Brain

Mackerel sharks (Lamniformes) are a group consisting of some of the most iconic sharks we know, including the mako shark (the fastest shark in the world), the infamous great white shark and Megalodon, the biggest predatory shark that has ever roamed the world's oceans. An international team of researchers around Patrick L. Jambura from the University of Vienna found a unique feature in the teeth of these apex predators, which allowed them to trace back the origin of this group to a small benthic shark from the Middle Jurassic (165 mya). Their study was recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Similar to humans, shark teeth are composed of two mineralized structures: a hard shell of hypermineralized tissue (in humans enamel, in sharks enameloid) and a dentine core. Depending on the structure of the dentine we distinguish between two different types: orthodentine and osteodentine.

Orthodentine has a very compact appearance and is similar to the dentine we can find in human teeth. In shark teeth, orthodentine is confined to the tooth crown. In contrast, the other dentine type is spongious in appearance and resembles real bone and therefore is called osteodentine. It can be found in the root, anchoring the tooth to the jaw and in some species also in the tooth crown where it supports the orthodentine.

Using high resolution CT scans, Patrick L. Jambura and his colleagues examined the tooth composition of the great white shark and its relatives and found a peculiar condition of the teeth of members of this group: the osteodentine of the roots intrudes into the crown and replaces the orthodentine there completely, making it the only type of dentine being present. This condition is not known from any other shark, which all possess orthodentine to some degree and thus it is confined to members of this group.

Another species that was examined was the fossil shark Palaeocarcharias stromeri, which is well-represented by complete skeletons from the famous 150 million year old Solnhofen Plattenkalks of South Germany. The oldest find of this species is from the Middle Jurassic (165 million years ago) and it didn't have much in common with today's mackerel sharks. Palaeocarcharias was a small sluggish benthic shark, not exceeding lengths of more than a metre and seemingly hunted small fish in shallow waters. To this day, its affiliation has been a riddle to scientists, since its body shape resembles a carpet shark, while its fang like teeth are similar to mackerel sharks. The examination of the tooth microstructure yielded the presence of the same unique tooth composition that is found only in great white sharks and their relatives. The shared tooth histology is a strong indicator that this small inconspicuous shark gave rise to one of the most iconic shark lineages that includes giants like the extinct Megalodon or the living great white shark.

"Orthodentine is known for almost all vertebrates - from fish to mammals, including all modern sharks, except for the mackerel sharks. The discovery of this unique tooth structure in the fossil shark Palaeocarcharias strongly indicates that we found the oldest known ancestor of the great white shark and shows that even this charismatic giant shark started on a shoestring" states Patrick L. Jambura.

What The Study Did:National registry data in Sweden were used in this study that assessed the risk of developing cancer in children and young adults with congenital heart disease compared with healthy people in the general population from birth to age 41.

Authors: Zacharias Mandalenakis, M.D., Ph.D., F.E.S.C., of the University of Gothenburg in Gothenburg, Sweden, is the corresponding author.

(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.6762)

Editor's Note: The article includes funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.

When the first full-length movie made with the advanced, three-color process of Technicolor premiered in 1935, The New York Times declared "it produced in the spectator all the excitement of standing upon a peak ... and glimpsing a strange, beautiful and unexpected new world."

Technicolor forever changed how cameras -- and people -- saw and experienced the world around them. Today, there is a new precipice - this one, offering views of a polarized world.

Polarization, the direction in which light vibrates, is invisible to the human eye (but visible to some species of shrimp and insects). But it provides a great deal of information about the objects with which it interacts. Cameras that see polarized light are currently used to detect material stress, enhance contrast for object detection, and analyze surface quality for dents or scratches.

However, like the early color cameras, current-generation polarization-sensitive cameras are bulky. Moreover, they often rely on moving parts and are costly, severely limiting the scope of their potential application.

Now, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a highly compact, portable camera that can image polarization in a single shot. The miniature camera -- about the size of a thumb -- could find a place in the vision systems of autonomous vehicles, onboard planes or satellites to study atmospheric chemistry, or be used to detect camouflaged objects.

The research is published in Science.

"This research is game-changing for imaging," said Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at SEAS and senior author of the paper. "Most cameras can typically only detect the intensity and color of light but can't see polarization. This camera is a new eye on reality, allowing us to reveal how light is reflected and transmitted by the world around us."

"Polarization is a feature of light that is changed upon reflection off a surface," said Paul Chevalier, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS and co-author of the study. "Based on that change, polarization can help us in the 3D reconstruction of an object, to estimate its depth, texture and shape, and to distinguish man-made objects from natural ones, even if they're the same shape and color."

