress, functioning, and well-being.

Can teaching kitchens be used to deliver an effective lifestyle program as part of shared medical appointments? The feasibility of this approach was the focus of an article by Theresa Stone, MD, et al. entitled "Fresh and Savory: Integrating Teaching Kitchens with Shared Medical Appointments." In this study, the teaching kitchen complemented other modalities, including physician consultations and mind-body exercises. Their findings led the researchers to suggest what such a weekly program could achieve to improve patient health and chronic disease risk.

Guest Editor Chao notes that "our editorial team was struck by the heterogeneity of integrative group visits for a range of health conditions, serving diverse patients across the life course and implemented in varied healthcare settings. A unifying theme is the potential for integrative group visits to address unmet needs of underserved and vulnerable patients. In many ways, group visits serve as a critical model towards integrative health equity."

JACM Editor-in-Chief John Weeks, johnweeks-integrator.com, Seattle, WA, states: "The fit of the group delivery model with addressing both what ails us as a people and how adults learn and change provokes wonder - as I do in my editorial - whether a reformed healthcare system will be characterized by putting group services closer to the center rather than the periphery of care planning."

Engaging a wider range of resources to connect patients with organizations within their community can help transform healthcare and improve overall well-being, according to new research published in the Journal of Business Research by faculty at Florida Atlantic University's College of Business.

The article, "Transforming Community Well-being Through Patients' Lived Experiences," introduces the concept of "patient ecosystem management" (PEM), which the authors describe as an organizational process that focuses on treating patients differently in terms of assessing, managing and expanding resources to achieve patient health and well-being goals.

"We believe more time needs to be spent, not just by physicians who are time-crunched as it is, but to really develop a team approach to identify what the issues are for individual patients and to connect them to a series of resources outside of maybe the hospital and inside their lived world in order to give them the resources they need to improve," said Andrew Gallan, Ph.D., lead author of the article and an assistant professor in FAU's marketing department.

Gallan and his co-authors write that a patient-centered model of care, accepted as a policy imperative in the United States, the U.K. and western Europe, could be expanded further, beyond the patient and families, healthcare providers, the community, peers and technology providers. Healthcare executives should consider employing and involving non-healthcare stakeholders and support services within communities, they argue, to help expand patient ecosystems to draw on more resources to improve condition management.

Gallan employs qualitative and quantitative methods to conduct his research, analyzing big databases of patient surveys and patients comments, shadowing patients and providers and conducting observations to get to the "truth of the patient perspective."

Training healthcare professionals to work as interdisciplinary teams to understand, assess, and make use of patient ecosystems could improve patients' lived experiences in hospitals, at home and at work, he said.

The researchers offer clinicians and other healthcare practitioners a set of practical guidelines centered on a structured framework of strategies and mechanisms used to make connections within existing ecosystems of individual patients and expand those ecosystems to provide more patient-relevant care within the community-enabled setting.

"Healthcare practitioners can rethink traditional approaches used to treat frequent medical conditions," the article states. "Examples include incorporating video consultations with physicians (or e-visits) into a standard sequence of in-person clinic appointments for diabetes patients; inviting engaged caregivers to share experiences with other patients and caregivers in the same community; designing activities where multiple patients are invited to participate simultaneously, such as midwife-facilitated pregnancy patient group meets; and utilizing technology and distribution networks to enhance access and adherence to medications."

Their framework requires health staff sensitivity training to assess a patient's experience and complete knowledge of community resources. Patients, caregivers and clinicians need to be engaged, while the role of others, such as community health workers, may need to evolve. These workers must be equipped with sufficient knowledge to deal with a variety of people, symptoms, and resources.

With every patient presenting a different set of needs and individual situations, healthcare organizations struggle to develop a protocol that allows them be efficient in what they do, but also have customizable components so they can address individual patient needs. At the same time, they're faced with the challenges of how to improve the health of their community.

"So, how do we make that connection?" Gallan said. "This paper is an attempt to help them understand that some investments are needed. We provide some examples and some models to organizations to say if this is the direction you want to go, it's not like you have to reinvent the wheel. There are organizations that are doing this successfully, and there are some good models for you."

As embryos develop, they follow predetermined patterns of tissue folding, so that individuals of the same species end up with nearly identically shaped organs and very similar body shapes.

MIT scientists have now discovered a key feature of embryonic tissue that helps explain how this process is carried out so faithfully each time. In a study of fruit flies, they found that the reproducibility of tissue folding is generated by a network of proteins that connect like a fishing net, creating many alternative pathways that tissues can use to fold the right way.

"What we found is that there's a lot of redundancy in the network," says Adam Martin, an MIT associate professor of biology and the senior author of the study. "The cells are interacting and connecting with each other mechanically, but you don't see individual cells taking on an all-important role. This means that if one cell gets damaged, other cells can still connect to disparate parts of the tissue."

To uncover these network features, Martin worked with Jörn Dunkel, an MIT associate professor of physical applied mathematics and an author of the paper, to apply an algorithm normally used by astronomers to study the structure of galaxies.

Hannah Yevick, an MIT postdoc, is the lead author of the study, which appears today in Developmental Cell. Graduate student Pearson Miller is also an author of the paper.

A safety net

During embryonic development, tissues change their shape through a process known as morphogenesis. One important way tissues change shape is to fold, which allows flat sheets of embryonic cells to become tubes and other important shapes for organs and other body parts. Previous studies in fruit flies have shown that even when some of these embryonic cells are damaged, sheets can still fold into their correct shapes.

"This is a process that's fairly reproducible, and so we wanted to know what makes it so robust," Martin says.