To unlock that powerful world of polarization, Capasso and his team harnessed the potential of metasurfaces, nanoscale structures that interact with light at wavelength size-scales.

"If we want to measure the light's full polarization state, we need to take several pictures along different polarization directions," said Noah Rubin, first author of the paper and graduate student in the Capasso Lab. "Previous devices either used moving parts or sent light along multiple paths to acquire the multiple images, resulting in bulky optics. A newer strategy uses specially patterned camera pixels, but this approach does not measure the full polarization state and requires a non-standard imaging sensor. In this work, we were able to take all of the optics needed and integrate them in a single, simple device with a metasurface."

Using a new understanding how polarized light interacts with objects, the researchers designed a metasurface that uses an array of subwavelength spaced nanopillars to direct light based on its polarization. The light then forms four images, each one showing a different aspect of the polarization. Taken together, these give a full snapshot of polarization at every pixel.

The device is about two centimeters in length and no more complicated than a camera on a smartphone. With an attached lens and protective case, the device is about the size of a small lunch box. The researchers tested the camera to show defects in injection-molded plastic objects, took it outside to film the polarization off car windshields and even took selfies to demonstrate how a polarization camera can visualize the 3D contours of a face.

"This technology could be integrated into existing imaging systems, such as the one in your cell phone or car, enabling the widespread adoption of polarization imaging and new applications previously unforeseen," said Rubin.

"This research opens an exciting new direction for camera technology with unprecedented compactness, allowing us to envision applications in atmospheric science, remote sensing, facial recognition, machine vision and more," said Capasso.

MORGANTOWN, W.Va.--Medications attach to the proteins in our bodies the way spacecrafts dock into the International Space Station. Describing that process in detail can reveal a lot about how the medications work--and what form new medications should take.

Researchers at West Virginia University have mapped the crystal structure of a protein that resides in our cells and determined--for the first time--how a drug latches onto it. The findings appear in Communications Chemistry, a Nature research journal.

The study--funded by the West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute--centered on a protein called "mitoNEET." MitoNEET inhabits the outer membrane of our mitochondria, which act like power plants that energize our cells.

"MitoNEET is a novel therapeutic target for metabolic-based diseases and could possibly lead to disease-modifying treatments for Alzheimer's disease and stroke," said Werner Geldenhuys, an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy and School of Medicine. He and his colleagues--including Aaron Robart, an assistant professor in the WVU School of Medicine, John Hollander, assistant dean for professional programs in the WVU School of Medicine, and Timothy Long, an associate professor in the Marshall University School of Pharmacy--carried out the project.

"This protein has been implicated in a lot of diseases that are very tough to tackle: things like diabetes, stroke, heart disease," Robart said. "We don't actually know what the protein does yet, but it hangs out in proximity to the powerhouse of the cell, and all of these diseases have an energy-flow theme to them."

To explore the role mitoNEET plays in our energy processes, the researchers isolated mitoNEET from both bacterial overexpression and animal models. Then they synthesized 11 molecules similar to furosemide--a common diuretic sold under the brand name LASIX--and exposed the mitoNEET to them.

After the molecules bonded to the mitoNEET, the researchers built atom-by-atom maps of the pairings. They remotely controlled Argonne National Laboratory's Advanced Photon Source--which bombards samples with ultra-bright, high-energy X-rays--to reveal precisely how the molecules came together.

The team discovered that the molecules docked into a cluster of iron and sulfur atoms that made up part of the protein. Raisa Nuñez, an undergraduate participating in the Research Apprenticeship Program, collected preliminary structural data. "This highlights that significant scientific discovery can come at any career level," Robart said.

"These findings are of importance as they allow us to continue to understand the role played by mitochondria and bioenergetics in many disease states," Hollander said. "The modulation of mitochondrial function through targeted therapeutics may be a critical avenue of drug discovery."

Understanding mitoNEET's cellular function could improve the performance of drugs that work by altering the protein's activity. For example, adding an extra oxygen group to a drug's molecular structure could dramatically tighten its bond to mitoNEET and eliminate unintended binding to other cellular proteins.

The potential upshot for patients who take the drug? Better symptom relief.

"The success of this project really illustrates how approaches that are considered basic science can provide considerable insight into clinical problems," said Michael Schaller, who chairs the School of Medicine's Department of Biochemistry. "It also demonstrates the power of tackling problems as teams consisting of members with very different expertise."

In students' first year of university, poor diet is linked to unhealthy weight gain with males affected more than females. The research publishing July 3 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Kayleigh Beaudry and colleagues at Brock University, Canada also suggests that sex-specific strategies and interventions could improve dietary habits during the move to university.

Around the world, rates of overweight and obesity are rising. A critical time for weight gain is late adolescence, when young people are settling into life routines and adopting lifestyle habits that can sustain into adulthood. Diet quality has been shown to decrease in the first year of university, which is associated with adverse health consequences.

Food frequency questionnaires along with height, weight, waist and hip circumference and body composition were collected at the beginning and end of the first year of university from 229 female and 72 male first year Canadian university students. The researchers found that diet quality decreased over the year and alcohol intake increased, especially in males. Males, in particular, had significantly increased their consumption of donuts, fried chicken, beer and liquor, alongside a decrease in healthy food options such as vegetables. Both male and female students gained a significant amount of body weight and BMI, with males gaining more than females. Mean weight increase was 3.8kg for males and 1.8kg for females, with BMI increasing by mean 1.2kg/m2 for males and 0.7kg/m2 for females, and waist circumference increasing by mean 2.7cm in males and 1.1cm in females.

Two limitations of the study are the use of self-reporting questionnaires (which may not accurately reflect what students actually ate) and a possible sampling bias with a self-selecting sample (since students chose to participate). The researchers believe future work should focus on mitigating negative dietary changes through nutrition education and the development of sex-specific interventions to improve dietary habits during the transition to university life.

The authors add: "Results from our study demonstrate that young male and female students undergo unfavorable and differential changes to their dietary intakes during the transition to university life. These changes reflect a poorer quality diet accompanied by increases in body weight, BMI, waist to hip ratio and body fat. Sex-specific changes were evident for nutrition indicating that males' diets were lower in quality, and body composition changes indicated that males experienced more adverse changes by gaining more body weight, waist circumference, fat and lean mass than females."

July 3, 2019--(BRONX, NY)--In a study published online today in Nature, researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine describe the first complete wiring diagram of the nervous system of an animal, the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, used by scientists worldwide as a model organism. The study includes adults of both sexes and reveals substantial differences between them.

The findings mark a major milestone in the field of "connectomics," the effort to map the myriad neural connections in a brain, brain region, or nervous system to find the specific nerve connections responsible for particular behaviors.

"Structure is always central in biology," said study leader Scott Emmons, Ph.D., professor of genetics and in the Dominick P. Purpura Department of Neuroscience and the Siegfried Ullmann Chair in Molecular Genetics at Einstein. "The structure of DNA revealed how genes work, and the structure of proteins revealed how enzymes function. Now, the structure of the nervous system is revealing how animals behave and how neural connections go wrong to cause disease."

Researchers have hypothesized that some neurological and psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and autism, are "connectopathies," that is, problems caused by "faulty wiring." "This hypothesis is strengthened by the finding that several mental disorders are associated with mutations in genes that are thought to determine connectivity," said Dr. Emmons. "Connectomics has the potential to help us understand the basis of some mental illnesses, possibly suggesting avenues for therapy."

A Model Organism

Because C. elegans is so tiny--adults are just one millimeter long and have only about 1,000 cells--its simple nervous system of a few hundred neurons (302 in the hermaphrodite/female sex, 385 in the male) makes it one of the best animal models for understanding the billions-times-more-complex human brain. It was also the first multi-cellular organism to have its entire genome sequenced.

Dr. Emmons' study builds on the groundbreaking work of the late British biologist Sydney Brenner, who in 2002 shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his C. elegans research. Dr. Brenner's laboratory, in an effort led by laboratory member John White, published the first map of the C. elegans nervous system in 1986, after painstakingly analyzing neural structures visible on thousands of serial electron micrographs of the roundworm. Each image consisted of a cross-sectional "slice" a thousand times thinner than a human hair. He and his colleagues manually "connected the dots" between each slice, linking the structures from one image to another to create detailed representations of the nerves and the 5,000 or so connections (synapses) among them.

The tour de force effort by Drs. Brenner and White, 20 years in the making, launched the field of connectomics and established the roundworm as an essential animal model for the study of biology and human disease. But their map, informally called "The Mind of a Worm," skipped large portions of the worm's body and included just one of the sexes--the hermaphrodite, or female--not the male.