In this study, the researchers focused on the process of gastrulation, during which the embryo is reorganized from a single-layered sphere to a more complex structure with multiple layers. This process, and other morphogenetic processes similar to fruit fly tissue folding, also occur in human embryos. The embryonic cells involved in gastrulation contain in their cytoplasm proteins called myosin and actin, which form cables and connect at junctions between cells to form a network across the tissue. Martin and Yevick had hypothesized that the network of cell connectivity might play a role in the robustness of the tissue folding, but until now, there was no good way to trace the connections of the network.

To achieve that, Martin's lab joined forces with Dunkel, who studies the physics of soft surfaces and flowing matter -- for example, wrinkle formation and patterns of bacterial streaming. For this study, Dunkel had the idea to apply a mathematical procedure that can identify topological features of a three-dimensional structure, analogous to ridges and valleys in a landscape. Astronomers use this algorithm to identify galaxies, and in this case, the researchers used it to trace the actomyosin networks across and between the cells in a sheet of tissue.

"Once you have the network, you can apply standard methods from network analysis -- the same kind of analysis that you would apply to streets or other transport networks, or the blood circulation network, or any other form of network," Dunkel says.

Among other things, this kind of analysis can reveal the structure of the network and how efficiently information flows along it. One important question is how well a network adapts if part of it gets damaged or blocked. The MIT team found that the actomyosin network contains a great deal of redundancy -- that is, most of the "nodes" of the network are connected to many other nodes.

This built-in redundancy is analogous to a good public transit system, where if one bus or train line goes down, you can still get to your destination. Because cells can generate mechanical tension along many different pathways, they can fold the right way even if many of the cells in the network are damaged.

"If you and I are holding a single rope, and then we cut it in the middle, it would come apart. But if you have a net, and cut it in some places, it still stays globally connected and can transmit forces, as long as you don't cut all of it," Dunkel says.

Folding framework

The researchers also found that the connections between cells preferentially organize themselves to run in the same direction as the furrow that forms in the early stages of folding.

"We think this is setting up a frame around which the tissue will adopt its shape," Martin says. "If you prevent the directionality of the connections, then what happens is you can still get folding but it will fold along the wrong axis."

Although this study was done in fruit flies, similar folding occurs in vertebrates (including humans) during the formation of the neural tube, which is the precursor to the brain and spinal cord. Martin now plans to apply the techniques he used in fruit flies to see if the actomyosin network is organized the same way in the neural tube of mice. Defects in the closure of the neural tube can lead to birth defects such as spina bifida.

"We would like to understand how it goes wrong," Martin says. "It's still not clear whether it's the sealing up of the tube that's problematic or whether there are defects in the folding process."

Researchers in cognitive psychology at HSE University have experimentally demonstrated that the colors and orientations of objects are stored and processed independently in working memory. However, it is easier for a person to remember these features when they belong to a single object: for example, it is easier for a person to remember and understand one graph on which both parameters are indicated (with a color and a line shape, for example), than two different graphs in which the two parameters are shown separately.

The results of the experiment were published in Acta Psychologica journal.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691818305511

Studies of working memory have been conducted since the last century. Working memory allows us to store and process information for a short period of time. A study by Steven Luck and Edward Vogel showed that it is possible to retain information about only 4 colors or orientations in visual working memory at one time, and that this information is stored in a bound way, i.e., changes in the quantity and complexity of objects' features do not affect the storage capacity of visual working memory. However, subsequent studies have shown that working memory can store features independently of each other.

At HSE University, a team comprised of Yuri Markovhttps://www.hse.ru/en/staff/ymarkov, Natalia Tiurinahttps://www.hse.ru/en/staff/ntyurina and Igor Utochkinhttps://www.hse.ru/en/staff/utochkin, studies the processes of visual perception at HSE's Laboratory for Cognitive Researchhttps://cogres.hse.ru/en/.

'In this study, we wanted to learn how information is stored in working memory, in particular, whether there are separate "shelves" for storing color and information about the orientation of an object. We wanted to see how this storage manifests itself, firstly, when the color and orientation belong to one object, and secondly, when they belong to different objects,' said Yury Markov, a research assistant at the Laboratory for Cognitive Research at HSE.

The team conducted three experiments to study this problem. Participants were asked to memorize and then recall the color and orientation of objects. In the first experiment, the color and orientation were features of a single object (e.g., a colored triangle); in the second experiment, these features pertained to different objects (e.g., a colored circle and a white triangle); and in the third experiment, the features pertained to different objects, but they were superimposed onto one another (e.g., a colored circle over a white triangle).

In all three experiments, participants were offered various sets of objects: for example, objects with different colors and orientations, those with the same color and different orientations, those with different colors and the same orientation, or those with the same color and the same orientation. The results showed that when objects shared one of the features, it did not help subjects memorize another feature. This suggests that features are stored independently in working memory.

However, the researchers observed a decrease in precision when subjects were asked to recall the colors of circles and the orientation of triangles as opposed to recalling both features of a single object.

'These results suggest that working memory is most likely structured hierarchically: objects are stored at one level, while their features are stored at a different level. This makes memorizing information pertaining to a single object easier,' Yury Markov noted.

According to Markov, one of the fields in which these results could be used is design and usability. As such, developers of online retail sites are advised to present information in one unit (in other words, rather than placing an icon near a product about a discount along with a 'Buy' button, provide a 'Buy' button, but in a different color). Another recommendation would be to use fewer navigation tools (because even if a person can orient themselves quickly by a single product feature, such as color, this does not reduce the difficulty in orienting oneself by another attribute, such as the size of certain site elements).