Taking Up the Baton

For the new study, Dr. Emmons' team analyzed new roundworm electron micrographs as well as Dr. Brenner's old ones and pieced them together using specially developed software to create complete wiring diagrams of entire adult animals of both C. elegans sexes. The diagrams include all connections between individual neurons, connections from neurons to the worm's muscles and other tissues, such as the gut and skin, and synapses between the muscle cells, with estimates of the strength of those synapses.

"While the synaptic pathways in the two sexes are substantially similar, a number of the synapses differ in strength, providing a basis for understanding sex-specific behaviors," said Dr. Emmons. The primary sex differences pertain to reproductive functions: in vulval and uterine muscles and the motor neurons that control them in the hermaphrodite; and in the large number of additional neurons, sex muscles, and connections in the tail that generate the circuits for copulation in the male. But beyond these, a surprising number of synapses between neurons in central pathways shared by both sexes also appear to differ considerably in strength.

"These connected networks serve as starting points for deciphering the neural control of C. elegans behavior," said Dr. Emmons. "Since the roundworm nervous system contains many of the same molecules as the human nervous system, what we learn about the former can help us understand the latter."

Dr. Emmons is currently studying how the roundworm connectome is encoded by its genome.

Long before Lascaux paintings, humans engraved abstract motifs on stones, shells or egg shells. the earliest are 540,000 years old. For the archaeologists who discovered these objects, the question is whether they are the result of unpurposive behaviour, the simple desire of imitating nature or endowed with meaning. An unprecedented collaboration between archaeologists* and researchers in cognitive neuroimaging** from the CNRS, university of Bordeaux and CEA is providing answers to this question for the first time. These prehistoric abstract patterns are processed by the same brain areas that recognize objects. They also activate a region of the left hemisphere that is well known in the processing of written language. The results of this interdisciplinary collaboration reinforce the hypothesis that our ancestors attributed meaning to their tracings, perhaps even symbolic. They are published in Royal Society Open Science on 3 July 2019.

KANSAS CITY, MO - Thanks to super-resolution microscopy, scientists have now been able to unambiguously identify physical associations between human chromosomes. The findings have brought to light a new understanding to a curious observation first made more than 50 years ago.

The Stowers Institute for Medical Research scientists probed these physical connections between five of the chromosomes in the human karyotype in a report recently published online in the Journal of Cell Biology.

"Inter-chromosome connections may prove to be an integral and pervasive governing feature of chromosome organization in many types of human cells," says Stowers Investigator Jennifer Gerton, Ph.D., who led the research team that investigated the basis and function of these linkages.

The linkages were detected during the course of research on the organization of the human genome. Tamara Potapova, Ph.D., a research specialist in the Gerton Lab, collaborated with Stowers Microscopy and Computational Biology teams to use structural image super-resolution microscopy (SIM) technology, which visualizes biological samples at nanoscale resolution, and DNA sequencing analysis in these studies.

Potapova, first author of the paper, explains that she and her colleagues were surprised when the SIM images consistently revealed connections between five of the twenty-three human chromosomes. "We knew there were points of contact between duplicated sister copies of chromosomes, but not between heterologous chromosomes," she says. "I was fascinated by why the same five chromosomes displayed connections in many different cell types."

Potapova located several previously published reports of possible inter-chromosomal linkages. Most of these observations were made during cytogenetic investigations, long before the advent of super-resolution microscopy methods.

An early observation of inter-chromosome linkages was published in the journal Lancet in 1961 by the British geneticist Malcolm A. Ferguson-Smith. Because of the very limited resolution of microscopy at that time, the connections were barely visible to Ferguson-Smith, now an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge. However, in the Lancet paper, he wrote that some of the chromosomes that he observed in his cytogenetic studies seemed to be linked by their short arms like a pair of "acrobats holding hands."

The Stowers researchers realized that the five chromosomes that displayed inter-chromosomal connections were linked together via a single shared sequence, the ribosomal DNA (rDNA). This sequence encodes the ribosomal RNA (rRNA) molecules essential to the formation of ribosomes, the protein manufacturing factories of cells. These sequences are near the ends of five different human chromosomes and can act as the "hands" of the acrobats, holding the different chromosomes together.

The researchers also detected rDNA connections in many different human cell types. rDNA links were pervasive in both healthy and diseased tissue, indicating they are not pathological, says Potapova.

In the paper, the Stowers researchers and their co-authors from Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
propose that the structural basis of rDNA connections between chromosomes is topological interlockings, or catenations.

The interlocking could occur via a combination of two factors. The first factor is intense transcriptional activity in the nucleolus, the site of ribosome biogenesis in the cell nucleus. The second factor is the presence of strands of rDNA sequences from different heterologous chromosomes in the nucleolus. Because of their close proximity in the crowded environment of the nucleolus, strands of rDNA sequences can bump against each other.

These strands can become interlinked by the actions of the enzyme topoisomerase II. To eliminate supercoiling stress due to high levels of transcription, topoisomerase II must constantly break and rejoin DNA strands. In the paper, the researchers propose that the enzyme could entangle strands from the rDNA regions on two different chromosomes, thereby creating the connections.

The researchers also determined that in addition to forming rDNA connections, topoisomerase II ensures that rDNA connections between chromosomes are resolved when chromosomes divide. Besides topoisomerase II, the research team identified other factors that modulate the connections. Factors that promote the transcription of rDNA increase connections, including the c-Myc gene, a global regulator of ribosome biogenesis and protein synthesis, and the upstream binding factor (UBF) transcription factor, which coats the rDNA linkages.

The research findings could provide clues about the origins of the chromosomal fusions that lead to Robertsonian translocations, the most common chromosomal abnormality in humans. Robertsonian translocations are fusions between two chromosomes that contain rDNA. The proximity provided by the connections may increase the likelihood that these chromosomes end up fused together if a break occurs in the DNA. Robertsonian translocations can lead to infertility and trisomies such as Down syndrome.

The Gerton Lab continues to investigate whether other regions of the genome engage in inter-chromosomal connections. Gerton says "The results from these studies have unveiled a new type of chromosome-chromosome interaction. Now we want to know if regions in addition to the rDNA can engage in these types of interaction using similar mechanisms."

Other study contributors include Jay R. Unruh, Ph.D., Zulin Yu, Ph.D., and Hua Li, Ph.D., from the Stowers Institute, Giulia Rancati, Ph.D., from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore, and Martha R. Stampfer, Ph.D., from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Lay Summary of Findings

Recent research from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research solves a mystery to a half-century-old observation of connections between particular human chromosomes. In an article recently published in the Journal of Cell Biology, the research team led by Stowers Investigator Jennifer Gerton, Ph.D. uncovers how the connections might be built.

Using super-resolution microscopy, first author Tamara Potapova, PhD, and collaborators determined that these inter-chromosomal linkages are composed of ribosomal DNA, a sequence shared between the connected chromosomes. The findings suggest that the connections are controlled by the proximity of the chromosomes in three-dimensional space and their transcription, which together allow chromosomes to bump into each other and become interlocked. The connections were detected in many kinds of cells, indicating they are a normal type of chromosome-chromosome interaction. However, they could provide clues about the origins of chromosomal fusions associated with infertility and developmental disorders in humans.

The capacity of the human central nervous system to regenerate after injury or illness is limited, and the resulting functional impairments carry a vast societal and personal burden. In glaucoma, degeneration of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) - the axons of which form the optic nerve connecting the retina to the brain - leads to permanent blindness; there is currently no effective treatment for RGC degeneration. Now, University of Nebraska Medical Center researcher Iqbal Ahmad and colleagues show that human RGCs can be regenerated in an in vitro setting helped by lessons learned in rodent models. The discovery is detailed in the journal Development.

"This finding could lead to new methods of screening for drugs and genes impacted by glaucoma to help treat and possibly reverse vision loss in people suffering from the disease," said Dr. Ahmad, a professor in the department of ophthalmology and visual sciences at UNMC.

RGCs are key in sending messages to the brain through a series of synapses and connections that tell us what the eye sees. In people who suffer from glaucoma, it's the degeneration of these cells that lead to loss of sight, Dr. Ahmad said.

Dr. Ahmad and his team of investigators found that when the mTOR signaling pathway, present in all cell types and essential for cell survival, is activated in RGCs the cells begin to regenerate and thrive. The researchers used a microfluidic chamber system to see how axons regenerated after axotomy.

Dr. Ahmad has spent 25 years studying the stem cell approach to understand and treat glaucoma, which is called a silent robber of vision because it strikes without warning or any noticeable symptoms. Glaucoma is the second leading cause of irreversible blindness and affects more than 3 million people in the United States and 60 million people worldwide.

The significance of this work, Dr. Ahmad said, is that it is done using human adult pluripotent stem cells, whereas previous work was done only in rats and mice. While those animal models provided insight into better understanding the disease progression of glaucoma, research using human RGCs will translate more readily when it comes to potential drug and gene therapies, he said. His lab has already applied for a patent on the technology that shows how RGCs can be regenerated.

"We are hopeful this process will bring us one step closer to recapturing sight in those patients who suffer from vision loss because of glaucoma," he said.

With every week that a pregnancy continues past term (37 weeks), the risk of stillbirth increases, according to an analysis of more than 15 million pregnancies led by Queen Mary University of London.

The results, published in the journal PLOS Medicine, also included a small but significantly increased risk of stillbirth in mothers who continued their pregnancy to 41 weeks' gestation (when women are routinely offered induction of labour), compared to those who delivered at 40 weeks.

The researchers say that women who are 41 weeks pregnant should not be alarmed, as the risk is low - equivalent to one additional stillbirth for every 1,449 pregnancies, compared to delivering at 40 weeks.

Compared to White women, Black women at term were also found to be 1.5 to 2 times more likely to suffer stillbirth at all gestational ages.

Lead researcher Professor Shakila Thangaratinam from Queen Mary University of London said: "While there is an additional risk of stillbirth at 41 weeks, compared to 40 weeks, it is small. Women who prefer not to have medical interventions such as induction of labour may therefore acknowledge this small additional risk, and choose to wait until 41 weeks so that they have more time to go into labour naturally. Meanwhile, other women may prefer to have discussions with their healthcare providers on induction after 40 weeks. So this is all about helping women make informed decisions on timing of delivery."

More than 3,000 babies are stillborn every year in the UK - a third of these are term babies (37 weeks or beyond) who were considered to be 'healthy' prior to their death. Prolonged pregnancy is a known risk factor for stillbirth and women are routinely offered induction of labour after 41 weeks' gestation. This recommendation is based on evidence of increased stillbirth risk beyond 41 weeks. However, one in three women with a stillbirth at term loses her baby before this period. The magnitude of this risk is not routinely communicated due to a previous lack of robust evidence.

The researchers have now analysed data from 13 separate studies in the UK, US, Denmark and Norway, which included 15,124,027 pregnancies, 17,830 stillbirths and 2,348 newborn deaths.

Despite the stillbirth risk figures, delivery before 41 weeks did not increase the risk of newborn death (defined as a death during the first 28 days of life) - the risk was unchanged for births between 38 and 41 weeks of gestation. The risk increased by 87 per cent for deliveries at 42 weeks' gestation compared to 41 weeks.

Professor Thangaratinam added: "This is the largest study of its kind, and finally provides precise estimates of potential risks of stillbirth. Now that we understand the extent to which stillbirth risks increase with each week of pregnancy, we should be incorporating this information in all discussions around delivery plans in pregnant women at term.

"We were surprised to see how much poorer pregnancy outcomes were for Black women - they were up to twice more likely to experience stillbirth than White women. Healthcare professionals need to take these added risks into account when developing care plans for these women."

Limitations of the study include variations in the definitions of low risk pregnancy, the wide time-span of the studies, loss of data due to exclusion of studies that did not provide stillbirth estimates in weekly intervals, and potential confounders affecting the outcome.

(TORONTO, Canada - July 2, 2019) - With concussions seeming more common than ever before, researchers at Toronto Rehabilitation Institute - University Health Network, set out to answer the question, Are we looking at a true epidemic, or just better recognition?

By embarking on the largest-scale study on concussions ever undertaken in Canada, the researchers discovered that 150,000 of Ontarians (1.2% of province's population) are diagnosed with a concussion each year. That's almost twice as high as previously recorded, and may represent a closer estimate of the true picture of concussion in Ontario.

Their findings were published the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation.

"Past research has looked at the incidence of concussion by examining a particular population; cause of injury; or use a single reporting source, such as records from the Emergency Department. This can under-represent estimates of the real incidence of concussion," says lead author, Laura Langer.

"Our study revealed concussion rates that are almost double what has been previously reported, and highlights the critical importance of looking at everyone who sought medical attention for their concussion."

These more accurate estimates support the importance ongoing awareness around concussion symptoms and management, and the need for more specialized concussion clinics near populations that need them the most.

WATCH OUR VIDEO: Learn more about our ground-breaking research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJcCd8QINvU&feature=youtu.be

Concussions in Ontario - who is at risk?

By leveraging the ICES Data Repository - a province-wide archive that integrates multiple clinical and administrative health databases - the team captured an unprecedented, comprehensive, view of concussion rates in Ontario between 2008 and 2016.

Here is what they found:

About 150,000 Ontarians experience a concussion each year

Children under 5 years old experience the highest rate of concussion among all Ontarians

Adults over 65 - especially women - experience a higher rate of concussion than younger adults

26% all of concussions are diagnosed in the summer

Rural communities experience a higher rate of concussion than non-rural communities

Though most concussions are diagnosed in the Emergency Department, more and more patients with concussion symptoms are visiting their own doctors

Epidemic or better recognition?

According to the team, the high rate of reported concussions is likely influenced by a number of factors, including increased public awareness from athletes and the media, new mandatory reporting laws, and the release of numerous diagnostic and management guidelines for physicians and patients.

Future directions

Access to the ICES Data Repository presents a unique opportunity for Ontario to be a world leader in concussion care and research.

As patients increasingly look to their own doctors for a diagnosis, the researchers identify a need to continue raising awareness about causes and symptoms, and a growing obligation to educate doctors on concussion care.

Furthermore, since about 1 in 7 Ontarians with a concussion will experience persistent, post-concussive symptoms, it's critical to develop tools to identify who will face long-term problems, so we can individualize early treatments to prevent long-term complications.

The study was funded by, and conducted in collaboration with, Ontario Neurotrauma Foundation. Toronto Rehabilitation Institute is also financially supported by the Toronto Rehab Foundation.

This study made use of de-identified data from the ICES Data Repository, which is managed by ICES, a non-profit research institute that uses population-based health information to produce knowledge on a broad range of health care issues.

As the authors posit, contemporary pedagogical ideas and approaches cannot fully satisfy the existing graduate requirements because of rapid informatization, intellectualization and technological progress.

According to the existing data, graduates have to acquire over a half of their professional skills after leaving their institutions. Their employers need to offer advanced training to them, and mentoring is one of the optimal ways to do that.

A young teacher can hone his professional craft and skills, learn about the traditions, values and norms of his new workplace, whereas her mentor can also improve professional qualities and teaching aptitude.

The co-authors mention the regulatory norms and principles which serve as the basis for mentoring in Russia today. Mentoring is mostly multi-professional in nature today, so interns can seek help from mentors of different qualifications. Tradition and innovation are also important in this regard, making young professionals grounded in history but also open to new technologies and content.

In international practices, there are various forms of experience transfer, such as mentoring, coaching, e-coaching, tutoring, shadowing, and supervision. Among the most widely used forms are buddying, business simulation, and storytelling.

Researchers conclude that mentoring is more and more pertinent because of constant socioeconomic and political change, which means that employees must be mobile, teamwork-oriented and be ready for nonstandard work situations.

Bottom Line: Legislative and administrative actions by the state of California were associated with a decrease in the rate of kindergartners entering school without up-to-date vaccinations. This observational study focused on three statewide initiatives: a 2014 bill requiring parents to prove they had discussed the risks of not vaccinating their children with a health care provider before getting a personal belief exemption; a 2015 educational campaign by state and local health departments to educate school staff on conditional admission criteria that allow students more time to catch up on vaccinations; and a 2016 bill banning all personal belief exemptions for vaccinations. Researchers used school entry data to calculate rates of kindergartners attending California schools without up-to-date vaccines. The authors report the rate of kindergartners without up-to-date vaccinations decreased from 9.84% during 2013 (before the three statewide interventions) to 4.87% in 2017 (after the interventions). Limitations of the study include a limited time period for examining each intervention and students with varying vaccination status not specific to particular vaccines.

Within the next 80 years, the world's population is expected to top 11 billion, creating a rise in global food demand -- and presenting an unavoidable challenge to food production and distribution.

But a new article published in Nature Sustainability describes how the increase in population and the need to feed everyone will also, ultimately, give rise to human infectious disease, a situation the authors of the paper consider "two of the most formidable ecological and public health challenges of the 21st century."

The article, "Emerging human infectious disease and the links to global food production," is the first to draw connections between future population growth, agricultural development and infectious disease. 

"If we start exploring how increasing population and agriculture will affect human diseases, we can prepare for and mitigate these effects," said Jason Rohr, the Ludmilla F., Stephen J. and Robert T. Galla College Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame. "We need to anticipate some of the problems that may arise from an explosion of human population in the developing world."

According to the article, the fastest area of population growth expected by the year 2100 will occur in the developing world where disease control, surveillance and access to health care already face significant challenges. Currently, some estimates suggest that infectious disease accounts for 75 percent of deaths in developing countries in tropical regions. Each year in the United States, an estimated 48 million people suffer from foodborne infections, and foodborne illnesses have been linked to imported food from developing countries -- where sanitation and food safety is lacking or poorly enforced. Of that number, 128,000 are hospitalized and approximately 3,000 people each year die from foodborne infection.

As the world's population grows, the state of rural economies, use of agrochemicals and exploitation of natural resources, among other factors, are poised to further contribute to infectious disease outbreaks. "There are many modern examples where high human contact with farm animals or wild game is a likely cause of new human diseases that have become global pandemics," such as avian and swine flu, and mad cow disease, Rohr said.

Rohr, who also works as part of Notre Dame's Environmental Change Initiative and the Eck Institute for Global Health, studies human schistosomiasis, a worm infection transmitted from snails to humans in many tropical and subtropical parts of the world.

Through that research, he has seen firsthand how farming practices can affect disease because the snails thrive in waters with algae that grow prolifically in areas of agricultural runoff containing fertilizer. The primary predators of snails are prawns that migrate to estuaries to breed, but these estuaries often become unreachable because of dams installed to facilitate the irrigation of cropland.

"There is the perfect storm with schistosomiasis: Agriculture has decimated snail predators, irrigation ditches provide more snail habitat, and fertilizer use causes the proliferation of snail food," he noted. "Agriculture is important for nutrition that can be crucial for combating disease, but the right balance needs to be struck."

Rohr and collaborators offer several potential solutions to various challenges, such as improving hygiene to combat the overuse of antibiotics to promote the growth of farm animals. They also suggest that farmers add genetic variability to their crops and animals to reduce epidemics caused in part by monocultures and too many closely related animals living in close quarters.

Other solutions include enhancing education and health literacy, which has been documented as a major factor in reducing infections. The researchers also suggest investing in predictive mathematical models that integrate associations between agricultural practices and infectious diseases. These models could forecast risk across spatial scales to facilitate targeting preventive and mitigating measures.

Citizen scientists have discovered that solar storms become more complex as the Sun's 11-year activity cycle reaches its maximum - a finding which could help forecasters predict which space weather events could have potentially devastating consequences for modern technologies at Earth.

'Protect our Planet from Solar Storms', a research project launched by the University of Reading, the Science Museum Group and Zooniverse in May 2018, asked volunteers to evaluate pairs of images of Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) and decide which seemed the most visually complex.

Overall, the project ranked the complexity of 1100 observations of CMEs taken by the wide-angle Heliospheric Imagers on-board NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft. The results will be presented at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in Lancaster today (Tuesday, 2nd July) and will feature in the exhibition The Sun, which opens at the Science and Industry Museum, in Manchester, on 20th July.

"The STEREO spacecraft capture images of solar storms as they erupt from the Sun. Some CMEs look very simple, like bubbles, while others are far more complex, like shattered light bulbs. Surprisingly, we found that the annual average complexity values actually follow the solar activity cycle," said Shannon Jones of the University of Reading.

CMEs are a key driver of hazardous space weather that, if directed at Earth, can cause serious damage to electricity grids, satellite navigation and communication infrastructure. Current prediction methods, based on the direction of the magnetic field within solar storms, are only really effective around an hour before the storm hits our planet. The complexity of an eruption could provide advanced warning about its likelihood of causing disruption.

"The most damaging storms have a magnetic field that is offset by 180 degrees to Earth's. Because complex storms have a magnetic field that keep changing direction, they are more likely to move into this alignment at least for a short period of time. The link between complexity and the solar cycle is important because not only are there more storms during solar maximum, their variability makes them more likely to contain an orientation of magnetic field that may affect our modern technologies," said Chris Scott of the University of Reading, who devised the study.

The Reading team has now launched a new phase of experiments on Zooniverse, where volunteers will assess the impact of brightness on complexity, weigh up how to quantify complexity, and study differences in the STEREO A and B cameras.

"Our results show that storms in the STEREO B camera were consistently ranked as less complex than in STEREO A, and that might be because the two cameras are not identical," said Ms Jones. "As we know the size of an object each camera can resolve, this might give a clue to the size of structures that people interpret as complex. The input of the citizen science volunteers will be invaluable in helping us start to understand the structure of CMEs in more detail."

"It has been a pleasure to work with Zooniverse and the University of Reading team, following a long tradition of engaging our visitors in research, through our Live Science programme, and in citizen science too, notably Hooked On Music and our Turing Sunflower experiments at the Science and Industry Museum," said Roger Highfield, Science Director of the Science Museum Group, which includes the Science Museum, Science and Industry Museum, Science and Media Museum, National Railway Museum and Locomotion.

The RAS National Astronomy Meeting is taking place at Lancaster University until 4th July. The Sun opens at the Science and Industry Museum, Manchester, on 20th July and runs until 5th January 2020.